This isn’t about the Jeff Kennet addition to our Victorian number plates, but rather our house move over the weekend. Still with a throat infection, we managed to get it all done in daylight and rain on Monday.

As much as I enjoy bagging other companies out for their poor customer service, I enjoy giving kudos to those few who are an exception. Metro Movers is one of those great companies.

Before the move

Moving house is said to be one of the most stressful periods of change you can experience in your life, so I was keen to make it less so in any way that I could. This is where the Metro Movers website gave me my first boost of help. Their FAQ has some great pointers on packing and organising stuff for your move. Many of which I put into practice immediately.

Making this information free to the public, gave me a sense of trust for them. Immediately they appeared to be some type of expert in the field. They realise that moving house isn’t just about moving day and try their best to make the entire experience as stress free as possible.

Loading the truck

Matt and Jess turned up early, in the rain, and immediately set to work. Emma and I haven’t moved like this before so we were exceptionally nervous about things breaking. The blokes exhibited a wonderful balance between fast and careful which put us at ease. Furthermore, they had our entire unit packed up in a little over 2 hours. It was like watching a giant game of tetris albeit a slowish one.

Throughout the entire experience, they both offered advice on how best to organise things and exactly what we could do to help. We couldn’t pack my treasured plasma into the truck (they didn’t have the right box for it - which I forgot to order!) but they did wrap it up carefully and load it into the back of Emma’s car.

Unloading the truck

This went much faster and still with exceptional care. Both Matt and Jess were very careful to not drag mud into our newly cleaned house and helped us to move all the boxes and furniture to exactly where we wanted them. This took a little over an hour with the added difficulty of pelting rain which didn’t seem to bother the guys at all.

Rewarding your employees

Watching these two at work, I suspect that Metro Movers staff are rewarded for exhibiting their organisation’s values. I caught a side conversation which happened whilst loading the plasma into our car. I deduced that our movers would’ve been paid a bonus if nothing was broken during the trip. If it was, they wouldn’t receive their extra $100 odd. This encourage them to take care of people’s belongings - one of the main fears in having someone move your posessions.

This is similar to Zappos paying their new employees $1000 to quit shortly after bringing them on board and training them. In this case, money is used to weed out the people who aren’t interested in delivering exceptional customer service.

I wonder what we could do in our field to motivate our staff to exhibit the values and behaviours? It’s a tricky one because metrics can easily be dodged. For example, if you want to limit the number of bugs in released software, you essentially doom yourself to limiting the number of bugs actually logged/recorded, rather than reducing the actual bug count.

I wonder what other software teams and organisations do to encourage positive behaviours?

On his blog, Scott proposes a new type of credit card account. Essentially a debit card, with an interest free period attached to a savings account. It’s an interesting idea and one which anyone can put into place with a little discipline.

It prompted me to briefly explore our situation. We have a home loan with a bank that forces us to have credit cards. These cards have enormous limits which are a huge risk for us (we can easily tend to overspend!)

What we also have on offer is a 100% offset account. This works by calculating interest on your savings at the same rate as your loan. This interest is then notionally paid off your loan, reducing your monthly repayments. Let’s take this simple example:

• $300,000 loan
• 9% interest rate
• 25 year loan period

In normal circumstances, you would be paying $2517.59 per month on this loan.

If you used your credit card to defer payment of all your bills, and had $5000 sitting in your offset account, your monthly payments would be $2475.63. Saving you $40 a month. Over the 25 year period of the loan, you would save almost $40,000 in interest payments and have your loan paid off a little over a year early.

It sounds like free money. The nice thing is that you don’t have to pay tax on this interest earnt (which is considered income) as you never actually get given it. It is automatically deducted off your loan payments tax free.

In contrast, were you to deposit this money in an interest bearing account at the same rate as your loan, here’s what would happen over 25 years:

• $5000 deposit
• 25 years
• 9% interest
• $47,425 earnt

Not a bad outcome. By saving this money in a compounding savings account, you end up slightly in front over 25 years. Of course, this doesn’t take into account any tax you would need to pay on that amount, nor the fact that is it quite difficult to find savings accounts paying an interest rate the same or higher than what you can borrow at.

For us, we use a little of both tactics. Offsetting our loan payments and using any savings generated to go into an interest earning account. Here’s an example:

Loan:

• $300,000 loan @ 9% interest and 25 year term
• $5000 in loan offset account
• $40 saved each month in loan payments
• $39,188 of interest payments avoided at the end of 25 years

Savings:

• $40 deposit each month into a savings account
• 9% interest rate (for the sake of simplicity)
• $45,089 earnt at the end of 25 years

Even at 7% interest on your deposit, you end up with $32,500 saved.

Whether this is the best use of our money, I’m not sure. I haven’t spent too much thinking about it. But in practical terms for us, it works quite well.

Most of what is published about agile/scrum methods doesn’t talk about this area very much. It tends to be focused mainly on a team dedicated to getting a single product to market. As an internal team, we often don’t have that luxury. We run multiple concurrent projects, some with different members, as well as numerous operational tasks & enhancements.

We manage our work, we looked at having multiple Product Backlogs (basically a prioritised list of work the sponsor would like us to complete). This naturally led to multiple Sprint Backlogs (which contain the work the team has committed to doing in the next 2 weeks). This was going to be very difficult to manage. Particularily when it comes to the team keeping focus on their activities. Multiple projects and backlogs all over the place.

What we really needed was multiple Product Backlogs that each project sponsor could manage, but one pipeline for the team to work off during their 2 week sprint.

Mingle to the rescue!

We’ve been using this tool by Thoughtworks for a few months now, and the more I use it, the more I love it. We’ve pretty much ditched Microsoft Project completely as this tool is powerful and simple enough to do all that and more (albeit very differently).

It was quite easy for us to create a number of “card walls” to filter out the work for each project or operational area. We then use these separate lists when we sit with the sponsor to have them prioritise the work.

From that, the team picks off the top ‘x’ stories and commits to delivering them during the next sprint. Mingle makes this very easy for us to manage.

The tricky part is knowing how much from each project we can commit to. Currently, I communicate the number of hours we should be dedicating to each project each week. Hours are one thing, but I’d like to get to the stage where we track our overall velocity. This way, we can more easily determine how many “points” we can take off the backlog from each project and commit to doing.

We’re not there yet, but should begin getting some metrics in the next few weeks. I’m keen to see how this pans out and whether the idea above will work in practice.

Advice: Don’t buy from DigiDirect.com.au.

A month ago I purchased a new Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-W300 camera from DigiDirect. I did my research and decided that this was the best buy for my budget and gave me all the functionality and quality I would like.

Since then, I have spent the month making numerous phone calls and sending emails to figure out where my camera is. The last time I called, it was sitting on their desk and was about to be shipped off that day. Two weeks later, here I am, still waiting.

In today’s phone call in which it seemed their staff don’t begin work until 10am, I discovered my order was flagged for “security.” Because I used digidirect@carljoseph.com.au as my email address and didn’t have a land line number.

Using companyname@mydomain.com is my standard practice when purchasing from an unknown company. It allows me to track whether an organisation sells my email on to someone else. Similarily, GMail users can do something similar by using the account.name+whatever@gmail.com format.

Even with these concerns, they still took my money and sat on it for a month!

My complaint isn’t only about the time it has taken or that my order was flagged as potentially fraudulent. My complaint is that I have had no communication from DigiDirect at all during this period. Were it not for me continuously bugging them, I wonder how long it would’ve been until they told me there was an issue.

Lesson to be learnt: Even if there is a problem, communicate it. It is far better to know that there are issues with something (even potential issues), than to be left in the dark believing it’s all okay, or worrying that you’ve been had by a crooked company.

Update 5th June 2008: Finally spoke with the MD today. He was somewhat apologetic and I now have a tracking number to show that my digital camera is en route. I find it unfortunate that I needed to escalate this to the company owner/manager in order to get action. Not only is it painful for the customer, it’s an extremely unsustainable business practice.

I’m a tool/model addict. I love them all. Anything which makes my thinking easier is a bonus. I sometimes struggle with forming my thoughts into cohesive structures, so I find models an invaluable additional to my arsenal.

One of the major benefits to an agile development process is the Inspect-Adapt loop. Reflection, or retrospective as it’s usually termed, is an integral part of continually improving what we do. In a Scrum Retrospective, the standard questions to ask are:

1. What did we do well?
2. What could be improved in the next sprint?

I believe these fall short in many ways. These two questions aren’t targetted enough to generate any real actionable outcomes. Instead, I would use the reflection model. We used it today in our Scrum Retrospective and I think the result was quite good for a first shot.

Like all useful models, it is extremely simple…

Spend a few minutes in each quadrant and ask yourself (or your team), what you should do more of, less of, and what you should keep, add and delete. You can work around them one by one or take random suggestions and add them to the appropriate box.

A nice outcome for the visuals amongst us is that you can see right away which areas you haven’t spent enough time on. I find it useful to focus on these for a few extra minutes  little more and force yourself to stretch your thinking.

It is also a way to subtly celebrate the things you’re doing well and come up with practical suggestions for those things which aren’t so great. When reflecting, it is important to phrase your words in actionable terms. “More communication” won’t get you anywhere, but “Update Jane once a week on progress” is much more useful.

The best thing of all about this model is that it is not only useful for work. When it was first presented to me, it was used for personal reflection. What in your life do you want to do more/less/keep/add/delete. You can really use it for anything you need to reflect and improve on. The more specific the topic, the better the results.

I liken packing supermarket bags to playing tetris. You somewhat randomly take the items out of your trolley and place them on the conveyer belt. The checkout chick/person then uses their skillz to scan and pack items nice and quickly into the bags. Packing these bags is definitely an aquired skill. The less experienced tetris players will put things in whatever order they arrive. The better ones will pick and chose appropriately to get the best fit. These are the Master Tetris Players.

I had my first self service check out experience today, and I realise now, that I am not a Master Tetris Player. This new system has its fair share of flaws as others have explained.

The general concept …

• You roll up your trolley,
• scan in an item, and
• put it in the bag.

The bag rests on a scale so the machine can tell if you have placed an item in the bag which you haven’t scanned in. If the item doesn’t have a bar code you can look it up on the list of pictures, it gets weighed calculates the cost for you.

• Hit the “finish” button,
• swipe your card,
• enter your pin, and
• go home.

The problems …

They started when I decided to use my own enviro friendly green bags. Once I placed it on the tray the machine warned me that there was a foreign object in the bag. It obviously weighed more than the usual plastic. To continue it required the assistance of a hovering staff member to wave her RFID card at the machine. This had to be done with every bag I placed on the tray.

I also had trouble packing my own bags. Because there was no conveyer belt on which to prepare your items, I found it insanely difficult to pack the bags nicely. It was like the final levels of tetris where they come flying in too fast. I ended up with items on all sorts of angles and arrived home with squashed bread and a leaking container of antipasto mix.

The additional pressure to scan and pack as fast as the Master Tetris Players is immense and doesn’t help the experience.

I finished my first bag and quickly snatched it off the scales. The machine freaked out because it musn’t have had enough time to weight it properly. After another swipe of the magic RFID card, I was onto my second bag.

Some good points …

Muddling through some more items, I finally got to the fruit and veg. Finding an item on the list of images was pretty easy. This part I was pleased with.

Finally, the paying options were straight forward. They obviously spent a lot of time making sure they could get your money, but not as much on the rest of the experience.

Gaming the system …

Through this debacle, I realised that I could cheat this system quite easily.

1. Don’t scan items and just place them in your bag

Place an item in the bag without scanning it, wait for the machine to complain about foreign items in the bag, look confused, hail the now retired Master Tetris Player, and have them wave their magic card.

I would guess that the more often you did this during your checkout, the more likely they would think you were just incompetent with technology and the more you were likely to get away with. If they catch you in the act, just return to that confused look and you’re home free.

2. Selecting a cheaper item

With fruit and veg, you need to weigh in the items and select the picture on the screen. It wouldn’t take much to select a cheaper per kilo item. If you get caught - “Oops, sorry maam. I thought I hit the picture of the avocado. This thing is so confusing.”

3. Walk out without paying

If you’re really game, it wouldn’t be difficult to do. Hit a few random buttons, get confused, swipe your card in some random slot and walk away. You may need to move your items past a certain area to demagnetise the barcode. As usual though, if you get caught, put on your confused face and pay up.

All in all, I hope these don’t become common practice. I much prefer leaving the professional bag packing to the well practiced Master Tetris Players. It’s not a skill I wish to aquire myself.

At Melbourne Business School, we’ve started using Scrum to manage our software development projects. Over the last few months, we’ve used it very loosely on a project as a trial run. The elements we picked up were the very basics of scrum. I’m nervous to even say that we were “doing scrum”. Even so, the results were so much better than I expected, and we completed our project ahead of schedule.

In the beginning …

The daily stand-up meeting was the first “ceremony” we instigated. It’s quite simple, we meet every morning for 5 - 10 minutes, standing up and we each answer three questions: what did you do yesterday, what will you do today, what obstacles are you facing?

The idea is that people want to get it over with quicker if they’re forced to stand up during a meeting. It really does tend to keep us focused and to the point.

It took a little while for people to warm to the idea initially, but we soon developed a bit of a rhythm. People were keeping to their time limits, mentioned salient points only and our ability to actually get stuff done increased considerably.

Most interestingly to me, was the new opportunities this created for the team. The opportunity to share every day has made it easier for us to offer help to each other when obstacles come about. I wouldn’t hesitate to say that the 10 minutes invested in the stand-up has returned us numerous hours a week of muddling through things as individuals.

Now …

Lately however, things have started to become more like a status meeting. Going through the three questions just because that’s what we so. I realise now that keeping this meaningful and actionable is not a trivial task. It’s even more challenging for us as the team is constantly working on multiple projects. Sometimes what you’re working on really doesn’t effect anyone else in the team.

We may be headed for “Daily Standup Withdrawal.”

Stacia from the Scrum Alliance writes:

Many teams really, truly believe that the purpose of the daily standup is to “just answer the three questions without exceeding fifteen minutes.” Maybe it’s that the questions (what did you do yesterday, what will you do today, what obstacles are you facing) seem so simple. They are not. There is so much underneath the surface of the three little questions. Coach your team to think about these questions and come prepared to the daily standup [...]

In other words, think about the tasks, the accomplishments, how it may impact John’s work or Mary’s next task, and keep in mind who you are working with to complete the task. Go into the daily standup with answers to the three questions that are meaningful, insightful, and proactive.

Later …

Taking on some advice from that article, I intend to spend some time actively coaching and giving more feedback to the team members. I also need to ensure I don’t contract the same disease myself. A bit of team reflection may be in order too.

Disclaimer

To date, I have avoided writing much about my work environment. Having thought about this quite a lot lately, I believe the net effect of writing about such things will be a positive one. So, it now needs to be stated that this clearly is a personal blog. The view and opinions I express here are my own and not those of the people, institutions, or organisations that I may be related with.

I love to be inspired. Especially by great thoughts and ideas. TED does this for me, every time.

We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we’re building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.

- About TED

If you haven’t watched any of these videos, then you really should. I’ve found them to be some of the most inspiring and thought provoking talks. Here’s a few of my favourites:

• Do schools kill creativity? by Sir Ken Robinson. A very humorous and inspired challenge to our notions of education.
• A journey to the centre of your mind by Vilayanur Ramachandran. A fascinating view into the way our minds work when impaired by some very specific mental disabilities.
• My stroke of insight by Jill Bolte Taylor. Jill’s a brain scientist and has had an amazingly unique experience - she was able to analyse her own stroke as it occured.

Take some time out of your day and listen to a few TED talks. You’ll be glad you did it.

When can you expect the unexpected? When your crystal ball is working at full pelt.

I received this email yesterday from a vendor we do some work with:

Subject: ACME Corp. will experience an unexpected power outage tomorrow between 8 am and 12

Dear Client,

We have been notified of an unexpected power outage in between the hours of 8 am and 12 noon, Thursday 15th May, 2008. This means that we will be without power, network and phones.

I’m hoping to get them to visit our site to help us predict any unexpected issues we might have with our own systems.

@ameel’s recent tweet prompted me to drag up some blog posts I used to read on sleeping. I’m a big fan of this activity, but in my many years of practice, I have yet to master the technique.

The article Ameel pointed me to is about catching up on lost sleep. I used to have a tendency of waking up quite early in the morning, looking at my clock and then worrying about not getting enough sleep for the remaining hours before my alarm went off.

This behaviour cost me considerable hours of this precious resource. I would continually watch the clock and cause myself worry about how little time I had left to sleep.

The solution? I changed my behaviour and stopped looking at my clock. Now, when I wake up in the dark hours, I just turn around and treat myself to more sleep. I no longer worry about the time and how much of it I have left.

By doing this, I have trained my body to fall back asleep quickly. So whether I have 2 hours or 30 minutes left before my alarm goes off, I make the best use of it without worry and with some good quality rest.

If you’re interested in reading more about sleep patterns and the like, then Steve Pavlina has written a number of articles on this. It’s a great log of his personal experiments with getting up early and Polyphasic Sleep. I just wish I had the time to spend playing around with this stuff.

(I stopped reading his blog when he began crapping on too much about “intention manifestation”. Something I have written briefly about before.)