Visibility is important for motivation

People always say that visibility is important, but often they fall short when asked to give examples.

I thought I'd give you an example that is fairly obvious and can easily be tested. That's if you have a newer kin of Nokia mobile phone..

http://sportstracker.nokia.com

The sportstracker gives you a few data about your training trips, but it also give you motivation trough it's functionality.

You can have your own training buddies connected and then you can actually see what your friends have done. The application is actually quite simple using your GPS on the mobile phone and registering speed and altitude in your workout (cycling/running/walking++).

More important is the web site that creates the link between your buddies and you. This creates a sense of competition between you and your friends. I find it inspiring to see that a friend of mine has done a 10km track in an hour last night. I suddenly find myself wanting to do some running.

Maybe this can inspire you to do some of the things you do at work visible to others as well. Maybe it creates a small sense of competition and fun. Maybe it motivates you and your co-workers?

It surely motivates me! Too bad you can't use the mobile phone when swimming..

Visibility

I have just ordered a 32" flatscreen for our project! I plan to use it to increase the visibility of the continous integration status. By this I mean the build status, the Cobertura test coverage data and the JUnit report.

This means that when we have the daily meeting, the screen will be very visible and as scrum master I want to increase focus on our test coverage. More coverage will enable us to make changes without the fear of breaking the application.

The last week I have used several hours to remove broken and useless tests from the codebase. This has been tedious work and the result is a lower test coverage than earlier, but now we have only tests that are running and not giving us an error (not the same as failure). We have made tests during our workshops and these tests now shows brightly on the JUnit report (-sky) as passed tests. Hopefully this will be motivation to actually go in to old code and bring it up to better standards with tests. We do all these changes one small step at the time and it actually seem to be working!


I will be back with some pictures when the screen has arrived.

Work Engagement

In my last post I talked about fear as an obstacle to be productive in development of a software project. Knowledge can conquer this fear, but there is also something else that can make people forget their fear. Engagement!

If you are really interested and motivated in your work you might just not be afraid of the huge codebase and the possibilities of errors and bugs when you do a change to it. In my opinion a motivated person often learn faster and are quicker to pick up on positive changes in their environment.

I often feel an "energy" when doing something interesting and it keeps me motivated. I read different blogs and I buy both management and system engineering books. This keeps me interested because I am constantly learning something new. But it is not what makes me actually tick, what does it is the actual tryout of an idea. Even if you only read it in a book or a blog. Does it work? If it does work it spurs me further in to the idea and I get motivated to continue to try new ideas.

How does one motivate others in the same way? To some extent I think it happens automatically when they are close to, or are working together with a person that has this energy. But is it enough?

My advice is to bring your colleagues or friends to the spot where you get your motivation from! Be an enabler and the motivator. Do not be afraid to bring new things to the table. Enable for others to bring new ideas into the work environment.

A day that nothing new is tried out can be a wasted day.. Can work be performed better for you and your company in any way?


Some of my favourite places to get ideas and inspiration:
The Practice of Leadership
Management Skill Blog
Management Craft
Agile Leadership
XP Meetup
*Technical*
Uncle Bob
(++)

Work Environment

On Friday we got a presentation at Computas by Sintef. The topic of the presentation was work environment and workspace. By this meaning office layout and its implication on efficiency, productivity and identity. They had an interesting perspective on how we where behaving in different workspace solutions. One of the points i picked up was the difference between a workspace geared for communication versus concentration. Cell offices works best for the latter and they had seen increase in communication with open office solutions. This created reactions in the audience which today have cell offices, but often with an "open" space between their offices. The offices are also occupied by people working on the same project. It was mentioned that the walls toward the open space was made of glass. Only that most people sit with their back to the door and the glass wall and the open space between the cell offices.

I think moving around is healthy for your own motivation and inspiration. I also think that open office solutions is one of the better solutions for knowledge workers. Here is what I wrote in my master thesis on the subject:

Work Environment
As an important facilitator of knowledge sharing Davenport and Prusak (1998) mention the work environment. They claim that changes in the work environment may cause loss of knowledge and it can also disrupt the existing sharing process. Knowledge has a tendency to thrive only in the environment it develops. Elements mentioned are, “organisational size, focus, management and intangibles as trust and atmosphere.” In the previous section organisational structure and size was described as an influential element to the way a knowledge worker performs. Knowledge workers often collaborate in different ways and use communication tools as well as face-to-face communication.

Office environment needs to facilitate the collaboration and exchange of tacit as well as explicit knowledge, Davenport (2005) mentions meeting spaces and conference rooms as a minimum. He goes further and suggests, based on findings by Thomas Allen (1984), that knowledge workers who need to communicate should be located physically close to each other. Becker and Sims (2001) claim, “The more open the environment, the more frequent the communication and the shorter the duration.” In addition to this they say that the communication in such an environment is “not viewed as interruptions, but these short, frequent interactions provide very fast feedback and shortresponse times, allowing work to move forward overall.” The data from Becker and Sims’ report also suggest that more visual contact actually contributes to fewer unwanted interactions, by “changing not so much the frequency as the timing of serendipitous communication.” By this they mean that by having visual contact the workers can see if the others are busy and not interrupt. On a more organisational level Allen (1984) claims that knowledge workers work environment should have aspects from the departments that work with Human Resources (HR), Information Technology (IT) and facilities organisations. These aspects together can create a thriving working environment with elements important for atmosphere, communication and the use of process supporting tools.

References

Davenport, T. H. and Prusak, L. (1998) Working knowledge : how organizations manage
what they know, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Mass.

Davenport, T. H. (2005) Thinking for a living : how to get better performance and results
from knowledge workers, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Mass.

Allen, J. T. (1984) Managing the Flow of Technology, MIT Press, Cambridge.

Becker, F. and Sims, W. (2001) Offices That Work - Balancing Communication,
Flexibility and Cost, October, Cornell University.