Analytical-Mind

I have just finished reading A sense of urgency by John Kotter. A useful book when dealing with an agile transition.

John Kotter is author of Leading Change, published in 1996 and still a business book bestseller. In that book he presented eight steps in leading change in an organization – the first step presented was to develop a sense of urgency. Kotter believed that topic was so critical that he followed up with this new book specifically dedicated to developing a sense of urgency.

The book is useful to help make clear distinction between a real sense of urgency, a false sense of urgency, and complacency. After explaining at length the difference between these 3 situations and providing clear examples, Kotter provides tactics to deal with complacency and false sense of urgency in order to convert them into a real sense of urgency.

Although the book is dry – don’t read it just before going to bed – it is well written and fairly concise.

The first section of the book focuses on what is described as a “false sense of urgency.” Kotter characterizes people with this attitude as feeling that change must be made but whose actions aren’t very helpful. The single biggest error people make when they try to craft change is they do not “create a high enough sense of urgency among enough people to set the stage for making a challenging leap into some new direction“. ”A false sense of urgency is pervasive and insidious because people mistake activity for productivity“.

The biggest challenge facing people who try to create a sense of urgency within the organization is “complacency”. “We underestimate its power and its prevalence“.

To increase a “true sense of urgency”, “create action that is exceptionally alert, externally oriented, relentlessly aimed at winning, making some progress each and every day, and constantly purging low value-added activities–all by always focusing on the heart and not just the mind.”

To implement strategies to address these situations, the author he suggests the following tactics: 

• Bring the outside in with engaging information so that the outside is acknowledged, understood, and acted on. 
• Demonstrate urgency every day as a leader and expect everyone else to do the same. 
• Find appropriate opportunities to change and improve from crises that threaten the organization. 
• Wall off, neutralize, or eliminate those who oppose or slow down change for no good reason. 

In summary, taken via Book Excerpt: A Sense of Urgency — HBS Working Knowledge.

Big Mistake Number 1: Assuming that crises inevitably will create the sense of urgency needed to perform better.

Big Mistake Number 2: Going over the line with a strategy that creates an angry backlash because people feel manipulated.

Big Mistake Number 3: Passively sitting and waiting for a crisis (which many never come).

It is a good book to help you transform your organization.

Big Mistake Number 4: Underestimating what the people who would avoid crises at all costs correctly appreciate: that crisis can bring disaster.

I just finished reading What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis the man behind buzzmachine.com.

Like many people, I’m a big fan of Google and most of their products and when someone told me about this book I thought it would be interesting reading material both pleasure and business knowledge.

The title is catchy but I must warn you, this is not a business book. The book does not even provide insight into Google’s culture, management style or innovation process. On his blog, the author says the following about himself: “Jarvis was creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly; Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News; TV critic for TV Guide and People; a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner; assistant city editor and reporter for the Chicago Tribune; reporter for Chicago Today” and as a consequence, the book reads much more like a long blog post than a structured book. Don’t get me wrong, Jarvis’ style is entertaining and the content of the book is interesting but you won’t find any major revelation that you can use to inject new ideas into your organization.

In summary, the whole book is based on the “Ten things Google has found to be true” and the book can pretty much be summarized by “Five Steps to a Googlier You” posted on the author’s blog. 

The most interesting part of the book is that Jarvis shows what other business models might look like if they were run by Google. These companies include airlines, real estate, banks, hospitals, insurance, and universities. Big comparing to real life example, the author demonstrates how internet companies like Craigslist, Flickr, Wikipedia, Amazon and Digg  have disrupted their market by applying Google’s philosophy.

Overall, I enjoyed this book eventhough it turned out to be more for leisure than business.

My Rating: 6 / 10

A perfectly messy book!

A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder – How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and on-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place is not intended to justify messiness, but the authors clearly demonstrate that over-organizing is an ineffective and costly endeavour that usually doesn’t bring as much benefits as is typically anticipated. In other words, in many instances the authors show that the cost of organizing is much higher than the resulting benefits. If you believe that being very organized is always best, you will be shocked when you read this book. Unfortunately if you are looking for reasons to be messy you may find that this book will support your condition.

Although this book was fun to read with plenty of anecdotes about the success of messy scenarios, it fails to provide valid comparisons for similar situations. For example, the book talks about situations where a positive outcome happen because of the surrounding mess but there is no replica of the same situation without the mess to determine if potentially a better outcome could have occurred.

Overall, the book was interesting with its many anecdotes and peculiar circumstances but the authors pushed it to such extend that the examples quickly became slightly exaggerated and inappropriate to demonstrate their point.

In my mind, the only conclusion to draw is to evaluate the need to organize and assess if the benefits call for the associated efforts. Use your judgement and determine how much organization is actually required and how much mess can be tolerated.

My Rating: 7 / 10

I was interested to see what Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit was saying after having read The Toyota Way.

On the positive side, the book is a good discussion of how the principles of Lean Manufacturing apply to Software Development. The authors explain why the usual metaphor of software as manufacturing is not quite right and why the metaphor of Lean Manufacturing is something we can learn from and apply fairly easily to application development.

The authors demonstrate it has been a mistake to think of software development as being roughly analogous to manufacturing and that developing custom software is not like assembling cars. Along those lines software development is closer to product development and principles that work well in product design have a more straightforward application in software development.

The book presents 7 principles (Eliminate Waste, Amplify Learning, Decide as Late as Possible, Deliver as Fast as Possible, Empower the Team, Build Integrity In, See the Whole) and each chapter is devoted to one of the principles. I included a brief summary below.

On the flip side, this is not the first book you should read to learn about Agile software development as it assumes you clearly understand the underlying principles and the correlation to manufacturing can sometimes be difficult to relate to.

Eliminate waste

Example of elements that are considered waste:

• Anything that does not add value;
• Partially done work such as code that is not yet integrated;
• Extra processes such as unnecessary paperwork or documentation;
• Extra features that do not bring value;
• Task switching;
• Waiting;
• Motion such as trying to find someone to get questions answered;
• Defects;
• Management related activities.

Amplify learning

The authors demonstrate that design is a problem-solving process that requires discovering solutions through experimentation. A sequential development model does not usually provide for much feedback which is unfortunate because frequent feedback loops amplify learning.

Conventional wisdom in project management emphasizes compliance to cost estimate and defined schedule at the expense of achieving the overall business goals. Lean Software Development methods add much more control in between steps within the development process and increase feedback between activities as opposed to evaluating the output at the end of the process.

Decide as late as possible

Since people find it difficult to make irrevocable decisions when there is uncertainty present, a Lean Software Development approach recommends to decide on details as late as possible because doing otherwise would close opportunities that would be more suitable to the situation at hand. As such, an adaptive paradigm of delaying decision until uncertainty is reduced usually produces better results than a predictive approach.

Deliver as fast as possible

Deliver as fast as possible is a correlary to decide as late as possible since the faster you can deliver, the longer you can delay decisions. In addition, the authors suggest that the customers’ needs should pull the development efforts rather than have the schedule push the work. When put together, the whole system of software development short iterations is based on customers’ input at the beginning of each iteration.

With this approach, customers write-down description of the required features on index cards while developers estimate the efforts to deliver each feature. The developers then choose which cards they will develop.

Empower the team

The critical factor in motivation is by moving the decisions making power to the lowest possible level in an organization while developing the capacity of those people to make decisions wisely.

People suffer when they lack purpose. Intrinsic motivation comes from the work we do and for pride in workmanship and our ability to help customers. To help the team gain a sense of purpose, start with a clear and compelling purpose and be sure the purpose is achievable given the team access to customers then let the team make its own commitments. In this context, the management role is to run interference from skeptics away from the team.

Build integrity

Do not forget to deliver customer value while ensuring that systems components work together as a whole.

The proposed mechanisms documented in the book are:

• Running tests assume that the code is written;
• Don’t write more documentation, write more code;
• Don’t gather more requirements, show more progress by delivering components;
• Do work for an immediate real customer;
• Prototypes synchronize efforts towards a well understood short-term goal;
• Iteration results in a full working portion of the final product;
• Feature means to deliver meaningful business value;
• High priority features should be developed first to add value early;
• Development team only accept the amount of work for an iteration they can compete;
• Deliver on commitments;
• Teams need organizational support to achieve their objectives;
• Customers don’t know what they want at the beginning of the project;
• Deliver on top priorities to build credibility and trust;
• Develop the ability to respond to changing needs;
• Frequent builds to ensure components will integrate well and allow for testing.

In my opinion, the fundamental learning behind the book are:

• That it is critical to add value throughout the development process and not have to wait until the end of development;
• Empower your team members so they get the autonomy and authority to determine the right steps to deliver quality outputs;
• Ensure continuous learning in order to ensure innovation and improvement of the existing process.

As with other major changes, successfully implementing a lean software development approach requires change in the organizational habits and the underlying culture.

My Rating: 9 / 10

I read Agile Data Warehousing: Delivering World-Class Business Intelligence Systems Using Scrum and XP a few weeks ago and I thought the author did an amazing job at demonstrating how the Agile approach can be used for Data Warehousing projects. A such, I wanted to spend some time providing a more detailed summary of this book.

Agile Data Warehousing (ADW) is the application of two agile development approaches SCRUM and XP (extreme programming) – to the specific challenges of data warehousing and business intelligence.

The new approach is being proposed to address lamentable success rates of waterfall BI projects and as such ADW addresses the following problems:

• Waterfall software development historically yielded notoriously poor ROI;
• Customers are increasingly impatient to get BI benefits;
• BI cannot avoid tackling the unknown;
• Infrastructure problems cause problems late in the project;
• Business rules can also appear late in the plan due to changes in the environment;
• Project often take fatal risk in order to avoid a little rework;
• Requirements definition and review cycles consume excessive efforts;
• Documentation has a short shelf life;
• Standard project-management consumes large portions of the project budget;
• Complex methods and elaborate plan rarely perform well;
• BI need more time to acclimate the project;
• Customers need more time to learn about BI.

If good decisions allow a company to market its products or services more accurately, reduce its production costs or amplify its ability to fill orders, then a software engineering method leading to faster and better development of data warehouse offers much more than cost savings. The proposed approach is based on the following 4 Agile principles:

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools;
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation;
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation;
4. Responding to change over following a plan.

The principles behind the agile manifesto are known but they are repeated to ensure a common understanding.

1. Our highest priority is satisfied customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
2. Welcome changing requirements even late in development agile processes are changed for the customers competitive advantage.
3. Deliver working software frequently from a couple of weeks to a couple of months with a preference for the shorter timescale.
4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
5. Build projects around motivated individuals, defend the environment and supporting to entrust them to get the job done.
6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors developers and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
10. Simplicity is the art of maximizing the amount of work done is essential.
11. The best architectures requirements and designs emerge from self organizing teams.
12. At regular intervals the team reflects on how to become more effective than tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
13. Even the best approach needs to be cultivated and refined into a step-by-step method that teams can follow.

Naturally, achieving breakthrough performance in the BI development requires some significant changes:

• The physical environment developers work in.
• The role of the project manager.
• The way we do requirements.
• The way we do estimates.
• The way we do design.
• The way we code and tests.
• The way we document.
• The way we implement the system.
• The way we relate to other corporate departments such as information systems.
• The way we relate to other business stakeholders besides the project sponsor.

The five stages to migrate to an Agile approach are summarized below.

Stage 0: Co-located self organized team

• Co-locating the team members in a shared workspace surrounded by dry erase board, where they can work closely together, relying on light weight, verbal and diagrammatic communication for collaborative design and coding.
• Embedding the customer into the team as a product owner so that she can work closely with the developers to build the application the organization needs.
• Acting team members to organize their work in any way they prefer as long as they can transform a significant portion of the product owner’s request into potentially shippable code every 2 to 4 weeks.
• The team works in the minimalist environment for a few iterations, with the quality of his work review and approved by the product owner at the end of each iteration of development. The work product during this preliminary phase can be incomplete and lack polish.
• The customer does become fully involved and the team finds ways to meet pressing the deadline without wasting effort on that to be documentation.

Stage 1 – User epic decomposition and estimation skills

• This stage introduces the teams guiding product owner to several BI specific architectural notions so that the team begin acquiring a common language and so that many intertwined details of the full business intelligence implementation get addressed in an orderly fashion.
• The developers learn to estimate their work using the rim of the relative size of requirement. That technique which they will use to scope each development iteration.

Stage 2 – Release planning

• The team tests the full circle of the desired software release and the number of iteration it will take for it to deliver the remainder of the data warehouse project.

Stage 3 – Reference model and test-led development

Stage 4 – Pipeline deliveries squads

Stage 5 – Continuous integration testing

• By establishing an integration environment into which every module is integrated. As soon as a developer declared it done.

During the project, the team follow an iterative process to deliver incremental business value.

Planning phase

During the planning phase stakeholders represented in the team work through a list of business needs that might be addressed through new software development and agree upon which of them will be within the scope of the next release of the application.

Requirements gathering

Requirements are called users stories and together they make the release backlog.

Build phase

The build phase of the release cycle involves many iteration or even shorter cycle the multi week development sprint in which the real coding work of the pro
ject will be done. The modules produced during each sprint are added to the deliverable of prior sprints until the team feels the entire collection represent an acceptable release which is then deployed.

The build phase of the release cycle consists of multiple development iteration called sprints. The sprints are likely structured time during which the team design and code the software modules needed.

Retrospective

The release cycle concludes with a review process where lessons learned can be identified and used to improve the effectiveness of the next turn of the cycle.

During this retrospective the team quantifies its velocity – the amount of work is successfully delivered within the time off of the sprint just completed. After a few sprints, the team velocity stabilizes into a predictable range allowing project folders to group the story in the release backlog using sprint-sized bracket and thereby forecasts how many time boxes it will take the delivered the entire release.

Here’s a list of books on my bookshelves.

Category: Agile Software Development

• Agile Documentation: A Pattern Guide to Producing Lightweight Documents for Software Projects
• Agile Project Management with Scrum
• Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit [read my review]
• Managing Agile Projects
• User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development

Category: Business Intelligence, Data Warehouse, and Data Mining

• Agile Data Warehousing: Delivering World-Class Business Intelligence Systems Using Scrum and XP [read my review]
• Business Intelligence Roadmap: The Complete Project Lifecycle for Decision-Support Applications
• Business Intelligence: The Savvy Manager’s Guide
• Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business
• The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit
• The Numerati [read my review]

Category: Consulting, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation

• Flawless Consulting Set , Flawless Consulting
• Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change
• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It
• The Google Story

Category: Globalization and Anthropology

• A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
• The Lexus and the Olive Tree
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
• The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

Category: Internet Marketing, Social Networks, and Web 2.0

• Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message [read my review]
• Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business [read my review]
• Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
• Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means
• Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync?
• Smart Start-Ups: How Entrepreneurs and Corporations Can Profit by Starting Online Communities
• The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
• The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations
• What Would Google Do?
• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
• Wikipatterns

Category: Leadership, Team Management, and Organizational Development

• A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge
• A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder
• A Sense of Urgency
• Emotional Intelligence
• Execution Premium
• First, Break All The Rules: What The Worlds Greatest Managers Do Differently
• Leading Change
• Outliers: The Story of Success [read my review]
• Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
• Success Built to Last: Creating a Life that Matters
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
• The Toyota Way
• Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

Category: Memoirs and Biographies

• Chasing Daylight:How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life
• Einstein: His Life and Universe

Category: Psychology, Negotiation, and Communication

• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
• Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
• Stumbling on Happiness
• Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior [read my review]

Category: Usability and Dashboards

• Designing Web Usability
• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
• Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed
• Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data
• Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten
• Universal Principles of Design

During a recent gathering, a friend of mine asked me “why are you posting book reviews on your blog“?

Since he asked, I thought others might also want to know.

There are a couple of reasons why I’m sharing my book reviews:

• To initiate discussion. As in every day conversations, having similar reading interests is great way to start a discussion – “I noticed your also read … How did you find it?“
• To capture and document the central themes of the books. A few of us are working on a collaborative project – writing a book – and through our research and reading we want to keep track of central themes we are covering. The book summaries are used as anchors in this preliminary phase of our project.

If you are interested in joining our collaborative effort, drop me a line.

My Rating: 7/10

Another book in the Web2.0 category, Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message categories Internet content creators into 4 groups: Filters, Fanatics, Facilitators, and Firecrackers. Throughout the book, the authors use many examples and anecdotes to demonstrate the growing power of content creators.

Although I could summarize the content of the book, you will certainly find more details on the book’s official web site which presents a great summary, chapter by chapter. I encourage you to read the summary as it clearly presents to main ideas of each chapter and the book overall.

If you don’t fully understand what citizen marketers are about, you can also read about each example given in the book on the book’s web site. Some of the examples are more interesting and more impactful than others.

I enjoyed the book mostly for the anecdotes and examples but felt it was missing a key central message – besides the fact that citizen marketers are a growing force on the Internet. The book is certainly interesting to get people familiar with the concept of citizen marketers but doesn’t go much further than introducing the reader to this growing trend. It is still an interesting read if you have some time to spend.

I finished reading The Numerati last night and I thought I would share my thought on the book.

My Rating: 6 / 10

The book was informative and interesting and was written around the central theme of mathematically and statistically deriving meaning from various types of data. Some of the data presented in the book are currently available – at least to some companies – while other types of data are slowly being accumulated for future use.

The book is divided in 7 main sections, each briefly presented below. The fundamental objective for deriving predictive models is ultimately to offer us (consumers, patients, individuals) more of what we are looking for. Although this doesn’t sound good at first, the book demonstrates that this objective is not as bad as it sounds.

• As Internet users, we leave vast amounts of data behind as we browse web sites. Companies are heavily analyzing that data in order to develop predictive models for advertising, among other things. Their intend is to develop algorithms to present us with the right messages so we feel compelled to investigate further and potentially purchase.
• As shoppers we sometime un-knowingly share our purchasing preference when we use credit cards or reward cards. Ideally, companies want to understand consumer patterns and offer us items that fit well with our needs and interests.
• As voters, we are being segmented in various groups so political parties can target their messages to obtain our vote. The groups to which we belong aren’t always simple to determine and most people belong to more than one group. Based on that information, how do political parties take advantage of that information to craft the right message to get more votes.
• As bloggers, we may thing we are immune to profiling but this isn’t the case. Tools and algorithms are being developed to determine some key information about the bloggers. In addition to basic information such as age group and gender, companies are trying to analyze bloggers preferences for certain products, services, ideas and so on. Although this might be easy to determine in some specific cases, this is a challenging undertaking when the bloggers are not specifically blogging about those specific products or services.
• Terrorism is also an important area of interest. With events in the recent years, governments have a strong incentive to profile people and groups of people to assess if they are part of terrorist cells.
• As the population ages and the cost of health care greatly increases, companies are trying to build sophisticated databases of health related information and hopefully develop predictive models to help people self-diagnose their illness or better yet potentially anticipate certain diseases.
• Our love life is also being put under analysis. Companies are building algorithms in order to determine the compatibility of people in order to build the perfect couples.

Having worked for a company who heavily used raw data to develop predictive models for pharmaceutical companies, I did enjoy and relate to the content of the book. Each chapter presented a different perspective on the theme of obtaining, aggregating and deriving meaning out of data. In many cases, the results are impressive.

The book fell short of my expectations because it mostly focused on facts – what companies are doing today and in the near future – and much less at giving an overall perspective of the world once all that data becomes available and models are actively used. It might simply be because I understood too well the potential use of all that data.

If you want to understand practical applications of data mining, this book will meet your expectations.

My Rating: 9/10

Outliers: The Story of Success is another good book from Malcolm Gladwell!

It is commonly believed that people become successful after “working hard” for a long time and then success happens! Although hard work is a success factor, there are many other variables that have much more influence on success. Gladwell presents real life stories and much background to demonstrate that success mostly come from factors such as: when someone is born, their “ethnicity”, their family heritage, their geographic location, and circumstances (i.e. luck). Some or all of these factors combined with hard work made individuals or groups of people highly successful. His examples are great and support his key message.

Although the book doesn’t tell what someone needs to do to become successful, it certainly shows that after the fact there are some obvious trends that explain why people were indeed successful.