Agile Project Management and Golf

I've just had two similar experiences: one working with a vendor on a software development project and another working with some of my wife's staff on setting up some hardware and software. In each case, what they considered "done" is not what I would call "done" and it's caused some problems.

In an agile approach, you bite off a piece of work for a given amount of time (a sprint), design it, build it, test it, make sure the user interface is complete, and that all the code is in a production environment. In other words, you deliver something that provides immediate business value. On the software development project referenced above, the vendor would come back with most of the code working, most of the user interface done, some system testing accomplished, and the code would still be in a development environment. They would take the approach that they had some "tweaks" to wrap some things up but "we get the idea...".

I tried to relate this to playing golf. Suppose you're on a 450 yard hole. The approach above would be analogous to hitting a 250 yard drive, then maybe a 185 yard shot from the fairway to put you within striking distance of the green, and then picking up your ball and walking to the next hole saying you got close enough. Looking at it from the distance perspective, 435 yards is obviously 97 percent of the way there. But depending upon how well you execute, those last 15 yards could take a chip onto the green and into the hole (if you are really good or really lucky), or multiple chips and multiple putts. From the number of strokes perspective, being 15 yards out could mean you're two-thirds of the way there at best or maybe even only one third of the way there if it takes you two more chips and two more putts.

The point is, you've got to do the detail work to get the ball into the hole before you move to the next hole. We don't play all the big driver and fairway woods shots for the whole course and then go back and do all of our short game work. I think project management works best when you play it the same way.

Software is like Tic-Tac-Toe

We just taught our three-year-old son how to play tic-tac-toe. I was in the beginning stages of the very lengthy porcess of putting him to bed the other night, and we were taking turns drawing on a little refreshable drawing pad when I drew a tic-tac-toe board. We played a few games. Then it was his turn to draw and he decided to draw a "better" tic-tac-toe board with more lines on the playing board so you would have to get five in-a-row to win instead of three. I chuckled because I remembered doing the same thing as a kid. But it occurred to me that traditional tic-tac-toe where three in-a-row wins was, in fact, the best (and maybe only really usable) version of the game. There is an optimal point where you hit "enough" and putting more complexity into the game makes it worse and sometimes not even worth trying to play.

The company 37signals has been an advocate of this same idea in software for some time: a given application should be about getting certain things done. The developers should find the easiest, fastest, most intuitive way to do just that and stop. Adding more lines (in this case, lines of code) to the game does not make it better. It buries the core functionality so that the software becomes too complicated, too hard to find the function you need in all the drop down menus, too much of a hassle. And we wonder why user adoption is so hard. I think the winners are those, like 37signals, who find that point of "enough" on the curve and deliberately stop while they can.

24 is Agile

The director speaking in a short film from the bonus DVD of Season 2 of 24:

In that 12 hours I gotta figure out how I'm gonna achieve everything I need to achieve in blocks of two hours and three hours. We do what's called a timeline, and we give ourselves a certain amount of hours to work on every scene. And we need to try to get to those hours to make our day--to stay within our 12 hours of shooting time.

Then as the day goes on you're constantly changing--things aren't working out, you look for a shorter way. A sort of more economic way to shoot a scene.

Keifer Sutherland speaking in the same short film:

When you actually put something on its feet, logic issues will come with the physicality of the scene that might not come up when you're simply reading it. Stuff hopefully is continually changing until the very last moment until we shoot it, and I think your ability to adapt in those specific situations and certainly adapt at speed in many cases is the difference between your ability to do something well and not.

The genius of Ken Burns

I've just finished watching the Ken Burns film Thomas Jefferson. In my mind, Mr. Burns is the preiminent historical documentarian. In the special features section of the DVD I found two short films on him and his work. Here are some notable excerpts:

Listen to the photos
One of Mr. Burns' trademarks is taking a still photo and either zooming in or out or panning across it in some way while the viewer hears an audio track. It's now even called the "Ken Burns effect" in filming jargon. There's a whole lesson in just this point on embracing constraints (see a chapter on this in 37signals book). But Burns says he would stare at a photo and "listen to it." He elaborates by saying the trees in the photo had a rustling sound, the boat going by, the people walking and chatting in the background all would have been making sounds. He even goes so far as to ask, "What did the dust sound like?"

Find an emotional connection

My work is not just interested in the dry dates and facts and events of the past, but the emotional archaeology--and I call myself an emotional archaeologist--because we know that's the glue that makes these complex past events stick in our minds and in our hearts and become permanetly a part of who we are now.

This is very similar to the approach author David McCullough takes to his work.

History is

History is, not was. We're never going to change what happened...But the way we engage our questions now about it tell us who we are right now. (now quoting Harry Truman) The only thing really new is the history you don't know.

Meaning accrues
When asked about the length of his films in general and his slow, gliding shots in an era of quick frenetic cuts:

We realize that all meaning accrues in duration. The things that we are all proudest of, the work we've done, the relationships we have, accrue in duration. It's the things we've given our best attention to, and we realize in the end the only thing we have is our attention.

Think wrapping paper is a commodity? Think again...

I'm trying out some premium wrapping paper we bought off a school fund raiser. It's maybe a tad thicker than the Walgreens cheap stuff, has the snowflakes on the front, yada, yada...but wait...flip it over to start actually wrapping and what do we have here? One inch dotted gridlines are lightly printed across the whole roll. Now, even though I graduated from pre-school many years ago, I can actually cut a straight line so my packaging doesn't look like it was done by a bonobo. It's remarkable how simple and yet useful that is.

Just set up new twitterfeed

I place short "what I'm doing" updates along with quick thoughts and observations on twitter. Things that take a bit more explaining make it onto this blog. I've now added a twitterfeed so that blog posts are mentioned in twitter. Regardless of how you follow what I'm saying, I thank you.

Moving away from PowerPoint?

After reading The Back of the Napkin I'm giving serious thought to moving away from slick PowerPoint (and my actual preference, Keynote) presentations and moving toward real-time diagramming of my ideas on a white board, flip chart, or piece of paper. I just did an experimental film using simple hand-drawn pictures on a series of index cards and laying them in a rough prototype of a proposed workflow for a client and it seemed to have worked just as well, if not better, than trying to do the same thing in a more polished, "professional" way. I'll keep experimenting with this notion. But I'm more inclined to move toward this intuition of mine based upon this great blog post. I love this representative quote:

[Speaking about others showing up with portfolios of their past work and him showing up with a paintbrush...]

It not about the past; it’s about the future. It’s not “build me something like you’ve already done” but “build me something from your imagination.” Calatrava came with a paintbrush and a vision, not a PowerPoint of his projects.

The challenge isn’t putting together the slickest presentation. The challenge is having the imagination and the ability to converse with clients about what their future will be. Those are the paintings that will win commissions.