At BestBrains we are strong believers in the Pomodoro-technique, as a pleasant way to improve our productivity.  This week we gave yet another presentation of the technique. For those who read Danish, there is a review here

Besides the Pomodoro-shaped alarm-clock we have now discovered another thing, that makes our Pomodoros even better. The Pomodoro T-shirt, as the one I'm wearing in the picture. It simply adds another dimension to your Pomodoro sessions. If you want one for yourself you can find it here at Amazon







By Bent Jensen

Is a quote from Jeff Jarvis' book: "What Would Google Do". If you suddenly find yourself out of business because your competitors has changed the game, and are light-years ahead of you, it might be because you were too busy milking the cash cow in the gold mine.

Many Companies, IT and software companies included, was in the last happy pre-crisis decade  of crazy growth, very busy milking the Cash Cow in the Gold Mine. The poor beast is not giving so much milk now. And if one is looking up it is clear the world does not look the same as it did before.

many software companies find out, that they completely missed being aware of the costs of running a software business. When the order-book was full,  the dedicated work of doing things better, lowering cost and improving quality was not on the agenda. Hire more staff (if you can them) and cut corners whereever possible,  was the practice of the day.

In the software industry as well as construction industry, the number of poor-quality, too late and too expensive projects grew rapidly. The only difference between construction and Software is, that in construction you always end up using what has been built, and thus getting some value out of the investment. Sadly that is not true for all software projects.

In the meantime a cost effective outsourcing industry has grown up, to do much of the work domestic companies used to do. A even larget threat to the worn out Cash Cows is that lots of, what used to be, expensive software solutions are available for free or very cheap on the internet. Google (here they are again) has created a strong competitor to Microsoft's Cash Cow: Microsoft Office Soute. While Microsoft was busy milking it, Google solved the real problem about real-time collaboration, sharing and version control. This will forever change the landscape of office applications, and Microsoft is way behind (as is Open Office and all the others still on the old paradigm).

I  was recently looking for software for doing on-line surveys. My search led me, among others, to these two companies: 2ask and Survey Monkey. My theory is that 2ask has been busy milking their cash cow (hopefully so), while Survey Monkey changed the business. For a tenth of the price Survey Monkey offers a fancy, slick application that allows you to build your own surveys very easily. Take a look for yourself, who do you want to buy from?

So what are you doing? Spending the time trying to get the old cow to give more milk, doing more of the same, of are you taking the opportunity to discover what business you really are in (another quote from WWGD), and finding ways to do that in a low-cost way?

And in our own kind business there has also been cash cows: Scrum certification classes (we do not do those) with long waiting lists and customers being willing to believe that standing up i a  circle 10 minutes every day would solve all problems. Maybe it is time to rethink that business too?

By Bent Jensen

For the past three months, I have been working with the team in Copenhagen from Barcelona.
There is no business reason for this, it is purely for the experience. Now, there are some obvious disadvantages to working away from the rest of the team. Office smalltalk, while not necessarily directly related to the project at hand, really keeps you in the loop in a way that is hard to obtain over a distance. On the other hand, constraints foster creativity. A real problem is rare and hard to find - and extremely valuable. So if I can help produce problems by working from Spain, I will be quite happy

So far, my random observations are:

1) Skype is amazing. Video conferencing is at a point where it just works. There are glitches and every now and then, the connection will die but overall, having a meeting with the Copenhagen team feels to me like I am present. Having a decent web camera really helps in this matter as having a high quality picture makes a very noticable difference. I bought a couple of Logitech Pro 9000 cams which deliver a very nice quality and frame rate.

2) Timezones matter. We run a very agile process with stand-up meetings every morning (okay, I don't actually stand up but that's because I am in front of the camera) at 9. This is always a good thing but it becomes even more important if you are located elsewhere, just to get in synch every day. However, such meetings are much easier when you are in the same timezone. And while Barcelona and Copenhagen are that, they are in different cultural timezones in the sense that the Spanish have very different eating habits than the Danes. I'm still working on adjusting my daily routine to fit both as well as I can.

3) A good thing about working remotely is that you can actually force peace and quiet if you need to. If I turn off my instant messaging, people can only bother me by calling me which they only will if it is very important. This is much harder to achieve if you are in the same office. We usually solve this by running synchronized Pomodoro's though. I will get back to Pomodoros and working remotely in a later post.

4) If you are already using version control and Google Docs or similar for your code and management, going remote is dead-simple! I was quite astonished to find that I could literally sit down in my Barcelona office and be doing normal work within 10 minutes. Everything works just as it does when I am in Copenhagen. I guess this shouldn't surprise me but still, it was a pleasant experience.

By Kristian Dupont

Today was the first official day of our Lean study tour "Roots of Lean 2009" in Japan. We started out this day by visiting Fujitsu Applications Ltd. in Tokyo. President and CEO Jun Watanabe gave us an introduction to how Fujitsu Applications had implemented Toyota Production System/Lean in their software development business.

Two things stuck me in particular.
1) Their use of standardized work (well-defined processes for how, when, and what to do). In the Fujitsu case I believe this was one of the major contributors to the productivity improvement they had experienced. Throughput had gone up by a factor of 7 - over a period of 6 years - without hiring more people!!
    
2) Changing the method of software developmet to a very manufacturing-like way had certainly improved productivity, compared to what they did before their TPS transformation. However I asked myself: They are paying salary to 300 employees - are they really utilizing the talent that they are paying for? I got the impression that maybe they were focusing a bit too much on Point Kaizen rather than System Kaizen.

Also we met Tomoya Saito who gave a talk on how Fujitsu Applications were crunching data from employee timesheets and measurements of progress in a way I have never seen before. What they were trying, was to do really fast estimation on a large scale. They were doing this using statistical theory and a high volume of historical data. I did initially feel slightly skeptical about it, but it has surely given me something to think about!

By Sune Gynthersen

As I'm beginning to feel a little stuck writing this blog-entry, I get a strong desire to check the news and see what happened in the world since I last checked 30 minutes ago. And I think I also need a fresh cup of coffee. I can imagine myself go down into the kitchen, boil water and add instant coffee to the mug, pour hot water over and add a little milk - heavenly! But instead of following my desires, I take a  look at the small ticking tomato-shaped timer in front of me, and I notice that I still have 15 minutes left to go. I put a mark on a piece of paper on my table, and turn my attention back to my blog-entry with a desire to keep going for the next fifteen minutes. I know very well that the desire to get a cup of coffee or check the news, are just a few of my procrastionation demons. They have haunted me for most of my life, but I now have found the ultimate weapon in the form of a small red tomato-shaped timer.

It was more accident than anything else, that led me to attend Staffan Nöteberg's talk about the pomodoro technique at this years agile conference in Toronto. This accident changed my life, and after that also the lives of my colleagues. Much would have been different had I known it 25 years ago.

The technique was invented by an, at that time, young italian student Francesco Cirillo, who was not too pleased with his own ability to study concentrated. As an experiment he borrowed his mothers kitchen timer, and tried to stay focused for 25 minutes. He did not succed immediately, but gradually developed the technicue to deal with internal and external interruptions. He developed a set of simple artefacts and  planning and improvement tools. As the technique matured, it was shaped to be used by others than just individuals. Also pair-workers and teams can have great benefit of the technique.

Curious? Check the links or attend my presentation in Copenhagen on Thursday  March 5th at 5pm - read more and register here.



By Bent Jensen