Innovation Garden

Learning agile (book by Stellman & Greene)

Learning Agile

Andrew Stellman & Jennifer Greene

Learning Agile

Agile working practices have become quite trendy over the last few years, but the application of the word agile to these practices dates back to 2001. A group of 17 people active in software development had a meeting and published what they called the “Agile Manifesto ”. This was a set of four values and 12 principles to guide software development. It is worth noting that agile practices were around much earlier than this. This creates some confusion about what is or is not agile, which sometimes misses the point.

It doesn’t have to be crazy at work (book by Fried & Hansson)

It doesn’t have to be crazy at work

Jason Fried and David Hansson

It doesn't need to be crazy

The two authors were the principle co-founders of a company called Basecamp. The company produces software that is used by (mostly small) businesses for project management. The company was founded in about 2000 and has been profitable for every year of its existence. The company has not gone public and is itself quite small (about 50 people). It sells access to their software by subscription and has over 100,000 client companies. By most measures this is a successful entrepreneurial start-up.

Making things happen (book by Berkun)

Making things happen

Scott Berkun

 

This book is primarily about project management, especially software development. It does not discuss the detailed techniques of project management as much as major principles to guide project managers. I skimmed the book, reading some chapters more than others. This might be a more interesting book for people starting into project life to read as a whole, but I thought there were a number of interesting observations (in no particular order) worth sharing.

Making ideas happen (book by Belsky)

Making ideas happen

Scott Belsky

 The central position of this book is that creative people have lots of fine ideas, but their inability to focus on execution of the ideas prevents these ideas from having any impact, either on the individual or society (or organizations). The author discusses three things that can increase creative productivity: developing a bias towards action, tapping the forces of community and developing leadership capability. Getting more/better ideas does not increase productivity, executing those ideas does.

 

The Checklist Manifesto (book by Gawande)

The Checklist Manifesto

Atul  Gawande

Checklist Manifesto

The author is a surgeon who has reflected on the nature of “error” in medicine. People undergoing surgery are at high risk of complications, many of which are due to the treatment – not the patient’s underlying condition. So-called preventable injuries range from 20-40% of all complications. He has since become associated with an effort to increase the use of a 17-point checklist for every surgical procedure. This book makes the case for the development and use of checklists whenever complex work is undertaken. Creating a checklist is harder than it seems, but using one is easier.

Uncertainty

I read a scientific article about the effect of uncertainty on people’s recognition of creativity (Bias Against Creativity). In brief, they authors did some experiments that showed that when people were put into an uncertain state, they became much less receptive to creativity.

Projects & programs

In the mid-1990s, Bob Thomas and I spent a few weeks thinking about the type of work our research department did. We initially thought we were trying to fit all of our work into a project management framework, but soon discovered that this was incorrect. Some of our work was clearly projects, and benefited from better project management. Some of our work was much more open ended. We eventually chose to call this type of work program management. Some years later, I had occassion to write this down again, with the material below being the result.

The driving insight to making this distinction was that the mindset and practices of project management don't really work when managing programs. It is very important that any work leader be clear about which type of work they are leading (or more likely what the mix of work is) and to apply the right mindset to the work. With that as contxt, here are some thoughts on the similarities and differences between the two.