SidesWays Blog

Ran across a couple of presentations that are relevant to building team culture, especially for virtual work groups. The first is a keynote by Jim McCarthy . I've been a long-term fan as he wrote a great book. See Pre-Agile Ideas: Jim McCarthy Videos for more. Here is the link to his keynote: Culture Hacking http://www.infoq.com/presentations/culture-hacking-singapore Some interesting quotes (he's very quotable) and take-aways: Get women involved! Technical teams lack diversity. "I'm not a real historian, but I like stories from history" "great editorial wall of China" "everything you do should be art" "team = product" Feeilings are "mad, sad, glad, afraid" "any process will work with presence" Book: Flow (P.S.) The other presentation that is full of tips for running virtual teams based on experience at InfoQ itself: Culture and Happiness in Virtual Teams http://www.infoq.com/presentations/cult...

Great presentation (30 minutes) on why multitasking is poor for productivity and how personal Kanban (and Kanban in general) works. There is a great short exercise at the beginning of the video that illustrates the cost of context switching. The Evils of Multi-tasking and How Personal Kanban Can Help You (by Sandy Mamoli) http://www.infoq.com/presentations/multi-tasking-personal-kanban Kanban in a nutshell: 1) visualize your work flow, 2) limit your WIP I'm experimenting with a personal Kanban board made using a 30" x 20" project board: The Pomodoro Technique is also discussed ( http://pomodorotechnique.com/ ). I'm experimenting with a Pomodoro App on my iPhone  

Working with distributed and overseas teams is a fact of life these days in technical environments especially and knowing some basic tips will utilize the talents of the entire team more effectively. Time Zones Time zone differences can accumulate to mean real schedule slippage so you have to try to use the time zone difference to your advantage. For example, if the shift in India starts 10 hours ahead of east coast time consider working in the evening for an hour or two to prep work plans for the next day. When you arrive in the east coast morning, the team in India will have had several hours to work on tasks that you'd agreed to. If you wait until the morning you may miss an entire day of productivity in India. This time zone issue even comes into play with east coast / west coast teams. If your west coast team gets a late start they are going to push the east coast team to have meetings at the end of the day. Not always practical. And having the west coast team get up ear...

For my primary email account I use FastMail instead of GMail. Why? FastMail is very fast, reliable, and feature rich. GMail is fast, reliable, and feature rich. I like the features of FastMail, but the primary reason I use it over GMail is the communication that they have with their user base when there is an (inevitable) problem. Here's a post about a recent problem: http://blog.fastmail.fm/2011/05/15/outage-report-a-cascade-of-errors/ This is the kind of thing I have never seen out of Google or Yahoo and probably never will. It's an advantage of being a relatively smaller service. They have maintained a policy of rapidly communicating with their user as well with a  status blog in addition to their regular blog . SalesForce implemented a similar "communicate with the users" policy after they had a major outage. You can see what they tell you about their service at  http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ . Google Apps has a similar page at  http://www.goog...

I've been a fan of Jim McCarthy since I heard a recorded session of his talk at one of the Microsoft developer conferences back in the 90s. The thoughts represented are echoed in Agile practices today. There is a nice set of short videos at: http://www.mccarthyshow.com/the-23-rules-of-thumb/ which are also available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/McCarthyShow#g/u He also has a recent (Dec 2013) keynote at InfoQ: Culture Hacking http://www.infoq.com/presentations/culture-hacking-singapore Some my selected favorites: Rule 1 - Don't know what you don't know Rule 4 - Don't go dark Rule 5 - Use feature teams Rule 6 - Use Zero Defect Milestones Rule 7 - Don't flip the bozo bit Rule 8 - Beware of a guy in a room Rule 13 - If you build it, it will ship (daily build) Rule 23 - Get the team into ship mode