After several years working with people I’ve now realized that I rarely worked with “teams”… more often I’ve worked with groups of people…

I’ve just finished to read the book “The five dysfunctions of a team” by Patrick Lencioni and it’s really a great book.

It’s that kind of book you easily and quickly read.

From the Table Group website:

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team explores the fundamental causes of organizational politics and team failure.

This gripping fable centers on Kathryn Petersen, an old-school CEO who comes out of retirement to accept the monumental task of transforming a dysfunctional group of high profile, egocentric executives into a cohesive and effective team. With an amazing gift for building teams, Kathryn forces her colleagues to confront the behavioral pitfalls that destroy most teams and adopt the five characteristics of a truly cohesive one.

You can see from the Five Dysfunction model a good summary of the dysfunctions and how to address them.

But, first of all, what is a team?
One of the best answer I’ve found so far comes from the book “The Wisdom of Teams: Creating a High-Performance Organization” by John Katzenbach and Douglas Smith and is the following:

A team is more than just a working group.
A team is… a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance, goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.

If we agree on the definition above then we can start to work on collaboration in the same direction with the team and the team will evolve following the diagram below:

[thanks to LMC for the nice picture]

A team will evolve to high-performance passing the well known (since 1965) maturity phases: Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing… but the team can’t be alone on this effort.
Help is required and appreciated specially in the early stages.

No matter the name you want to use (Scrum Master, Agile Coach, Agent of change, Facilitator, …) if you are working with a team you should read and carefully learn the following lessons from the book “Collaboration Explained” by Jean Tabaka:

• When beginning work with a group, don’t trust someone else to tell you that a team is already working in a very convergent, collaborative mode; watch the team for any clues that an underlying current of distrust may still be flowing
• Make sure you build time into your meetings for team members to openly diverge: evaluate the reference materials, examine your approach, check the preparations, and question the attendance
• As a group sits in the discomfort that such discussions evoke, do not fall back on command-and-control as a means to move forward; trust in the wisdom of the team
• Aggressively believe in the team’s ability to find consensus by continually bringing their suggestions and solutions back to them and asking them to formulate a useful consensus

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise

That’s all I can say about teams for now… let me go to work with “my” teams now

Looking around to understand why we need another device like the iPad…. still not convinced about it, I’ve found this… and boom!

iPad is perfect for interactive eBook applications for students: not because it will substitute the paper books (I don’t believe it possible), but because interactive experience helps a lot the ability to learn.

Theodore Gray, co-founder of Wolfram Research, Inc makers of Mathematica, Popular Science columnist, and element collector, created this awesome application.

The Elements: A Visual Exploration [AppStore link]. Best selling iPad book currently on the home page of Apple iPad Apps.

I’d really like to see my sons using it at school to interactively learn the periodic table of elements (no more boring 2D tables with acronyms).

So at the end… my next geek dream could really be the iPad now… they got me again.

No, I’m not talking about the Funambol Sync Client on the MacBook Air… (that is a great client we’ve just released).
Once again I’m proud to be part of the “Italian Silicon Valley”. This time I’m not part of the show, but the office looks great and my colleagues so professional

Enjoy the show (in Italian) from the Rai TV (Funambol starts from min. 17.00).

Today I’ve received the news: my submission for CSP has been accepted by Scrum Alliance!

Soon after my certification as Scrum Master in January (with a great 3 days course by Craig Larman), I’ve started looking for the next step (CSP).
The CSP certification (formerly Certified Scrum Practicioner, now Professional) is not just a matter of a course and some online exam, it’s something really different.

From the ScrumAlliance website:

Becoming a Certified Scrum Professional is not easy. You will need to demonstrate that you have at least one year of actual experience using Scrum on a project, that you know how to apply Scrum concepts, practices, and principles, and that you understand how and why Scrum works. Potential employers can be assured that when someone is a CSP they have taken the initative to go beyond a foundation-level understanding to achieve a depth of knowledge and experience in the Scrum process.

So I’ve submitted my application form, telling my story and demonstrating how deep we’re applying Scrum in Funambol, challenging ourselves day by day for the best Scrum application we can do.

One month later they accepted my submission, I’ve paid my $250 certification fee and so here I am: CSP.

The next levels for certifications are Coach (CSC) and Trainer (CST).

But… it’s a big step forward:

1. they cost much more: $100 non-refundable application fee +
   CSC = initial fee of $750 + subsequent annual renewal fees of $750
   CST = $7500 upon acceptance of application + $7500 for second and subsequent years (yes 7500)
2. you have to demonstrate that you coached or trained people for some years, send clients reference letters, wait that the round of certification will be open again for the trainer level, ….

For the moment I’m ok with CSP, but who knows in the future… becoming CST would mean a new step in my career as a Trainer, and at the moment I’m happy with my current job.

I was looking for this checklist since some months and now that I’ve found I’ll put it on my desk as a reminder.

It’s a great collection of all the tasks that a Scrum Master should do in a company and it helps a lot to share the meaning of a Scrum Master role within the organization. Sometimes I can read the following question in some eyes… “What the heck a Scrum Master does? Isn’t it all a matter of team working?”

You can be a good Scrum Master, handling more than one team at a time, but you can be a great Scrum Master handling only one team at a time (specially in the early stages). And it’s all related to the time you spend on the those tasks.

Michael James from Danube Technologies (recently acquired by Collabnet) published this great list where you can find the following areas of tuning:

How is my Product Owner doing?

How is my team doing?

How are our engineering practices doing?

How is the organization doing?

And there is also a video to invite to check the list and a pdf.

I think this list can help you to become a Full-Time Facilitator and not just the guardian of the Scrum process: organizing meetings, enforcing timeboxes and responding to the impediments are the minority of the tasks that make a Scrum Master.

I strongly recommend to identify what you’re currently missing from that list and prioritize the items (yes just like the backlog of your release), starting to work item by item, iteration by iteration.

So I’m going to have my sprint backlog, planning and… you know what?… a sprint review meeting with the scrum team and the product owner. It could be a good idea to share the improvements within the company.

The first tasks candidate for my first sprint should be the following:

Are team members spending some of their time in the state of flow?

Has the team kept focus on acceptance criteria?

Is the appropriate amount of inter-team communication happening?

Let’s try to keep the backlog short and avoid over-commitments

Winning $100,000 in the Android Developer Challenge – ADC2 is already a great experience, but creating a company (in UK) and being acquired by Google after only 4 months… well this is awesome!

PlinkArt is an Android app that allows users to identify paintings and artworks by just snapping a picture from the phone’s camera: simple and effective.

Yesterday they announced that Plink has been acquired by Google and the founders will join Google Goggles team and integrate Plink in it.

That’s the best way to add a feature to a product: no iterations, no estimates… just buy it (if you have money).

When I start a new release planning with a customer (product manager, product owner, any stakeholder), the first request coming from them is:
“I’d like to collect the estimates for all the candidate features and only then I can properly target some of them in the release”.

Consider you are preparing a new release backlog and the customer (mainly the Product Owner in our Scrum case) is looking for the best trade off between features and release date. Well he needs for sure to understand the effort associated to each feature to target them.

But at the same time the Agile approach suggests that you should estimate in details only the imminent iterations (one or two), leaving the rest to a further refinement (split of user stories and better estimation as soon as you approach the related iteration).

Therefore with this approach the customer must understand (and agree on) that the team will provide just estimates: a certain grade of variability will be present and reduced iteration by iteration.

One way to share this approach within the team and with the customer is talking about the Cone of Uncertainty: as sources of variability are further investigated and pinned down, the variability in a project diminishes, and so the variability in the project estimates can also diminish.

From the wikipedia definition:

In project management, the Cone of Uncertainty describes the change of uncertainties during a project. It goes back to research done by NASA which came to the conclusion that in the beginning of the project life cycle (i.e. before gathering of requirements) estimations have in general an uncertainty of factor 4. This means that the actual duration can be 4 times or 1/4th of the first estimations.

Take some time to read this article from Construx company to understand better how the Cone of Uncertainty is always there when you plan and you deal with commitments.

If you register as a member to the Construx website you can also download from the resources section a nice poster reporting the idea of the cone (I’ve printed it in color and attached to our walls in the office as a reminder).

As soon as I read about James Gosling leaving Oracle I wrote to Fabrizio Giudici to comment the news.

We have thought about this in the latest months after Sun acquisition, but now it’s happening for real.

Well, Fabrizio just wrote a great post about it and I cannot add anything more…. just agree.
So I’m forwarding you to his blog to understand how the heap paradox is becoming true in Oracle/Sun nowadays.

Are you interested in creating an advertising campaign and developing a professional advertising solution for your customers or for yourself?

There is a flexible technology and hosted ad serving solution that allows you to easily power all of your digital advertising: OpenX Ad Server.

If you’re interested in OpenX you can start reading the OpenX Ad Server: Beginner’s Guide from Packt Publishing.
Here is a sample chapter to start with.

What you will learn from this book (from Packt website):

• Learn the essentials of online advertising from the advertiser and publisher points of view
• Install and utilize OpenX Ad Server effectively to make your business run faster
• Get to know the usage of all the campaign and banner types
• Manage ad campaigns and banners on multiple web sites from a centralized platform
• Display ads according to their importance and alter the under-performing ads easily and swiftly
• Learn the most effective way to work with web site ad zones
• Maximize your profits by selling your ad space on your blogs and web sites effectively
• Take full advantage of GeoTargeting for generating maximum revenue by showing ads according to visitor origin
• Utilize the channels to show relevant ads based on the content of web sites
• Integrate Google AdSense and Amazon ads with your web sites using OpenX
• Convert OpenX Ad Server into a multi-user ad management platform for advertisers, publishers, and ad agencies
• Track the success of any ad campaign, banner or web site zone using detailed statistics, and reports

I’m going to write a deep review of the book as soon I’ll complete to read it… so stay tuned and if you have any experience with it feel free to share your thoughts commenting this post.

Note:

From the latest Apple keynote, iAd is already out there and mobile advertising can start (for real now) to be the next big market.

Working on my new role of Scrum Master, I’m frequently attracted to the command & control way of working: “I’m the project manager and I know hot to make the team work”.

I’ve worked in the latest 10 years in different projects, with teams coming from different experiences and companies, for customers requiring us to use different approaches for managing projects: collecting requirements, building architectures, coding, testing, releasing, versioning, maintaining and supporting the software have been almost always re-invented for many reasons… mainly because the customer is always right and must win.

Now that I work in the product development area I’m living in a different age: we (I say WE) have easily identified and adopted the methods we want and we are able to change or adapt them as we want.
It’s like building a castle of cards sitting in a bus compared with building a castle with lego while you are sitting in your house.

Working as Scrum Master in my company is a totally different experience that is daily challenging my soft skills: ability to communicate, ability to facilitate the team work, ability to avoid command&control culture. But it’s a really nice experience… I definitely need this also to improve myself.

Unfortunately the human beings are often attracted to branch from the main road, and so I’m. Sometimes it happens to me to go back to command&control mode, but now I’ve found my recipe to merge back to the main road of the servant leadership… I watch Terry Tate in this funny video and I feel much better.