Best and Most Popular Posts of Web Wanderer Blog in 2014

Blogging frequency have been going down again from the previous years. One reason has been that I haven't read as many books I would have hoped to. Also I haven't written that many other posts that in previous years. On the other hand, I've written down almost 30 ideas of blog posts that I should write. So blog isn't fading away, I just need to find the time to write it in the future.

Five Most Popular Posts from 2014

1. Separate Testing is Waste
2. Book Review: The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality
3. Disease of Being Busy
4. Book Review: The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris
5. Book Review: All The Devils are Here by McLean and Nocera

Most of the posts come from earlier this year, so maybe that's the reason those got more reads than the newer ones. This year I didn't have any one post that would have been much more popular that any else, but there were many which were quite popular.

For some reason the most read blog posts of the year were from 2011. These three blog posts suddenly raised to be popular this year. Almost no one had read those before, but now these got lot of attention. It is weird, but it also proves that good content will find its way to be read sooner or later. There are the three posts from 2011 that actually were most read this year:

• What I miss in the internet - real discussions
• One Hundred Posts
• Ideas are seeds, execution are the plants

My Own Five Favorite Posts 2014

• Why "how are you" is so difficult to Finns
• Estimates or #noestimates
• Work Needs to be Fun - Happy people are more Effective
• Disease of Being Busy
• Separate Testing is Waste

This time again, only one of the most popular posts are the same from the ones I think that were my best posts. All of these got attention, but I would have wished those would have got even more attention.

Thanks for everyone who has read my blog during this year. It's been good year and let's wish next one will be even better.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Organize for Complexity

I got book Organize for Complexity when I was at Dare Festival in Belgium about a month ago. Author Niels Pflaeging did also give a speech at the conference. The contents of the speech and the book (or perhaps booklet) were mainly the same, so this review is a bit about both of those.

Topic of the book interests me a lot. I've recently had many thoughts, writings and discussions about how organizations should be organized in the future, to be able to suit the markets of the future and the needs of next generation workforce.

This short book is a good first step to the new organizational thinking. It gives some initial ideas why the organizations should change and it gives one simple view to the challenge. It is not a book as such, more of a booklet with few paragraphs and illustrative pictures. It gives basic ideas well and raises some thoughts, but it lacks all critical thinking and discussion about the subject.

I liked the ideas what Niels seems to have, but I don't think this book really brings those forward. It's almost as powerpoint slides would have been transferred to book format. It isn't really a proper book, but it has some powerful thoughts.

If you want to have a simple touch on the organizations of the future, this book might be for you. The contents are valuable, the format of the book wasn't just to my taste.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Today Matters by John C. Maxwell

Once in a while I like to read self help books. Today Matters by John C. Maxwell was highly recommended book by many. The full name of the book actually adds to the Today Matters a second title, 12 Daily Practices to Guarantee Tomorrow's Success, which actually tells quite much about the book.

Book explains a simple way to succeed tomorrow - make every day count. The whole idea of the book is to understand to concentrate to today. Make the right decisions every day to support your growth to whatever you wish to be in your life.

John C. Maxwell is author of many books, priest and teacher of leadership. He has been given many rewards about leadership and management. He seems to be interesting character, who gives quite easy and straightforward advice.

I've read some self help books about success and in a way there wasn't that much new in the book for me. Still the idea, which is so simple, concentrate to today, is something that easily gets lost in the busy world we live in. Every day counts. You shouldn't care too much about the past and definitely not think too much about future. You need to make the right decisions every day to help you to become who you want to be.

The idea in the book is to concentrate to the 12 Daily Practices. These are basically values or point of views that should be taken in to account every day. I did write my own Mission Statement after reading 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and I think the ideology behind is similar. That's the reason I'm not taking this in to daily use for now. For many people those 12 practices definitely will be valuable.

Once a year it is good to read a classic like this about personal development. If you haven't ever read one or haven't read one for a while, I recommend this book. It's a good book and it did change my behavior a bit already. I enjoyed it and it was quite easy to read. So go ahead and read it.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: 100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People

Presenting, selling ideas to people and training has been part of my job for the past few years. Presenting as such is something I've always been comfortable with, but I know I could be much better. That's the reason I read 100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People by Susan M. Weinschenk.

The author has Ph.D. in Psychology and has a strong background on behavioral psychology. This shows a lot in the book. I originally had different thought what the book would have inside. I wasn't expecting that much science and actual proof behind the things that presenters need to know. So the surprise was positive and made the subject more interesting.

The idea in the book is to explain and benefit from the behavioral psychology. Maybe it was because I had read quite a lot about behavioral psychology in the past years, that the psychology parts as such weren't that new to me. Some of the ideas how to use those in presentations where the ones that brought me the value.

Book is well structured. It was fun to read. It worked especially well for bus or train trips which I use when I visit our offices in Helsinki central. Like the title tells it has 100 of things that every presenter needs to know. Those things are short and backed up with a proper research. I have to admit that book would have been at least good enough with 91 or 93 things, but maybe 100 is just much more effective. Few of the things were there just to fill the hundred.

I highly recommend this book to everyone who wants to understand people's behavior in presentation situations. If you are presenter, you facilitate meetings or meet people for sales, this is a good book for you. It also reminds about many important psychological studies from the past decades. It's a good book and quite easy and enjoyable to read.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Work Needs to be Fun - Happy people are more Effective

We spend every week around half of our time awake at work or travelling to work. Already from that perspective work needs to be something you are happy on doing. At least in my thinking being happy every day is something I wish from life.

That's still not all. There's research backing up the facts that happier people are more productive at work. Study from University of Warwick showed that happy people are 12 percent more productive than others.  That's of course just one study, but there's more data for similar results. In Gallup's State of the Global Workplace study (over 200 000 respondents) they found that companies which had engaged employees had significantly higher productivity, profitability, and customer ratings.

Even though I believe we need lot of other studies on the subject to be really sure about how the causation goes, there is definitely something in happiness at work place. Happiness at work place also might have a positive effect on company image and that way make it easier to recruit new talented people. On top of the previous one's there's also evidence that happiness has a strong effect on intrinsic motivation. And intrinsic motivation affects productivity.

My purpose wasn't in going to the academic discussion about what is proven and what is not. From personal experience, from my own workplaces and places I've seen as a consultant, this correlation is true. The happier people are, the better results the company will get.

In the State of the Global Workplace study, the engagement level in companies was surprisingly low. Overall in the world in average only 13% of the people were engaged to their jobs and 24% were actively disengaged. That's quite huge. Almost two times more people are disengaged than engaged.

In my interests there's of course the numbers of Finland. Here the numbers where 11% engaged and 14% disengaged. We were almost the worst in Western Europe, only France and Netherlands behind us. Maybe it tells a bit about our overall nature of being unhappy about almost everything, but still it's really worrying and we should do something about it.

I unfortunately don't have a list of "5 things that will improve your work place happiness" in my mind. There are lot of good articles about the subject existing and I recommend to read some of those to get the ideas. What I think is important is first to approve the fact that this actually matters. Happiness and engagement are important in productivity of the company. I believe these are not something that HR can do (at least not most of it), but this is something that operational leaders and other key people in organizations need to take under their radar.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Estimates or #noestimates

Everyone working is Software industry have been involved in estimates in a way or another. Most of the people have known for ages that the one thing that's sure for estimates is that those are wrong. More complex the software or organization creating the software, more difficult it has been to estimate how long creating software takes.

There's been buzzing around for some time the #noestimates movement. The basics of it, as I understand, is that software teams should get rid of making estimates, since those do more harm than good. But I think there goes so much discussion under #noestimates, that I'm not fully sure what all it contains.

I've seen estimates to do lot of harm in many organizations. Estimates have caused poor quality, unhappy people and lot of unnecessary waste on creating those and reacting to those. But then on the other hand, I couldn't see organizations to live without any estimates on software.

Value of estimating versus the time used to it

Value of the estimates versus the time used on creating the estimates is one of the key questions on estimating. Too often estimating takes lot of time. People use hours or easily even days to figure out how much time creating some software takes.

I guess it's not valuable to discuss too much about what's wrong with estimating. People are known to be terrible at estimating. One excellent source to understand more is Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow which introduces at least WYSIATI, anchoring effect and lots of other reasons we can't estimate. So I'm not going to use more time on arguing about the subject, but use is as a given fact that people are bad at estimating.

So what is the reason estimates still exist. Why estimates are still done, even though those are always thought to be wrong. I believe estimating goes to the same category as planning. As Eisenhower said: "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything", there's something similar with estimates. Estimates as such are not accurate, but the journey is valuable and some figures are always needed.

Sometimes the time spent doing the estimates doesn't match the value that estimates can give. Estimates should be used as a tools for decision making. Most often the decision is that should something be tried to do or not. The decision should be about the start, not about the completion. That's what Agile and iterative thinking should help on, there should come multiple decision making points and clarifications about the completion when knowledge increases during the development.

Companies can't live without estimates

Liked it or not, companies can't live without estimates. Most of the companies have limited resources in developing software (and everything else too). Those few who currently seem to have unlimited resources, still need to serve their customers quite often to keep their positions.

In real life, there are customer commitments and internal commitments that need to be handled somehow. Most of these are based on estimates, things that are most probably not accurate. Still those don't change the fact that sometimes these commitments need to be given. Think about yourself, would you be willing to purchase a house building project, if your contractor would say that we don't really know how much it will cost, when it will be ready and what it will contain. Of course you want to get an estimate, or even a fixed price with fixed timeline and features.

Many companies actually are in estimating business. They estimate the costs of development, they estimate their sales, they estimate the timelines and then take known risk with price and profit margin. This is how most of businesses still work. The luxury of making fixed profit is with fixed hour rate businesses. So basically some of consultants, lawyers and couple of others. There the risk is in not getting clients and not in making bad estimates.

Other than actual businesses relying on estimates, many companies have internal dependencies to SW development estimates. Product marketing for example, can't wait for product to be finished before marketing activities can start. They might need easily few months head start to get all the activities ready when product would be ready to ship. There easily are tens of these dependencies inside companies to the software team estimates: sales , marketing, documentation, hardware creation, operations, training, partners and so many others.

Software estimates, as much as software teams hate those, and as much those are wrong are mandatory part of all businesses. Those of you who still hesitate, think about Lean value stream map. For customer, software is just a small part of product. Even a plain software product. I can't even invent a software that wouldn't need other activities to go parallel to software creation to shorten the full cycle.

What's the solution then

Estimates are problematic. Sometimes estimates cause waste, sometimes lack of estimates cause waste. When sales uses SW development estimates as promises, those can create business, but at the same time those might cause quality issues, stress and unhappy people. So what could be done to estimating, when to do estimates and how.

I can reveal already now, that I'm not a believer of black or white solutions, so I don't think there is a one solution for all. But here's couple of thoughts how situation with estimating could be improved.

Estimated targets and predictions

One possible solution is to go towards having targets from early estimates and then predictions separately. At least when estimates are not in the team level, but in the project or feature level, it would be beneficial to have a target and then constantly update the predictions based on progress. Both of these figures should be always visible and that would give to everyone else idea what is the real situation.

In this approach there are many potential problems also. People tend to keep the first estimated targets as the goals and then predictions as a follow-up of the situation. This might give the feeling of failure, when the first estimates will most often be wrong. Still this approach should give everyone the idea, that decisions are made with something that will most probably be wrong.

Software aided and fact based estimating

As discussed, people are terrible at estimating. In a way it's easy to say that computers can't be worse. Saying this, I've never seen a good software that could do this properly. There are quite many variables that needs to be taken in to account to have a proper estimate. Still I believe that it would be possible to create framework that would give rough estimates of projects or features.

This framework should benefit from the historical data that has been stored to many software tools that has been used in the organizations. As an input, the framework would need to get software components that require changes. Then based on throughput times in past and historical progress of projects estimating software could give an idea how long something will take. Even thought these estimates would be quite rough ones, still it would give valuable data for human made estimating. And I believe it still would be closer to the truth than many other estimates. As said, unfortunately I haven't seen system like this yet in place. I would be surprised if there wouldn't be any software projects ongoing in this field. I just haven't bumped in to those yet.

It's ready when it's ready

There are few companies who have been good on preventing the harm what bad estimates have on markets. Apple is the prime example of this. I'm hundred percent sure, that even the guys in apple are bad at estimating. They concentrate on the product quality, so they can't guess when they are ready. They have taken the approach on telling when things are ready when those are ready. In Apple case it works for their benefit, but many other companies need to be able to have some timelines beforehand.

Still the approach it's ready when it's ready has something to learn from. It starts with understanding, that estimating software project length is difficult. When this is realized, then companies should build their activities based on this. Sales shouldn't be selling exact dates too early, handovers and dependencies between different teams should be minimized and people shouldn't be rewarded or punished because the estimates they have given.

Software, even the minimum viable product, won't be ready before it's ready. There isn't any amount of estimating activities before hand which can tell for sure when the ready will be. Activities in companies need to be able to react to each others timelines and not work with fixed timelines.

Summary

Estimating is a key aspect of business in software business (and basically in any other business). There are too many aspects and ideas to improve estimating for a one blog post. Some people believe in time boxed development, others think Minimum Viable Product will help and some believe tools will be the thing that will fix the issues. I don't believe there is one solution to fix it. I see the key thing to be that people start to understand that estimating is really hard and people are bad at it. Most businesses need estimates and can't live without those.

As a feedback to many of Agile and Lean discussion ongoing in different forums, I have to say that too many people forget the business behind software. It's so easy to talk about no estimates thinking, Agile practices or Lean values without understanding the effects of it to the businesses. Software is a key part of many businesses, but it won't make money without the other activities in the companies.

Everyone involved in the estimating processes should acknowledge what is the decision estimates are used for. Minimum Viable Estimate could be a good guidance for everyone. What is the minimum level of estimate we need to know in order to make the decision in hand. And as reminder to everyone, estimates don't get better with estimating, those get better with implementing.


Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: End This Depression Now! by Paul Krugman

Wow, wow, wow. That was the feeling I got from reading the book. Nobel Prize winner from Economics Paul Krugman, gives in the book his view what should be done to End This Depression Now! His view is quite contradictory to the politics that have been ongoing. He rates himself to be New Keynesian and he brings many views from old Keynesian macroeconomics.

First of all, as the best influencers, he knows his stuff well and has the ability to explain those entertainingly and easily. Book about macroeconomics and recession doesn't sound like the most interesting topic, but I wasn't bored even once with this book. He uses examples well and still backs up his stories with hard cold facts.

I don't even think that I would be capable of arguing against any of the ideas he presents in the book. His main idea is that markets do not work perfectly and increasing government spending would help economy (at least US) out from depression.  He brings lot of historical and scientific proof that solution could be so simple.

Other than recession, book is an excellent source to get more understanding about macroeconomics. He is such a good to explain things, that I at least had couple of aha! moments reading the book. It increased my understanding of macroeconomics.

Book is concentrates to US, but is has few chapters to Europe also. I admit being quite supportive for our common currency Euro, but Krugman was able to explain what has been so risky on it. Also he explains why Euro has been one of the main reasons for the recession in Europe and also in Finland where I live. Still he doesn't recommend of getting rid of Euro, but believes that bit higher inflation and few different moves from European Central Bank should do differently to get us out from recession.

I'm so glad I read this book. Few previous books I've read have been good, but this was an eye-opener. These are the feeling you get with best books. You feel that your thinking has changed after reading it. I highly recommend the book to everyone. It's essential book about essential subject.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Peer training inside organizations can be very effective

In one organization I was working with, there was a desire to improve overall coding skills. The guys had used some external training sessions, but as most often those were in such a general level, that those didn't give much value to the environment they were working in. We started to think about solutions for the problem.

Team had couple of people who were thought to be gurus, who could easily train the others, but as always, the gurus were also the busiest guys in the organization. Creating a proper training takes lot of time and effort. Anyone who have ever created tailored training sessions, know that it takes at least 5-10 times more time to create the training than keeping it. If the training is for 2 hours, you easily need 10 hours of work on creating it.

So the answer didn't lay on the gurus. We also did have a look for external tailored training, but there wasn't much of a budget prepared for this. And also, the external trainers are never as effective as internal ones. So we decided to try peer training. We decided that everyone in the team needs to keep one session to everyone. At that point, we came up with an idea of taking few valued books of the subject and divided chapters from the book to be the subject areas people had to make their training sessions.

In addition there was created a good template for the training. Template made people to explain the basic theory from the book and then it was made mandatory to bring examples from their own production code as a reference learning for the training.

Exercise was successful. Of course people were hesitant in the beginning, but the feedback after the sessions was good. One of the best ways to learn is to teach. When you have to teach others, you have to know the subject much better than you will ever learn from any training sessions.

This example was from actual coding, but in can easily be taken in to use in different professions. I believe the ability to take learning from a valued book and consider and show the examples from organizations daily life is really beneficial. Experienced external trainers are excellent in keeping the atmosphere and proofing points, but they rarely know enough about the daily life to actually be able to make a change to stick.

I have experience in doing tailored training sessions. I've kept close to 50 sessions during change projects inside companies. Even though I normally know quite much about the companies, the challenges people have and the practicalities, still I've seen that my teachings are much more effective when there is internal experts backing me up.

I highly recommend this practice to all teams. I can guarantee it works. It might work differently than you think, but it will definitely make people to learn and find ways to improve.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Agile State of Mind has been lost in the journey towards Agile

First statement in Agile manifesto is “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. When people talk about Agile SW development, much of the talk is about processes and tools. If they are not talking about Scrum or Kanban, then it’s about code reviews or Test Driven Development. Too often the basis for all of this is forgotten.

I think there has been a clear vision of all of this. Back in the years that this movement started, Agile Manifesto was written with careful thinking. Somehow the message got lost in the way. Currently there are so many different methodologies and processes, that have been introduced under the Agile umbrella, that what really is Agile is unclear.

In team sports, there’s always ongoing trends on playing tactics. In football, at the time Barcelona and Spain was dominating, many teams wanted to play like them. What often went wrong was that teams and especially the players didn’t seem to understand the ideology behind the tactics well enough. They were just mimicking the ways others play, but didn’t really understood the reasoning of why to play like that. This lead to the problem, that in a second that there came a problem which didn’t have ready made solution, players didn’t know how to act. This was all because they didn’t understand the reasoning why they had done some of the things in the field like they had.

I believe this same is happening with Agile. People are happy and productive when everything is going like the books have told. At the moment there comes something unexpected, people don’t understand the logic of making choices. Making choices in SW development is never easy. For example in Backlog creation, there needs to be done many guesses and estimates on items when prioritising it. Creating user story items or what ever we call them, is never exact science and always needs judgement from the person in charge.

Focus in many organizations should go towards how to successfully create SW products with Agile State of Mind. That’s at the end what SW development is all about, creating SW for customers. Being Agile in SW development means, that focus should be on creating more value to the customer with improved ways of working. Not just to improve the ways of working.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Implementing Beyond Budgeting by Bjarte Bogsnes

Budgeting has been a subject I've wondered for a long time. I do understand how budgeting works, but I've never really understood why it is there. Implementing Beyond Budgeting by Bjarte Bogsnes didn't explain to me why budgeting should be done, but it told, why it shouldn't be done.

This is essential book for any modern organization. Traditional budgeting will slowly fade away and there will come new ways to lead companies and handle costs. Bjarte says that he might be too hard on some aspects of traditional budgeting and make some things too black and white. I didn't really feel like so. I believe budgets make so much harm in organizations, that Bjarte could have been even more strict on the effects of those.

This book isn't a how to do Beyond Budgeting guide, but a story about the underlying principles and two journeys towards the ideology. Stories and ideas will give a good guidance how to start implementation, but there is definitely lot of thinking needed.

What I love in the book is that tells realistically about the change. Implementing change needs lots of discussions, persuasion and time. Creating a new process or guidelines doesn't really change anything. The mindset behind actions needs to change. Bjarte tells about two organizations that have been on this journey. He admits that other journey was still ongoing as the book was written. The change started many years before, but it was still continuing.

I highly recommend this book to everyone interested on improving the companies they are working at. This topic needs much more attention. There are some valid reasons behind budgets, but most of the reasons are just barriers for creating value to customers or constrains making people unhappy at work or pure waste. Changing traditional budgeting is important topic and this book was a good peek to the topic.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Life as a Consultant - Hard part of letting the process to live the life on it's own

In the past years I've worked ans still work as Product Development Improvement Consultant. I've worked with interesting companies in past years. I've been given the privilege to work with them on finding better ways to organize teams and roles, plan the work better or improve the efficiency of daily work in product development or product delivery.

The one thing I hate is the moment of letting the process to live the life on it's own. As a consultant, there always comes the time to let go. In some cases, companies have let me be there to ensure that process actually gets up to speed as planned, but in some companies they've wanted to take the ownership right after the training's or pilot (or whatever the implementation method has been). In any case there always comes the time, that process or practice needs to be taken in-house and I must leave. That is the difficult time for me.

I admit, that I'm sort of a perfectionist. When I have a vision of how something should go, I do work hard to achieve the vision. As a consultant it's in one way easy to persuade people. It's easier to bring new ideas from outside than inside, but it's then much harder to actually get the people to accept and adopt the new ideas from an outsider than from insider. As an outsider, you need to sell the ideas to everyone and be always willing to discuss and adjust the idea to match the reality that people inside the company work with.

When you've done a long journey on persuading, discussing and inventing the new ways of working, there comes the time you need to let go. I almost feel like a parent at that point. You leave your child to walk on it's own. The benefit of being a parent, rather than a consultant, is that with your kids, they keep in touch and you see how your parenting went. As a consultant sometimes you don't see. In good cases you keep in touch and even come back to improve the things even further. But in some cases you don't work with them again, and you don't even hear how it actually went.

I think this problem isn't that unique. There's many people who work on short term contracts with specific topics. It would be nice to hear am I the only one with this kind of pain of abandonment. I don't really lose my sleep over this, but I admit I think about previous project quite often. Did it go well, are people happy, are the planned benefits happening. I'm wondering am I just strange or does other have these feelings too? This question is the reason I sometimes think, that maybe I would be better working in product development companies directly, rather than a consultant. I currently love my job, but I hate these goodbyes.


Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Hiring new manager is not only solution when there is too many things to manage

In past years I've had the luxury to work with few companies growing from being small to becoming middle sized. It's been great to learn from them and also give something back to them.

One thing that have happened in all of these companies, is that there becomes too many things for certain person to control or manage. That's natural, when companies grow there comes more and more business or product related questions someone needs to solve.

The problematic question is that how to cope with that situation. Often the first solution that comes in mind is to hire a new person to handle the increased workload. Too often this is also the only solution companies know off and decide on hiring a person to handle that workload.

Recruiting in many ways is the most important factor affecting long term success of companies. Companies tend to hire too fast, incompetent people and to wrong roles. For some reason universally it seems to be easier to get the permission to hire more managers or other supporting persons than actually the people who do the value work. In the simplest possible setup, companies only need to have product development guys and sales. Everything else can be questioned.

There are other solutions to increased workload. The first solution to think, should always be, are all of the increased workload really valuable work. Could some of the work just be dropped as a waste. Every company has lot of waste work, meaning things that never have any affect to the end product or to the value customer gets or efficiency overall. Everyone knows in their heart, that they've done some waste work sometimes. Most will do some waste work every week.

Second solution for increased workload is sharing the responsibility. When one can't handle all the things they should, they should first think, how to make sure that all of the necessary things could happen without adding a new person to the group. With proper planning existing people can most often handle all of the necessary things in time. Sharing the responsibilities and giving a good direction most often helps. Most people are willing to take the extra responsibility when given a possibility.

I've never faced a company that would have too few middle management. I count Product Management, Marketing, HR and these kind functions to middle management. Few companies I've seen could have benefited from having some people working for internal tools and processes, but never from having more managers to manage business.

Of course companies need to hire new people when they are growing. Once in a while there is a true need for person to the middle layer. Companies just need to be really careful on hiring them. People in middle layer will come busy and can keep themselves busy. There is always more work than can be done. Key is to know when that work is actually valuable to the company and needs a new hire and when not.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander

Out of curiosity I wanted to read Eben Alexander's Proof of Heaven. It's a neurosurgeon's story of his Near Death Experience. It does make a different story when NDE happens to someone who works with brains daily and doesn't really believe in God.

Religion as such has gone out fashion. It's more trendy to not to believe in any higher forces. Also it's much easier to explain that God doesn't exist, than try to believe that it does. No one knows for sure to way or another, so I'll leave the subject out of the review totally. I'll just concentrate to the book itself.

Subject interested me a lot. I was excited to hear the story, what happened and how the situation actually happened. After all it was a neurosurgeon who faced the situation, so I was expecting a quite detailed and well organized package.

I have to say I was disappointed. Book wasn't well written and it was even hard to follow sometimes. It would have used a proper editor to structure the book better. Book jumped between real life and the life Eben Alexander was facing too much. I don't know what was the logic behind the books structure, but I at least didn't like it.

I did get interested about NDE's as such. Without going too much into why the NDE's happens, it is interesting to hear and understand what goes in minds of those who are dying. We all are going to die and most probably we will face something similar on that moment.

I don't really recommend the book. It is an interesting book, but I would have liked bit different approach to the storytelling. I'm still glad I read the book. I want to keep my mind open and this was one subject I hadn't touched before. I might even read another NDE book some day.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Management 3.0 by Jurgen Appelo

Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders by Jurgen Appelo was one of the books that I've planned to read for a long time. The positive thing about reading it now and not earlier, is that I was much more ready to understand the book than I was few years ago.

Management 3.0 is an excellent book. Even though the name might promise a one more management model to learn, Jurgen Appelo tells that there isn't a model that would suit all. To be more precise, Jurgen tells that all models have their flaws. He does say that models are important, but we need to remember that all companies, products, people and environment are different in every case.

Jurgen does give his view on what is important in Management in the future. His model has six major themes, which start from energizing people and go all the way to improve everything. He goes all his themes through with very extensive walk-through of underlying knowledge on each of the areas. He explains things thoroughly, but still interestingly.

I really liked the book. It was excellent reading and widened my view of the importance of people in companies. It does discuss about many of the same issues that other Agile books, but it does add lot of new ideas to the discussion.

I recommend this book to managers in product development companies and others who are interested on how the whole companies should be organized. It's a great book and I promise you won't be disappointed.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: The Fifth Discipline

This time I had in my reading list one of the business literature classics The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter Senge. It's a book that introduces systems thinking as we know it know.

Book is well written, but even more importantly the contents of it are really valuable. I had read about systems thinking before and I had been given so many recommendations about this book, that I had high hopes for the book. Luckily it matched my expectations.

The idea of the book is that organizations should become learning organizations to stay in business and have a good future. The book introduced a fresh way of seeing organizations as whole systems. It gives lot of value to personal development and human values ensuring that organizations learn to improve themselves in the long run.

Book introduces five disciplines of learning organization. Also it introduces eleven learning disabilities that prevents learning organizations to form. It has a lot good examples and it is easy to learn with this book.

I highly recommend this book to everyone working in organizations, small or big ones. So this would be a good book for almost anyone. It's a bit longish with over 400 pages. That's a pity, since it might scare few potential readers away from it.

It's great and important book. Many people have read it, but still only few organizations live to the values of the book. Learning needs understanding. Hopefully many more will read the book, understand the teachings and share the knowledge.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Agile Software Requirements

I did read this book a while ago, but I somehow had forgotten to review it. I recently took it from my bookshelf to check few things and decided to write a review about it.

First of all, I think the book title sucks. Dean Leffingwell's book is named Agile Software Requirements, but it is all about the Enterprise Agile model called Scaled Agile Framework (a.k.a. SAFe). I don't understand why that couldn't have been the title of the book also.

I have hands on experience about SAFe model, when it was invented (at least partly) at Nokia. I was heavily involved in taking it in to use in Multimedia area. I don't want to talk too much about SAFe model this time, I try to concentrate more on the book side. I have to say I'm not a huge fan of the SAFe model, but it does make many good points and definitely adds value to certain kind of organizations.

The book as such was a disappointment. It does have some good insights in many of the different chapters, but it is way too long. Everything about the book could have been said in around 200 pages. There is lot of repeating the same basic things in many different chapters.

Maybe it's just me getting bored, but I'm not sure if all Agile books need to repeat the how Scrum works and all the other basic things. I guess we could get over that part on the future books. I do realize those are easy to skip, but I don't easily skip chapters, because authors have wanted those to be there.

What I liked about the book was that it shows that software development affects to so many different parts of organization. There needs to be well planned mechanism to have proper amount of guidance to write the actual code.

For those who have no idea how to scale Agile software development to larger scale organizations, this might be a good book to read. It gives one view how scaling can be done, but it is too strict for my taste. I don't believe there to be one size fits all solution. I think I've heard Leffingwell to say the same thing, but the book forgets to tell about the other possibilities.

I'm not sure if I would actually recommend the book to anyone. Scaled Agile Framework is definitely worth of checking at, but you can get almost the same level understanding from the SAFe webpage. It didn't raise to be any of my favorite Agile books.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Be Iron Fit by Don Fink

For a long time I read triathlon training book to get some motivation to my training. The book I selected was Be Iron Fit, 2nd: Time-Efficient Training Secrets for Ultimate Fitness by Don Fink.

From the start of the book it became obvious, that this wasn't a deep dive to the training science, but more of a practical guide to the training while being busy. It did go through every aspect of triathlon from techniques to nutrition, but it kept all of those in a high level. At least compared to Joe Friel's approach.

At some point I was disappointed and thought that book doesn't have much to give to me. I'm quite good life organizer, so I've always found the time to train. This book heroes the people who have been able to make ironman even with very busy schedules. I do respect everyone who have done ironman, but I don't respect busy people. So book annoyed me quite often.

It still was enjoyable book. It reminded about the basics of triathlon training. It also did give some good time management tips. About actual training for triathlon, it didn't have that much to give. It was more like a long motivational speech, that you can make it if you just want it.

If you want easy book to read as a first triathlon training guide, this a proper book. If you've already familiar with basic training, then I recommend you select a different book to read.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Why "how are you" is so difficult to Finns

I've worked almost ten years with UK and US people. I had heard about and experienced the "how are you" -culture few times, but properly I experienced it the first time when I started working with them and traveled there more. In the first years, I actually answered to the "How are you" question properly even to the cashiers and waitresses. I did tell about long travels, difficulties with time difference or what was actually ongoing on my mind. Then at some point I realized that they don't actually give a shit about how I am, but that's just their way of being polite.

In Finland, when someone asks "How are you", they actually mean it. Most of the times people genuinely want to know is everything OK and is there something new ongoing. World is slowly changing even in Finland,, but we've had the mentality to only talk when there's something to say. So the always coming "how are you" questions are quite strange.

I've learned a lot in my trips about the "how are you" culture, but even nowadays I'm confused in when the question comes from someone you know or even consider a friend. I'm not really sure if they actually want to know how I am or is just their way of saying hi.

In my recent London trip I again noticed myself actually answering to the "how are you" question with a proper answer at least twice. They were people who I hadn't seen for a while, but I considered as a work friends, people who might have actually cared about how I was doing. When I was answering to the question, I did notice from their body language that they were not actually expecting me to answer.

The whole "how are you" thing is just too difficult for Finns. I would encourage anyone working with Finns to skip the "How are you" part, if you don't actually mean it. We will not get offended, because we don't realize that's something one should do. Next time you meet a Finn, just say Hi.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Disease of Being Busy

Increasing interest to movements like Downshifting, Slow Movement and Zen are clear indications, that people are starting to be fed up with their work and living in a busy world. There's too much work, studying, partying or whatever that makes people busy.

I've been lately visiting London and being busy and trying to be highly effective is visible there even in jogging. People run there really fast! I go for a jog there quite often and I'm always the slowest runner on the street. It shouldn't be because of my shape, since I should be in an OK shape with few triathlons done in the past years.

My personal learning from few years ago is that I'm most ineffective when I'm busy. When my calendar is full or I'm trying to tackle it all, that's the point I'm not getting much value done. I do run around doing things, but being busy and being effective are two totally different things. It's easy to be busy, and it's hard to be effective.

Once in a while I notice that I'm lacking time to do all the things I'm planning to. That's the point I get ineffective. I've got better to notice this in myself and I've learned to prioritize. I do have a mission statement written to myself and I like to read that one then, to remind myself about priorities in life and work. After reading those I do go through all my to be done things and always find something to set aside. There are always things you can leave undone and some things you can do later.

It takes courage to say no to someone. To say that I don't believe the thing you are asking from me is more important than the thing I'm working on. Specially when you have a supervisor who is asking. But this one skill, is one of the most important skill you will or will not learn during your career. The most effective people are the ones who can say no and have empty slots in their calendar.

There's also the other side of wanting to be busy. As young kids learn bad habits from older "cool kids", the same way newcomers in organizations learn to admire busyness from their more experienced peers. Being busy is disease in many of the organizations. Being busy is too often thought to be an indication of being important.

Being busy is always a selection. There might be days everyone needs to work in the busy mode, but that should be an exceptional state, not a standard way of working. Being busy is always a selection, always.

The reason why I'm worried about people being busy is that being busy affects to all of us. Busy people are unhappier and unhealthier. Organizations are less effective with busy people. It might sound an overstatement but we all lose money and affect each others happiness by being busy. We ruin our organizations and life environment with being busy. Being busy is a real disease.

I start to sound quite hippy saying all of these, but I can assure that I personal interest behind all of this: I really do hate busy unhappy people.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: All The Devils are Here by McLean and Nocera

For some time I've wanted to understand more about the reasons of 2008 financial crisis. I did know the basics of the housing bubble, but not much more. That's the reason I got All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera.

I was enthused to read the book. I had positive thoughts about the book and I really tried to like it. But I didn't. Book did explain why the crisis happened and introduced all the players who had played major role creating the housing bubble. The problem for me was, that the authors focused to people and companies so much that the actual problem was hidden behind all the blaming.

Authors Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera are both journalists and full time writers. This unfortunately shows in a bad way. The book would have worked in 40 separate articles, but it didn't work as long book. The full story wasn't well taken in to account with the separate twists to it.

I didn't like the blaming culture there was in the book. Most of the bankers and people mentioned in the book must have been money graving idiots, who made millions and millions with screwing others, but I don't still think blaming them gets us anywhere. This book wasn't only about blaming, it did discuss about the system a bit, but it focused too much on the individuals who had been creating the system.

I believe blaming culture actually creates the basis for the macho culture to exist. Then the macho culture creates these idiots who play the systems and create their own rules. So in a way I believe these kind of books doesn't solve the problem, but actually are part of the system that cause them.

Maybe it was my fault, that I didn't understand the book from the title. It really talks about the devils, not about global systems that created the devils. Still the book I would like to read, would search to understand the system. This wasn't the book I was hoping for.

I do believe there are people who like these kind of books. They are the people who like blaming others, I don't. I don't recommend this book to anyone. I didn't like it and I found it quite boring to read.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: The New Jim Crow

Once in a while I try to find books from subjects I don't know about. This time I got my hands to very important book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. It's a book which reveals that racial discrimination still exists in US and it is almost comparable to the ages of slavery.

Book goes through the history of racism from early days of US to the latest moments with Barack Obama being the president. Book tells the story of Drug War and how it is actually a war against black people and not that much about drugs.

Michelle Alexander is associate professor of law in Ohio and has been involved in many civil rights campaigns. She definitely has a good view on current justice system and knows what she is talking about.

I don't live in US, so I have an outside view to the country. It was shocking to read many fact about US. The amount of prisoners in US prisons is huge and the vast majority of those are black males. Also I was surprised to find out that prisoners can't vote and how huge sentences you can get from minor drug possessions. As an example in Finland (where I live) we have 10-times less people in prisons when equalized to the amount of people overall. Also in Finland everyone has the right to vote, even prisoners.

As this is a review of the book, I don't want to dig too much into my own views about the subject. What is certain is that this book will definitely raise questions and thoughts. The subject isn't that close to me, I'm a white person living outside US, but still I found it important and interesting. It feels that I'm telling about subject, that I shouldn't be criticizing or supporting, since I'm not involved. I do want to support human rights everywhere, so I encourage people to read the book.

Book was well written and had lot of quotations and supporting material included. Even so, that it became bit cumbersome to read. That's my critic for the book. With better editing, I believe book could have been made easier to read and understand. The current editing will turn down some of the readers who should read this book.

Hopefully the issue behind the book will be raised to the attention it needs soon. Also I hope people will read this book and talk about these issues. Racial discrimination is far from over. It needs attention. This book will help to understand how it is happening.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality

This time I got my hands on the book The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality. I have to admit that I wasn't really excited to read the book. Demings thoughts have been coming up from so many different directions, that I wanted to give him a shot. I'm glad I did, his thoughts were marvelous.

This book isn't really a book and neither it is written by Deming. This book is a collection of Demings writings, personal notes and speeches from throughout his career. It goes through all the main thought Deming was talking about in his books and his teachings. It tells those in a bit shorter format, but I think it was enough for me.

The book goes quite far back to 1950's and 1960's in telling what has been the problems with companies back then. Strangely the problems haven't really changed that much from those years. Of course many aspects have changed, but the underlying problems are the same. Also many of the solution proposals hopefully suit to current organizations as well.

I mark to books pages I will come back later for reference or future investigation. From the books I've read this might have had most markings done by me. There were quite a few good thoughts and sentences that will come handy in the future.

I have to admit that Demings thought were not totally strange to me. I've read those from multiple sources beforehand, but this was the first time I read his own words. That might have helped me a bit on understanding this book. It's not difficult book to read, but it needs some thinking to understand.

It was an excellent book and I enjoyed it. Even though it's old, thoughts are valid and valuable. This is a book which many if not all the the people who care about their organizations improvement should read.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Separate Testing is Waste

Thinking very Lean, testing is waste. Testing takes time and doesn't bring any value to the customer. Most of the it only provides information, that product works as expected. Only time testing brings value to the customer is when errors are found.

Testing is seen as an important activity. There is lot of focus on improving testing and the coverage of testing. More and more people are working testing products and creating test cases. These activities, do improve the product quality a bit, but it isn't really a way forward.

Testing is a wide subject, and I'm talking especially on the cases were testing and product creation are seen as separate activities. There might even be separate test teams and separate product teams. Product teams do test to some extend, but the main responsibilities are given to test team. This is the big problem of testing. Separate testing should only be about knowing the risk level of releasing, not about increasing the product quality.

The aim should be to decrease the amount of testing and increasing the the product quality during the product creation. In the long run, the thing that matters is the product creation quality, not testing quality. Of course some of the product creation quality comes from testing, but this is not separate testing, but assuring the quality while creating something.

I don't believe any organization can get rid of testing. Some amount of testing is always necessary to know the risk level of releasing. Amount of testing needed should be analyzed thinking the costs and effects of fault in product release. In some businesses fault could mean bankrupt, in others, few annoyed customers. This analysis should tell the amount and scope of needed separate testing.

Testing and product creation should work together to ensure quality of the product. Organizations need to learn to build good quality products from the start. Every error should be analyzed and corrective actions should be made. Unfortunately this is utopia in most of the companies. Errors found in testing are seen as normal way to ensure quality. In the long run this will start hurting organizations and cause more and more errors.

The only way forward, is for management to start taking errors seriously. Especially having an eye on why the errors have been introduced in the first place, not why the errors were not caught in testing. Blame is often put to testing, even though it's an activity that shouldn't be done separately at all.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: The Story of Human Body by Daniel Lieberman

The Story of Human Body: Evolution, Heath and Disease by Daniel Lieberman was waiting for me in my bookshelf for a month. I really looked forward to this book. So much that I had to hurry with previous books, to get this started. It turned out to be an excellent book, just different way that I had imagined.

Daniel Lieberman is professor of biological sciences and the chair of department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. This gives him the credibility that is needed to write about evolution, which has many aspects that have to be guessed. Basically only bones, some tools and DNA we have left from old generations to study the evolution, but still there needs to be much speculation about behavior and other body parts to tell the full story. I believe in these days, Daniel Lieberman is the man who can make the best guesses.

I have to admit, that I looked forward to this book from few articles and videos from Daniel Lieberman about barefoot running. I guess I'm not the only one, since that's the part that made him famous to non-biologists. This book is so much more than barefoot running. From 350 pages, there's about 10 pages about barefoot running. When I realized that, I felt bit disappointed, but the book turned out to be full gold. It will definitely be one of those books that made me understand the world and myself much better in the future.

The book goes through the whole human evolution starting from the time bit earlier than we divided from the apes. It goes through all the sides of the story. It really digs deep on what happened and why it happened. Then the book walks from times before homo sapiens through hunter gatherers to farming and also to the cultural evolution what we are facing currently. It is a story all of us should know.

Then at final part of the book, it goes through why we are fat, why we are sick and why we die on cancer and heart diseases. It opened my eyes to really understand what we should be doing to keep healthy. I feel currently that this book changed my life forever, but of course I can't be sure.

Unfortunately book isn't easy to digest reading. It requires concentration and interest towards the topic. It is longish book, but it is full of excellent and important information. I recommend it to everyone. With some of the thoughts in this book, we could improve so many lifes. I am realistic and know that too few will ever read this. I'm so happy that I did.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Communication is really important and really hard

Often putting information available or sending an email is the thing people think to be enough communication in organizations. For me, communication is never about making information available, but about getting people to understand the message. Too often communication is seen to be broadcasting information to all and not caring if anyone is receiving the message or not. I see this as both inefficient and unnecessary communication.

People receive messages differently so there needs to be many different ways the message can be received. This is the part that it is so easy to underestimate. It is easy to get communication out of the way by publishing information to be available. I've never seen this to really work. Only the cases where ones work continuation is in question, as larger layoffs, publishing information might be enough. For any other communication, there are always too many distractions to lose the message to all the other noise.

It's not only about the noise, that prevents communication going through. People also receive the messages differently. Some people need to see the big picture in order to understand the message, others need to get the details for understanding. For some people it is important to know the reasoning behind something, for others goal might be the most important thing. This needs to be kept in mind when communication is planned.

Communication is one of the hardest topics in organizations. The value of the communication is hard to measure, but fails in communication are easy to point out. Often improving efficiency in communication, could increase many things in the organization. Better communication would need to be done so that it won't take much time out from people other tasks and still makes sure people receive the message.

The rule, using more time in the planning, will save time at the end, suits communication really well. The better person or small team plans communication and uses time to prepare it, the more time will be saved from everybody else. The bigger the organization, the larger the savings.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris

I remember running into the book The 4-Hour Workweek few years ago. First I was really excited and followed Tim Ferriss's blog for some time. Then I started to hate the exaggerating style Tim Ferriss has. I started to hate it so much, I decided never to read this book, but when friend of mine recommend the book,
I decided to give it go.

Book The 4-Hour Workweek is as controversial as Tim Ferriss is. On the other hand he has many brilliant ideas and tips, but then he does present everything as black or white. I try to be open minded to all kind of people, but it is hardest for me with people who only see things as black or white. Things are never that simple as for example Tim Ferriss presents in his book. Neither those are so complex as many believes.

Tim Ferriss is really smart guy. He has achieved a lot and seems to enjoy his life. It's hard to say if he really is so happy as he says he is. In a book like his, when author states close to hundred times how good life and everything is, I start to question, if the case is really so. As an example, based on the books I've read about happiness is, that those who have absolute freedom are not really happy at all. People need to have rules and restriction in order to enjoy life.

About half of the book was something I really enjoyed reading. There wasn't many new things, but some really good ideas. The rest was just total waste. I think with proper editing this version I read could have been cut to 150 pages. Now it was 350.

I don't recommend this book to anyone. It has many good things in it, but the other thoughts and advice's where something I wouldn't want people to think I agree to. So the bad overrides all the good on it. I do appreciate Tim Ferriss and what he is doing, I just don't agree on many things he is saying.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: The Happiness Hypothesis

First book for this year was The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. It was awesome book to start with. Basic idea of the book is to compare ancient wisdom to the knowledge of today's psychology. But it is much more, it's a journey to the roots of happiness. What makes people happy and why.

Book starts with basics of mind. It goes through the theories and thoughts about what mind is and how it is supposed to work. Book introduces the elephant and the rider metaphor, where conscious mind is the rider and the elephant is the automatic processes. This works as a good simplification on many of the other things that come up in the book.

Book goes through very comprehensively theories about happiness. Why complete freedom actually isn't a way to happiness and how money could buy happiness. It introduces so many important insights about happiness, that it wouldn't make sense to start going those all through here.

Book talks quite much also about divinity and gods. It goes through religions from many different perspectives. Religions are known to be source of happiness, but the as the book states believing to god isn't all there is. Author Jonathan Haidt is atheist, so the he talks critically about religions, but still explains how and why people need religions.

Book is only around 250 pages, but is still covers so many things. It talks about work life, history, ancient religions, raising kids, philosophy, medicine and so many other things. It is packed in a really good form. It is easy to read, but still I felt there was enough background offered on the facts that were presented.

This goes in my list as the books that should be made mandatory on schools. I didn't agree on all the opinions in the book, but that's not the point. It raises so many thoughts and will definitely make my life better in the future. I highly recommend this book to everyone.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Top 5 Books I read Year 2013

As I've been blogging so much about books lately, I thought it would be valuable to share the best books I read 2013. From these books only one was published this year, so it's not a review of best books of 2013, but what I read year 2013. All of these are books I'm really happy I read. All of those changed my world and view of the world. Here the list and few words why I think those were so important. I highly recommend all of those.

1. Thinking in Systems: A Primer

I've been familiar to systems thinking before the book, but this was the book that fully opened my eyes. This book works bit like the famous "red pill vs blue pill" scene from Matrix which promises to show the world as it is. Systems thinking should become a mandatory subject to school, it's so important.

2. The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

I'm mainly sad that I didn't read this book earlier. This is a book everyone in SW industry should try to understand. It's not easy to read and it's even harder to understand. It gave me so many new ideas how to improve SW development organizations. I'm sure it had good thoughts for everyone else too.

3. Green Illusions

Green Illusions opens eyes about the state of the world currently. There are many controversial thoughts in the book and I didn't believe everything as such, but that doesn't matter. I believed the main point, world has a consumption problem. To fix consumption problem we should put much more focus to different things that
we are currently doing. Today's economy is based on consumption and supporting cheap energy. How should we change this? Read the book and think yourself.

4. Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

This book I enjoyed the most in the whole year. It's the first book over 400 pages that I wouldn't have liked to finish. It is packed with so much information about current technology and future predictions, that I bet all the tech freaks will love the book. The author is very familiar how hard it is to try to guess the future, but him if anyone in the world have information and sources to make good guesses. If there would be more books like this existing, I would read many of those in a row.

5. To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

To Sell Is Human was an excellent book. It goes through some of the same topics Daniel Pink has been writing already previously. Dan Pink writes good stories and every book from him is a fun to read. Also the books are filled with really important information. I'm still honest to myself, this book got to the list because Daniel Pink is my favorite author. I've read almost everything he has written and his writing doesn't light me up as they used to. I still own him so much. His books have been the ones that got me back to reading again. I hope this book could do the same for someone else.


Written by +Henri Hämäläinen