Tag: Planning

The Road to Being a Business Champion is to Train Like an Olympian

Written by Richard Lannon on May 4, 2014. Posted in Articles.

Have you ever admired the strength, flexibility and endurance of an Olympic Athlete? It takes a lot of dedication to become a successful athlete. Olympians are at the apex of perfection. The fact that they get to go to the games is amazing, but to win makes them champions. There are secrets in training and preparations that Olympic Athletes have that increase their potential for success. As business leaders we can learn a lot from Olympic Athletes to help us become business champions.

Here are a few tips from the best of the best:

Have a Plan: It is amazing how many business leaders do not have a plan–they just wing it. The reality of being a top athlete is that you must have a plan. From diet, to workouts, to rest, there is a plan of focused intent. Know what it is you want to accomplish and why it is so important. Have a strategic road map for your business success.

Create a Routine: A routine is everything. It is part of your plan. Routines require an emphasis on high value activities. Focus on those things that will make a difference to you and your business. Schedule them in and make sure you do them.

Take Care of Yourself: Top performers usually have off-the-chart energy. How do they manage this? They take care of themselves through a healthy dose of proper eating and rest. Even the greatest boxer who ever lived, Mohammed Ali, ate well and rested. He took one day off a week to relax and ease his body and mind.

Proper warm-up and recovery: If you are going to work hard then you need to ensure you have proper warm up and recovery. This includes creating a natural rhythm to your business, as well as building in agility and flexibility. This is something that should be part of any good business practice. You and your people need to ensure they take the time needed to remain limber and prepared.

It’s all in the Head: Mental preparation is all about psychologically preparing for the big events. It is easy to get psyched out and think you or your people are not good enough. You need to tell yourself and your team they are the best at what they do. Create mindful rehearsals, read inspirational books, or count your blessings daily. Whatever it takes to build the mindset of a champion.

Consider a Trainer and Coach: Great athletes have coaches–we all know this. Business leaders who want to mix it up know they need help. From motivation to accountability, a coach can make a difference.
Be dynamic on your business: You can’t just focus on one thing in your business. You need to consider all the moving parts and train yourself in those parts. Olympic Athletes switch things up using fixed to variable equipment; they run, jump, throw, row, and do a lot more. The key, they mix things up.

Engage your People: Olympians have a team of engaged people who are rooting for them. It includes many key stakeholders including family and friends, sponsors and vendors, managers, coaches, trainers and peers. Engaging your team is important for your business as well. It is important you find a way to connect your people to what it is you want to accomplish. Engage the people that are in your corner.

Prepare for Heavy Lifting: All champions need to build their strength and endurance. Find ways to build your ability to deal with the events that are the heavy lifting of your business success. Build core competencies in yourself and those around you. Part of an Olympic Athlete’s heavy lifting ability is having a strong, engaged core. The same is true in business: businesses without a strong core tend to have more challenges. . Make sure you have engaged your core.

Train Early in the Day: Common wisdom says to train early in the day. Most Olympic Athletes do. Create an early ritual of getting focused, reviewing your strategic plan and the work plans that you have laid out. Focus on building up skills that will take you to where you need to go.

Build your Training Team: A dedicated team is everything for a Champion. You must have a team that will not only work with you, but also train with you. Olympic athletes are known to train together for years before they turn to competing against each other. Therefore, a training team can include your peers, your team and your competitors. Olympians train with their competition so they get better.

In business we ultimately want to be the best at what we do—we want to become champions. One of the best places to look for inspiration is at our Olympic Champions and the hard work and dedication they put into being the best at what they do. Like them, the first step to becoming the best is to think and act like a champion.

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Process Patterns – Applying Method to Chaos

Written by Hari Shankar on April 28, 2014. Posted in Articles.

Unpredictability. Randomness. Chaos.

They are the only certainty in the life of any Business Analyst. Even more so for the brave ones painting green-field processes for a large enterprise project.

Throwing up our hands in despair is not a choice. And making costly changes to a program of work midstream will not endear us with the Project Managers ( and that’s putting it mildly).

I was faced with such a challenge in the last year working as a Lead Business Analyst for a major program of work. Process patterns came to my rescue.

Patterns in real life

Humans are intuitively programmed to bring structure around us. Every successful civilization has worked on making society predictable. Our approach to science has been no different from life. We are governed by patterns — climate, seasons, diurnal dance of the planets in the solar system, etc. Where they do not exist we invent one — transport, communication, weekends, etc.

Astronomers see patterns in the random sprinkling of stars in the sky. Mathematicians look for fractal patterns even in the most chaotic distribution. Bio-technologists search for patterns in DNA. Climatologists study weather patterns to predict global warming effects. Every field involved in handling complex systems deploys the use of patterns to analyse and simplify.

Alex Bellos, in his fascinating book Alex’s Adventures in Numberland, talks of intricate design patterns in the mosque as a way of finding God through patterns.

Patterns in IT world

Patterns occur in everything.

Design patterns are a very common methodology in developing IT systems. Creational, Behavioural and Structural patterns are quite common thought processes used by Developers.

Data mining is deployed to understand information, correlate and study the behaviour of discrete data points. Statistical tools are very common to understand variance, randomness and distribution.

Interaction pattern is the development of a framework to model inter-organization interactions (can be used for intra-organizational too) to predict the exchange of information. Request, Acknowledge, Respond is such a pattern that could be deployed between a Customer and Supplier framework for interactions.

Process patterns is the emergent ability to define fragments that will provide a reliable mechanism for handling random events in a complex system.

Process Patterns

In the program of work I was involved in, I established the Happy Day Scenario using Level 4 processes at an activity level. Process patterns were then used to decompose individual Level 4 activity into Level 5 processes at the task level.

Embracing Murphy’s law, we soon firmed up that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Data may be missing or inaccurate. System integration can break. People can make mistakes. Hence scenarios were soon approaching quite a large number. Defining a Level 5 Task process for each Scenario would have been a hopeless exercise. And we would have missed the forest for the trees. This is the key distinction for mapping patterns between Scenario-driven and Pattern-Driven.

The answer I felt was in the identification of the pattern in the process. For instance, a set of tasks could lead to the happy-day outcome. What would happen if things go wrong? We established a pattern for exception as follows:

Resolve the exception using the system as part of the activity (Automatic resolution pattern; e.g., Re-try transaction)
Resolve the exception manually as part of the activity (Manual resolution pattern; e.g., Fix data issue and re-try task)
Resolve the exception and re-enter the activity (Activity Re-entry pattern; E.g., Fix issue and re-enter from the first task in the activity)
Resolve the exception and re-enter from the previous activity (Process Re-entry pattern; e.g., Fix issue and re-enter process from an earlier activity)
Resolve the exception by abandoning the process (Process Abandonment pattern; E.g., Cancel Order and re-commence)

Similarly, patterns were established for workflows, sub-processes, alternate flows and product types.

It was a fun exercise to map these patterns and ask our business stakeholders to challenge with scenarios. We were lucky to have a lot of black-hat thinkers who could come up with What-if situations based on data, systems or people exceptions and test the process pattern. The use of the right combination of process patterns stood the test in most cases.

Process Pattern led Design

Advantages of the process patterns were it fostered the need to design based on patterns. So the thinking is percolating to the way systems are developed. Further testing is simplified by testing the core patterns. Since we ended up with close to 100 process patterns (yes, it was a complex program), testing was prioritized for the critical patterns and scenarios chosen to ensure each pattern worked.
Process patterns provided us with some level of insulation from changes that are constantly happening in our business landscape. The introduction of new products, contracts or customer interactions have largely been channelled through existing process patterns.

And to quote Richard Bach below, the recognition of process patterns can help us see new horizons.

“A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed…It feels an impulsion…this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons.”
– Richard Bach, Author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull

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It all Happens from the Get Go – 7 Planning Steps to Achieve Measurable Results

Written by Richard Lannon on February 18, 2014. Posted in Articles.

Business leaders need to ensure that planning and implementation is focused. A well thought-out planning and implementation approach considers linking strategy, tactics and operational needs. It includes considerations for key business impact zones (productivity, tools, people and culture) and the outcomes required for solutions to business problems.

Consider the business objectives, the process and the work approach that must be used to successfully achieve results in an organization. Results should be resource-driven beginning with shared thinking and consideration of the challenges that need to be addressed. Call them points of pain. All businesses have them and every business leader knows it.

A checklist would be handy at this point. Consider common business challenges such as issues with focus and direction, trust, communications and collaboration, productivity, effectiveness and efficiency, process and work procedures, outdated equipment and tools, people experience, skills, beliefs, values or even blame-storming. No matter the issue, they all add up to one thing – a negative impact, something a business leader seeks to avoid.

Here are 7 steps to consider when planning for measurable results:

Step 1. Understand your business priorities

What five things are on the strategic agenda of the organization? Why are they so important to the business? In what way can your team make those items happen? If you can answer these questions you are on the path to good business leadership thinking.

Step 2. Identify the challenges

What are the points of pain? What are the key challenges? How are these challenges impacting the business? Can we qualify and quantify the problem? Have we considered the impact to productivity, our tools, people and culture? What are the overall impacts and ripple effects to the organization? Write a clear and concise business problem statement that everyone understands. Share that statement and engage in shared thinking and creative solutions with your people.

Step 3. Determine key solutions

Throughout the process, encourage teams to assist you in solving the business problems. Be careful here, as coming up with ideas on how to solve business problems does not mean implementing solutions. Provide support and insight to people whose natural approach is to roll up their sleeves and jump right in. At this point, as a business leader, you should be seeking thinking and solutions. Only after the ideas have been put forth do you seek to prove their viability.

Step 4. Choose a solution that makes sense

This is where viability comes in. It really comes down to what, why, who, how, when, where, how much and what’s in it for the organization, the benefit, risk and return factor; all the things we learned in grade school and on the playground only with more risk. The best thing is to review situations and possible impacts. Pick three solutions: the do nothing solution, the do something solution or the do something else solution. Think through the issues and make a decision.

Step 5. Implement the solution

It’s not always easy, but it must be done. As the business leader, make sure you have your team together. Establish your approach to deal with people and team dynamics across the organization. Change means push back so be prepared. Be honest about your resource abilities. Invest in their success through investing in your own development. Use a good business coach to avoid future issues. Make it part of the process so your people will embrace it. This is a preemptive approach for solution implementation. Remember, as the leader you do not need to be the sage on stage but be the guide on the side.

Step 6. Measure the results

Ensure that you have put the right items in place to measure the results. This could be at many levels. Answer the simple question: does it work? The answer needs to be a yes or no, not maybe or sort of, eh! Did you get what you expected? How long did it take? Is it over or under budget? Will you see the expected return on investment? If so, over how many years?

Do we have the right people? Have you considered the impact zones and the impact? Does the solution (process, tools, people, etc) align with what is important to the business? The list of questions here is long and depends on what was set as the measurement needs earlier in the planning process.

Step 7. Capture lessons learned

This is an area that business leaders rarely engage in. Yet, it is extremely valuable at all levels in the business. A feedback loop should always exist and the business leader should explore what was learned internally and externally. This is your intellectual property that can be used for future planning and continuous improvement.

In the end, it comes down to following a planning and implementation approach that ties strategy and tactical solutions together. As the business leader your success depends on following a proven approach, engaging your people in the process and building key business skills. Planning for measurable results happens from the ‘get go’.

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7 Steps to Kick-Start Your Strategic Planning Process

Written by Richard Lannon on January 28, 2014. Posted in Articles.

Strategic planning is an exercise in gathering and documenting information about the past, present and future of your business. Strategic planning helps determine where you want to go over the next few years, how you are going to get there and how to recognize when you’ve arrived.

One of the more common strategic planning approaches is Basic Strategic Planning (BSP). BSP uses a triangle approach and seeks to align strategic agenda items with the tactical reality of the organization.

Starting from the top, BSP includes the following steps:

Identify your mission statement. It is amazing how many organizations don’t take the time to develop this statement. A mission statement is foundational to all strategic planning work. An effective mission statement describes what the company does, provides insight into client value and captures the essence of your company.
Create a vision of the future. A vision statement should look to the future. After all, you can’t get to where you want to go unless you know where you want to go. Think ahead to three to five years from now and write your story. What is it that your organization has achieved? Tighten that story into a clear crisp sentence and share it.
Develop core values and guiding principles. Core values and guiding principles are foundational to your entire organization. Guiding principles are a set of accepted guidelines formed by the business that capture how your people act, work, make decisions, set priorities and conduct themselves. It is imperative to set and communicate core values and principles or else they will set themselves over time through employee habits.
Create long-term goals and smart objectives. Goals are general statements outlining what you want to achieve to meet your mission and vision and address any issues you are facing. For each and every goal it is important to identify strategies to achieve them. Objectives should be SMART; that means specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound. It is important that you make a distinction between long-term goals and smart objectives for those goals.
Establish an action roadmap with timelines. An action roadmap is a visual representation of your strategic planning items. It includes high-level agenda items, initiatives, champions and key elements. It includes the key areas that your organization will focus on in order to achieve its goals and objectives.
Build a communication plan. Communication plans should not be complicated and should be shared within your organization. It is important that time is spent determining the best approach for getting people informed as to what is planned and ensuring that they know impacts of not achieving the objectives. Consider printed plans, maps, high-level visuals, town hall sessions, etc. It is all about communication. Be visual, be creative.
Establish an implementation and monitoring plan. This is important to be successful. Organizations and teams fail because they don’t assign a top-notch resource to put together an implementation plan. Consider using a highly-skilled program manager or director to translate the strategic plan into tactical reality. Ensure that the rules of engagement are established and build a strong monitoring process that engages people in open dialogue centred around the actions that must be taken to be successful.

Strategic planning is an important part of every organization’s success. There are key elements that must go into strategic planning; if you do not have all the elements to start with, then you must start with the basic strategic planning process (BSP). Everything that you do as an organization will come from your strategic plan. This includes enhanced sales, improved business processes, inventory controls, or market advancement. The list of options is huge. We don’t plan to fail, we just fail to plan.

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Pareto and You – Separating the Wheat from the Chaff

Written by Robert Galen on January 14, 2014. Posted in Articles.

I can’t recall when I first came upon the Pareto Principle. I think it might have been when I was studying for my Six Sigma Green Belt. But I’m unsure. I know I was operating as a QA Director at the time, because most of my example uses for it surrounded testing and defects. Nonetheless, it’s probably been over 15 years.

That being said, I don’t think I hear people “considering” Pareto enough in their day-to-day activity, so I thought I’d bring it up and remind everyone of the Pareto Principle or 80:20 Rule and it’s implications for software engineering in general and agile teams in particular.

Basics

In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto created a mathematical formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his country, observing that twenty percent of the people owned eighty percent of the wealth. In the late 1940s, Dr. Joseph M. Juran inaccurately attributed the 80/20 Rule to Pareto, calling it Pareto’s Principle. While it may be misnamed, Pareto’s Principle or Pareto’s Law as it is sometimes called, can be a very effective tool to help you manage effectively.

Where It Came From

After Pareto made his observation and created his formula, many others observed similar phenomena in their own areas of expertise. Quality Management pioneer, Dr. Joseph Juran, working in the US in the 1930s and 40s recognized a universal principle he called the “vital few and trivial many” and reduced it to writing. In an early work, a lack of precision on Juran’s part made it appear that he was applying Pareto’s observations about economics to a broader body of work. The name Pareto’s Principle stuck, probably because it sounded better than Juran’s Principle.

As a result, Dr. Juran’s observation of the “vital few and trivial many”, the principle that 20 percent of something always are responsible for 80 percent of the results, became known as Pareto’s Principle or the 80/20 Rule.

–Quoted from About.com

Implications

Let me give you a couple of scenarios that illustrate “80/20 in action”:

If you’re testing a software application, then 80% of the bugs will reside/surface from 20% of the applications components.
If you’re counting costs, then 80% of the cost of a Toyota Prius, will be contained in 20% of the component parts.
Continuing the Prius example, 80% of the weight, will be contained in 20% of the component parts as well. And if we’re putting them in storage, there will be a warehouse space equivalent.
Back to software, 80% of the technical complexity (perhaps call it risk as well) resides in 20% of an applications components.
And so on…

I really like Juran’s wording around “the vital few”. The 20% turns out to be the interesting case and, once we find it, we can adjust our views to handle it much differently than the 80%.

Disclaimer

Now of course the numbers aren’t quite that precise and I don’t want you to build your every action around or upon Pareto. But making it a part of your analysis and thinking has served me well for years in focusing towards what truly matters.

Agile Implications

Now let’s get around to some of the implications or examples within agile teams:

Backlogs & Product Ownership

20% of the User Stories probably need some sort of “research spike” in order to sort through the technical implications and ambiguity.
20% of the User Stories (functional work) probably contain 80% of the customer value. So find them and do those first.
20% of the User Stories (non-functional work) probably need expanded Acceptance Criteria to better guide the confirmation of completeness.
20% of the User Stories need to be groomed multiple times (discussed, broken down, estimated, explored) before they become “ready” for sprint-execution.
20% of the Features drive probably 80% of the customer usage.
20% of the Features will contain 80% of the stakeholder & customer driven change.

Technical Risk

80% of the technical complexity is in 20% of the component work a team is taking on. Find it and handle it differently: designs and design reviews for example, teamwork and pairing.
The estimates for 20% of the more complex User Stories will be inaccurate or contain more variance. Consider this when estimating.
20% of the backlog will have strong architectural implications.
20% of the backlog will have cross-team technical dependencies.
20% of the application will contain 80% of the technical debt. Or will be attractive targets for refactoring.
20% of the application will require 80% of the maintenance activity.

Planning

20% of the Release Plan will contain 80% of the risk.
20% of a Sprint Plan (backlog) will contain 80% of the value, 80% of the risk, 80% of the swarming opportunity.
20% of the Sprint Plan (backlog) will contain 80% of the testing activity, testing work, testing risk, bugs/rework.
20% of the overall work will take up 80% of the time; I wonder if that has anything to do with “90% Done Syndrome”?
20% of the teams work will result in 80% of the “blocking issues”.

Quality & Testing

20% of the User Stories will contain 80% of the bugs.
20% of the User Stories will contain 80% of the testing complexity and/or repeated testing risk.
80% of the User Stories or Features need less testing than you might originally think—think risk-based testing here.
You’re test strategies and plans ought to include the 80/20 Rule.
20% of the defect repairs will contain 80% of the defect rework.
20% of your tests will take 80% of the time to run; find these and automate them…then go to the beach.

These were not intended as “exhaustive” lists. More so, they are intended to get you thinking of the implications of the Pareto Principle in your daily agile journey.

Wrapping Up

Now all of that being said, there IS a challenge in using the 80/20 Rule.

It’s finding the 20%! It’s not always evident where it is.

Let’s take the bug example. It clearly aligns with my experience that 80% of the bugs “cluster” around a small percentage of the code in every application I’ve ever tested. Let’s call that 20%. So from a testing strategy and planning perspective, 80% of my effort (testing hours) should be focused there. However, finding or predicting those defect clusters isn’t that easy. If I’m presumptuous and think that I can predict them all, then I will most likely have wasted some time and missed some critical areas. So blind use of Pareto isn’t in your best interest nor is it prudent.

However, you should constantly be thinking of Pareto sweet spots in your daily work. It aligns nicely with the Agile Manifesto principles, Lean thinking, and common sense.

One final request: please add comments to this post with other “Pareto scenarios” that you can think of within agile contexts. I’d love to build on the examples I provided.

Stay agile my friends,
Bob.

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Quick references:
1. The photo is from Wikipedia article on Vilfredo Pareto.
2. http://management.about.com/cs/generalmanagement/a/Pareto081202.htm
3. http://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-the-pareto-principle-the-8020-rule/