I have a brain!

A friend of mine is writing his masterthesis on frequences in an MR machine. This machine scans your brain. Yesterday he asked me to help him out with his last scan for his thesis.

Do you have a brain? Use it! :)

Communication and Context

What about it? We all know that communication is important and most of us also know that the context of where or what the communication is about is just as important.

Consider some of the pictures i took while in China. They show a will to communicate with you as an english speaker, but they do not always make sense. Anyway here are a few of them:


The next one is harder to understand the meaning of.. Mingtien means tomorrow, so maybe they mean tomorrows language café? or language coffee?




Think about the context when you communicate with someone. They might not understand what you are trying to communicate even though they understand the language.

Motivation and Attitude

Most of our life we stick to some basic values. Sometimes we do things we would usually not do because someone or something motivated us to do so. Its the attitude to be open to change that is one of our most important traits.

It is time to start motivating for change. Its your life and it should be you who decide what you want to do with it.

Have a look at this movie from the HOME project. It speaks of motivation for change on a global scale.

http://www.youtube.com/homeproject

Mockups, what is it good for?

Some people like to think in terms of text and others prefer diagrams or drawings. I am a huge fan of drawings. But I prefer drawings that do not draw too much attention to details that are not important in the context. When looking through some old favourite blogs I found this post about the level of detail in a demo. Its a great summary of what not to do when you want to show ideas and get creative feedback.

And guess what? I've been in a discussion with someone about this before. In the discussion someone mentioned a tool that gave you the possibility to make mockups fairly quick with a look of a sketch. I've now tested and even bought the tool for my self to use at work when making backlog elements for further specification. Since my drawing skills are rather lacking the tool helps me to make some really nice sketches. The tool (Balsamiq) is really easy to learn and I use less than 5 minutes on the sketch below.

The level of detail enables us to communicate on the content instead of the details of the dialog window like colors and text size.

And as Kathy mentioned at CPU; it does not give the customer the idea that we are almost done with implementing it, because it looks almost finished on the openoffice slide!

This is because the details that really doesn't matter right now is not there. I would go as far as to say that this is good enough for specification purposes in most cases. It will get changed later in the development iteration anyway, when the customer sees the real screen during development he will then ask for new or altered functionality. The important part here is that this sketch often contains enough information to start developing the desired functionality. This removes the waste of making too much spesification. And did I say that this sketch is so much easier to change than a photoshop picture?

Balance

You need to have balance.

If you want to do things right you need to be in balance. Being in balance in taiji (tai chi) means that you have practiced doing the movement many times and you are able to have control through the whole exercise, thus never loosing balance. It does also imply that you have the mind in balance.

But what does it mean to be in balance in a project? I would say it is the same thing. The project should have practiced doing things slow enough to gain full control and enable the people to be in balance. If you run fast and you do not normally run that much, what do you think will happen? You either run too fast and not be able to finish the round because you are exhausted or you are maybe running so fast that you loose your footing and fall? These are the visible problems we easily notice if you are not fit enough to run that fast, but there are others that are more subtle indications like your running style. Maybe you are running in a hurtful way and if you continue to run in this way you will harm your body, but not see it before you have been running for a long time.

To run fast you have to run well. To run well you have to practice. To practice well you have to practice slow. Did the sprint go bad? Maybe you ran too fast? Slow down and be in balance whereever you are. When in balance you are always able to change your direction.

When a project is in balance it adapts to whatever comes down the road. It runs well and it runs fast.

Vacation

I am sorry for the lack of posts these last months, but time has been too quick to pass on me. The reason for this post is to inform you that I will be going on vacation for the rest of the year. Maybe there will be some posts during my backpacking in China, but I do not know.

I have a lot of ideas for great blogposts in the new year, one is an experience I just had in a project that suddenly had new stakeholders and I got some opinions on coaching in the agile environment (+even on being your own coach). But all this will have to wait till next year if I do not get bored down in the far east.

Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

Video from Smidig2008

The videos are here! http://smidig2008.confreaks.com/
It's in Norwegian I'm afraid, but its all about agile. I promise!