holiday retrospective

:)

i'm on holidays. i feel guilty about it too.

i'm feeling guilty about not having any self improvement plans. i have things to do, but i'm at another crossroads.

i was feeling earlier today that i haven't changed for years... my boss resigned on the last day of my work pre-holidays.

that's prompting me to reflect a bit deeper on where WM is headed. as we've clashed on opinions in the past. not that i have any ill feelings against the person. he was an 'enterprise' thinking person. i look at myself and my team members as entrepreneurs. we do what it takes to get it done.

we can do a better job with less resources than spending $MM's on 'enterprise' solutions. i need to put together something like the 'open intranet'.. a very simple way of selling to SOAness of what we are actually trying to accomplish.

i think.. and believe... that we can get it done.

replace intranet

replace all the services

build our own CRM

build our own integration services.

build our own financial reporting system

build our own security management system.

we can do it in a way that is 'more' future proof that what is currently going on.

the idea that we can build something now and reuse it forever is a stretch in most cases. people point at our previous systems and say ' look at that, we can't reuse that'... exactly my point. when looking at the previous system and it's an access/VBA front end developed from 1998-2005, what do you expect?

when have webbys, dba's, c# devs, ops, ba's. we can do it. we already have dedicated people in ops doing 8 hours a day of user maintenance of 'enterprise' systems. bit of a joke to be honest.

i'm hoping that our big bosses give us the chance to pick our new boss. we can drive a better direction.

this was inspired by http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/09/23/adafruit-slides-from-open-source-hardware-summit-keynote-openhwsummit/

in particular the idea in the last couple of slides asking "Why they do Open Source Hardware"

We do open source hard ware...

... to join a community

... what we make will outlast us

... to become better engineers

You always get back more than you give.

Just beautiful...

we need to open the minds of upper management to show that we are capable are being in control of our technology pathways. we can't prove it with how much money you are going to save or give them a value on the cost. we just need to be trusted. at least give us a voice to be heard.

Thankful For More Change - A 3 month retrospective.

My mouth causes a lot of problems, the filtering system doesn't work well between my brain. Thankfully lately everything that has been coming out has in some way been helpful to myself and others.

Thankfully what is coming out of me i'm confident in, in that i can achieve the vision i want. At the moment people are starting to see it, it's way too hard to have a 10 minute discussion about a topic that i've spent nearly two years studying (agile/scrum/lean/productivity) and for the other party to pick up all the backstory on my rantings.

Thankfully the little droppings i've been planting over the last year are sprouting in people's brains.

In conjuction with a 'task force' of one representative from each internal department we put together a paper to begin the discussion with managers about what is going on, and what we want to move us forward together. It was about 10 pages and 4000 words, thats the quick version. draft version was double that.

From that paper, we planted the seeds of Scrum. It was difficult from the beginning of the taskforce to not just say 'i have the solution already', we spent a whole lot of time talking about the problems we all had.. all the time thinking 'i know how to fix this'. The good thing was that my colleagues were already suggesting small artifacts of scrum, so when you present a paper like Sutherland's "The Scrum Guide" (find the link) people are already convinced to look further into it.

When meeting with our Group Manager, after he had read the whole paper, he picked out the idea of the standup and said 'Do That. Do that for a month'. I was shocked. I have spent months drilling this idea into him. Spent months drilling into him that we can only change when he throws the gauntlet down and challenges us all to improve. We need his backing and support. We need his authority to wake people up. We got it.

We presented it to the Department last Wednesday and I believe it was successful. People were asking the right questions. The expected people were raising the 'it won't work' flags.

It's going to be real challenge to get people to engage. I want people to work out how to fix their own problems, and then tell others what they did to do it.

SHARE YOUR KNOWLEDGE!

Thanks to Jason Yip of thoughtworks for providing his slides... especially the one entitled 'No Problems is a Problem'.

Change For Myself Means Change for Others

What a wanky self indulgent title.....

I'm in the middle of another career-job-responsibility change and i'm not sure how i feel.

i'm excited, but also apprehensive. I want to be sure that the work i'm doing at the moment doesn't dig a bigger hole for my employer. I don't want my co-workers to blame me for stuffing up their jobs and therefore their lives.

i want to improve everything but i want others to tell me the right way to do it.

i mentioned to someone yesterday that my career path since 2003 from filing clerk to payroll to developer and now i'm architecting a 10 year plan for the whole company. It's crazy that in this organisation that it's possible, because you wouldn't get that impression from talking to anyone else.

The work i'm doing needs to be more than just my opinion, every time a developer comes in the door the standard of the day becomes whatever they want.

Everyone in the department needs to change their focus to at least include a 10,000 foot view of the world. We need to fix things for the future, not just for now. The big picture determines what services will be providing in the next couple years. If you don't speak up, some manager will decide. That doesn't work for me.

I'm spending so much time caring about what happens, that i need to stop now and actually get things working. More than proof of concept, proving that my collation of ideas, my filter, is correctly aligned with where we all need to go.

i disgust me, i hate my arrogance. i look down on others who talk/write like i do. this internal conflict is causing me some damage... if i think i sound arrogant what does that mean others think. it's all opposite. anytime i'm actually angry, people think i'm calm. any time i'm calm people think i'm angry. mental issues FTW!

we aren't agile

it's been a year since i wrote the last post. my attempts at 'doing' agile in our team has failed.. a lot has been learnt.

don't get me wrong i'm upset about it. i think our current culture in the company wants to fail. the overriding push i get from above is, shhh don't stick your head out. don't make noise. don't share your opinion with anyone outside. don't speak up that you have a better way to do it. but when things are going wrong, why didn't you speak up?

guess what? i'm gonna do what i think is the right thing to do.. because after the dust settles i'll still be there to clean up the mess. probably not... more likely keep the mess contained and support it. until we can spend a couple more million dollars on a system that promises to fix our company and all of it's processes...

why doesn't our business fix itself. there must be a point at which someone somewhere raises the question to someone in our department to ask for involvement.. there must be a point at which early on we could allocate some resources to manage the project.. or at least guide them.

or is it just that we are looked down upon? look at the mess we are in and how we aren't able to fix it. so we let people crap all over our systems and dig the hole deeper.

these analogies are coming thick and fast recently. 'digging the hole deeper' i must say at least twice an hour...

is it bad that i'm airing dirty laundry... don't care. ill send this tomorrow to my bosses. it will be like all my previous complaints. deaf ears falling again.....

because i care. because i want better for my employer.. because the work we do is more important than the political bullshit that we have wade through to get anything done. it is. we need to provide better for our dependants.. our stakeholders need help. the world is in the shit at the moment. why do we have so many people in suits determining the outcomes of people in need... get the people with problems helping us spend the money.

they should all be hung for wasting this money. it's money taken from the mouths of children. of the homeless. it's money that has not benefited the needy in anyway. where's the accountability.