Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

The summer break was a good time for a bit of rest and reflection, especially given the down-and-up year we had in 2011.

Naturally for me, part of this time was spent with a couple of books borrowed from the growing office library – a couple others much harder going than this one here:

The Book	What we thought
“Great by Choice Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck–Why Some Thrive Despite Them All” by Jim Collins and Morten Hansen	More food for thought

Having previously read “Built to Last”, “Good to Great” and “How the Mighty Fall” by Jim (and others) I was not disappointed with a few more points of insight the authors have added with this latest piece of analysis. read more »

Back around November 2009 read an article by Roger Martin promoting his new book, and posted about it here.

The book arrived and I read it some time ago, but some developments more recently prompted me to pick it up again.  Given the reliance our company has on product innovation, it was worth reading (even a 2nd time).

The Book	What we thought
“The Design of Business – Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage” by Roger Martin	Not a large book, but packs a punch

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When you see a job advertised with a title like

General Manager for Discerning, Developing and Delivering
What the Customer Wants

it is hard not to be curious.  In particular, I’d never had a job title that needed an acronym before - “GM 3D WCW” has a sort of geeky attractiveness about it, so I had to come and have a look.

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Frequent readers to this blog will have noted an organogram included in a post made back in January that identified the organisation structure and responsibilities that existed at the start of the year.

Since that time, our business has been evolving fairly rapidly – with a fair number of changes already completed (and a number still to go) in order to ensure that we really can deliver on our primary core value of “Customers First!”.

When I have a bit more time, I will post in more detail about some of the other developments that have been completed, or are still in progress – in this post I just wanted to ensure you were aware that last Monday (22nd March) we were delighted to have someone start with us as our new General Manager for Discerning, Developing and Delivering the Software our Customers Want.

The title is a bit of a mouthful, so he will shorten it in most cases – but he will certainly be specifically focused on delighting our growing customer base with the software we develop.

I will let him introduce himself in his own time, so stay tuned for more …

Fuelled by Stephen’s glowing recommendation of the Thoughtworks presentation “Emergent Design & Evolutionary Architecture”, I went along to Neal Ford’s repeat performance in Sydney this morning.

The talk presented some very sensible sounding ideas on software “design”, and few more on “architecture”. Stephen has covered some points that stood out for him in his post, and here are a couple more that I consider worthy of mention or additional comment.

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You don’t have to of read much of this blog to realise that over the last few months Global-Roam’s software development practises have been changing as we adopt a more structured, and more agile, approach.

As has been made clear by a recent visit by Steve Hayes from Cogent, and our other attempts to learn more about agile, there is a thousand ways we can improve. This makes it easy to be stunned, like an animal caught in headlights, and instead do nothing.

So last week, Stephen and I worked out what the next level of low hanging fruit was, and have put together this plan to reach it.

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Some time ago, Paul Klaptocz wrote this (restricted) review of a book “Four Steps to Epiphany”, written by Steve Blank.

Out of interest, I watched through this hour-long lecture by the author, given at Stanford - in which he summarises a range of guest lectures over the year.

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I was speaking with someone today, who stated that they had inferred I would have a tattoo on my butt reading “Agile Rocks” (or something like that).

I do apologise for any misconception caused by posts such as this one.

I also apologise for the images inadvertently conjured up by the first sentence.

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After posting my review of Kent Beck’s webinar back in November, I contacted Kent to confirm it was ok with him to publish.

As part of doing this,  I asked Kent if there were good people in Australia who could provide us assistance in transitioning to Agile.

Hence, Kent pointed us at Steve Hayes of Cogent Consulting, who we have been recently using to provide us some greater understanding of different aspects of Agile (though I read recently that Steve is planning to leave)!

Perhaps a year ago, we bought our first copy of this book. One of the guys read it then, and highly recommended that we get a number of copies such that everyone in the office could read (alas no book review online then).

We did this, and a number of others did read the book – giving similarly rave reviews.  Coincidentally, they commenced a software development project (our “UPIP project”) with the “lessons learnt” still fresh in their mind.

However, the wheels fell off – leading to the UPIP project being canned indefinitely.  This was one of the major triggers for me to instigate our Autopsy 1 process, which continued into the Autopsy 2 process, my stipulation that we were going to go Agile, and the commencement of our process for looking for our Chief Software Engineer.

Note that there is plenty more we can learn from the many things that went wrong in the UPIP project – with a view to improving ourselves for the future.  When I find the time, I will post a more detailed retrospective as a restricted post, just about that project.

Don’t get me wrong – I understand that we had significant shortcomings that were the root cause of our calamity.  For instance, it became clear through this process that our team collectively had no major project management experience – hence a read of a single book (no matter how good) was not going to make them competent (especially with respect to a complex project).

However I did wonder how a project to could go significantly off the rails (and in the early stages) so soon after a number of people had read, and raved about, this book. read more »