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