Citation du Dimanche – Ivan Illitch
May 13, 2012
“L’outil simple, pauvre, transparent est humble serviteur ; l’outil élaboré, complexe, secret est un maître arrogant”
Une phrase lumineuse de Ivan Illitch, que l’impeccable Pierre Pezziardi a ressortie pour sa présentation à Devox France.
J’en profite pour vous inviter à nouveau à lire Lean Management et Informatique Conviviale de Pierre, livre sur lequel #hypertextual a eu la chance d’échanger avec son auteur.
Un ouvrage, particulièrement éclairant sur l’entropie des organisations du 21ème siècle, ainsi que sur les opportunités que le Lean, les méthodes agiles et les nouveaux outils distribués de communication proposent pour y remedier.
Lean as the solution to scale agile methodologies
April 25, 2012
Agile Methodologies have already proven how efficient they are when applied on small teams to deliver software with great quality, predictability while nurturing team spirit and fostering people engagement. There are tons of literature on that very subject out there and, in 2010, Gartner predicted that by 2012 80% of software development project will be carried out using Agile methodologies.
As these methodologies have proven their value and became industry standards for small projects (PMI added the PMI Agile Certified Practictioner as a new certification which says a lot about how well this methodological toolbox has been integrated into corporatica), the detractor voices became less and less audible but for one point : scalability. The official anti-agile persona (usually not comfortable with the change of culture related to the implementation of Agile methodologies) know they have a point here : how to scale agile on large projects with many teams ?
Henrik Kniberg’s book Lean From the Trenches : Managing Large Scale projects with Kanban is the definite answer to this last question…
USI 2012 : Entretien avec François Hisquin
March 31, 2012
Alors que la conférence USI s’apprête à fêter son cinquième anniversaire avec l’édition 2012, #hypertextual profite de l’occasion pour discuter avec la personnalité derrière cet évènement de l’industrie des systèmes d’information, évènement singulier de ce côté-ci de l’Atlantique en ce que les geeks et les boss y sont logés à la même enseigne.
François Hisquin a créé Octo (entreprise organisatrice de l’USI) en 1998. Octo est un “Cabinets d’Architectes en Systèmes d’Information” : François insiste sur ce point car il souhaitait vraiment distinguer sa société naissante des Sociétés de Service en Ingénierie Informatique (SSII), terme “qui me posait problème” comme il le concède volontiers.
Ce cabinet a placé au coeur de sa culture le bien-être de ses consultants. Ce qui peut apparaître comme du bullshit RH ou marketing pour certains esprits chagrins est une réalité. Octo walks the talk et aligne ses actes avec ses principes pour un résultat manifeste : la société a été classée ces deux dernières années en première place des Great Places to Work.
L’ouvrage collectif rédigé par différents Octos (comme les dénomme affectueusement notre interlocuteur) Partageons ce qui nous départage est un excellent extrait de cette culture. Une approche à la fois irrévérencieuse (“Les clients c’est comme les enfants : ce n’est pas parce que vous leur dites non qu’ils ne vous aiment plus” entendu durant l’USI 2008), passionnée, pétillante, qui a su adopter pour faire sienne des outils méthodologiques (les core protocols de Jim McCarthy, le ROTI, les méthodes agiles …).
On apprend en outre dans cet ouvrage éclairant que l’entreprise préfère sortir ses consultants de missions fructueuses plutôt que les laisser y dépérir s’ils ne s’y plaisent pas : nos consultants d’abord, les clients ensuite, comme un écho à la célèbre maxime de Vineet Nayar.
Ce qui sort de cet entretien est particulièrement instructif car cette approche, qui peut sembler de prime abord iconoclaste, sert à merveille leur objectif : la quête d’excellence. François Hisquin enrichit le tableau de chasse #hypertextual et nous explique comment ici et maintenant … Read the rest of this entry »
I have been blogging quite substantially about Lean Management lately and I have noticed a common purpose with Agile methodologies (which get me blogging 4 years ago) and Enterprise 2.0 (which has kept #hypertextual busy for the last 2 years) : they all address complexity and permanent change, the key characteristics of our business world. This is one of the key ideas of the great book by Yves Caseau Processus & Entrerprise 2.0 [FR].
They also all fight the same plague : the standard hierarchical organization inherited from Frederick Winslow Taylor, and its specific characteristics : division of labor, strong hierarchy, economy of scale, centralized decisions, command and control management, top down processes etc …
They don’t fight it because it’s uncool (even though it deadly is) but because it does not work in the 21st century. We now have many evidences that this type of organisations is not appropriate in an economy where complexity and perpetual change are the rules (for french readers, refer to this awesome interview by french paleo-anthropologist Pascal Picq).
Peter Drucker has taught us that in the knowledge economy the main sources of wealth are knowledge and innovation. Gary Hamel and John Hagel both stressed how fostering employees passion is critical for organisations to thrive.
While Lean, Agile and Enterprise 2.0 lie on the Republican Side (Douglas McGregor‘s Theory Y), Taylorism lies on the Dark Side (Theory X). Let’s make it clear : such vertical and hierarchical organisations as the latter don’t scale in this horizontal and networked world.
Yet, it still prevails. The questions are how come and what can we do about it … (warning long truck ahead)
#atbdx : Anti-Patterns, Billes Rouges et Fin du Logiciel
October 24, 2011
(Cliquer pour agrandir)
L’Agile Tour s’est arrêté cette année encore les locaux de l’ENSERB à Bordeaux pour une journée dédiée à l’agilité dans le monde du développement logiciel aquitain.
Des présentations pour l’évangélisation et des perspectives éclairantes, des workshops pour partager et avoir un autre regard sur son travail quotidien, des Coding Dojos et des Katas parce que l’agilité c’est de la pratique. La panoplie complète des sessions de travail qui font de l’agilité cette alternative plus que crédible au développement planifié et contrôlé qui reste majoritaire dans notre industrie. Aussi : une occasion de rencontrer la communauté Agile Bordelaise, communauté active, enthousiaste et passionnée à l’image du crew Arpinum.
Attardons nous sur les 4 sessions les plus éclairantes auxquelles j’ai eu la chance d’assister…
(Picture by Henrik Kniberg)
This is a huge honor for #hypertextual to publish an interview of Tom & Mary Poppendieck. They’ve been in the IT Business for forty years or so and their practical approach and advises, impressive experience and enlightening books have turned them into some kind of IT legends.
Simply put : they are the soul of Lean Software Development and if you don’t believe me, read their trilogy on the topic. They obviously spoke at the Lean IT Summit and I had a chance to meet them a couple of hours before they take off to China (thanks @florencepreault for arranging for this).
Despite having travelled around the world many times and having a thorough understanding of our industry, they remain curious and enthusiastic, they show the humility of the ones that constantly want to learn : this probably is the most impressive thing about them. This makes them engaging, they look forever young and it’s really fun to hang around with them. They are the living examples of what IT professionals should be after so many years in the business.
The only example of such enthusiastic, engaging and fun senior professionals I can think of is from the Cuban Music Scene. So please welcome the Buena Vista Software Club …
L’entreprise Lean, Agile et interconnectée au Lean IT Summit
October 11, 2011
Le 1er European Lean IT summit aura lieu les 13 et 14 Octobre à Paris au Cercle National des Armées.
J’aurai la chance d’y assister (et le plaisir de vous y rencontrer) et pourrais ainsi peut-être entériner une réflexion entamée il y a de longs mois sur le lien de parenté très fort entre les mondes Lean et Agile dans le développement logiciel et celui de l’Entreprise 2.0 …
Lean IT Summit – Interview Pierre Pezziardi
October 4, 2011
Le 1er European Lean IT summit aura lieu les 13 et 14 Octobre à Paris au Cercle National des Armées. Une excellente opportunité pour faire le point sur l’adoption de cette approche industrielle dans le monde du développement logiciel, le Lean Software Development.
Une distribution prestigieuse avec, entre autres, la spécialiste du sujet (l’épatante Mary Poppendieck co-auteur du tryptique fondateur sur le sujet) et notre champion national, Pierre Pezziardi, auteur l’an dernier chez Eyrolles de Lean Management et Informatique conviviale.
Un ouvrage remarquable qui traite des mésaventures d’un DSI au sein d’un grand groupe bancaire. Sous forme de fiction (l’ombre du regretté Eliyahu Godratt) ce livre permet à l’auteur de mettre en scène les principes forts qu’il défend et les confronter à des personas de l’organisation.fr croqués avec justesse et vérité, dans leur cynisme, leur vulnérabilité et leurs doutes.
Ces principes sont ceux du manifeste de l’informatique conviviale :
- Des systèmes en amélioration continue
- Aussi simple de s’en servir que d’y contribuer
- Où tout ce qui n’est pas explicitement interdit est autorisé mais tracé et réversible
- Et où ceux qui rendent leur poste obsolète sont promus
Pierre nous a fait l’honneur de répondre sans se défiler aux questions de #hypertextual pour creuser ce manifeste et discuter de cet ouvrage à mettre entre les mains de tous les DSIs.
Jason Fried Web 2.0 Keynote – Be a Software Curator
September 19, 2008
How many of you are in software? You’re lucky. All you have to do is type. You don’t have to worry about physics. What you work on is easy to change. It’s not like you’re building a house. You can build software anywhere, in your house, in a plane, inside outside. Doesn’t matter you can build software. You’re lucky you can do all these things.
Watch Jason Fried @ Web 2.0 Expo. 20mns on why you should take care of your software product as a curator does for his museum : keep things out.
Check out report by Kris Jordan Jason Fried Web 2.0 Keynote – Be a Software Curator | Kris Jordan.
Bitter SOA
August 3, 2008
Service Oriented Architecture is the new mantra to ease integration between heterogeneous systems in the enterprise.
Lately, I have been having questions about this approach and this post comes out from different experiences. One being reading Vincent thoughts on the topic on TechItEasy.
The other being this excellent and lively presentation by Jim Webb and Martin “architecture guru” Fowler : SOA without ESB. The last was the presentation from Didier Girard during the excellent Université du SI conference in Paris back in early july. The bottom line of both presentations being : the web works. The Web is resources that are easily accessible.
Using Web Services for different systems integration within the Enterprise should be easy. We should have resources easily searchable and accessible. Hence these questions about how relevant Service Oriented Architecture stands as it is implemented today.
So you wanna be a management star
September 6, 2007
Here is the thing : after a while in the IT tech area, one feel like stepping to another level. What is it going to be ? Architect ? Consultant ? Marketing and product definiton ? Manager ? This is a post for the ones that made the last choice…
37Signals : Alternative Software Business
August 30, 2007
Code will tear us apart
There is this Alternative rock scene that blossomed back in the late 70s/early 80s on the ashes of the punk music. This encompassed bands like XTC, Wire, The Cure or Joy Division in the UK and Husker Dü or R.E.M in the US.
They basically had the energy and the DIY approach of the punk bands but as opposed to the latter they have a much more realistic view of the business, were not so self destructive (except maybe Joy Division Ian Curtis).
They had a proper plan : offering an alternative to mainstream (hence the name) pop music, driven by their vision of what it should be : quality pop song with an attitude, with an independent (hence Indie in the UK) artistic approach, ignoring business driven advices from major record companies marketing executives.
Viewing this Jason Fried (co-founder of web2.0 start-up extraordinaire 37Signals) video, I thought of the many similarities of their business approach in the software industry with that very musical vogue. Thinking about it, this analogy also gives some hints on 37Signals success … Read the rest of this entry »
Scrum, Agile, XP and the real life
August 28, 2007
I mentionned it earlier : I have joined the techiteasy.org mob. This is a bunch of passionated and motivated young professionnals blogging collaboratively on the IT world, the internet culture and entrepreneurship.
Scrum and XP from the trenches
I have just posted my first contribution : this is about the Henrik Kniberg e-book : Scrum and XP from the Trenches. I was kinda procrastinating about this book for a while but then Fred strongly recommended me the read.
I had the opportunity of managing a team of server side developers in the mobile industry and this post is about applying these agile methodologies during that time.
Scrum and XP from the trenches
August 27, 2007
Sprinting the stories
Scrum and XP from the trench describes how Scrum has been used to apply some Agile project team management methods on real life projects. Henrik Kniberg modestly describes this as a paper while it actually happens to be, well, an excellent practical guide.
The specific jargon may make it a bit slightly difficult to dive into, though. Sprint, scrum master, stories, when iteration, project leader or use cases could have done the trick. This could result in having the author sounding like some kind of sectarian, at least for the first 10 or 20 pages.
However, regardless of the actual Scrum radical approach, the project and people management tips in this book make it a definite must read to whoever is interested in these area of professional software development .
10 lessons in Project Management
The first half of the book mostly describes a Sprint (iteration). 10 brilliant project management tips bubble up from this description :
- Complete transparency on the projet. All people in the team have clear tasks assigned to them, and everybody knows who is doing what, what are the objectives and dependencies.
- Cost estimates are carried out by developers. I’m sure you fellow developers know how terrible that is to meet estimates and deadlines a manager (a technical one if you’re lucky) commited to. Having developers estimating their work (as long as you can challenge them) makes everybody comfortable.
- Never ever compromise on quality to add more stories in a sprint. Rather have less stories.
- Seat the whole team together
- 15 mins daily status meeting. Hard time for procrastinators ahead …
- Always end up the Sprint with a demo. So many reasons : it motivates the team, you can communicate more easily on what you’ve been doing, and hey ! you have to have something working !
- My favorite one : the large taskboard to track the Sprint progress. No fancy colorful excel sheet that no one bar the managers can understand or even bother go through : just a board with colorful stickers for tasks and the Burndown graph. Instant view of the progress, daily updated, always accessible.
- Keep the managers at bay
- Post Sprint retrospective. This helps finding out what could have be done better, validate the initial estimates, the velocity, have the team to talk to provide feedback, etc …
- All meetings are time boxed.
Applying XP with relunctant people
An interesting section of the paper talks more about how Scrum (team organisation) fits nicely with XP (programming methodology), going with the following main eXtreme Programming features.
These are : Pair programming, Test Driven Development, Incremental design (no need to over design at the early stages of the project), Continuous integration, collective code ownership, fighting overtime which eventually happens to be counterproductive, etc …
This is another story to apply these. In particular Pair Programming.
Here comes the other main quality of this book : suggesting different ways of dealing with people to put in place such controversial practices, especially when the most relunctanct people are the ones that never actually experienced those practices.
Each time Henrik describes different situations with different type of oppositions from the developers and suggest an appropriate way of dealing with it. This smooth, clever, thoughtful and yet assertive approach definitely are (from my experience) the most efficient and the less frustrating ones, from both perspectives.
It’s free
And that’s not the only reason why it’s worth having : this is an excellent book, fun and easy to read : strongly recommended if you’re interested in project management methodologies, even if you dont plan to apply such radical technique as Scrum.
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