Monthly Archives: September 2011

Local Leadership Fail

Posted by on 2011/09/27 No comments

Today’s post isn’t about software development, it is about an epic leadership fail I had the honour to live through. As it happened, I had to go shopping several days ago. There is a nice store nearby, I go there all the time, but this time I got into the middle of an unpleasant situation between the cashier ladies and a customer. Actually, they were shouting at each other, and I was standing right in the middle of their little war. As it turned out, the problem was that the customer wanted to – and did – pay with small change. Actually, she had a bag of coins. The customer didn’t like the tone of the cashier ladies, and they didn’t like the bag of coins. The cashiers insisted that the proper way to pay with a large amount of coins is to have them in rolls, which is not true any more.

There are too many fails in this situation, for example

  • although the customer isn’t always right, her money is as good as anybody’s, so take it
  • even if a cashier is underpaid, there is no reason to be primitive. If she doesn’t like working as a cashier, then she should quit and look for another job
  • don’t ruin somebody else’s day (like mine) with your frustration

But somebody was missing, at least for me. Oh right, the shift leader. Actually, I saw him in the store: he was sorting tea boxes about four meters away from the danger zone. There was no way that he didn’t hear anything from the fight, and yet he chose to mind the teas instead. How nice of him, because everybody wants to buy tea on a hot Sunday afternoon.

Actually, what he did is a nice example of bad leadership. Hide when the heat comes and let the employees take it. It is not a surprise that the cashier ladies always complain about him to the customers, including me. This is another interesting “feature” of the store: complaining to the customers. The cashiers don’t respect the shift leader, and the only thing he can do in order to keep up his status quo is to abuse his power and set a schedule for the cashiers they definitely don’t like, and show them who the boss is. Still, it wasn’t him who deserved the fail prize from me: it was his boss, who also happened to be in the store! She was the one who was supposed to tell him: “Get over there, solve the problem and after that, come to my office!“.

Nice little company, I have to admit. But they have to change soon, because the competition is coming and it is coming fast. Another German store is being built right next to this store. They are famous for their great but cheap products, and their customer service. How will they compete with them? Using their very weak leadership skills and attitude? I hardly think so. They’ll certainly fail.

When I was in Germany several years ago, I was in a store of this chain – the new one -, and I had a lot of coins with me. It’s worth spending them abroad because they are kind of useless in Hungary – you cannot exchange coins, only notes. So I paid about 20 euros with a handful of coins. Literally, I had my hand full of change. Nothing happened. They took my money, I got my goods and everybody was happy, end of story.

There are several lessons here:

  • Always be with your team, and help them no matter what
  • Take the heat from the customers, it is part of your job
  • Never abuse your power
  • Don’t give power to those who cannot handle it

And the last one is for myself:

  • Find a new store
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IT-Business Article about Kanban

Posted by on 2011/09/27 2 comments

Breaking: IT-Business published an article about Kanban: click here. It is in Hungarian, but I think this is the first time when an article is published about Kanban in a newspaper which matters.

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ALE2011

Posted by on 2011/09/19 3 comments

ALE2011 was the first unconference I’ve ever attended, and I’m glad I did. It took me some time, though, until I managed to write a post about it. In my first version, I wrote about every session I participated in, because people were asking me to do it. They wanted a summary, but somehow that didn’t feel right. Then I got a brilliant idea: I would write about what went wrong there. There are several positive blog posts, so why not write a negative one? Let’s be the devil’s advocate! This didn’t feel right either, because I got so much energy and many good ideas from ALE2011. So I ended up with this version, which is a little bit of both.

The Atmosphere

Maybe it was during my first yoga class when Mukesh, our yoga teacher told us something very important. I can’t remember the exact quotation, but it went something like this: If you want to be successful at anything you are about to do, you need to surround yourself with inspiring, motivating and passionate people. If your environment isn’t inspiring, motivating and passionate, then find a new environment. Otherwise, you’ll stay in the very same state you are in now. This is exactly what ALE2011 was for me: an inspiring, motivating and passionate atmosphere. Unfortunately, my current environment isn’t inspiring or motivating and there definitely hasn’t been any passion for a while, but thanks to ALE2011, I feel recharged.

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When Expand and Collapse Got Beaten

Posted by on 2011/09/14 No comments

Today’s post is an instructive story about mixing various good patterns and ideas. They are very useful separately, but when one uses them together, they may lead to problems which nobody wants to deal with at all.

We found several different defects in a certain feature, and in order to reduce handover costs I collapsed them together to make an “umbrella defect” (defect1+defect2+…defectN) and put it into our Queue. When my colleague started to work on it, I was quite happy with the result: less handover costs less context switching and more focus on a faulty feature. It was really nice until our deployment day came. Or Kanban board and version tree looked like this:

The mentioned umbrella defect appears as ‘UD‘ on the Kanban board, and it covers ‘UD1.1‘ and ‘UD1.2‘. Based on our Kanban board, there is no impediment to the deployment, but right before the deployment we realized that not everything we wanted to deploy had been tested since we were using one-track. One-track means that we don’t have branches, labels or tags, we just have the trunk where we have our latest version. One-track is an excellent thing, but it seems that it doesn’t work well with collapsing.

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Our Detective’s Blackboard

Posted by on 2011/09/06 No comments

My colleague Attila and I had an interesting discussion several days ago:

- Zsolt, I feel that sometimes we are missing the big picture.
- That’s not cool, and it may explain the high number of work items moved back.
- Maybe, but can we do planning together again? I miss it.
- Sure we can, but no regular planning meetings, right?
- Of course not.

As my friend @keksz_i pointed out, regular planning meetings aren’t that effective and I’m also not a great fan of them: talking to the product owner is a brilliant idea, but the traditional task breakdown is just a tremendous waste of time. After our discussion, it was clear to us that we had to bring the planning back, but we needed something new, something effective. So we came up with the following detective’s blackboard for our next feature:

It is drawn on a large piece of paper and hangs on the wall right next to our Kanban board. It has all the information we need in order to do our work: the big picture, how our user interfaces will look like and how they will communicate with other parts of the application. Additionally, we also have work items, prioritisation, test plan and estimation.

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