Knowledge Bridge Musings

Vignettes from Apollo 13 Related to Decision Making

2008-06-04T00:14:00.001-05:00

Here are more Apollo 13 vignettes that didn't make the cut for Stand Back and Deliver. Less than two days into the flight of Apollo 13, the crew experiences a major malfunction in the service module. Mission control quickly assesses the situation and realizes that their purpose has changed. No longer are they focused on landing two of the astronauts on the moon, they are now solely focused on

Friendship 7 and Real Options

2008-06-03T23:58:00.001-05:00

We face a lot of decisions in the course of a project. One thing we often don't put much thought to is the appropriate time to actually make the decision. A case where the time to decide was quite clear occurred on the flight of Friendship 7, John Glenn’s Mercury flight in February of 1962. The flight was planned for three orbits. At the end of the first orbit, Mission Control was just about to

A Successful Failure

2008-05-23T22:10:00.002-05:00

I am in the process of writing a book titled Stand Back and Deliver with my partners in Accelinnova. As we go through the editing process, some of the stories I originally put in my chapter draft on making value based decisions didn't make the final cut. I still am personally attached to the stories, so I thought I would keep them some place. Here's my take on Apollo 13 as an example of the

The Familiar vs the Comfortable

2008-03-11T11:16:00.002-05:00

Reading through the Scrum Development list this morning, Alistair Cockburn and George Dinwiddie pointed out a great quote from Virginia Satir that I had not heard before, but rings true in many ways.Alistair wrote: Virginia Satir wrote words to the effect of, "When give a choice between the familiar and the comfortable, they more often than not choose the familiar."George replied: Exactly!

Agile Politics?

2008-02-01T09:47:00.001-06:00

I admit it. I have become a political junkie over the past month. It was bound to happen I guess, living in Iowa home of the country's first caucus, and seeing first hand the excitement being generated by this election cycle's slate of candidates. As a result of becoming a politics addict, I have taken to listening to the POTUS 08 channel on XM Radio

Analysis Does Not Have to Mean Paralysis

2008-01-19T20:34:00.000-06:00

Back in November in Iowa Biz there was a blog entry titled Please Make A Decision. The basic premise of the post was a call to action to actually make a decision and stop suffering from "analysis paralysis. On the surface, pretty good advice. But dig a little deeper, and that post is really encouraging people to follow their typical human distaste for

Good Blog Post on TDD for Databases

2007-11-20T20:35:00.000-06:00

Gojko Adzic presented at XPDay 2007 about his experiences with Test Driven Development in a heavily database focused legacy application. He then posted his experience report on this blog post I have always been a believer in experience being the best teacher, so am always happy to pass along interesting descriptions of people's experiences combining the somewhat disparate worlds of agile

Creating Effective Teams Podcast on pm411.org

2007-10-15T22:41:00.001-05:00

In September, I wrote an article in my ProjectConnections.com column titled Picking the Right Project Team. Ron Holohan with PM411.org liked the article enough to call me up and talk to me about it during his pm411.org podcast, which you can find here.

Is Delivery Date the Only Thing

2007-09-30T23:31:00.000-05:00

In the September 2007 Issue of the PM Network there is an article titled "The Need to Speed". According to th article a survey of project managers around the globe that indicates that there seems to be a problem with on time delivery of IT projects. When you look at the cold hard reality of things, this should not really come as surprise to anyone. Aside from the fact that the article never

Moving to Knowledge Bridge Musings

2007-09-02T23:09:00.000-05:00

All of the blog entries posted before now on Sunday September 2 are actually copied over from my old blog on KentMcDonald.com. I decided to switch over to Blogger.com as my blogging mechanism, but I wanted to save my old entries. As I went through the old entries, I noticed a lot of them were announcing a new presentation. I decided not to replicate those, but I am posting all of my

A Challenge to some Friends

2007-09-02T23:00:00.000-05:00

I recently challenged some friends to identify one book on MP3 to which I should listen. Assuming I can actually find the book in a format that I can use, I commited to listening to the book and letting them know my thoughts. The results so far (I should note that some had trouble keeping their recommendations to one book): Innovator’s Dilemma (Clayton Christensen)Innovator’s Solution (Clayton

Powerpoint waters down great ideas

2007-09-02T22:56:00.000-05:00

I will admit that I still utilize PowerPoint, and I will also freely admit that until recently, I have used it in a bad way. We all learn to improve, and I think this example is the best way to show how PowerPoint can actually detract from good ideas. On November 19, 1863 Abraham Lincoln gave perhaps one of the most famous speeches in American history. Legend has it that he wrote it on a

Agile Stories

2007-09-02T22:51:00.000-05:00

Mike Cohn has done it again. In a new article on gantthead.com entitled Agile Stories Mike describes in his usual clear, concise style how User Stories can be expanded to provide more details about the requirements with getting into documentation overload. He introduces the use of conditions of satisfaction along with user stories to provide a nice level of requirements information.

A Few Good Managers

2007-09-02T22:49:00.002-05:00

For those of you out there who are big fans of agile software development, Tom Cruise, and/or Jack Nicholson, check this blog posting from Robert Holler.

Community Ship

2007-09-02T22:49:00.001-05:00

Many thanks to Alistair Cockburn for alerting me to the presence of this article by Henry Mintzberg that suggests perhaps we should be thinking about Communityship more so than leadership.

Brainwriting

2007-09-02T22:47:00.000-05:00

A recent post to the Agile Experience Group tipped me off to a good approach to gathering information from a group called Brainwriting. This approach takes away some of the difficulties with brainstorming.

That's what dreams are made of

2007-09-02T22:43:00.000-05:00

Chris Matts and Andy Pols are working on a prototype for the Dream Factory which is a little bit of a lot of things, including a tool for coordinating communities, managing IT investment portfolios and projects, and managing the requirements for a development project.Chris explained the concept of the Dream Factory to me at Agile 2006. The idea is based partly on the the concept of the Wisdom of

Are Featutres the right things on which to focus?

2007-09-02T22:31:00.000-05:00

A series of four Blog posts over the past few days have put forth the idea that projects should focus on outcome more so than features.Franks Sommer's Blog entry Valuing Outcomes Over Features on November 3 summarizes the other blog discussions. In that discussion he mentions the others. Dan North's entry Outcomes over Features - the fifth agile value Ditch the feature shopping list. Think

Try this one at home to test document usage

2007-09-02T22:22:00.000-05:00

As I try to get caught up on my Yahoo Group reading, I came across this great test in the Agile Modeling Yahoo Group to determine who,if anyone, is actually reading project documentation.This story is from Huet Landry on the Agile Modeling Yahoo Group:One of the folks at my site did a version of this. He password- protected his "deliverable" files and included a statement to contact him for the

Behavior Driven Development

2007-09-02T22:16:00.000-05:00

I learned about Behavior Driven Development from Chris Matts. It is basically a way to utilize some of the principles of Test Driven Development for analysis. All in all it is really quite elegant in its simplicity. Dan North describes Behavior Driven Development in this article. Basically it suggests the use of the following pattern for recording requirements: AS A [person or role] I WANT [

Is Agile Agile?

2007-08-27T22:49:00.000-05:00

At the Agile 2007 Conference, I collaborated with Chris Matts and Olav Maasen to present the discovery Session Is Agile Agile? Is it time we ate our own Dog Food. Here is a video of the key parts of the session.