Oct 18 2009
AAladdin.com is an agile organization transition framework that was created by me in order to help medium and large size company to transfer from current organization structure to an agile organization.
For details please check AAladdin.com (in English) and AAladdin.com/cn (In simple Chinese)
//Jun 15 2009
For measurement, use common unit, such as hour, day, point, profit, $ and etc. and ensure that it is easy to be understood and used.
Apr 26 2009
London marathon was held on 26th April 2009 and there were more than 35,000 people participated. Runners dressed up with all kinds of funny costumes, funny as hell. I saw at least 4 spider men, 3 super men, 2 bat men, sunflowers and etc. Of course there were professional athletes, especially women’s game. The winner of 2008, 2007 London marathon, Olympics medalists were all present. Zhou Chunxiu(from China), Olympic bronze medal Olympic 2008, campaign of London marathon 2007 was one of the strongest potential winner who ended up out of top 10. She was in the first group in the first 25km and in very good shape when she passed my front door on Westferry road. Unfortunately she fell behind right after the 25 km point.
There might be a few reasons that she lagged around that point(24 km) where I was. She was not able to pick up the energy drink that was prepared for her and put on a table under a big sign something like “Drink pick up-1″. I guess that she might have moreenergy and get much better result if she was able to pick up that small bottle of drink. I also observed that almost all Japanese athletes had no trouble to grab their drinks. If you look at these two bottle of drinks and read my analysis, you might know why the design of the drink bottle actually matter.
| Chinese design | Explanation | Japanese design | Explanation | |
| Easy to be seen | Very poor | No clear sign, the label was rolled up and too hard to be seen; The colour is not outstanding | Very good | Two clear sign and one can strongly differentiated against other bottles; Color is obvious and can be seen from at least 20 meters away |
| Easy to be grabbed | OK | There is a strap but the material is hard and sharp. It could easily hurt the athlete’s hand | Very good | Strong and smooth material strap with blue color which is shining. Easy and comfortable to grab |
| Easy to drink | Very poor | Has lid; the position of the strap and the bottle is awkward [see the picture below]; very difficult to drink | Very good | No lid; has straw; very easy to drink |
| Multi-function | None | Nothing, but a bottle | please and encourage the athlete | There are the athlete’s favorite cartoon character, and slogan to encourage the athlete overcome the tiredness. It makes her feel warm and encouragement |
Check out the pictures below (demonstrated by my super model – Dapang ) and find out why the Japanese design is much easier to drink.
So, you see the design of a simple bottle does matter and maybe matter a lot. Think of the design in auto-motor or IT industry, a small awful design might just ruin your potential big success which was established with millions of dollar and lots of hard work.
//Mar 12 2009
Mar 12 2009
Mar 09 2009
when you drive from office to home, you don’t need think of what will happen along the whole journey. As long as you go for the right direction you only focused on from where you are to the next junction or roundabout. The reason is that there is going to be change ahead so do not think of too much about too far away. Keep watch out what is happening in front of you. Thinking of mistake that you made would not help you to drive better when you are on the road. Concentrate making it right next time rather than thinking it over.
| Jason’s thought | Lean/agile principles and practices |
|---|---|
| Drive from office to home, go for the right direction | Goal oriented, see the whole system, set a clear goal and direction |
| Focus on where you are to the next junction or roundabout | Iterative development, focus on one iteration a time |
| There is going to be change ahead so do not think of too much about too far away. Keep watch out | Change is inevitable. Continuously communicate and collect feedback, adaptively project management |
| Forget the mistake that you made when you are on road, make it right next time. | Continuously improve the process and plan |
Dec 05 2008
If you paid a little bit attention to global finance for the last 3 to 6 months, “credit crunch”, “financial crisis”,” economic recession” and “downturn”, these keywords would not be strange to you. Whatever it was called, your life was less or more impacted by it. If we were only allowed to tell one reason for the financial crisis without mentioning any financial terminology, it could be described as simple as that both banks and consumers did not have enough cash to pay off their over spending.
There were many reasons that behind it. Financial organization took too much risk in investment; credit rating agencies did not give a correct rates to some products. Governments, especially US was not able to monitor and manage the system strictly. The financial crisis has already caused an economic recession in western european countries and America. Even China and India had paid a huge bill for the lessons learnt. Real economics started going down because of weak demand.
Even though, all around the world, not every country was so damaged by the credit crunch. I watched a BBC finance show last night, there is a small middle east country called Lebanon (Capital Beirut) whose economic was not impacted almost at all. The treasure minister revealed the reasons that they foresaw the big risk in American and Western european financial system and had pull all their investment from US and Europe since 2007. Meanwhile, they have these very strict regulations for banks, such as
Government also played a critical role in financial system management and monitoring. All these regulations or rules that they made reminded me some basic principles in in Karl Marx’s Das Kapital that I learned from high school.
So far, US and UK have already nationalized some banks, insurance companies maybe car manufactories soon. In truth, part of the capital were actually owned by government, and nationalized. If there are more business which is danger, would government take them over and invest them? If that happens, the western financial system might look very much like Chinese financial system, which although is under construction from a very beginning stage compared to US and UK.
It seems that when western capitalism economics theory could not solve the problems that would happen anyway, they leaned to capital nationalized which was very similar to what Chinese government or Lebanon government do. Does it mean that Marx’s economic theories are the actually the way out to solve these problems?
It is obviously that China or Japan did much better than US and UK in this credit crunch till now. It does not mean what they did not make mistakes, in reality they did make a lot mistakes. However it might be the time to think of the reasons behind their success and mistakes that they made.
//Dec 05 2008
Gordon Ramsay, a famous British food writer, business man and TV star. He stars in the Channel 4 series Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares which tells stories how he help some dreadful restaurants to come back to the business and win back customers. I watched the episode this Thursday, which was very impressive because I found that there were so much in common of what Gordon did in his show and what we did in our agile software development projects.
The show started, he walked into this rural Lancashire pub where he had found the landlord laying down the law in the kitchen and doing 120-hour weeks, despite undergoing a quadruple heart bypass, and had debts of £250,000.
It reminds me a failing project that was over spent and had people doing quite a lot over time but still did not seem to make the deadline.
Gordon identified some key problems and found out the root causes very quickly.
| Problems | Root causes |
|---|---|
| £250,000 debt | Restaurant was running very inefficient, one person was the decision maker for everything. |
| No one could work in this restaurant more than 6 months | Team was forced to taken order from the owner and no motivation and appreciation |
| There were many fancy plates, decorations that were not necessary and did not match Pub theme food | Not customer centered and lack of communication with customer |
| People did not trust each other, there were huge boundaries between the manager and staffs. | Lack of communication and integrity |
Does it ring any bell to you? Yes, we had very similar problems in software development projects. Let’s look at a series of ways that Gordon tried to solve above problems.
Gordon Ramsay played a very good project manager role in this game and he demonstrated many good software development practices by using agile and lean principles.
| Problems | Root causes | Solutions and practices | Principles/Methodologies |
|---|---|---|---|
| £250,000 debt | Restaurant was running very inefficient, one person was the decision maker for everything. | Change menu, make it simple and efficient, customer centered | KISS, Lean(Eliminate waste), Value driven |
| No one could work in this restaurant more than 6 months | Team was forced to taken order from the owner and no motivation and appreciation | Kicked out the boss, team motivation and decision, self-organized team | “Walk Out The Door”, People who do the work make decision, Lean (Empower the team), Lean (Build integrity in) |
| There were many fancy plates, decorations that were not necessary and did not match Pub theme food | Not customer centered and lack of communication with customer | Got rid off unnecessary stuffs, more communication with customers | Lean (Eliminate the waste), User centered design |
| People did not trust each other, there were huge boundary between the manager and staffs. | Lack of communication and integrity | Stand up meeting, retrospective | Agile, Lean (Eliminate waste), encourage communication |
Running a business or managing a project might be very different between different industries and domains. However insight how to solve problems, there are methodologies and principles that could be used in common. Maybe it is because running a restaurant and developing a software are both professional service. I still remember that I benefited a lot from the experience of working in a restaurant when I started my IT career as a technical support engineer.
//Nov 30 2008
I recently watched a BBC show called “Dream homes”, that basically talked about how to help people who had problems to decorate their awful house into a dream land within a limit budget. Normally, from the beginning, the house-owners and the show organizers came out a plan, say “budget 80 grand”. When the procurement and engineering work started, with some changes happening, the budget always went up dramatically to double or even higher. Then they had to give up something in their original plan in order to cut down the cost. Along with the whole program, there were many changes, such as change of the engineering design, “shopping-list”, construction implementation. Sometimes, money were saved and sometimes lost by these changes. This show made me think of our software development projects that included lots of changes every release, every week even everyday. These changes might be initialized by business owners, end users, project managers, or development team. People in this show did not feel like being good at the change management that touched me off thinking about what good practices that we can use in project change management and how to use them.
Insight a traditional project change management approach, a change typically goes through at least 6-7 steps of a process from it is born to its end.
This process made sense to me theoretically, and I did went through several times of the whole process when I was an IT manager in a large organization. It certainly “worked”. However, I observed several phenomena that were either waste or dragged the whole thing to the opposite direction of the goal of the change. E.g.
A process/plan driven management approach might caused the above problems. The underline reasons are that human-beings keen to protect themselves and achieve personal achievement firstly if you do not bind their performance with your organization’s value and achievement. However if people could be trained by value/goal driven thinking align with reactive/adaptive project management approach, those problems would be solved.
In a typical IT change project, however it is big or small, going through with the structure of the process is not a bad idea, meanwhile, put too much assumption or make the plan very much details could kill creativity and flexibility during the implementation of the change itself.
Software development project could be a bit different in change management. It is not easy to achieve the same understanding of cost-efficiency of each change, so it normally came to the situation, business stakeholders and development team went for slightly different direction during the implementation of a change. It might be worse, if there was change during the process of making a change. So, certainly it would be very inefficient to go through a whole process every time.
So what would be a good idea? When there was a change that was initialized, team can regard it as a task and put it into development task list, we can think it as a functional task, or defect or whatever it is easy for the team to understand. Then re-prioritize the task list and rank this new task (change). When team estimate the workload of this task, its impact on the existing system need to be considered. Sometimes, it might be just less costly if a change could be combined into some existing tasks that they have similar priority.
People who manage change plan should consider which option could put more business value into the software application and what the goal was to finally achieve. When people driven by value or goal, with a simple plan in hand, they could be very flexible during the implementation, so that the process and documentation just played a helper role rather commander.
Tips:
Back to the beginning, if the house-owners could manage their changes in this way and well prioritize their task list and considering any change as one of task, their job might not be that painful, they might just get a fairly dream home.
//Nov 03 2008
Finance institutions are always the core of world economic system. Investment banks, funds have innovated a big amount of products and tools to make profit aggressively. IT played a crucial role of building information system to transfer information, calculate risks efficiently and guarantee the continuity of business. Financial system hugely depends on IT system. When the financial crisis spreaded all over the world in 2008, the Wall street experienced a scary nightmare in a coupe of months, Lehman Brother, Merrill lynch and Bear Stearns fell down over night. There were huge impact on other business too rather than financial business itself because lack of liquidity and loss of confidence of investment. Business started cut off cost and save enough liquidity to prepare for even worse economics situation. No one can ignore the fact that world economics recession. The UK chancellor reported that GDP decreased 0.5% in the 3rd quarter which means the economics of the UK, one of the world top 5 economies is recessing. The US is also experiencing a huge pain and injected more than 700 billion dollars into their financial system. Car manufactures, toy makers, and other manufacturing had to shut down their business.
There are definitely more that IT can do in order to help business to achieve their goals. One of the reason that the US learnt from the financial crisis is that lack of effective supervision and Inappropriate regulations. In order to build or reform the existing financial system, a set of new rules, regulations, tools and products would come out. A new system which can lower the risks of investment and make the whole process clear and easy to supervised. All these changes need new information system or business re-engineering of existing system. Only IT can help business to make that happen. It is a great opportunity for IT to server government, industry and business to build good basis of the better financial system and go forward.
Simple^4 Xiaoming Wang
Professional IT project management consulting
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