Red Toad Solutions

SCRUM For Business Not Just Development

Where does SCRUM fit into business? Is it just in development? I don’t think so.

I am at the tail end of a project with a company that can’t quite work out if it is a bloated corporate with steady revenues, or a start-up bootstrapping and waging a guerrilla war against larger, cash rich companies with established client bases.

It has left many “what if” questions on my mind.

I looked back and realized the agile approach to development that just could not be implemented due to lack of buy in from the management team also applied company wide.

Is a company really any different to a software development project?

What if the fundamental basics of SCRUM was applied company wide. Had it actually been done before? If so, how successfully?

So, having never seen any obvious material on the subject, began writing a white paper. The first stage is obviously researching whether it had in fact been done, but under another guise. Then work out the mechanics of it.

I’ll keep you posted, and if you have specific examples that my brief investigation for obvious answers has missed, feel free to share.

Tags: bootstrapping, management systems, Project Management, SCRUM, start-up

The Lost Art – Defensive Programming

Nearly twenty years ago, when I first got into software development, one of the things drummed into me was “always assume the worst, be defensive in your coding”.

Somewhere in the last twenty years, that seems to have changed to “don’t worry, the framework will look after that”.

I recently undertook a code review for a client, and a couple of peer reviews for colleagues at another company I am seconded at.  The result were both surprising and alarming.

Let’s look at the development team situation first. One of the colleagues is a junior, and in all fairness, had not been given any programming standards to work from, and the pressure is on to get things done; the other colleague however is experienced and highly educated.

Standards

It has become very, very apparent that standards are not taught anymore.  Simple things as naming variables, catching exceptions and even validating user input seem to be an enigma to the “new” developer.  Why is this?  Is it the curriculum, or simply the new generation of developers don’t actually pay attention?  Do these new developers need to be taught all over again?

Attitude

More and more I see intermediate and senior developers who have lost their way.  They can’t seem to fathom the commercial implications of their decisions.  “Small”, “unscoped” changes that ends up pushing a project out a week, a month, a year?  What has happened to the discipline of experienced developers?  Anyone who is time poor or in any level of professional management has a word they need to understand and use.  “No”.  A client wants that easy unscoped change, well, fine, they will have to wait until we have time to scope it. Can’t you just do it?  “No”

Today I have raised a couple of point I want to explore further.  A large part of the above is about company culture.  It also leans heavily toward what the responsibility of project managers actually is.

I recently started writing an article “When a project goes bad, and what to do about it”.  An experienced professional director, business consultant and strategic ICT adviser said “fire the project manager” upon learning of the article.

I’m not so sure, but this subject is worthy of further investigation and thought.  What are your thoughts on this?

Crisis: Project Turnaround Part 1

Your project is overdue, there have been cost overruns, and the final destination is still out of reach.  In this series of posts I will be covering the process of turning a crisis project around.

This probably sounds all too familiar to many project managers, development managers, business owners, and even company board members. It’s so common in fact, that I hear almost daily from industry people about these project’s in crisis. I myself have been involved in more than I can recall, at all levels of a project. Lately however it has been to pick up the pieces.

Generally you will find projects like these have had several project managers, who have either been fired or exited before things got too bad. Team moral is almost always at a low, with unusually high sick leave or staff turnover from front line staff like the software developers. Stake holders are stressed, and usually incredibly grumpy. Worse, the board of the client company are usually ready to pull the plug and even bring in the legals.

By the time a project reaches this stage, it has usually become emotional, and very personal for the key people. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to get resolution once it has reach this stage without outside assistance. Taking a step back, you basically have five key reasons it reached breaking point.

• Unclear requirements/scope

• Poor planning and Project Management

• Unrealistic expectations

• Insufficient commitment or mixed messages from project sponsors

• Inadequate/inconsistent communication

There are more, often subtle problems such as culture clash, ego and various other human traits, but as a rule if you nail the above from the outset, the chance of a project going into crisis is very slim.

Of course, that does not help you with your current mess.

The first thing to do is get acknowledgment from all stakeholders that the project is in trouble and that all parties need to take steps to come to a resolution. If this step cannot be achieved, then the most likely outcome is legal disputes and nasty words. The reality is that most projects fail because both sides are at fault, which is why this consensus is needed.

Once you have the agreement of all stakeholders, the hard work begins. Ideally you need to bring in an external person. This could be from a different division within one of the companies, or more preferably, an external company. As a bit of a company plug, this is part of the services Red Toad Solutions offers through it’s Executive IT Consultancy.

You can now begin the process of trying to recover the project. The three key factors from this point on are:

• No blame game antics

• Open and regular communication

• Realistic expectations

You can consider the role of the third party as one of mediator, project manager, chief architect, and business mentor.

Often what will happen is that not only has their been functional scope creep, no one actually knows why a particular feature was required, what the business case was, nor why it was not added as “out of scope”.  So, the first task is to put a hold on all further development and focus on the current snapshot of the project.

Ideally the third party will work with both sides to get a full understanding of what was originally asked for by the client, versus what the vendor though was being asked.  This is why a discovery stage is so important, as outlined here in “Discovery – Just Do it“.

However, now is the time to revisit the original objectives of the project, working initially with the client to try and come up with an agreed specification based on what they know now.  If the project has dragged on, with many undocumented and unchallenged changes, this step is absolutely critical.  Often you will find many of the changes still needed are not actually needed.

This is obviously a very delicate step, emotions are high, and I will be covering it in some detail in my next post.

Tags: Failed Projects, IT consultancy, It Project, Management, Project Management

Technical Toast

A little technical tid-bit for frustrated users, even quite savey users like myself.

If you are on a network, and try to map a drive, sometimes for no apparent reason you can’t, and you get the following error:

“The mapped network drive could not be created because the following error has occurred:
The credentials supplied conflict with an existing set of credentials.”

I have spent many an hour over the years trying to fix this, and often even a reboot won’t fix it. For someone who uses a lot of network mapped drives it can be a real show stopper.

But then I found a simple, if somewhat brutal fix:

net use * /d

This is a pretty blunt weapon, and clears all maps, regardless of what they are. But it works, and gets your mapping back under control.

My latest incident found to hidden mappings that I had no idea of, and for some reason my computer though they were a different user, so gave me the above error.

There goes another coin in the jar for stupid errors that can trip even the most experienced user. That jar is getting very full when using Microsoft’s products.

Tags: Network Mapping, Networking, Windows

Email Management

I get a lot of emails. Loads and loads of them.

But I seldom misplace or fail to action an email. And at the end of each day my inbox is usually empty. Other people I have worked with over the years have often misplaced important emails, or overlooked responding/actioning emails.

I came up with a simple method (which works even better if you use Gmail) but can be implemented easily using any email system.

Firstly, you need two folders, one called follow-up, and one called archive.

When an email comes in, you read it then and there. If it needs a response, but you are not ready to respond, leave it there for now. If it’s informational, and requires no follow-up move it to archive as soon as you have read it. If you can respond immediately, do so, then move it to archive.

Over the course of the day, action any emails that you have previously left, then move them to archive.

When you are finished for the day, move all remaining emails to follow-up. This is very important.

At the start of your next day, anything in your inbox will be new from the end of the previous day. Do not touch them until you have dealt with the follow-up folder emails first.

This simple approach takes a little bit of getting used to, but remember, emails should be treated as a task orientated tool. Don’t get bogged down with 1000s of emails in your inbox.

Tags: Email Backlog, Email Management, Email Productivity

Discovery – Just Do it.

Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, and Verify.

Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control.

While Red Toad Solutions does not rigorously follow Lean Six Sigma, the underlying focus of the business is the last two of each of the above. However, the first three common aspects of Lean Six Sigma are critical as well.

Any business can Define, Measure, Analyze, but these key steps of an IT project are often overlooked. Yet they are essential to any successful IT project. You did allow for a discovery stage did you not? One that allows your business to fully define the requirement, allow for measurable results, and deeply analyse the benefits, not just choosing the flavor of the month because someone read it in a magazine?

No?

My previous post talked about “The Promise”. Part of being able to deliver on a promise is fully understanding the implications of making a promise.

As a kid, I remember making sweeping promises like “I’ll clean my room when I get home from school”, or other silly promises I knew I had neither the time or inclination to fulfill.

Business can be dangerously similar. A company may well “promise” to delivery something. You as the client have every confidence they will deliver. But the first warning bell should sound if said company did not insist on “Define, Measure, Analyze”. This is commonly called a discovery phase.

Before we go on, we are all in business, either as an owner or employee. We all know time is money. Discovery phases cost money. But they are a finite cost, with a clear deliverable. A company that doesn’t charge for a discovery stage is unlikely to actually do a thorough investigation; would you build a house on land that was surveyed with a 30cm ruler and a piece of string?

So, what can you expect from a discovery stage?

Basically, meetings, lots of emails, phone calls and requests for clarification. The IT company knows your business generally, but they need to know your business specifically. How can they write a new system if they don’t understand your business?

Most IT systems replace manual systems or old IT systems. If a proper discovery stage is not undertaken, how do you know the new system will perform? You need to measure how the current system is handling it’s tasks, or if the system is completely new, there must be guidelines to determine what the new system will do.

Analysis. Yup, and lots of it. Simply thinking about all the possibilities, implications, technologies and screeds of other things to ensure the design being looked at will delivery what is expected.

If you do not do the discovery phase, you are running a project that, based on anecdotal evidence, is likely to fail.

I love adages. Here’s one. Measure twice, cut once.

Consider the initial discovery as your first measure. Even before a design is put together, you need to do it. The design is the next step, and can be considered the next “measure”.

Discovery, just do it, because the cost of not doing it is potentially a failed IT project.

Tags: Design, Discovery, IT Projects, Measurable Results, Quality Assurance

The Promise

Over the years, it’s become apparent that the perception of IT consultants is pretty much as bad as car salesmen, lawyers and the Inland Revenue Service.

IT consultants go in, they talk the talk, walk the walk, then ninety percent of the time , fail to deliver.

When was the last time you heard of a lawyer charging like a wounded bull or a car salesman selling a lemon for twice what it should have sold for. It frustrates and annoys people, and makes a good story while down at the pub.

However, when it’s IT, the implications can be pretty serious. Budgets are usually large, and unless you are dealing with a corporate, the consequences of a failed project can be devastating to a business. Yet people still fail to take IT seriously.

Put this into perspective with another large expense.

You are about to build your dream home.  You want to live there for a long time with your spouse, bring up the kids, maybe even retire there.

Are you going to trust a builder who won’t provide you a definitive cost, a builder without decades of experience and more importantly one that has processes and planning in place for delivering your dream home? Yes, the builder who is cheaper, or quicker or talks the talk may look great, but at the end of the day the old adage holds true.  You get what you pay for.

In IT, a great deal of trust is given to “experts”, but as Michael E. Gerber say, just because you are technically excellent doesn’t mean you can do it on your own.

A business based on the promise to deliver backed up with experience and processes that show they can deliver is far more likely to fulfill your project requirements than a business that says yes all the time, and then scrambles to try and deliver something they know nothing about.

The promise is critical.  And after nearly two decades in this industry, I finally came up with one for my business:

“If we say we can do something, we do it, on time, and to budget.”

I think it is a great promise. What about you?

Tags: Consultant, Contract, Marketing, Michael E. Gerber, Quality

Free Technology

Welcome to the new and improved web site for Red Toad Solutions.

Technology is an amazing thing. In many ways the use of technology levels the playing field for business. Where corporates may spend tens of thousands of dollars on relatively simple requirements, small and medium business can take a step back and find a good fit for their technology requirements using relatively cost effective solutions.

This new site is a good example. It is powered by WordPress.

WordPress is free. It is open source, runs on Windows, Linux or a Mac, and this implementation has a back end based on Lamp.

We have evaluated lots of options for our web site.  And it has changed many times over the years.

However, we wanted something cost effective, easy to maintain and more importantly, something that could be extended.

WordPress covers all these criteria, and for our purposes, fits the bill.

Next time you are looking for an IT solution for your business, don’t overlook free stuff, but do get someone who knows what they are looking for to evalute it.

Tags: Blog, CMS, Lamp, Marketing, MySql, Open Source, PHP, Technology, Wordpress