Pictures from the Overview of Kanban - Austin SPIN Oct 11, 2012

David Hawkes CEO of Agile Velocity gave an overview of some Kanban concepts to the Austin Software Process Improvement Network

Here's the notes I jotted down during his talk:

Multitasking is bad
Why do we work on too many projects at one time?
- Not focused on deliverying value
- Maximizine utilization
- stakeholders need to have their project "In progress"

getKanban.com

Little's Law

Work In Progress
----------------   = Aggregate cycle Time
Throughput           

Stop Starting and start finishing

If we focus on fewer items at a time we can:
1. Increase productivitiy and deliver more
2. Get our customers more engaged
3. Have agility to adjust when changes occur
4. Lower our cycles times, less time to finish after getting a project
5. Limit the costs of delay

David Anderson wrote a Kanban Book for software development 2010

How to limit WIP
Throttling the input (demand) into the system

Lowering the WIP highlights the bottlenecks

Prioritization is no longer about ordering all the work, 
  but picking the next one

We need to optimize the whole system not just one part.

Kanban
Start with what you do now
Agree to continuous improvement
Respect the current process, roles, responsibilities
Encourage acts of leadership at all levels 

5 Core Properties of Kanban
1. Visualize Workflow
2. Limit WIP
3. Measure Meausre and Manage Flow
4. Make Process Policies Explicit - document what done means
5. Improve Collaboratively (Using Models/ Scientific Method)


Throttle demand to meet throughput in order to gain leveled flow

Shortening cycles and increasing the rate of delivery will build trust

Identify the constraint in your system and focus on optimizing the whole

Kanban companies here in Austin:  BankVue, HomeAway, BaazarVoice
Dan Pink RSA Drive video

Sprint time is how long you can resist change

64% of features are never or rarely used

Do we ever measure the usage of the features we delivery?

Awesome FireFox AddIn, Blank Your Monitor

I tried switching completely over to Chrome recently to get the better threading of tabs, but one thing stopped me - the lack of a good darkening addin or feature. I tried a few chrome addins, but always got a bright flash between sites. My eyes are photophobic, so staring at a white page with black letters gives me a headache after a while. Blank Your Monitor works great in Firefox. You can toggle between normal and dark mode with just hitting Ctl-Alt-B, which is much easier than "Tools/Options/Content/Colors...". I still need to toggle because some sites (I'm looking at you Facebook) are not made for sensitive eyes - all the buttons are black with no hint or title. I love Blank Your Monitor. Thanks dlento for creating it!

"Don't Just Do Something, Sit There!"

 
During a recent upgrade I panicked. We were upgrading our system to be on a Universal Time so all the countries could schedule and see events in their local time (don't get me started on daylight savings time).
Our team in India ran my upgrade script to convert all the historical records to Universal Time from the local server time, but my web application was still showing the old time, just as if the script had not run. I spoke with the person doing the SQL script execution and he assumed me he already ran it.
 
But our system wasn't showing the new times. This is when I panicked. Instead of carefully thinking the situation through and talking with some other knowledgeable people, I had the India team rerun the script. Then it hit me. The servers where caching the times. The database had really been updated, but the app was clever enough to cache the time to save load on the database.
 
I restart the web app and sure enough the historic times were now changed by twice the intended amount. After rerunning the upgrade script with a negative time to set the clock back everything was fine. The upgrade proceeded and I learned a valuable lesson,
 
"Don't just do something, sit there! (and think)."
 

Keeping up with Tech

Besides the bizzion tech blogs and twitter feeds which litter the internet, I find book publishers' email newsletters to be a good source of what is new and upcoming in the tech field.
The advantage of dead-tree publishers is that they take the time to see what is really viable and take a little longer term view than web-only sources.
A print publisher has more at stake if a book bombs - a warehouse full of unsold books.
A few that I subscribe to:
The Pragmatic Programmer newsletters and magazines.
Mannings subscribe to Newsletter.

The Myth of the Better Alternative

For some reason, we believe the Myth of a Better Alternative. We believe that, if someone or something is bad, there must be a Better Alternative. We see an evil despot overseas and believe that if he were overthrown, the Better Alternative - democracy and freedom - would flower.
 
The problem is, of course, we don't know who will rise to power after a bad dictator is disposed. Will the new government be better? Hopefully, but it could easily be worse. We just don't know. We can't know. Removing a dictator could result in a long, bloody civil war that kills thousands of people and literally destroys the country, only to be followed by a more evil dictator.
 
Czar Nicholas was not the best ruler, but I think many Russians - the 20 million killed by Stalin come to mind - would have preferred the Czar to the communists.
 
The United States does not need to intervene everywhere in the world that has what we consider a less than optimal government. We just can't afford it. Besides, we don't know what's best for other countries. Why don't we just save thousands of our soldier's lives, trillions of dollars and let the rest of the world work out their own problems?

Investing Tip: Be Careful of Target Funds Fees

You've probably heard the old saying, "You can learn for other people's mistakes, but sometimes you have to be the other people." I was the "other people" in my investments in target funds.
I was excited to hear about Target funds - funds that target a specific retirement year, like 2025, and automatically move assets into more conservative investments. I thought this would be great; I wouldn't have to worry about rebalancing my retirement fund - and my financial advisor recommended it.
But what I didn't research carefully enough is the management fees. My 2025 Target fund had a fee of .74% per year and was composed of index funds in US stocks, World bonds, International stocks. If you take the weighted average of my Target fund's components, management fees were only .26%. So I was paying .48% interest, hundreds of dollars, a year for the Target fund to slowly move to a more conservative balance. For half a percent interest, I could make a few trades at the end of the year.
Some target funds are a good deal. At Vanguard my target fund is cheaper than its weighted parts.
Moral of the story: Research your target funds and make sure the management fees are not excessive. Learn from my mistake so you don't have to be the "other people".

In Mountain Lion "invert colors" shortcut not working

I upgraded my shiny new macbookpro to Mountain Lion and the keyboard shortcut for "Invert Colors" (ctl-alt-command-8) stopped working. To re-enable this, go to "Preferences/Keyboard/Keyboard Shortcuts/Accessibility" and check "Invert Colors". (Apparently too many Windows users were visiting Apple stores and turning on the "Invert Colors" for all the machines)