Gung Ho, Friend

The team recently wrapped up its third book. This time we read Gung Ho even though there was some apprehension around it. I have to say it was an excellent book. It totally reinforced the ideology of our team. There are 3 main concepts in this book, and they now hang as posters within our workspace. Here is the content of each (minus the cheesy graphic I picked for each animal):

Spirit of the Squirrel:

MEANINGFUL WORK

Important

Leading to shared goals

Value-driven

Way of the Beaver:

IN CONTROL OF ACHIEVING THE GOAL

A playing field with clearly marked territory

Thoughts, feelings, needs, and dreams are respected, listened to, and acted upon

Able but challenged


Gift of the Goose:

CHEERING OTHERS ON

Active or passive, congratulations must be TRUE

No score, no game, and cheer the progress

e=mc2 - Enthusiasm equals mission times cash and congratulations

If you are participating in a team book club (or even if you're not), I highly recommend putting this book on your reading list. It's an easy read and relatively short. We are now trying to determine what book to read next. Any suggestions/recommendations are greatly appreciated. Gung Ho, friend.

Book Club Update: Lean Software Development

The team has completed it's second book, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit and continues to benefit. Over the course of roughly eight weeks, we discussed a chapter a week with each team member facilitating at least one chapter.

After the first chapter, entitle "Eliminate Waste", we implemented a change to our weekly team status meeting. That meeting consists of 8 people and traditionally lasted one hour. During our discussion on how to eliminate waste, we decided to utilize a SharePoint Meeting Workspace to maintain a running agenda and trim the meeting to half an hour. This produced a financial savings for the business and has made the team meeting more productive. We calculated the savings as follows:

8 people X 1/2 hour X 50 weeks X $70/hr (allocation rate)

for an annual savings of $14,000

We shared this information with our business sponsors and they

were very impressed with our initiative. They have attended one

of our meetings to see if they can replicate what we have done

throughout their teams. I am very impressed and proud of our

team for continually looking for ways to improve and learn.

Additionally, the team was so encouraged with the results from this book, that we've decided to continue. We will be reading Gung Ho! starting this month. I will provide an update upon completion. As I stated in a previous blog, I encourage every team to incorporate a mentality of continuous learning/improvement and start a book club.

Trip Report: TDWI Solution Summit: Master Data, Quality, and Governance

I just returned from the TDWI Solution Summit: Master Data, Quality, and Governance and have to say I came away impressed. This was a hosted event, with 100 attendees from a variety of industries. The presentations were high quality and there were no high-pressure sales pitches from the myriad of vendors that were present. The best presentations were the case studies from those in the trenches. Several IT leaders presented the solutions they had implemented in their organizations and the lessons learned along the way. One of the best presentations was on the Five Levels of MDM Maturity by Evan Levy of Baseline Consulting. It was very informative and will help with driving an MDM solution within our organization. Overall, the agenda, the presentations, and the venue were all top notch and very professionally run. I would recommend this summit to anyone currently implementing or envisioning an MDM solution.

Gartner AADI Trip Report

In December, I attended the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit in Las Vegas. This was my first Gartner conference, and I have to say I came away impressed. The quality of the presentations was excellent and the speakers were very polished. The main focus for me during the conference was Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), Master Data Management (MDM), and Business Process Management (BPM). I have been selling the benefits of SOA for some time and hope that after attending this event we are finally ready to start implementing.

What are we looking to gain from SOA? First, I'll paraphrase what Gartner defines as SOA. It's about how to design a system with an architectural style that is modular, distributable, discoverable, swappable, and shareable. Given that definition, we are looking to improve our agility through improved responsiveness to business changes and improved developer productivity. I'm excited about the opportunity to lead this initiative and anxious to get started. My vision is to start with a centralized team that will focus on governance, service portfolio management, development, and support. We will focus on data driven services as I believe that is where the most short-term value is and will help us move our MDM initiative along as well. The team will very quickly need to become more involved with our business leaders in order to provide long-term value providing services that actually meet business needs. Finally, once we have some core services available, BPM will become a much more viable option for our business users.

The possibility of enterprises services working on a core set of master data that is accessible with a variety of applications and business processes is an exciting opportunity that has me driven. I'll provide an update on how we're doing in a future blog. If you have experience in this area, or suggestions on where to start, please let me know.

New Site for Kanban Beginners

If you're looking for an introduction to Kanban, then you must check out Kanban101. This site provides an excellent introduction to Kanban terminology and concepts. It also compares Kanban and Scrum from a high-level perspective. The site does not provide a lot of detail, but if you are new to Kanban or just want a refresher on the basics, then it's for you.

Staff Book Club Update

The team has completed The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork: Embrace Them and Empower Your Team and it was tremendously beneficial. Over the course of several weeks team morale, cooperation, and productivity has dramatically improved. The book was good overall, but I believe the most important part was the team involvement. We met twice a week with each team member facilitating at least 2 chapters over the course of the book. We had great discussions and wouldn't meet without the entire team present. If you lead a team, I strongly encourage you to start a book club and participate in it with your team.

Another one of the benefits, was the creation of a Team Mission Statement. This came up during the discussion of one of the chapters. We decided to create and publish one of our own. We solicited feedback from the team, received buy-in from our executive sponsor and came to consensus. The result's are now proudly displayed on the wall in each team members cubicle.

Finally, the team was so encouraged with the results from our first book, that we've decided to continue. We will be reading Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit starting in December. This is a relatively short read, 8 chapters, that we will finish after the first of the year due to holidays and vacations.

Team Mission Statement
"Leverage team insights, strengths, and competencies to deliver on-time, high-quality, cost effective solutions that provide increased and sustainable value to our business partners while supporting [Company]'s purpose, values, and vision."

BA Training In Mason

Ellen Gottesdiener is an industry leader on Agile Requirements and will be teaching a class at MaxTrain in Mason.

MAX will give IIBA Members and their colleagues a 10% discount off of the cost of the class ($1,295) AND also donate 10% of the registration paid to the IIBA Cincinnati Chapter! When registering, IIBA Members should use Promo Code IIBACVG20

Agile Requirements: Collaborating to Define and Confirm Needs

When: December 2-3, 2009

Where: MAX Technical Training, 4900 Parkway Dr, Suite 160, Mason, OH 45040

Registration: http://www.maxtrain.com/classes/classInfo.aspx?id=EBG-AR

Instructor: Ellen Gottesdiener

Overview: In agile projects, requirements are the basis for delivering business value for customers. Requirements analysis is integral to delivering the right product at the right time, and on time. This intensive course builds skills in creating small, well-defined requirements to deliver value one iteration at a time. Through practice exercises, you’ll learn how to define and prune your product backlog items, collaborate to develop requirements, adapt your requirements practices, and clarify your business needs. You’ll gain an appreciation of both the content and the timing of requirements analysis in agile projects, and you’ll learn why it’s crucial to collaborate with the entire project community. You’ll leverage EBG’s Agile Business Analysis Roadmap to learn when, where, and how to draw on other analysis models to build your agile project. Emphasis is placed on calibrating the content, format, and timing of your requirements analysis so that you can prepare for and participate in iteration planning and daily requirements analysis as requirements are transformed into code and tests.

This course is endorsed by the IIBA™

Attendees will receive 14 CDU’s upon completion of the course.

Questions on this course? Please contact MAX Technical Training 513.322.8888

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Cincinnati IIBA
cincinnati.theiiba.org