The important features of a great team

There is a game we play at home that I would like to share.

The rules are simple:

Given you are alone in a dark room or corridor
When you hear someone else approaching
Then you have try jump out at them
  And scare the c**p out of them

There is some skill to this game. Once you have played it a few times everyone knows what is going to happen. In anticipation, everyone goes very silent in order to detect where the other one is. Inevitably, people stop breathing but start laughing - first one who does has lost.

None of the kids play this game. This is something myself and Mrs A do, which is most unbecoming of some 40 year olds.

It is something that is uniquely ours. Something that does not really make sense in another context. It is special to us but probably completely dumb to others. It was not planned but was spontaneous and if it was copied would not be the same.

But this is where the good stuff is.

Teams also have these special bits too. They come from working closely with each other and letting your guard down enough to reveal our human selves.

This does not happen immediately. I often does not happen if there conditions are not right, if there is not enough freedom to express who we are and explore our relationships with one another.

Often unprofessional, usually silly and totally unique to each team, these are the special features that make teams great both to work in and with. Love them or loose them.

Dre-status!

If you have the pleasure of working on a big programme of work, which involves many teams you will have probably encountered a status meeting.

For those from the 21st century, this where a collection of people get together on a regular frequency to share their status with the rest of the group. This usually forms some sort of rag ("RED AMBER GREEN") status which is usually in a huge spreadsheet which is usually accompanied by some words to explain why your status is not green.

If you cannot get rid of this then how about changing the way we deliver the news.

My favourite so far is by dressing in the colour of your status, so you proudly show everyone as soon as you enter the room.

The person asking for this will be able to focus immediately in people wearing red, forget about people wearing green and selectively pick on the more nervous looking oranges.

Who knows, if you all end up wearing green the encounter might only last for minutes freeing the meeting space for less fortunate souls.

My case for why story cards deserve a bit of love

I am an avid user of Post-its, which I commonly call 'stickies' since I am not a brand junkie even if I secretly compare my Brand X to Super Stickies.

I give you exhibit A:

Definitely a 'C' for effort - could try harder!

The stories on my board are represented by stickies and they have traditionally been extremely low rent. Creating a new story takes seconds and have always thought of this being a good thing. The format usually persists and easily adaptable so I have never done it any differently.

Just recently I have noticed that the simplicity of creating cards also means new ones are created often which I am not sure is a good thing....

Are we facilitating the idea that changing items in a sprint is quick and painless? Maybe even that it's a fringe benefit and does not cost anything?

If our goal is to form a set list of work for a sprint then we should be only creating stories once. We can afford to spend a little bit of time on them.

The card should reflect the effort that the team has already expended to get them into a state that we can create software with, which could have had many hours spent on it in refinement and planning by various members of the team.

Does a sticky really represent our investment in that story? Throwing away a sticky does not 'feel' serious but it might represent a significant investment in time and ultimately money.

So I have a new theory: Story Cards should be difficult to create and fantastic to look at.

Whilst my team think that glitter, funky calligraphy and lamination is maybe a smidge too far (I disagree) printing them off using a nice template and font's would make them easier to read whilst making them just too difficult to create ad-hoc or without a good reason.

Is our work really best represented by a dog-earred stickie written in questionable handwriting? Doesn't it deserve just a little bit more?

I think story cards should embody our view of our work and deserve just a little bit of love.

Maybe allow anything that was not part of our sprint planning be a sticky so we can see just how flexible and accommodating our team really is, which is often overlooked by the wider business.

The 'Lean' Oven

A while ago, I started a project to build an outdoor kitchen complete with a wood fired oven. It has been a completely frivolous adventure which has kept me busy over the summer. The whole driver for this was the wood fired oven (and the need to build things, obviously).

When I came to the point where I wanted to fit the oven, I kinda stalled. You should know that these things are really expensive, the cheapest was around £500 the most expensive around £1000. I had planned to have a small one since I figured I would only use it a couple of times a year.

It was this thought that made me realise that I was not thinking clearly about the value, or perceived value it would bring me. I had bought into buying the oven because I wanted an oven and that is as far as it went.

So, I started to think how I could test if having an oven would be as valuable as I thought it would be?

So, I found some guides on building a clay oven. This made more sense - it was less money, I could fit it into the space I had created already and it looked fun to do.

Most of guides said how they had 'dug up some free clay' which obviously makes this sort of caper much more attractive. Not much of that around here, so it would be a cost. I found a local company selling clay, the cheapest was around £6 for 12 kgs. A rough calculation suggested I might need about 5-7 bags. This is mixed with sand which is easy to get hold of and relatively cheap so I ignored that for the time being.

It also had a hidden cost in the floor should probably be made using firebricks. It doesn't have to be but if normal bricks crack from the heat then I would loose my entire investment. I would need 15 for my base and they cost about £4 each locally. I can get them cheaper on the Internet but the postage offsets this so much that it probably is not worth it.

This would give me the option to keep it if it worked, which is a fair presumption since I would probably be following instructions from someone else rather than making it up as we go along. So, to test this idea with the option of keeping it would be around £100 - significantly cheaper than buying one that's for certain.

My thinking was a little clearer now. As great as this was sounding, it's still limiting my options and carries significant risk too. It was certainly a do or die operation - if it worked then awesome but if not I would only have a base and a whole load of clay to get rid of.

Then I saw this....

Yes, it's a fire back. I removed some from my house a while back and put them to one side since they are heavy.

I saw an oven however and with some bricks I had laying around I quickly bodged something that 'looks' like an oven:

But does it behave like an oven? The guides all have a ratio between the height of the oven and the height of the opening. You need enough to ensure a good airflow from the bottom to the stoke the fire. Let's test what we have and get some feedback to see if we need to tweak our design or if this is a non-starter.

It lights and keeps going at a steady pace, it never roars but the wood is questionable and probably damp. I stick a BBQ thermometer and just leave it for a while, monitoring the temp every now and again.

The max temp the oven reached was about 150 deg C. Way short of the 600 you would expect from a 'real' oven but this was with dodgy wood and zero insulation, which is key to getting the temperature up and holding it. Whilst it was going, a lot of smoke come out of cracks and gaps. I solved this by simply packing them with some damp sand, which worked a treat and was nicely temporary as well.

What I also observed when I lit the fire was how the smoke came out of the front, which looked like it was causing a bottleneck. I also noted that the heat losses where significant since it got really hot, so insulation would certainly play a part in how well this works for actually cooking things.

So a further improvement would be to create a chimney just after the dip with a column to funnel the hot air up and out a little easier and hopefully improve draw. This is a one time shot since I would have to cut the fire back but I happen to have a spare so this is not as bad as it sounds. If I ruin it then I still have this one as a backup - so I still have options. If I break the first one I would need to be clear on my commitment since if I break the second one too, I have no more options with my current experiment.

Before I do that, however I could try to insulate it and make sure I can get higher temps. Just a covering of sand would probably help, maybe with an oven fire blanket too which has pretty good insulation value. Using some decent wood would be more representative and pretty low cost (or zero cost if my neighbour lends me some from his wood pile).

This is still a work in progress but it is the thought process that I thought was interesting. I was unsure what value my 'feature' would provide me so I wanted to test it and get feedback. I looked around to see what I had that could get me feedback as fast as possible. I then review what I now know and see if it fits with what I thought. I learn from it, tweak it and iterate to get more feedback.

I still have to prove that the oven will provide me with 'value' a.k.a yummy pizza - but a pile of wood and a few friends will answer that. So my BBQ 'showcase' will get me buy in to create a production version of my prototype.

CV.alt

I hate my CV. I know it contains what agents want to see but I don't think it represents 'me'.

So here is me playing around, maybe I should just send it and see what happens :)

Here is a link to a larger version