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I have said for years that transparency is the secret to solving problems and that one really good component of transparency is blogging.
President Barack Obama has said that transparency is what our government needs to expose corruption and to keep politics at bay.
To prove his point, he has started a blog.
But…
Lately, he has been too busy to update his blog, so he’s delegated the tasks.
Hmm… That could work!
I love blogging.
I love talking about my teams and their accomplishments. I love talking about the improvements this company has seen in these last few years. To me, that is what blogs do best—allow us to share successes and failures, so that we may learn from one another.
Unlike many in the blogosphere, I never use my blog for ranting.
Never—until now!
Our blog host (I almost said “of choice”) is Typepad. They were great until late October of last year, when they upgraded their product—and destroyed my way of life!
Their update broke my ability to post using Windows Live Writer, essentially forcing me to use their web interface to update my blog.
Despite my reputation, I do have more to do at the office than just blog. I seldom have time to toy with a kludge web application.
Sound petty? Of course, it does. Maybe I was really just standing on principal. Being a stubborn Southerner, I do that sometimes.
I started this post talking about how businesses can use blogging to learn from each other. I learned much from this experience.
Even the most minor of software changes can wreak havoc on your customers lives—and make them bitter towards you, your product, and your company.
The customer is still always right.
Sometimes we forget.
Yesterday, I received a nice note from Michael DeWitt...
"HL, I heard your Fireside Chat with Lisa Haneberg and was very impressed with what you had to say. I decided to check out your blog, which is great. I was particularly taken with your Agile / Scrum / HueyLong post. It's probably in my top 10 all time in the blogosphere, because it was entertaining and right on the money!"
Michael also pointed me to a related article on his rather famous blog, Spooky Action. If you liked my Hipopalorum and Lopopahirum post, I recommend checking out Michael's take on the subject as well.
The other day, I mention
ed Scrumbut, the folks who say they are practicing Scrum, but they are doing some things different. They—I've said way too often—are practicing Scrumbut not Scrum.
Tommy Norman, in his blog "Ravings from a Crazed Code Monkey," describes how he came from a Scrumbut shop into a company open to applying Scrum as it was intended. His experiences with the two are as different as night and day.
Check it out.
Last week, Jason Gorman compared Scrum to a virus. I would like to remind him that being infectious doesn't make something a virus. Laughter is infectious, but it is good for you. Laughter spreads quickly, because it makes those infected feel better.
In my opinion, Scrum and Laughter are two "viruses" that simply cannot spread fast enough.
Like the laughter contagion, Scrum also makes people feel good. It does so by making them successful—by helping them reach their goals.
In Jason's post, he exposes his believe that Scrum is nothing more than Snake Oil sold by consultants, then he exposes the fallacy in his believe with the following statement...
"...Scrum is not exactly rocket science. It shouldn't take long to get a practical handle on the key principles and practices. 5 minutes might be pushing it - but you can certainly figure most of it out in, say, a sprint or two."
That is exactly what we did at Decade Software Company. We were into our second sprint and making great progress, long before I received my certification as a ScrumMaster, and we were a year into the process, before I was certified as a Scrum Practitioner.
At our company, no Scrum consultant has ever darkened our door, but my development department has used Scrum to literally quadruple quality and quantity across the board, and today, our design, implementation, conversion, and client service teams are starting to see success with Scrum.
If Scrum is a virus, we don't want the cure.
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