Software Engineering, Project Management, and Effectiveness
One of the challenges my General Manager put on my plate, was to tell a simple story, as simply as possible, about the essence of doing Enterprise Strategy.
Here is what I ended up with:
The way I told the story is …
He loved it.
I elaborated.
I shared a simple Workstream Frame to show how when we drive Enterprise Strategy, we can use the following canvas as our backdrop:
It’s a simple map but it helps chunk up and think about how you are making the changes:
To fully appreciate the simplicity above, below is what I first walked my General Manager through, and he said, while he could appreciate the essence of it, it was too complex:
At the end of the day, I think he was right, and I was glad that he pushed me to find a simpler story and to be able to tell it quickly at the whiteboard.
When people see that it’s all about driving a chunk of organizational change, and that it’s by changing the business, people, and technology capabilities, light-bulbs go off, and people get excited by how they can reshape the future of their Enterprise story, through Enterprise Strategy.
Xbox One
Microsoft Secret Stuff
The Microsoft Story
Microsoft Explained: Making Sense of the Microsoft Platform Story
Microsoft Developer Platform at a Glance
Office 365 at a Glance
Windows Azure at a Glance
“Xbox One is designed to deliver a whole new generation of blockbuster games, television and entertainment in a powerful, all-in-one device” -- Don Mattrick, president, Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft
I mentor several folks on how to make money online, either because they are trying to supplement their income, or take their game to the next level, or simply trying to reduce the worry around losing their job.
An interesting pattern is that many of the folks that I know that make a second (3rd, 4th, 5th) income online, show up strong in many ways. Their second source of income is always a “passion business.” They find a way to monetize what they love in a way that’s sustainable and creates a ton of value for their tribe of raving fans.
They end up spending more time in their art, so they recharge and renew, and show up fresh at work because they found a way to spend more time doing what they love (it’s an interesting question when you ask the question, “What do you want to spend more time doing?”, and then actually do it
One of the most important success patterns I see is that people do what they would do for free, but pay attention to what people would pay them for. This does two things:
I see people succeed at making money online by doing lots of experimentation and continuous learning. The ones that do the best, learn from success AND failures. The ones that create truly outstanding success, learn the patterns of failure to avoid, and the patterns of success to do more of.
Lucky for me, I got to see several people right around me making $10,000, $20,000, etc. a month online, and they happily shared with me what they were doing, including what was working and what was not. The variety was pretty amazing, until I started to see the patterns. As I started to see the patterns, what surprised me the most is how so many people fail to make money online because “they try to make money online” – it’s like chasing happiness, and having it always evade your grasp.
How ironic.
There are so many ways NOT to make money online. In fact, they are worth enumerating because people still try them and get incredibly frustrated and give up.
Here are 50 Ways How NOT To Make Money Online.
It’s serious stuff.
I took a pattern-based approach, so that it’s easy to see the principle behind each recipe for failure.
You can actually apply many of the insights whether it’s an online or offline business, and whether you are a one-man band, or a business partnership, or working in a corporation.
It puts a distillation of many business basics, great business lessons, and business skills at your fingertips.
I’m hoping that more people can be entrepreneurs and create their financial freedom by doing more of what they love, in a business-smart way.
Also, I’m hoping this helps more people get their head around the idea that we’re in a new digital economy and the ways to make a living are changing under our feet.
The future is here and it belongs to those that create it and shape it.
Own your destiny.
Daniel Cook has a great PDF on the 8 Laws of Productivity. The subtitle is “8 Productivity Experiments You Don’t Need to Repeat.”
It’s the synthesis of Dan’s learnings and research over the years on how to create more productive teams.
Right up front, Dan defines productivity as work accomplished, minus work required to fix defects, and minus work required to fix bad design decisions. He adds that it’s possible for productivity to be negative when workers end up doing more harm than good. Dan says, “People commonly measure ‘what was accomplished’, but often this is a poor measure of productivity. It is possible to check in code and design decisions that must be later fixed or removed at great cost. If you only measure work accomplished, you could generate great ‘productivity’ numbers but never ship a working product. The real measure of productivity is valued working code in customer hands.”
Here are the 8 Laws of Productivity according to Cook:
What happens if you try to improve productivity by working longer, either through more hours in a week, or more hours in a day?
Cook summarizes the results: <40 hours and people aren't working enough > 60 hour work week gives a small productivity boost The boost lasts 3 to 4 weeks and then turns negative
Cook tells us that according to Ford, and 12 years of experimentation, 40 hours was the most effective.
Interestingly, an early XP practice was 40 Hour Week, before it became Sustainable Pace. The main idea is that "productivity does not increase with hours worked."
A key point here is that "After a certain tipping point, teams tend to be more destructive than productive." (see InfoQ on Sustainable Pace)
I've experience the benefits of a 40 hour work week and wrote about it in 40 Hour Work Week at Microsoft.
An interesting data point is that 6 of the top 10 competitive economies prohibit employees from working over 48 hours/week. (See MBA on Bring Back the 40 Hour Work Week.)
What happens if we work harder in bursts? Can we take advantage of the burst that comes from working overtime? What happens if we crunch for a week and then 'only' 40 hours for another week? Are there other patterns of scheduling work that might be more efficient?
Cook summarizes the results:
Do the same rules apply to creativity and problem-solving as manual labor?
Cook summarizes the results: Studies show that creativity and problem solving decreases faster with fatigue than manual labor. Grinding out problems by working longer on average result in inferior solutions. Lack of sleep is particularly damaging.
If many workers self-report that they are the exception to the rule and can work longer with no ill effects, and overtime workers report they are getting more done, is this true?
Cook summarizes the results of measurements where Team A works overtime and Team B does not: Team A feels like they are doing much more than Team B. Yet, Team B produces the better product.
Does productivity change for various team sizes and which size team produces the best product?
Cook summarizes the results: Productivity for small groups is shown to be 30-50% higher than groups over 10 Cost of communication increases dramatically for groups larger than 10 Smaller groups don't have enough breadth to solve a wide array of problems well
Interestingly, the Navy Seal create super teams with teams of 4.
What is the most productive physical work environment? Are cubes, individual offices or team rooms most effective? Every individual has an opinion, but what is best for the team?
Cook summarizes the results: Studies show 100% increase in productivity Being nearby means faster communication and problem-solving Few external interruptions to the team (not the individual) means higher productivity
How should workers of different disciplines be organized? Should teams be composed of a single discipline? For example, all programmers or all artists? Or should teams be mixed?
Cook summarizes the results: Cross-functional teams produced more effective solutions in the same time Cross-functional teams have more likelihood of generating breakthrough solutions There is some negotiation of norms of front, but this is a short-term loss
What percentage of team capacity should be officially scheduled? 110% to promote people to 'stretch'? 100% because that's what they can do? 80% because slacking is good?
Cook summarizes the results: Scheduling people at 100% doesn't give space to think of creative solutions Not lost time: Passionate workers keep thinking The 20% goes into new idea generation and process improvements Producing 20 great features is usually far more profitable than producing 100 competent features
Dan included some of his research sources:
Crunch in the Game Industry IGDA - Articles - Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work: 6 Lessons - http://www.igda.org/articles/erobinson_crunch.php InfoQ - Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work, by Ben Hughes - http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/01/crunch-mode
Best Team Size Is Your Team Too Big? Too Small? What's the Right Number? - http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/articles.cfm?articleid=1501 Team Performance and Team Size - http://www.teambuildingportal.com/articles/systems-approaches/teamperformance-teamsize.php
Sickness and Overtime Correlation Relationship between self-reported low productivity and overtime working - http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=15461524
Prioritization First Things First (book) - http:///en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Things_First_(book)
4 Day Work Week Alternative Work Schedules and Work–Family Balance: A Research Note - http://rop.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/28/2/166
Team Spaces "Rapid Software Development Through Team Collocation" IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Volume 28, No. 7, July 2002
INFOQ: Does Sustainable Pace Mean a 40 Hour Work Week?
MBA on Bring Back the 40 Hour Work Week (Info Graphic)
40 Hour Week (C2 Wiki)
10 Big Ideas from Getting Results the Agile Way
40 Hour Work Week at Microsoft
How I Use Agile Results
Any activity can be turned into a game, if it meets the right criteria. Wise words from Dan Cook:
“If an activity can be learned…
If the player’s performance can be measured…
If the player can be rewarded or punished in a timely fashion…
Then any activity that meets these criteria can be turned into a game.”
Gamification is hot. I called it out in my Trends for 2013 roundup. When all things are equal, fun is a differentiating factor.
The Gamification of Education
Wearable Computing
30 Days of Getting Results is a hard-core time management course.
It’s a 30 Day Sprint with a lesson each day, but you can go at your own pace. For example, I every now and then I scan through it in about 20 minutes to remind myself of the best time management skills to work on.
Some of you have let me know that you can’t get to the site. I’m not sure why.
Regardless, I have a free PDF version of 30 Days of Getting Results available.
It’s powerful stuff. If you want to master time management, productivity, and work-life balance, this short-course will help you do that.
Time management and extreme productivity are a few of the things that I regularly mentor individuals, teams, and leaders on.
It’s 129 pages, and very easy to flip through.
Each lessons includes an exercise to make it real and drive it home.
If you download and go through it, please rate it on Good Reads.
Enjoy.
To do great things, it helps to study people that do great things and show us better ways to do things. It helps us build our reference library of what’s possible and it helps inspire us to new levels of success.
Most importantly, it expands our capabilities.
Chalene Johnson is a powerhouse when it comes to personal development. She continuously pushes herself, while expanding and exploring what’s possible physically, mentally. and emotionally. She’s a unique blend of entrepreneur, physical fitness expert, choreographer, author, life changer, and motivational speaker … and we can learn a lot from her approach.
I wrote up 27 lessons from Chalene Johson, but my favorite lesson is actually Lesson #7 – Success isn’t magic, it’s a method:
Chalene says, “It’s NOT luck — it’s KNOW HOW. There is a formula for everything.” You have to study the people that have the results that you want. Learn from their formula. Study what made them successful. If you can find the proven practices and the methods that work, you’ll speed up your success, and you’ll avoid the dead-ends. Finding a formula helps you establish and practices routines that will help you get better and better over time.
Personally, I’ve found this to be true time and time again. Whenever I got stuck, it was my strategy or approach. I just didn’t know the right formula or who to model from. There’s always a recipe. One of the most important things I learned on the Microsoft patterns & practices team is that if you look to the right sources, you’ll find the proven practices or the patterns that really work, even if it’s not well-known (in fact, part of our job on the Microsoft patterns & practices team was really to share and scale this knowledge more broadly.)
I’ve shared my personal rapid results formula before in The Way of Success, and it helps elaborate on how to model success in a more effective way. As Tony Robbins says, success leaves clues. We just need to be good students of possibility to find them and apply them.
Even if you’re not into working out, I think you'll enjoy lessons from Chalene Johnson on personal development, productivity, motivation, and more.
Everything.
This morning I started and finished, The UnStoppables: Tapping Your Entrepreneurial Power, by Bill Schley.
It’s a powerful book that brings us the essence and lessons of entrepreneurship, including what we learn from a band of Navy SEALs, Israeli investors, a branding expert, and a chairman of a multibillion-dollar tech company.
But my favorite nugget is about what we learn from customers.
Customers teach us how to be better.
They are our ultimate business mentor, if we listen and learn.
Schley writes:
“Customers might as well be air and water; your business has no life without them. Success is something you must learn from them because only they can teach it to you, through what they need, where their pain and pleasure are, how they want to be sold to, what kind of relationships they want to have with a company in your category, and so forth. Customers hold the answers to all your most important questions about your product, service, and brand. The Wonderful Paradox is that the secret of getting what you want is to think most about what they want.”
I’ve always been a fan of customer-connected development to build better software and ship better products. Empathy for customers seems to be the difference that makes the difference when it comes to envisioning and creating great products and services. (It works for education, too, when you put the learner-first, great things happen.)
If you just have a long list of tasks in Microsoft Outlook, then it won’t help you focus on immediate actions. The key is to organize your tasks in Microsoft Outlook by priorities.
The challenge is that the first thing you’ll most likely want to do is sort by a custom priority.
While it’s not very complicated, it can be incredibly frustrating if you just want a simple task list that sorts by your custom priorities, and you don’t know the precise steps to make that happen.
Let’s do it.
If you do want to use Microsoft Outlook for tasks, here’s the trick to making it more useful:
Here it is visually …
This is just a simple set of tasks in Microsoft Outlook, nothing fancy, so we keep our focus on the key thing – a list of tasks organized by priorities with a start date.
When you right-click on the fields, you can click the “Field Chooser”, and then click “New …” to create a “New Column.”
To group your tasks by your new custom priority field, you can again, right-click the fields at the top of the Tasks, but this time, click “View Settings.” From there, click “Group By …” and then change “Select available fields from” to be set to “User-defined fields in folder.” This will then let you set the “Group items by” option to your new custom priority field (“Pri” in my example above.)
Remember, the key to effective task management isn’t managing your tasks. It’s actually doing the most important tasks that achieve your goals, at the right time, in an efficient and effective way.
Are You Using Agile Results?
Agile Results on a Page
Agile Results: It Works for Teams and Leaders Too
I was helping a mentee take a new view on their business, so they could transform their business to compete in a new arena. Here are the 7 ways I outlined for them to get a better view on their business to shape significant change:
If you can answer those without a lot of work – congrats!
The above lens gives you quick insight and a critical view into the customer, the value you provide, the cost, and the capabilities you can use to drive meaningful change and transformation.
To put that into context and apply it, when business leaders look to shape a business, they tend to look at the capabilities. They want to know what’s unique and what’s redundant. If you can’t differentiate at your capabilities, then you have a problem articulating your unique value.
Capabilities help give you a simple language for talking about value and unique strengths. They are also a business tool for consolidating and improving efficiencies by maturing or outsourcing capabilities.
Use them wisely.
Beautiful.
In a new digital economy and a world of ultra-competition, it’s great to shape a smart organization.
We learned this long ago. Agile was part of the early Microsoft patterns & practices DNA. We embraced agile methods and agile management practices.
We learned that execution is king, and that shipping early and often gives you better feedback and a way to make changes in a customer-connected way.
Here is what Gartner says …
“Accepting higher project failure rates can help organizations become more efficient more quickly, according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner said project and portfolio management (PPM) leaders who take a "fail-forward-fast" approach that accepts project failure rates of 20 to 28 percent as the norm will help their organizations become more agile by embracing experimentation and enabling the declaration of success or failure earlier in a project's life.”
Check out the article, Gartner Says Smart Organizations Will Embrace Fast and Frequent Project Failure in Their Quest for Agility.
In PM Network magazine, Jesse Fewell wrote a great article on Agile Downsizing? Why Agile Skills Improve a Project Manager’s Job Security.
Here are a few highlights:
“Agile wasn’t designed to improve the bottom line like that, but it’s a misconception that has some project managers worrying whether a move to ‘self-organizing’ teams would make their position redundant. Even more concerning, many of the formal approaches, such as Scrum or Kanban, do not define a project manager role.”
Project managers are in higher demand than ever. Fewell writes:
“PMI research shows the use of agile approaches tripled from December 2008 to May 2011, and 63 percent of hiring managers would encourage their project managers to pursue agile certification.”
It’s not doing more with less.
Fewell shares a few skills that project leaders with agile experience can show on their resume:
Delegating more work – “Do you have a bent for process and facilitation? Then create that well-oiled machine and groom an analyst to manage the business. The most successful project managers I’ve met have focused on their strengths, and found capable hands for the rest of the work.”
Leading more – “Agile approaches place a dogged focus on delivering business results by improving collaboration. Once you’ve delegated the daily minutiae to the project team, you can invest in more strategic relationships.”
Driving more improvement – “… if you’ve equipped and trusted your team to handle the details and you’ve improved collaboration with stakeholders, then you finally have the energy and influence to brainstorm solutions to that quality problem, stabilize a more reliable delivery cycle than last year, or launch a product-strategy working group to mend some broken fences and get everyone on the same page.”
The key take away is this:
“The project manager with agile skills has evolved past a positional title babysitting details. The new role is about building the capability of your teams, partnering with senior stakeholders and driving incremental improvements across the board.”
You Might Also Like:
10 Ways to Make Agile Design More Effective
Agile Life-Cycle Frame
Agile Methodology in Microsoft patterns & practices
Are You Used to Delivering Working Software on a Daily Basis and Changing the Software in Response to Emerging Requirements?
Methodologies at a Glance
Roles on Agile Teams
The Art of the Agile Retrospective
That’s a pretty good question, and timeless, too.
I remember several years ago, when a vendor asked me that, and I remember laughing and thinking, “yeah, that’s what we try to show other people how to do.”
What was great though, was the vendor followed up with a short-list of precise questions:
That’s actually a really good set of questions both to quickly get a handle on your software development process and to test how “agile” you really are.
It also reveals your culture and how responsive to change and feedback you really are.
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The key shift with Agile Design is to deliver quickly while handling changes smoothly. Instead of doing long requirements phases, and heavy documentation up front, with Agile Design you focus on incremental and iterative delivery, going from low-fidelity to high-fidelity, while getting feedback and improving your design.
Here are 10 ways to make Agile Design more effective:
The last thing you want to do is throw a solution over the wall, and nobody wants it, or you missed the basic scenarios. That’s why delivering early helps get the risk out, and helps validate your path.
If you’ve ever watched people argue over how they “satisfied the requirements”, but nobody wants to use it, you know exactly what I mean. People don’t always know exactly what they want, or, even if they do, it’s hard to articulate in a way, that everybody gets it. But people are way better at recognizing what they like, and knowing whether or not they like something when they actually use it.
Embrace it.
That’s what Agile Design does – it embraces the reality that people get more clarity over time of what good really looks like.
Creating an early feedback loop also forces you to keep your solution easy to maintain and easy to evolve. Otherwise, it’s very easy to cement your design, and no longer respond to emerging needs. The key to lasting solutions is they are built to change.
It’s a process of continuous learning and continuous delivery.
One of my mentees was looking for ways to grow her prowess in “Inspiring a Vision.”
Here are some of the ways I shared with her so far:
The key with vision is, when possible –
And, a powerful tool we use at Microsoft is a Vision / Scope document.
Sometimes the best way to do something well, is to know what to avoid. In Ex-Windows Boss Steve Sinofsky: Here's Why I Use An iPhone, Nicholas Carlson shares some tips from Steve Sinofsky on analyzing the competition:
Sinofsky elaborates, and says to use the product deep, and use it over time. Use the product like it was intended by the designers. Wrap yourself around the culture, constraints, resources, and more of a competitor. And, don't take a static view of the world -- the competitor can always update their product based on feedback, or weaknesses you call out.
I’m a fan of anticipating the future, and creating the future. Even speculation helps dream up what’s possible, and be ready for anything, when it happens. And if you balance that with key trends, you can really stay on top of things.
After all, what’s The Art of the Long View teach us? While we can’t predict the future, we can better prepare for it by playing out the “what if” scenarios and possibilities.
With that in mind, I did a search on Microsoft secret stuff, and found some interesting things. After all, Microsoft spends more on R&D than Google and Apple combined.
Here are some of the more interesting articles I found:
Here are my key take aways …
Kinect Stuff
Touch and Touch Screens
More …
What neat stuff do you see Microsoft working on?
How do you create career opportunities? You reinvent yourself.
While you can always hope for things to land in your lap, there are specific patterns I see successful people do. Among those that continuously create the best career opportunities, here are the key success patterns:
If you’re wondering where the best career opportunities are, sometimes it’s the job you’ve already got, sometimes you have to go find them, and sometimes, you have to make them.
What do Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Walt Disney teach us about building a culture of innovation?
A lot.
I put together a comprehensive collection of innovation quotes. And by comprehensive, I mean more than 100 of the greatest thoughts on innovation, all at your finger tips. You’ll hear from Edison, Mozart, Michael Porter, Peter Drucker, Seth Godin, and more.
And, to make the innovation quotes more meaningful, I’ve grouped them into useful categories, so you can flip through the sections you care about the most. There’s a section on Action, Birthing Ideas, and Continuous Learning and Growth. You’ll also find a section on Fear and Failure. After all, success in innovation is often a numbers game. Remember what Edison taught us.
Just because it’s a comprehensive collection of innovation quotes, doesn’t mean it’s complete, or that it’s a done deal. There’s always room for improvement (and innovation.) So if you have some favorite innovation quotes that I’ve left out, please let me know. I want this collection to be truly insightful, and most importantly, actionable.
After all, what good are good ideas, if you can’t turn them into results.
And that’s the truth about innovation.
This past January, more than 20,000 people got the book that’s changing lives, and changing the workplace:
Getting Results the Agile Way: A Personal Results System for Work and life
You’re going to want to read this if you want to level up in work and life, or share it with a friend you know that you want to help give the edge.
I’m going to walk through how I use Agile Results to show you how YOU can seriously and significantly amplify your impact, get better performance reviews, and spend more time doing what YOU enjoy. (So, while this post might seem all about me, it’s really about you.)
I’m not going to make it look easy. I’m going to make it real. I care way more that you get the full power of the system in your hands so you can do amazing things and get exponential results. Agile Results is not a fly-by-night. It was more than ten years in the making.
Keep in mind, it’s an ultra-competitive world, and what you don’t know can hurt you. On the flip side, what you do know can instantly boost your creativity, productivity, and impact in unfair ways.
Use Agile Results as your unfair advantage.
Now then, let’s roll up our sleeves and get to it. But first, some context …
I use Agile Results as a personal productivity and time management system.
In one line, it's my "personal results system for work and life."
I also use it to lead distributed teams around the world. I use it to drive high-impact projects, and for projects at home.
This post is a detailed walkthrough of how I use Agile Results as a time management and productivity system for making things happen.
Before we dive into the details, I want to make an important point ...
The simplest way I use Agile Results is as follows:
I write down Three Wins that I want to accomplish for the day on paper.
Yes, that’s it, and it is that simple (to at least, that’s how simple it is to start using Agile Results.)
If ever I get off track (and I do), the simple way I get back on track with Agile Results, is I simply write down my three wins for the day, down on a piece of paper. Agile Results is both forgiving and instantly useful.
The main goal of Agile Results is to help me spend more time where it counts. I needed a light-weight and flexible system that I could use for myself or for others. For several years, I had to build up a new team every six months. I needed to build high-performance teams under the gun, as quickly as possible. And, at the same time, I wanted work to be a place of self-expression, where you live your values, give your best where you have your best to give, and experience flow and continuous learning on a regular basis.
I needed to get "Special Forces" results, from individuals, and from the larger team. So I needed a system that could stretch to fit ... either scale up for a team, or simply help an individual get exponential results. I wanted it to be based on timeless and self-evident principles, rather than tools or fads. And I wanted it to "play well with others" ... where if somebody already had an existing system, or favorite tools, Agile Results could just ride on top and help them get more of what they already use.
Above all, it had to be as simple as possible.
Having a system that’s as simple as possible, helps support you while you do the impossible.
With that in mind, let's dive in. So here is how I use Agile Results ...
My favorite startup routine is:
It's a simple routine. I've learned that one of the keys is carving out time for what's important, first thing in the morning. What I like about this routine is that it's not chaotic. It's serene by design. I've had chaotic startup patterns. This is the one that I purposefully made the morning about exercising, eating, and setting the stage for a great day. I don't turn on the TV. I don't watch the news. I don't check my computer. All of that can wait until I'm in the office.
It's how I charge up.
Monday is all about vision for the week.
For example, if the week were over, and you were looking back, what would be the three big things you want under your belt?
It's such a simple thing, but I make the most of the week, by starting with what I want out of the week. On Monday mornings, my main starting point is Three Wins for the Week. I identify the top Three Wins that would make this week great. To do so, I jump ahead and imagine that if this was Friday, what would I want to rattle off as my three wins under my belt. I do this on my way to work, while listening to my favorite songs. I play around with possibilities. I think of what big wins would look like. I also think about the big, hairy problems need attention. I try to balance between addressing pain, and acting on opportunities.
If I really get stuck, I try to think of the top three things that are top of mind that really need my attention. If I'm going to invest the next week of my life, I want to make sure that I'm nailing the things that matter.
The key is that I use very simple words. I'm effectively choosing labels for my wins. For example, "Vision is draft complete" is simple enough to say, and simple enough to remember. If I can't say it, it's not sticky.
When I get to work, I scan my mail. I think of my inbox as a stream of *potential* action. I walk the halls to beat the street. I absorb what I learn against what I set out to do for the week. If necessary, I readjust. If I catch my manager, I do a quick sanity check to find out his Three Wins for the Week, and how I'm mapping to what's on the radar.
For each project on my plate, I have a simple list of work items. This gives me "One Place to Look." This also helps me identify the "Next Best Thing" to do. It's this balance of the lists with what's top of mind, that keeps me grounded. I try to support my mind, with just enough scaffolding, but let it do what it does best. If I can identify the big outcomes for the week, I don't have to get caught up in the overhead of tracking minutia.
On my computer, I keep notepad open so that I can list my three wins at the top for the week, list my three wins for the day, any tasks or things on my mind below that. It's important that I keep my mind fresh and ready for anything. It's also where I do my brain dump at the end of the day ("Dump Your State"), which is simply a dump of anything on my mind or pending issues, so that I don't take work home with me, and I can pick up from where I left off, or start fresh the next day.
Each day of the week, the most important thing I do at the start of the day, is identify Three Wins that I want for that day. I write them down. I cross-check them against the Three Wins that I want for the week.
First I brainstorm on what I want or need to achieve for the day. This is just a rapid brain dump. If I'm at my desk, I write it down on paper. When I hone in on what seems to be my three key wins for the day, I say them out loud. Verbalizing them is important, because it's how I simplify and internalize them. Being able to say them, keeps them at my mental finger tips. It's like having the scoreboard right in plain view. I want them front and center so that I can use them to help me prioritize and focus throughout the day.
I try to put my "Worst Things First", either in the start of the week, or the start of the day. The worst thing is to have something looming over me all day or all week. The other way I look at this is, if I jump my worst hurdle, then the rest of the day or the week is a glide-path.
If my worst thing is time consuming, then I might need to "Timebox" it, such as spend no more than an hour max on it. If the work is intensive, I might tend to split it up, and work through it in 20 minute batches, and take 10 minute breaks. If I'm on a roll, I might go straight for an hour. If this is regular work that I need to do, that I really don't enjoy doing, then I try to either get it off my plate, or find a way to make it fun, or "Pair Up" with somebody. I find somebody who loves to do what I hate doing, and see if they might like to show me, either why they love it, or how to do it better, faster, and easier. This practice has taught me so many new tricks, and it's also helped me appreciate some of the deep skills that others are good at.
I know my peak times and my down times during the day. For example, at around 11:00 AM, I have lunch on my mind, and 3:00 PM is effectively siesta time.
My best hours tend to be 8:00, 10:00, 2:00, and 4:00.
They are the hours where I am in the zone and firing on all cylinders. I’m generally more “productive” earlier in the day, and more “creative” later in the day. I don’t know all the reasons why, but what I do know is it’s a pattern. And by knowing that pattern, I can leverage it.
What I do is I push my heaving lifting into those hours as best as I can. I use my best horse-power to plow through my work and turn mountains into mole-hills. When I don’t use those peak hours, somehow mole-hills turn into mountains, and it’s slow going. It’s the difference in feeling between riding a wave, and pushing rocks uphill.
To get to this point, I simply had to notice during the week, when my best hours really are, not just when I want them to be. Now that I know my best times for peak performance, I have to defend those hours as best I can, or at least know what I am trading off.
When it comes to defending your calendar, you need to know what’s worth it. Once you know your best Power Hours, you know what’s worth it.
Aside from spending more time in my high ROI activities, and playing to my strengths, my Power Hours amplify my productivity more than any other way.
This is the space of creative breakthroughs and innovation. It’s not that I’m not creative throughout the day, but I generally have a pattern where I’m more creative at night, or in the quiet hours of the morning. I’m also more creative on Fridays and Saturdays.
I can try to change the pattern, but I can also first notice the pattern and leverage what already exists. If I know the times when I’m most creative, I can start to use this time to think and brainstorm more freely.
And, I do.
That’s how I come up with ways to do things better, faster, and cheaper. It’s how I figure out ways to change the business, or ways to change my approach, and ways to take things to the next level.
When I’m in my creative zone, I do more exploration. I follow my thoughts and play out “what if” scenarios. I value the fact that my Creative Hours lead the ideas that help me learn and improve whatever I do.
A simple check, if I’m not flowing enough ideas or if I’m feeling too much nose-to-the grindstone, is I ask myself, “How many Creative Hours did I spend this week?” If it’s not at least 2, I try to up the count.
Create Hours are my best way to decompress, absorb and synthesize, which ultimately leads to my greatest breakthroughs.
Day is done, gone the Sun. From the lakes, from the hills, from the sky.
But how do you put it to rest?
I like a deliberate switch from work-mode to home-mode. I don’t want to bring my work home with me, and have it seep into everything I do. When I’m at work, I work hard (and play hard, too … especially because I treat work like play, and drive it with a passion.)
But when I shut down my work day, I need a way to unwind.
I found the best way to free my mind, is dump it down. So I simply dump it to notepad, or my little yellow sticky pad. Any open issues or challenges or things on my mind. I can always pick them back up. Or, I can let them go.
But the last thing I want is for a bunch of problems to be swirling around in my head.
Besides, if you stop swirling problems around in your head, you make space for creative insights, and the answers start to pop out of the woodwork.
Another pattern I’ve adopted is to use a metaphorical tree in my mind to hang my hat of problems on. Again, I can always pick them up again tomorrow, but for now, I’ll stuff my problems in this hat, hang them on the tree, and free my mind.
What if every Friday you could get smarter about your productivity and effectiveness?
You can.
I know it sounds simple, and it is, but remember that one of the big keys in life is not just knowing what to do, but doing what you know.
Friday Reflection is a perfect chance to ask myself two simple questions:
That’s how it starts.
I keep a simple recurring 20-minute appointment with myself for each Friday morning. It’s often the most valuable 20 minutes I spend each week. It’s where I actually reflect on my performance. Not in a critical way, but a constructive way. I explore with simple questions:
Friday Reflection is how I learn to master my capacity and be more realistic about my own expectations. I tend to over-estimate what’s possible in a week (and underestimate what’s possible in a month.) This little feedback loop, helps me see the good, the bad, and the downright fugly.
The most important outcome of my Friday Reflection is, three things to try out next week to do a little better.
The little better adds up.
The main thing to keep in mind is that Friday Reflection gives you deeper insight into your strengths and weaknesses in a way that you instantly benefit from. The key is to carry the good forward, and let the rest go, and to treat it as a continuous learning loop.
You only fail when you give up or stop learning or stop trying.
To make my month more meaningful and to add a dash of focus to it, I identify my Three Wins for the Month. At the month level, I can take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Asking myself, “What do I want under my belt when the month is over?” is a powerful and swift way to create clarity, and identify compelling outcomes.
Since I'm leading a team, I go a step further. I think of Three Wins for the team. Based on everything that's on our plate, I try to identify what the Three Wins for the team should be. I try to figure out things that would be easy to share with my manager. This makes it easy to check alignment, and it makes it easy for them to sell our impact up the management chain. (Read – It helps you get better performance reviews.)
When I get to work, I send out a short mail to the team, with the subject line: WEEKLY WINS: 2012-07-23. It's simply WEEKLY WINS, plus the current date. I briefly summarize the drivers, the threats, and hot issues on our plate, then list the Three Wins identified. I follow this by asking the team for their input, and whether we need to recalibrate. At the bottom, I simply do an A-Z list of bulleted items to dump the full working set of work in flight. It both helps people see what the full scope is, as well as help us rationalize whether we bit off the right things, and it helps people stay on top of all the work. It's like a team To-Do list. Sometimes it's a crazy list, but the three wins at the top, help keep our sanity and focus at all times.
It's a simple approach, but it works great for distributed teams, and it gives us something to go back and check at the end of the week, or throughout the week to remind ourselves of what we set out to do.
Since my manager adopted Agile Results too, he shares his three wins for the week to the team in a simple mail. Folks across the team, simply add their wins for the week. It's nothing formal ... it's more like a simple assertion of our intended victories.
During our team meeting, our manager goes around the team, and we share our three wins from last week, and our three wins we plan for this week. This helps everybody across the team stay connected to what's going on.
I need to throw in this tip, because it’s the single most effective way I’ve found to get a team on the same page, and avoid a bunch of email. And, it’s a simple way to create clarity, and avoid confusion.
It also builds the discipline of execution.
All you do is meet for ten minutes each day, Monday through Thursday. I call it, Ten at Ten.
I found ten at ten to be one of the most effective times in the day to do a sync. That said, because I always have distributed teams, I’ve had to vary this. But for the most part, I like Ten at Ten as a reminder to have a quick sync up with the team, focused on creating clarity, debottlenecking any issues, and taking note of small wins and progress.
The way it works is this:
You’d be surprised at how quickly people start to pay attention to what they’re working on and on what’s worth working on. It also helps team members very quickly see each other’s impact and results. It also helps people raise their bar, especially when they get to hear and experience what good looks like from their peers.
Most importantly, it shines the light on little, incremental progress. Progress is the key to happiness in work and life.
One thing I’ll point out is that the Monday meeting is actually 30 minutes, not 10 minutes, since it’s more of a level set for the week, and it’s a chance to figure out the Three Wins for the Week.
Well, there it is.
It might not look like a simple system for meaningful results, but when you think of all the synthesis it is effective.
The way to keep it simple is to always start simple. Whenever you forget what to do, go back to the basics. Simply ask yourself,
“What are Three Wins I want for today?”
- OR -
“What are Three Wins I want for this week?”
“What are Three Wins I want for this month?”
… if you’re feeling really bold, and want to go for the gold, “What are Three Wins I want for this year?”
Hopefully, this little walkthrough helps you easily see how you can apply Agile Results to your workflow, and get more out of the time you already spend. If nothing else, remember this:
Value is the ultimate short-cut.
When you know what’s valued, you can target your effort. When you know the high value activities, you can focus on those.
What Agile Results does is streamline your ability to flow value, for yourself and others.
Pure and simple.
And that’s how getting results should be … elegance in action.
If you find you can't keep up with the world around you, then break things down. Breaking things down is the key to finishing faster.
Breaking things down is also the key to agility.
One of the toughest project management lessons I had to learn was breaking things down into more modular chunks. When I took on a project, my goal was to make big things happen and change the world.
After all, go big or go home, right?
The problem is you run out of time, or you run out of budget. You even run out of oomph. So the worst way to make things happen is to have a bunch of hopes, plans, dreams, and things, sitting in a backlog because they're too big to ship in the time that you've got.
Which brings us to the other key to agility ... ship things on a shorter schedule.
This re-trains your brain to chunk things down, flow value, chop dependencies down to size, learn, and, move on.
Best of all, if you miss the train, you catch the next train.
I’m always on the lookout for the best insight and action you can use for work and life. I especially enjoy when I find somebody who is truly a thought leader, a giant in their space.
After all, I’m a big fan of helping everyone “stand on the shoulders of giants.”
Elizabeth is a giant (actually, more like a Titan) in the field of management. She brings to the table more than 30 years of experience in the art and science of management. She’s a former McKinsey partner, a holds a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, and she is the author of McKinsey’s Marvin Bower, and The Definitive Drucker.
She knows her stuff.
So I asked her to share her stuff.
Elizabeth has written a powerful guest post for me on her best lessons learned in the art and science of management:
Management Lessons of a Lifelong Student, by Elizabeth Edersheim.
She reveals the secrets of the best managers and best leaders, and puts it right at your fingertips. Every now and then you read something that changes your breadth or depth on a topic. This is one of those posts.
It’s a wealth of insight and action.
Keep in mind that Elizabeth operates at multiple levels of management, so whether you are a line-leader or a CEO, Elizabeth has distilled some key insights you can immediate apply, or refine your thinking, or perhaps lead to a new “ah-ha” moment.
Enjoy, and may the best practices for management serve you well, whether you’re shaping your own business or the business around you.
I was watching a video on Google Glass with Robert Scoble, and I couldn’t help but wonder about all the possibilities that technology can bring to the table.
Wearable computing bridges the gap between the real world and the things we see in Sci-Fi movies.
Of course, when we overlay information on our world, the key will be turning information into insight and action. All change isn’t progress, and the market will flush out things faster than ever before. And, to the victor go the spoils.
In the video, you can see how the Google Glass does a few basic things so far:
The big limit in what it’s capable of, so far, seems to be the batter power. And of course, a key concern was security. It’s another reminder how in the software space, security and performance always play a role, even if they are behind the scenes. In fact, that’s the irony of software security and performance, they are at their best when you don’t notice them.
Security and performance are often unsung heroes.
The big take away for me is that the game is on warp speed now. By game, I mean, the business of software. You can go from idea to market pretty fast. So the big bottlenecks range from the right ideas, to the right people, to the right strategy, to the right execution.
But more importantly, the reminder is this:
Companies with smart people, data-driven insights, a culture of innovation, great software processes, customer focus, and reach around the world, can change the world -- at a faster pace than ever before.
Who knows what we’ll be wearing next?
No, this isn't about "Once upon a time." There are ways to know and share yourself with skill. You can combine stories and branding to reveal the truths that help you stand out in the marketplace or workplace, and play to your competitive edge.
But the challenge is this -- unless you're a skilled marketer, how do you reveal the power of your brand in a more compelling way?
I'm not a marketer, and I don't play one on T.V., so I have to work at it. The way I work at it, is I pay attention to the people that are outstanding at what they do.
So what do the people that are outstanding at this do?
They focus on values. Finding shared values is the key to building brands and building stronger relationships in everything you do ... in work, and in life. Brand building is largely about creating clarity around the values the brand stands for.
A simple way is to start by just figuring out three attributes that you want your brand to be about. For example:
It needs to be believable. You need to believe it, in your heart of hearts and soul of souls.
Related to that, you need to know who your brand is for. What are the values they share? What are the boundaries of those values, and at what point, do you have polar opposites or create conflict?
Find the intersection.
That’s where the magic happens.
If you want to be relevant, you need to find the intersection of the values.
Values are the ultimate lightening rod.
If you have an understanding of types of behavior change, you can design more effective software.
Software is a powerful way to change the world.
You can change the world with software, a behavior at a time.
Think of all the little addictive loops, that shape our habits and thoughts on a daily basis. We’re gradually being automated and programmed by the apps we use.
I’ve seen some people spiral down, a click, a status update, a notification, or a reminder at a time. I’ve seen others spiral up by using apps that teach them new habits, reinforce their good behaviors, and bring out their best.
To bottom line is, whether you are shaping software or using software on a regular basis, it helps to have a deep understanding of behavior change. You can use this know-how to change your personal habits, lead change management efforts, or build software that changes the world.
We know change is tough, and it’s a complicated topic, so where do you start?
A great place to start is to learn the 15 types of behavior change, thanks to Dr. BJ Fogg and his Fogg Behavior Grid. No worries. 15 sounds like a lot, but it’s actually easy once you understand the model behind it. It’s simple and intuitive.
The basic frame works like this. You figure out whether the behavior change is to do a new behavior, a familiar behavior, increase the behavior, decrease the behavior, or stop dong the behavior. Within that, you figure out the duration, as in, is this a one-time deal, or is it for a specific time period, or is it something you want to do permanently.
Here are some examples from Dr. BJ Fogg’s Behavior Grid:
Do New Behavior
Do Familiar Behavior
Increase Behavior
Decrease Behavior
Stop Doing a Behavior
When you know the type of behavior change you’re trying to make, you can design more effective change strategies.
If you want to change the world, focus on changing behaviors. If you want to change your world, focus on changing your behaviors. (And, remember, thoughts are behaviors, too.)