May 20, 2010 at 13:09 · Filed under Agile & Scrum, LinkedIn
Lunar Logic Polska Planning Poker
I went to Krakow this week to hold a couple of workshops for people from our office on 18th of May.
Workshop 1.
Agile estimations with planning poker.
Workshop 2.
Agile planning with Blitz planning.
To my great disappointment early in the morning the day the session should be held I discovered that I forgot planning poker cards. And how do you teach people play planning poker without the cards? I needed at least 4-5 decks of cards because it should be around 20 people at the session.
The were not many options:
- Print out and cut the cards from the A4 sheets of paper.
- Find the real cards
I was more inclined to try the last option. So I turned my laptop and fired a search “planning poker krakow”. Couple of hits returned the name of Mariusz Ciesla and an image you can see above this post. The caption on the image was “Lunar Logic Polska” and this was also my second google search which returned a link to the Lunar Logic Polska – a company based in Krakow.
My reasoning went fast. If a company orders planning poker cards from a designer, probably they will have some decks available. I went to a contact us page, grabbed the address (it was a few blocks away from my hotel) and went out of the hotel. 5 minutes later I was knocking on the door in a dark office (hey, it was 8 in the morning). A girl showed up and I fired: “Hi, I´m an agile coach who forgot his planning poker cards at home and will have a planning poker workshop very soon, so I need to buy 5 decks of cards. I found you your company on the Internet and understand that you are doing agile development and can possible have the cards here”. *smile*
The girl said wait a second, and seconds later I was met by a men who said that I can just get the cards from them free of charge. I said I would happily borrow and return the cards later. Got my 4 decks, got a business card saying Paul Klipp on it and was about to leave the office when
Coincidence 1 happened
I saw kanbanery.com opened on the screen and I said to Paul: “Oh, you are using kanbanery.com too (because I used the tool)” and got a reply: “We actually made it”. What a surprise!
I had little time to express my astonishment so I jumped out in the rain to go to the office to do my workshop preparations.
I had my cards and the session was saved!
Coincidence 2.
During the session I found out that the designer who designed the cards was one of our former employees and actually worked in our Polish office where I was holding the session.
The same evening I chatted with Paul over skype and we agreed to meet the day after to have morning coffee and an agile talk :). We met 9:30 in the morning, I returned the cards, and we had a really great chat discussing our agile challenges, broken different scrum implementations and such :). An hour went like a minute for me (thank you Paul for sharing your insight and expertise). Paul had his daily scrum at 10:30 and had to go, while I had one more hour before I should be heading to the airport, so I was invited to attend the daily scrum (thanks again Paul).
Which agile coach can say no to attend others daily scrum meeting? None? Me neither. I said yes and minutes later I was attending the morning meeting of the kanbanery team :) (they even let me talk there, yeah a talking chicken).
Now I´m back to Oslo sitting in my office, really glad to actually have forgotten the cards at home. I feel being grateful to the agile community, to people like Paul Klipp helping strangers, to the world being such an amazing place to be and to all the coincidences happening in my life.
P.S. Coincidence 3.
Paul is a man behind Agile Central Europe Conference that I hope to attend next year.
April 3, 2010 at 20:40 · Filed under Ideas to grab, LinkedIn
The scene in Queen Elisabeth Hall, Antwerpen
I´m sitting on a train from Antwerpen to Brussels writing this post. I came to the Hall of Queen Elisabeth in Antwerpen just to hear Seth Godin speak. And now I´m returning back home to Oslo. Reflecting if my trip was a waste of time and money so that I could do some name dropping afterwards or was there a real value for me.
I read most of the books that Seth Godin wrote. I read his last one – “Linchpin” the same day it was available on my kindle and the idea from this book (as well as his another book Tribes) was the main topic this evening. The idea of us breaking away from our “factory work” to do the work that really matters. The idea of finding you true passion and to creating experiences for other people around it. To lead the tribe of people who shares the same passion to a place where they want to go.
I highly recommend you to read both books in full for a more persuasive copy, but I can tell you that this were these books that influenced me enough to make up the time (it is Easter holiday after all), to book flight to Brussels, take a train to Antwerpen just to hear Seth speaking for a couple of hours.
I can tell you the truth I did not hear anything new. That is why the name of this post. But I can also tell you that I´m inspired (once again, hehe) and maybe this is the kick I needed to actually do something. Seth didn´t say anything I did not know from before. No secret knowledge, no broadening of the theme (the book of cause covers more than an hour speech). I already knew the stuff he was talking about. And at the same time knowing does not equal doing. During Seth talk I suddenly realized that I don´t need more listening, I don´t need more theory, I´ve got enough. Just go do it.
So to make it clear, I do not regret a single cent or single minute spent to see Seth Godin speak tonight.
He is a great speaker, the topic is interesting. It was good seeing so many people in the audience. And it was beautiful Q&A at the end. Here is what I remember from it:
About discipline.
One guy from the audience said that he was reading Seths blog for a while and he really admires the regularity of his blog posts. And Seth answered that he did not miss a day for a long time. He also said:
Start a blog. Everybody should have one. Do a post every day and after a year you´ve got 365 of them. It´s a great thing for you even if nobody is reading it.
After a short discussion on politics and our education system a lady asked how Seth would change our schools?
The answer went like changing the system takes longer but all of us can teach our kids at home. And we should teach them two things:
1. To solve interesting problems
2. To lead
Because both things are scarcity in todays world.
One more guy like me has been coming from Munich to hear Seth speak. He said he was expecting kind of a roadmap about how to become an artist doing things that matters. And he did not get any.
Seth offered him a refund ;). He said that there is no map. If there were everybody should already been there. You should just start doing something that matters. Nobody knows the way, nobody can tell you what to do. But it happens that you get a hint from yourself. That is when your lizard brain kicks in. When you get scared of doing something, when the resistance in you arises and you are afraid. Then you maybe onto something. Do the things that scare you, overcome the resistance and maybe you wake up an artist one day.
December 17, 2009 at 16:40 · Filed under Ideas to grab, LinkedIn
Here is an idea I discussed with a colleague of mine during lunch and its up for grab to you.
We discussed how one can mix social media with a brick and mortar business and came up with this brilliant move :)
Imaging you are entering a salad bar that looks like an internet cafe. There are flat touch screens along the walls and big screens hanging from the ceiling. You go towards one of the screens and start mixing your salad. You simply touch the ingredients buttons on the screen and hit “done” when you are finished.
Now, the guys and gals at the kitchen start mixing your salad for you, while the system checks if anybody else in the history of the salad chain have chosen same ingredients, if no: Hey! you can name you own salad mix, the camera in the screen snaps a picture of you, you can write some lines that will be stored together with the recipe and next time somebody chooses the same ingredients, they will see that this is YOUR mix :) they´ve just ordered.
The screens at the ceiling show what other people are eating right now in the bar, they show what salads are most popular, and most rare ones.
Of cause there will be possible to log in into the system online from home, and see the list of all “your” mixes, you can discuss them with other users. You can browse the recipes of others, you can even order online or from your iPhone one of the existing mixes in the nearby salad bar.
The menu with the existing mixes is also available on the touch screens in the bar.
You can do this for pizza chains or other businesses. Hey, I think this will work, what´s your thoughts? Share them in comments.
April 15, 2009 at 11:01 · Filed under Design, LinkedIn
Every online company should always try to continuously improve their product. As head of development of norwegian classifieds website zett.no I’ve been looking at our competitors’ websites (finn.no and tinde.no) comparing our booking solutions.
Booking solution of finn, tinde and zett
Booking system is a heart of these applications since this is where the money comes from (at least from the private persons). And being such an important part of the system the way booking solutions work today did not impress me much (on either of the three websites).
I have documented the booking process on all three websites just the way they looked 8th of April 2009 (I’ll publish own posts on this later for: finn, tinde and zett).
So here comes the challenge:
In 6 months from now 15th of October 2009 I’ll compare them again looking at how the process have been improved. Every detail count, I’ll evaluate the changes then, but I can announce the winner already now.
The winner is our users! And a nice side effect of improved booking solution is our revenue!
I hope that finn and tinde accept this challenge, and that we will see great improvements very soon. I also hope that when the improvements are made, we will steal the best ideas from each other and do a follow up release taking our booking solutions to the top of usability, ease of use and performance.
April 14, 2009 at 23:28 · Filed under LinkedIn, Private
Here is the list of books and resources that I read recently that has influenced me in one way or another (in no particular order):
- Zen Habits – blog of Leo Babauta covering: achieving goals, productivity, being organized, GTD, motivation, eliminating debt, saving, getting a flat stomach, eating healthy, simplifying, living frugal, parenting, happiness, and successfully implementing good habits.
- Get rich slowly – blog of J.D>. Roth sharing stories about debt elimination, saving money, and practical investing.
- Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery by Garr Reynolds
- The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams
- Web Standards Solutions by Dan Cederholm
- DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model by Jeremy Keith
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
- Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
- Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg
- The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing by Jason Kelly
- Scalable Internet Architectures by Theo Schlossnagle
- Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design by Robert Hoekman Jr.
- Getting real by 37signals
- Winning by Jack and Suzy Welch
- The big book of key performance indicators by Eric T. Petterson
The list is never complete, so I’ll update the post once in a while…
April 14, 2009 at 13:42 · Filed under Agile & Scrum, LinkedIn
Just wanted to share with you all this sprint burndown chart:
Sprint burndown chart (click to enlarge)
How do you feel about it?
How do you think the team felt about it?
Do you think this was a good or a bad sprint?
Say what you think in the comments, I’ll update this post one week later with real answers :-)
March 13, 2009 at 22:15 · Filed under LinkedIn, SEM & SEO
I was speaking today at SEO howlers session at International Search Summit Oslo together with Andy Atkins-Krüger and Kristjan Mar Hauksson. We were trying to wake up the audience after lunch and I hope we done this well. It was quite fun (at least for me) and at the same time quite rewarding.
Following things were mentioned as SEO SEM howlers:
- URL rewrites (just take a look at elkjop.no product pages)
- Missing 404 pages
- Non existing pages returning 200 status
- Defending your brand reputation
- Supporting your offline campaigns online
- Doing the basics (titles, h1s, flash, etc)
- Use of negative keywords in ppc campaigns
I hope the audience enjoyed the session as much as I did :-).
March 2, 2009 at 9:56 · Filed under Agile & Scrum, LinkedIn, Web-sites
I launched http://kanosurvey.com a small project for the Agile community. If you use kano model for prioritizing your features, this site would be helpful. You can set up a survey and get your users/customers answer it in order to find out more about your features.
February 26, 2009 at 14:06 · Filed under Agile & Scrum, LinkedIn
Yesterday, I’ve been participating in a Debate about agile and usability.
Three Scrum Masters (I was one of them) and three UX people was sitting at the same table. Everyone of us should come with one suggestion about how to fit UX people into the scrum teams better.
Here is what’s been said.
Scrum Masters:
* Geir Amsjø: Use Feature Times (and sprint 0)
* Sergey Dmitriev: UX people can swallow their pride and contribute to the backlog
* Johannes Brodwall: UX people should become more versatile, so that they can contribute more
UX people:
* Jon Gunnar Wold: Developers should know their responsibilities
* Fredrik Matheson: Product Owner should be a pro
* Anders Fagerhus: UX people should stay one sprint ahead of developers
We had a really great talk and I want to thank all the participants. I also enjoyed talking to the audience in the free minutes: Miguel Calix (nice chat about combining PO and SM roles) and Marit Søholt Stokes about the importance of making the contracts better by having a paragraph or two about the customer responsibilities as a Product Owner (I really wanted to do a followup on this one).
August 27, 2007 at 17:00 · Filed under Private
Let’s take a look at the elections with the eyes of the web-developer.
We’ll take a look at following parties: RV, SV, DNA, SP, KrF, V, H, Frp
I choose to focus on 4 areas, each of those will get a score -2(awfull), -1(bad), 0(neutral), 1(good), 2(excellent). The areas are:
1. Visual design
2. W3C conformation and source code
3. Ease of finding the “electoral promise”
4. Ease of finding of party’s vision and long term plan
Let’s start.
RV
1. -1: Boring visual
2. 0: No doc type, but they “play” HTML :-), just look at this 
The guys have sense of humor though
who disagrees :-)?
3. 0: Located in section “Useful”, one click away from the front page leading to a pdf document :-(
4. 1: Second link from top to the right, one click away from the front page, not bad at all.
RV Total: 0;
SV
1. 1: Actually not that bad, could give them 2 if it were not those red boxes at the end of the page and sesam search field at the top :-)
2. 0: they are on the way to writing better code, if they check it for missing closing tags, remove some inline css, etc
3. 2: In the middle of the front page, you hardly find better place
4. 2: In the middle of the front page, you hardly find better place
Total SV: 5.
DNA
1. 2: Very good visual
2. 0: Suffers from divitis, missing closing tags, but is on the way to good code
3. 0: Top banner is actually the thing, but I thought it was a top banner :-)
4. 0: Two clicks away from the front page, starting with first link in the left menu.
Total DNA: 2
SP
1. 1: Three pictures of Aslaug Haga on the front page is too much of a good thing :-)
2. -1: it looked to be 0 for inline css, nonlimited use of br tags, etc, but then I spotted font tags and tables :-( grrr and it functions bad in firefox
3. 1: One click from the front page, though the link is not very descriptive
4. 0: There are two-three links that talks about the same and could be counted as “the thing”, why not say that in plain text and have only one?
Total SP: 1
KrF
1. 0: white text on white stripes does not work very well
2. -2: Tables, deprecated tags… Looks like web-designers at KrF just stumbled upon FrontPage :-) Wake up, it’s 2007 out there.
3. -2: Didn’t find one. At all… Seriously…
4. 1: One click away from the front page
I’ve seen this too much during my surfing
P.S. And it’s god damn sloooow.
P.P.S. Have you seen your fonts in FireFox? Neither did I, had no microscope.
Venstre
1. 0: You have to do something about fonts.
2. 1: Wow. It actually validates!!! MediaFront has sold their ability to make flash where the client needed web-design. Let’s see what google sees on front page:
I think Venstre will have problems getting new votes: they are not even on the first page for search “venstre politisk parti” on google. But the main site is good.
3. 0: you are actually coming to the election version of website, and have to click to come to the normal one
4. 0: three to ten clicks away, depending on how fast you realize that there are two versions of the website :-)
Total V: 1
Høyre
1. 1: Pretty good visually, would have been 2, if they had removed the banner on the right side.
2. 2: Hey, this one validates too :-) P.S. one typo: atl instead of alt, but we forget this.
3. 1: One click away, though the link name could be more descriptive
4. 2: Right on spot. Two clicks away and the choices you make are very logical.
Total Høyre: 6
FrP
1. 1: Nice visual, fonts chosen did not allow to give 2.
2. 0: well, there are other tags then div’s, you know.
3. -1: When clicking on link with the right name to see their “election promise” I was greeted with “access denied” (ingen tilgang) :-) he he, do they have something to hide? Though I could download a pdf version
4. 1: This one worked as intended, two clicks away from the front page.
Total Frp: 1.
Well, the web-developer votes Høyre this year.
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