transientis.com - António Melo’s transient moods

Some time ago, I read the book “WINNING” from Jack Welch, who was GE’s CEO.
I really liked the book. For each idea presented, it is backed up with several real examples from the author’s experience. I think it is a must-read for every worker.

The book is divided in 5 parts, with a total of 20 chapters. As I was reading it, I underlined some sentences. In these ‘reading series’ posts, I will transcribe the underlined sentences (at least until I get fed up :). This way, maybe you get interested, and eventually also read the entire book yourself.

I asked permission, via email, to the Publisher - HarpperColins. As I received no answer, and if you are the publisher and don’t want this positive advertisment :), contact me. If needed, I will of course delete the posts. Thank you.

http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060753948/Winning/index.aspx

“…I would call lack of candor the biggest dirty little secret in business.
What a huge problem it is. Lack of candor basically blocks smart ideas, fast action, and good people contributing all the stuff they’ve got. It’s a killer.
When you’ve got candor - and you’ll never completely get it, mind you - everything just operates faster and better.
Now, when I say “lack of candor” here, I’m not talking about malevolent dishonesty. I am talking about how too many people - too often - instinctively don’t express themselves with frankness. They don’t communicate straightforwardly or put forth ideas looking to stimulate real debate. They just don’t open up. Instead they withhold comments or criticism.They keep their mouths shut in order to make people feel better or to avoid conflict,…”

“…The mission announces exactly where you are going, and the values describe the behaviors that will get you there.”

“…an effective mission statement basically answers one question: How do we intend to win in this business?”

“…The question forces companies to delineate their strengths and weaknesses in order to assess where they can profitably play in the competitive landscape.”

“…There could be no doubt about what this mission meant or entailed. It was specific and descriptive, with nothing abstract going on…”

“…Moreover, we harped on the mission constantly, at every meeting large and small. Every decision or initiative was linked to the mission. We publicly rewarded people who drove the mission and let go of people who couldn’t deal with it for whatever reason,…”

“…But setting the mission is top management’s responsibility.”

“…In contrast to the creation of a mission, everyone in the company should have something to say about values.”

“…The actual process of creating values, incidentally, has to be iterative.”

“…The text included imperatives such as ‘Act in a boundaryless fashion - always search for and apply the best ideas regardless of their source” and “Be intolerant of bureaucracy” and “See change for the growth opportunity it brings.”

“…With all the stories I have heard in the past few years from employees in companies around the world, I’m convinced you can not be too specific avout values and their related behaviors.”

“…In the most common scenario, a company’s mission and its values rupture due to the little crisis of daily life in business:…”

“… I am saying your company will not reach anywhere near its full potential if all that is guiding it is a list of pleasant platitudes hanging on the lobby wall.
Look, I realize that defining a good mission and developing the values that support it take time and enormous commitment…”

My laptop was slow. It was several years old. Nothing new here.

I just said: I need a fast machine, big disk, 2 GBs of memory. More, I don’t care about the laptop’s size. I don’t care about its weight. I don’t care about the graphics card. I don’t care about the installed software. I just need a fast machine for my (power demanding) day to day work.

I tried to convince our IT that it makes no sense (to me) having a single computer model / configuration for the whole organization. I understand having a single model has its advantages, but I suggested we could stick to 2 models / configurations - one for the R&D (my department) and other for the Professional Services’ personnel.

As I told our IT before the purchase, this does not mean that “our” machines should be better that “their” machines. For me, it would make all sense that their laptop could be more expensive, if that’s the case. Maybe 1 giga is enough for them, but, as they travel a lot, they should have a lighter laptop with better battery autonomy.

Well, no success. Here I have the standard 1 GB configuration laptop. And, as the standard configuration, it also cames the new standard software.

Office 2007, it is. I also had to hear the disclaimer “Look António, this Outlook 2007 has very nice features, although it is heavier and slower than Outlook 2003″. I replied “I exchanged the machine because the other was slow. No 2 gigas were allowed. I didn’t ask for office 2007 and the first thing you tell me is that it is slower? Please, give me a break.”

Unfortunately, this was not all. I started seeing some odd email renderings. Images or graphics that would not be displayed. some emails, from several sources would not render well. Other would render just fine. Weird stuff.

We developed a tool that every day sends an email with a progress report. To have an idea, look at an email rendered in outlook 2003:

And a similar one rendered in outlook 2007:

What the… What happened to the bars? They seem that were not rendered. And no, the graphics are not done through scripts. No, they are not done with dhtml. No, not even with images. Yes, I just have a simple outer span with plain simple inner spans with specific background-color:

<span style=’float:left;display:block;background-color:green; position:relative;left:0;width:180;top:1;height:11;z-index=1′ >
</span>
Using the “View in browser” feature of the (not so) nice outlook 2007, this is what we get:

So, the problem had to be with the rendering engine of outlook 2007. I googled for: outlook 2007 html rendering

Here are 2 of the first hits today:

Microsoft takes email design back 5 years - http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2007/01/microsoft_takes_email_design_b.html

Word 2007 HTML and CSS Rendering Capabilities in Outlook 2007 - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338200.aspx

How come Microsoft breaks (even more) the html support? Why deciding to go to the word html rendering? Is it because of security concerns? To have a consistent office layout viewer? If so, why not have the IE engine stripped out of scripting capabilities?

I definitely am thinking of not using outlook 2007 and start using the much lighter (and that works) outlook webmail access.

That’s right, that’s a plus (+) before the one (1). We managed to finish everything to the (closed) Beta, 2 days before the estimated date.

My congratulations to all the Engineering Team. Taking in account all the stuff that was made, mainly on the latest days, this is really cool. Probably there are other team members in a better position to mention the challenges that were surpassed. In that case, just leave a comment.

<disclaimer>
Today, it was a tiring day for me - 3 sessions from the MS TechDays 2007 during the afternoon (great stuff, Microsoft), with one extra session starting at 20 o’clock and ending at 23h+. Basically, 9 hours almost non-stop. So, I’ll for sure miss lots of stuff:
</disclaimer>

• OutSystems Express Edition:
  • Late Service Studio instability fixes
  • Late Service Studio web editor usability improvements - and yes, usability tests were also made by Mr. T., before changing the product
  • XSP (OutSystems’ own version) - deployment architecture refactoring to fix several problems
  • OutSystems Express installer user experience improvements
  • .Net 2.0 connection pooling cleanup in order to get rid of damaged transactions. Related to System.Data.SqlClient.SqlTransaction.Zombie() somehow accessing a null connection
  • And so many other problems fixed…
  • …but still lots of them still missing
• Major outsystems.net Community site redesign, to accommodate:
  • Support for Downloads area instead of Documents
  • Major re-structure of documents/downloads (simplified)
  • Support for public, anonymous view of the existing downloadable content
  • Complete re-structure of forums (really simplified, less forums)
  • Back-office support for OutSystems Express Beta program (user approvals, etc.)
  • First-user experience completely redone
  • Improved Samples
  • OutSystems IT Asset Management - decision to support Windows XP Home Edition, and consequently application was changed

I’m pretty sure that these latest achievements were possible due to (besides the excellent team, that I already take for grant!) the principles behind the Agile Manifesto, that OutSystems is following for several years. <pub>And, of course, due to the OutSystems Platform “built-to-change” nature</pub>

Here is an un-ordered list of some (current) rules I impose to myself. This does not mean I think other people should follow them. These are my rules to myself only.

• I shall define a fixed time to arrive at the office everyday, in the morning (9 o’clock).
• I shall not bring pet projects to the office. Pets belong to home.
• I shall define a time limit (20 minutes, time permits) per day for non working tasks, like news catchup, etc. I shall go home earlier if I want to do it.
• I shall treat with respect everyone, even if I think someone does not deserve my respect.
• I shall not play computer games at the office. Period.
• I shall not blog at the office. Period.

What a nice post from Hugo Ribeiro.

Reading it, I decided to share some thoughts about this subject. I’ll try to show examples from my day to day experiences. I’ll try also to make my own interpretations of why some things work out while others don’t.

I think the problems arise right from the start, with the teams’ composition. Having a team with the wrong team members will make everybody uncomfortable. Say you are starting a new release and have to create the teams. How do you define how many teams will exist at a given moment, what is the size of a given team and what pigs belong to it?

Having a wrong team composition will most probably lead to some or all of the following situations during the scrum meetings:

• Pigs will think “The project has a so tight schedule and here I go waste my and everybody’s time”
• Pigs will think “Why the hell is Mark saying that? Who cares?”
• Pigs will think “After lunch I must go the bookstore buy my wife’s present. What shall I buy? Hummm, let me see…” - yes, people will be physical in the meeting and they will even be standing up, but their minds will be far away.
• Scrum Master will systematically say, one meeting after the other, and usually to the same set of pigs “Ok, Joe, what you’re saying is not in the scope of this scrum. Please move on, as the meeting is already taking too long and we have a iteration to finish!”. I’ve been there, I’ve seen (and done) that.
• Pigs will think “Now it is my time to talk, but what exactly should I say? What I’ve done since yesterday’s meeting has almost nothing to do with what these girls and guys are doing. If I say everything I’ve done, they will tell me it is not in the scope of the project or scrum. If I just say the few things related, it will seem I am a real slow worker or am lazy. And I want to discuss a problem (an impediment) I’m having and this is the only meeting I go to.”

There may be a number of reasons that might be the causes of this. Here is my own view in the form of an (incomplete) list:

The team is too big. I think it is really difficult to have productive scrums with 8 pigs. With time it might be possible, but if you’re starting to follow these practices, I would suggest to have smaller teams.

The team has the wrong pigs. You should sometimes make a reality check, to assure that the scrums taking place make sense. For example, if you have 3 people talking about feature A and 4 people talking about feature B, you’d better create two independent scrums. And, of course, it is possible for a given person to be a pig in more than one scrum in the same day.

Not everyone has the scrum culture. It takes quite a time to get used to and to understand its benefits. But, as time goes by, it turns the other way around - you feel lost if you haven’t any scrum. And if the company already use scrums, new employees get used really fast.

Pigs’ personality. As in all aspects of life, personality really matters. So carefully choose the people you employ.

Scrum master not being able to enforce the 3 scrum rules (in summary: what have I done since yesterday, what will I do until tomorrow, what are the impediments for me to get the job done). For me, this is a hard point. In the past we’ve tried to follow this rule strictly. Basically we almost could not discuss the problems - we had a two columns (subject / set of name) paper sheet that the scrum master would fill as needed, to schedule follow-up meetings. Eg: “Disabled Job is re-enabled on system start-up” / “Peter, Mat, John”. Then, after the scrum, he would have to guarantee that Peter, Mat and John really had the meeting and agreed on a solution design. Nowadays we discuss the problems in the meeting and agree either in a solution direction or, if not linear, we identify Peter, Mat, John and John is responsible to get the meeting done. As always I think what is needed is good sense (I’m not saying I have :)

Note 1: in my company, we use the term Iteration to refer to a two weeks’ time slot. This is basically the same as a Sprint in the Scrum Agile Software Development Process.

Note 2: we also use the original terms “pigs” and “chickens”

I didn’t expect it to be so thrilling. Some months ago, when the rumors started spreading inside the company, it seemed just a natural step - in a near future, we would release OutSystems Express Edition

Since its inception, back to 2001, OutSystems has been relatively closed. But now we are opening our doors, or at least I hope so.

We just finished the build (known as alpha 1), and selected end-users will be trying it.