Jiri’s Notepad

Happy new year to you all. I am continuing with the Best Of theme and today I am moving on to books.

If you measure the quality of a book by how much it changes the way you think or do things, I was lucky to find some truly excellent books. Deciding which one were the best ones was not easy as there were quite a few that had a bit of the ‘my life will not be the same again’ quality, but here it is.

Stephen Clarke: A Year in the Merde

This is a hilarious, and politically incorrect view on French (and British) cultural stereotypes. If you live(d) in France, work with French or even like the country, read the book for your amusement and education. Everyone I spoke about it (regardless their nationality) agreed that it is both extremely funny and at the same time a factual description of many cultural quirks of a Parisian life.

Nassim Taleb: The Black Swan
It would have been enough to read the Black Swan if only for the fact that it foretold the last year’s financial crisis. Yet, Nassim Taleb went a step further and this book gives  a treatment of the subject of predictability (or a lack of thereof) in everyday life and puts up a straw man of a philosophy enabling you to act in a positive manner in a world where ‘noone knows nothin’. Whereas the Black Swan is slightly more applicable to business and investment domain, it is worth checking out his previous book, Fooled by Randomness, which deals more with personal implications of the uncertainty and over-abundance of data.

Michael Pollan: The Omnivore’s Dilemma

What Taleb does for finance and unpredictability, Michael Pollan does for food. Whether you are vegetarian or eat burgers, you will find this book fascinating. The book will make you pause, more than once, to reflect about what you eat and how.

Samuel Hayakawa: Language in Thought And Action

Despite a book on language may seem boring, its subject is something extremely important. Words give us a filter through which we see the world around us. They colour perception with emotions. They enable us to distinguish lie from the truth and give us a windows into the inner world of others’. Their skilful use makes some people charismatic and turns others into spin-doctors. The book paints you the basics of what Samuel Hayakawa describes as ’science of how not to be a damn fool’, explaining the basics of what different usage of words do to you. Overall it is a great self-defence manual to all kind of mischief in the media and a guidebook to a better and fairer use of words.

Other noteworthy books I read in 2008:

• Tom Peters: Brand You 50:
• Darren Brown: Tricks of the Mind
• Andrew Austin: The Rainbow Machine
• Keith Johnstone: Impro
• Stevens, Brook, Jackson & Arnold: Systems Engineering: Coping with Complexity
• Womack & Jones: Lean Thinking

Slightly off topic, my favourite tunes of 2008, courtesy of last.fm:

• The Go! Team
• Jack Johnson
• Hot Chip
• Camille
• The Orb
• Bob Dylan
• Marisa Monte
• The Velvet Underground
• M.I.A.
• Tom Waits

With twitter traffic on low  and with my new assignment about to start, I decided it would be a good idea to break the holiday mood and finish off some blog posts that have been lying around as draft for quite some time. Happy new year to everyone!

Earlier this year I decided to have a look at lean and agile delivery methods. Why? They’re here and they are getting into a state where they are are bound to impact large delivery organisations. Agile, and to a lesser extent lean, seem to be all over the internet. Although it sometimes seems the subject is written about more often than actually practised, it still deserves a serious look.

But before going into the detail, it is important to spend some time on applicability. I will probably cover my views on Agile another time, but in short, I think Agile is not really too applicable in the context I most often work in, i.e. large projects run within a commercial customer-supplier relationship. It seems possible to use agile(ish) approach on a larger scale project run in-house, and some of my colleages have actually ran successfully smaller scale agile software development projects of a team size scale in commercial context. But doing both at the same time still seems to be too hard. (If someone saw a case study of where this happened, please let me know via comments).

Lean, on the other hand is a different kettle of fish:

1. It applies to a broader set of projects than Agile. It covers the whole life-cycle from inception to operations (i.e. when project delivers the value), and not only software development aspects, which is what Agile is applied to in practice
2.  Its application is about the mindset of continuous improvement rather than a one-off project that has, in my experience better chance of succeeding and producing some tangible results than a one-off project
3. Starts with customer value in mind, rather than a particular set of delivery techniques
4. It is process-based, but still acknowledging that skilled and motivated people are crucial, rather than espousing something over something else

In short, Lean is better suited to the large, commercial IT-heavy projects. People will sometimes counter-argue that Lean can not possibly applied to IT, because IT depends too much on creativity and one-off projects as compared to routine repetitive nature of manufacturing production in which Lean originates. I am not sure that really holds. With majority of IT budget currently being locked up in operations, the argument about the one-off nature does not neccessarily hold. Secondly, all manufacturers do do product development that is rather similar to IT projects. If there is Lean Product Development, why not Lean IT? That’s why I think that an intelligent reading of Lean can help to learn some things. This reasing cannot focus on techniques because these differ between industries, but needs to start with principles driving the organisation and management of work.