Friends

http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2009/12/14/what-supermarket-shopping-has-in-common-with-information-overload/

http://blog.mathemagenic.com/?p=2982

Still in the middle of writing deadlines, so just something that came to my mind yesterday before falling asleep…

I love cheese. I also grew up in a country with planned economy, so while there was a variety of cheeses produced there, you wouldn’t find more than one or two types on a shop shelves at any given moment.

cheese shop, Flickr photo by loop_oh

Now try to imagine how I felt during my first trip abroad in some regular British supermarket. Suddenly all kinds of cheeses were in front of me, ready to be picked up and enjoyed. I was overwhelmed and lost and didn’t know which one to choose. Also, it wasn’t only about cheese – there was great variety of other familiar products and lots of those that I didn’t know. There was abundance and lots of things to choose from…

That planned economy is part of the history now and I’m pretty used to the variety of cheese in supermarkets, only in well-to-do countries, but also in Russia. I still get overwhelmed getting into an unfamiliar supermarket once in a while, but I also know that there is some logic in there and it takes a couple of visits to find your way around. If I’m in a hurry I locate relevant parts and pick up things needed for dinner. If I have time I may look at new products, try to figure out how to use them and pick up a couple to try out. I don’t get stressed or think that it’s something extremely difficult to deal with.

The same with information overload. When you grew up in a world of information scarcity (or, at least, the world that felt that that way because accessing everything out there wasn’t easy), information abundance is overwhelming: you don’t know how to find your way around and to make choices. It’s even worse than my first supermarket experience – with internet it feels like you have to find stuff for your dinner with all supermarkets in the world.

But I guess it will pass: I’ve learnt to do shopping in a supermarkets, so with some learning we’ll figure out how to recognise patterns and make choices in the sea of information without feeling overloaded.

http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2009/12/11/leadership-is-pretty-much-like-respectful-parenting/

http://blog.mathemagenic.com/?p=2972

Was struck after a conversation about leadership by the parallels I see between it and parenting (or, at least, the parenting values we tend to choose as a family):

• creating conditions for others to grow without treating them as “small”
• legitimate peripheral participation: creating conditions for learning by observing and participating on one’s own terms in existing practices, rather than telling about how things should be
• seriously addressing nightmares as serious stuff even when you can’t imagine how someone could be afraid of that
• nurturing passions while taking care of safety
• thinking in terms of boundaries and attractors
• telling what is going to happen and discussing the options instead of pulling others along for a pre-arranged trip
• believing that loving care and on-going conversation can get you much further than punishments and rewards
• figuring out how to express love in another’s terms, not in your own

http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2009/12/09/shrunken-communication-in-distributed-teams/

http://blog.mathemagenic.com/?p=2964

As promised – more thinking from our project looking at the challenges in distributed Agile teams. One of the first things we have observed was a heavy focus on goal-oriented communication between people in different locations: they would talk (this includes ‘type’ :) about solving particular problems around work, but hardly anything else. I drew a picture to explain what happens in this case that others found useful and quickly nicknamed “the egg” – so, here it is.

You can look at communication in a team across two axes. The first one (horizontal) is about what triggers it. I find it useful to distinguish between goal-oriented and opportunity-driven communication:

• Goal-oriented communication is about work-related problem solving and coordination. It’s the task at hand that forces you to approach others to sort out things with them. This is the case where you wouldn’t hesitate to plan a meeting, send an email or pick up the phone to call.
• Opportunity-driven communication is about things not 100% necessary, but potentially useful, or, even, not very useful, but just said at the moment (”good morning everyone!”). Think of the cases where you wonder if your email is ’spamming’, add “by the way, do you also know…” or most of the conversations at the coffee corner. In this case communication is triggered by an opportunity – bumping into people, interesting things happening, ideas floating by or just an awkward silence that forces you to look for a topic to continue. This type of communication is piggybacking on something else: either happening around goal-oriented communication (e.g. side conversations at a meeting), other activities (having a coffee together) or observing others (e.g. seeing a colleague and remembering to ask them about something).

Vertical axis is about the ‘pre-arrangeness’ of communication (I’m not sure with the terms here, so any suggestions are welcome):

• Structured communication is expected and, to an extend, formalised. Planned meetings, promised memos and status reports are here. In this case there is time, space and resources needed to communicate (or, at least, nobody questions that they should be there).
• Informal communication is about everything else. It’s also expected, but in a more fuzzy sense (”let me know if there is a problem”). It’s not likely to be known in advance when and how it will happen, so it’s more difficult to allocate the resources for it.

In a co-located team all types of communication have place (the whole egg :). There are enough triggers for an opportunity-based communication and being in front of someone makes negotiating about time, space and channels for informal communication easy (you rather make a minute to talk about the thing, say “no” or make an arrangement about communicating later on).

In a distributed team communication shrinks to the basics (egg yellow :). From one side, when there is no “easyness” of face-to-face settings, we are likely to rely on structured communication, since negotiating time and resources for informal communication is more challenging (e.g. email might be not read for a while, phone is interruptive and costly, etc.). Informal communication is still happens, especially in the goal-oriented space, but the chances for it are lower, because it’s extra taxing (e.g. questions that would be asked in a meeting may not get get asked in email or IM chat). For opportunity-driven communication it’s even worse: lack of shared physical space results in far less triggers that might turn into a conversation: there are not many non-essential activities (no drinking coffee online :), it’s more difficult to observe others and even goal-oriented communication mediated by technology tends to be more “on topic” (from my experience “social talk” at a face-to-face meeting happens much easier than in a phone conference or email exchange).

There are quite a few more things to add here (in particularly about the negative effects of shrunken communication and ways to extend it), but nobody likes very long blogposts :)

http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2009/12/02/distributed-agile-the-black-box-of-co-located-team/

http://blog.mathemagenic.com/?p=2953

First, a bit of the context: we are working on a project helping distributed Agile teams to identify challenges they have to deal with and to find solutions for them. Also, as much as I would like to make it a proper research project (with in-depth state-of-the-art review, large scale data collection and time to process all that), it is more of a research-based consulting: we observe a bit, interview some people, scratch the surface of what had been said on it and hope that our research backgrounds would help to fill in the gaps to come back with useful insights.

Second, a disclaimer: I’m not an expert on Agile software development, but have been learning about it in the past few months. And, while my research is pretty much about technology-mediated ways of working, research on distributed teams is not at the core of it. But all that shouldn’t prevent me from writing about it, isn’t it?

Now to the point. I’ll start from the values behind the Agile approach, as articulated in Manifesto for Agile Software Development:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Those values are supported by a set of principles and a variety of methods and practices that address those principles in practice. Now the part that is directly relevant to our case: while it’s not always immediately obvious, Agile methods are designed for a co-located team, articulated in one of the principles:

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

From one side, this makes the whole exercise of figuring out how Agile can work in a distributed team pretty pointless: it’s not designed for it. From another, there are various reasons for distributed Agile teams and examples where they work (some links). So the question is not if distributed Agile is possible, but how to make it work.

For me it translates into the focus on understanding what is actually happening face-to-face and then figuring out what of it and how exactly can be supported in a distributed settings.

This is a simplified picture of what we have observed in our case. It is heavily based on Scrum as a main method, which could be described in terms of roles, ceremonies and artifacts. In a sense those are the known ingredients for the success, so a lot of effort goes into figuring out how they can work when the team is distributed. This involves, for example, finding tools and adjusting processes to support ceremonies (e.g. daily stand-up meetings) and figuring out how to share and update artifacts online.

However, next to those known ingredients there is a big black box: co-located team. Co-location and face-to-face interaction is one of the cornerstones of Agile, but from what I’ve seen there is not that much understanding of what exactly happens there. Which is fine when the team is co-located – we have evolved to make the best uses of face-to-face and don’t even have to think of what and how we do. But when the team gets distributed that lack of attention to the black box results in all kinds of challenges. And, given that Agile philosophy places so much value on informality, putting efforts into articulating and formalising the blackbox ingredients doesn’t get much momentum.

So, this is more or less what we are doing in the project: bringing research instruments to open the black box and then working together with the teams to figure out how to make it work in distributed settings.

[As you have probably guessed two previous posts are directly related to this one: Why sharing a team room might be not so good and What a coffee corner provides, how to call it and a research agenda. More to come :)]