Sadly, waterfall.

The California Department of Transportation is investing over $102 million on the Carpinteria to Ventura section of the 101 road construction for the next 4 years. Being a commuter of this stretch of 101 among many co-workers, I rarely experienced traffic in this route, unless there was a road construction; neither do my colleagues.

So I emailed them, out of curiosity, why. Curiosity kills the cat, I know, I know.

I did get a prompt reply, stating:

“Our studies of traffic volumes and patterns conducted in 2005 and 2008 indicated that this stretch of Route 101 is congested for several hours in each directions – predominantly northbound during morning peak hours and southbound during evening peak hours.”

Even back in the academia world, we didn’t cite literature that’s around 8 years old, unless, it’s very very compelling.

I pulled the Google traffic on Mondays, 8am, 9am, 5pm, 6pm – both directions are green at those rush hours.

What can I say? It was a 8-year waterfall process: before you ship it, customers no longer need it! And what’s worse, it’s making the customers life harder – the commute is going to be miserable.

More sadly, it’s a $102 M undertaking – the tax payers’ money could have been spent at somewhere else that’s more meaningful.

Google Traffic at 8am on Mondays, and stays the same:

Personal kanban board & October UX meetup

After watching lynda’s time management course and being educated to reduce the collector points to maximum of 6, it’s hard, pretty darn hard, until I went to Irvine last weekend and attended this Kanban workshop. Not a whole lot of new stuff to me because we are practicing Kanban for a few projects at work for a while but one take away from this awesome speaker Pascal Pinck is a free kanban web app: leankitkanban. Now I got my personal kanban board and am able to reduce my focal points significantly!

As opposed to having post-it notes everywhere and reminders in emails, calendars (physical & multiple digital), now I only got one board to look at and prioritize. Life is made so much easier.

Good thing about personal kanban board: you are the product owner and executor so you don’t run into resource issues across multiple teams. The team we have at work is still looking at product owners for release schedule but if everybody of us is dedicated, the deployment for kanban should be a natural work flow from state 1 to state 10 – essentially it’s practicing scrum w/o a timebox.

An fun exercise we played at the workshop using dice to check off complexity points and event cards to facilitate unpredictability almost mirrored the harsh reality. The tip of that day, “we all try to explain things in life but we are just throwing dice.”

And Kanban board doesn’t need to be fancy; it can be everywhere: on the white board, sticky notes, or on the window:

Last tweet for today: October UX meetup is coming soon, at lynda.com! (NOTE: RESCHEDULED to Nov. due to power outrage)

Date/Time: 6:30-8:30 pm November 20th Thursday

Venue: lynda.com lobby conference room, 6410 Via Real, Carpinteria, CA 93013

As always, food & dessert will be served.

Laura Smith Sr. UX Designer at Citrix Online will talk about how the web is being rebuilt around people and will discuss the fundamental shift that social networking has brought to the way people behave online. She will present findings from UX researchers & designers that have shaped products like Facebook, Google+ & YouTube. Laura will give examples of how to integrate social behaviors into products & websites, that goes far beyond simply bolting on a “Like” or “Share This” button, and will share with us 6 key principles to think about when designing products in light of this shift in online behavior. Hopefully you will walk away with practical ideas you can take back and apply to your own projects, or at least be inspired to think differently about social networking.

Take a peek at the meetup group shot from September, and see you soon!

Scrum Product Owner Training

Constantly asked “would you recommend it?” after a 2-day training I went to in La Jolla San Diego, and the answer is, yes it’s worthwhile. lynda.com sent us to this scrum training by Mike Cohn, the guy who authored User Story Applied, Succeeding with Agile, and Agile Estimating and Planning, long heard of his name through word of mouth, and turned out, it’s an excellence course.

A bit user experience lost though the first morning when I was trying to find the room. Every sign says “Mountain Goat Software” but I didn’t associate the name of the company with Mike Cohn or Agile. It took me a while but it’s okay.

Mike started with this “Agile Manifesto” which is basically a agile over waterfall statement:

• individuals & interactions OVER process & tools
• working software OVER comprehensive documentation
• collaboration OVER negotiation
• responding to change OVER following a plan

And my major take-aways from this training are:

1. Team self manages themselves in scrum. (love it!)
2. Dedicated teams for projects. Mental switching cost is not affordable.
3. A buildup of technical debt (a lowering of the intrinsic quality of the software. e.g., missing automated tests) leads to the need to rewrite the application.
4. And most importantly, communication. Scrum to me, it opens up those commutation channels and constant check-ins with team all the time. Waterfall creates barriers from staying in the loop, ending up throwing stuff off the fence and constant check-in may create discomfort to team.

Some characteristics of team and product owners concluded by Cohn:

• Typical scrum team 5-9 people. 2-pizza team:)
• Members should be 100% dedicated to the sprint
• Should sit together in a shared space
• Self-organizs in response to challenge provided
• Cross functional: include all skills and disciplines to go from idea to implementation

Product owner characteristics:

• Understand the market, customer and users
• Has good working relationship with stakeholders
• Empowered to make decisions, is decisive, is willing to say no
• A leader who is respected by the team
• An individual, not a committee
• Typically works with one team, maybe two

He also raised an interest question: does the role of the project manager exist any more? Now that the team shares the risk, defines the scope, be willing to communicate, and is held accountable for final deliverables, it makes better sense to have a role as a scrum master to protect and shield the team. Mostly likely PM in the waterfall environment becomes scrum master in agile, but it’s also a change in roles and responsibilities.

Another FAQ was “should product owner and scrum master roles shared by one person?” That was pretty straight-forward. No, conflicts in interest.

Day I was less intense, fun play with ideas (our team exercised a fun Netflix story), user stories, elevator pitch; Day II got more intense and serious with all the practical stuff: prioritize using relative weighting (relative benefits, relative penalty, total value, value percent, estimate, cost percent), velocity, etc. etc.

A fun fact: gender ratio in this training male v.s. female approximately 7:3.

All fun stuff, now we are back, it’ll be challenging but also interesting to see how we apply scrum in this traditional huge huge waterfall environment. And we are going to keep in mind that in the first few sprints, we’ll probably fail, and fail miserably:)