Congrats to my beautiful wife, Dr. Lara Milane, who is a continued source of inspiration for me and became a PhD in Drug Delivery Systems and Nanomedicine (aka magic) late Friday. I love you, but that is true even if you were something brainless, like a PMP 
That’s a JOKE people!!
What dictates backlog priority? You could simply discuss it. You could have someone assign it. You could use Faceted Feature Analysis and get a value based on technical ease, business value, and user value. You could let the team organize backlog tasks in light of the development path they will be taking. There are lots of ways to do it. I generally favor one approach in particular, but that is not what this entry is about. It is about our dog, Daisy.
I had a friend tell me that what was so great about dogs is that they, unlike people, will not conspire against you. He is right. Dogs know pure emotion. Vanilla and chocolate emotion. They love. They have fun. They sleep. They do not contemplate why the caged bird sings, although they do contemplate the caged bird.
Daisy had a brain tumor. It was diagnosed after we noticed her anatomical left lagging a bit behind. Sure enough, brain stem, tumor, prognosis a big question mark. My family has had a few dog pass and all but one was due to cancer. Daisy is the only one who came home after the diagnosis. I give the credit for that to my wife, Lara, and her making an issue of being proactive about her health. I would probably not have been as aggressive. Keep in mind, this is my Mom and Dad’s dog, and they are no longer here to care for her. Chemo was not an option for Daisy, the dog who hated that she was a dog. Mikey is our other dog, and he is thrilled to be a dog. Fun fun fun all day. Daisy resented being a dog, and we loved her for it. She did not like having to eat out of a dish. She did not like you to see her pee. She thought she was as human as Lara and I am, but when a cat crossed the lawn, all bets were off and she was a dog.
Her decline was slow. First the left side of her face started to sag, and the muscles in her head atrophy. This was due to the tumor essentially paralyzing the nerves. On her last morning, I hand-fed her pieces of hot dog, and the primal old brain knew how to chew, but it was catching her tongue and swallowing / knowing what to do after chewing was not so clear. She was a little crooked for a few weeks, then one day she could not catch her breath and could only walk in circles. I could not carry her up and down the stairs anymore. She was beyond that. I could not hand feed her. She was beyond that. 
I told Lara, “Daisy will tell us when it is time” and she did. I have video of her eyes that last day. She was asking for relief. She was tough, but fighting just to fight. Daisy was gone. Everyone I love has been falling away over the past year. It is awfully strange, to be honest. I kind of knew Dad’s time was coming, and Mom is a while different story that is too difficult to get into here at the moment. Forgive me. I share a lot here, but reserve some things that I have not come to terms with yet – such as my parents – for myself and my wife. My family. Mikey, too. He knows what to do when I cry. Yes, I cry. I am 300 pounds with 22 inch biceps and I am allowed to cry. I also believe that there is no up without down, and the capacity for pleasure increases / decreases with the capacity for pain. This is part of why I torture myself in the gym. Simple is good. Vice-versa, too. 
When Daisy was diagnosed, we had a nice, open-ended prognosis. Could have a year, they said. Could be less. Nobody knew. Being a horrible thought, the idea of putting her to sleep was filed among the low priority items, while monitoring her was a daily necessity, because of love. Pure emotion.
Daisy followed my wife around like her shadow. When I would yell, which was rare, Daisy would hide behind Lara – who I weigh about 3 times as much as. Daisy cuddled with Lara. Daisy sat by Lara as Lara got ready to go into the lab. For hours. Just sitting there to be near her. When Mom got sick, Daisy bonded to Lara like nothing I have seen before. Lara couldn’t even talk about Daisy being put down. Truthfully, there was no need to.
Until there was a need to.
That last day, when her eyes told me she was gone, let her go, it is too hard to just keep on keeping on, and the Vet agreed that with the bloody nose and infected eye and other manifestations of cancer, even one night like that would be cruel.
This is where life is Agile way before software is Agile. Somehow, I think it all ties back to trust being implicit in love, and passion mandating truth.
I left work thinking we would be increasing Daisy’s prednisone. I left the vet without her. When they injected her, and before, and after, we told her what a good dog she was and how much we loved her. There was nothing complicated about it. This was a very simple situation, and a very sad one, but a very simple one nontheless. How could we have managed her care better? I have been in the position to make a lot of decisions like that for people as well as dogs lately. You do the best you can, day by day. You recognize that what might be low priority today may spring up tomorrow as a fire that needs immediate attention. You mitigate. I knew to be strong for Daisy in those last moments, since she was looking to us to understand what was happening. I knew to make her feel safe because I thought about it and experienced it before. It is not about planning. It is about living.
It is about loving.
Love what you do and you will be great at it. Since this is a Project Managment and Technology blog, I should probably weave a tie-in here. I would suggest you do less discussing of whether the Agile Manifesto should be augmented and more work. I would suggest you argue less about Lean versus Scrum and listen where you would talk. The simplest things, I have always believed, are the most true.
Daisy was simply Daisy, even though I sometimes called her Doodles. We were lucky enough to know how very much that meant; we were lucky to know simplicity and the value of shutting up, listening, experiencing, and letting pack dynamics lead to amazing relationships and more. To be complely honest, Doodles would argue with us, but only because she knew she would win. That’s not really an argument
Plan more than barely enough and you may miss those little things with vast potential, implications, or joy.
I am still learning, and I owe a lot of what I know to that little, sweet dog. Her nephew still lives with us. We love him too. One day at a time, without planning. Somehow, it works.
More pictures of simple truths are here.
All my best,
Josh
Indeed, the most *productive* software team I have ever been a part of (with happy Product Owners being the measure) was a “lightweight methodology” shop. It was around 1995-1996 and the Developers took place in JAD sessions, delivered every week, and did an on-the-spot JAD session that was integrated at once and the project backlog recompiled to see where things stood. The office had cubes and was nothing like the “Agile Development Rooms” that you see today, but somehow that was not insurmountable. Imagine that. We had common areas, and people spent a lot of time in them. Tons of whiteboards. Tons.
Everyone was constantly talking. Resources *had to be* dedicated because we were too small and aggressive to keep track of things in a transferable manner.
Here’s the thing though: if we told a Client that we practiced a lightweight methodology that leveraged Rapid Iterative Prototyping (or worse, RIP), their eyes would glaze over. If we told them we would be there every week to work *with* them, their eyes would light up. The DEVELOPMENT BLACK BOX is scarier than tech lingo, which is scary enough that it elicits pretty strong emotion.
The point here is not the obvious point (avoid making things more complicated than they need to be). The point is that communication is the most important ingredient of any project. By communication, I mean dialog.
Now the “lightweight methods” have been sucked into the Agile Manifesto and the Manifesto has become the blessed vessel from which methodologies are ladled, branded, and sold. If you have ever played a game of checkers, been on a sports team, or been part of a club you have a good Agile foundation and IMO, can skip the whole Manifesto once you give it a good solid read and understand that there is a particular way of utilizing skills you learned in kindergarten that will let you be accepted among those who claim they detest process yet yearn for guidance.
From utility came formality came handcuffs with traditional IT PM. Let’s do all we can to avoid this and maybe stop calling it Agile. Just call it building software.
I am on a project now where if I were to try to inject full-blown Scrum, I would fail miserably – and not because of the Team. I would fail because what they do work well enough and the adoption of a new method is often seen as pure overhead with associated risk by the people who give the nod. In many cases, this is not incorrect or erroneous or due to lack of education. It is audacious to assume anyone knows a business better than the business owner who has dialog with people he or she trusts (domain experts) within the organization.
Still, day to day we are Agile. And we are getting things done because of the communication and the dialogs between the people who actually even go up and down stairs to get face time. We have become lazy in IT. We want frameworks for everything. Technical debt is not limited to hardware or code. It also applies to behavior.
Best,
Josh Milane
I am colorblind, so yeah, that’s a tree in the bottom left.
It helps to question yourself now and again. I did. This is interesting to me, and I am not too proud to say I neglected to give this a good hard look until fairly recently when it occurred to me that Phases can be, to some extent, compartmentalized and simultaneously co-dependent.
Directly from a PMI-affiliated content page with a bunch of worthwhile reading:
I really wonder if this is saying that 80 something percent of IT professionals are running Scrum, because I would have a hard time believing that, but regardless of the context the statement itself is noteworthy. A lot of the “Scrum” responses are probably Scrum-ish (iterative or having standups most likely) and TDD can reside within Scrum or Iterative, so it isn’t a knockout punch graph but I still like it. Today.
Best,
Josh
Hi,
Something occurred to me today while trying to do an exercise that I didn’t have time to do and will not have time to do tonight. Those things bother me, but little visual metephors are nice and at least I got one of them.
We have lots of little “exceptions” in the world of language and science. “I after E” is a rule, of course, except after “C” and blah blah “neighbor and weigh”. That is just one. And at one point leopards were jungle creatures until they found one in the snow and said, oh, that’s a “snow leopard”. We adapt as wel go along, more so the further we get from math, which is one gigantic tautology with both sides of the equals sign (or in language, the “is”) are the same exact thing.
SDLC methodologies are not close to math. They involve complex ideas (words, thoughts) that even when defined have a context, an environment, and a value.
Remember years ago I was writing about PMI and phases? Sure you do. Yes you do. Okay, well I did. I made this sassy little picture:
And then I gave a whole bunch of artifacts as examples:
And I was thinking, Sprints are obviously a different animal from the above, but the iteration is common. I get the impulse to say, “well, a spike is not really a backlog item but it kind of is, so let’s call it something special and make an exception.” This is commonplace. I would suggest taking a step back, maybe?
If you took all the stuff that Scrum calls “spikes” and all the stuff that people say don’t really fit in a Sprint such as political or organizational change, fact-finding missions, hardware setup, etc etc, and consider them along with the backlog in a Sprint planning session, then the first model of outputs driving inputs holds. In fact, even without applying it wholistically, inputs in Scrum and Agile still drive outputs and vice versa. It is about responding to change, and responding in general.
Kinda neat at this moment. Maybe not a big deal, but I can see two schools of thought merging here in a really obvious way that never occurred to be as vividly before. It is a bit embarassing, I suppose. Still, I bare my soul to you, Dear Reader. A Sprint need not be limited to tasks or stories. Really, I don’t know if it *ever* is… no matter how cut and dry the backlog seems. There is always churn in the background, and actions have reactions.
Best,
Josh
Artsy today
(that’s a 22″ bicep… Arnold won the Olympia with ~21″ biceps – you know how we do?!!)
Not having a tablet has limited my ability to convey ideas.
That will all change shortly. Also, my book project is officially stalled because I need to work more billable hours. 
Doodles are coming. Cool doodles. Workflow doodles that make fun of workflow doodles. Doodles that will make some people upset and some smile. Doodles. By nature, they are informal. Stay tuned… I am excited.
Also, a new project landed in my lap that has been taking some seriously unexpected time. I will not tweet this update, but for those who do read the blog (there is 120 or so subscribed to my feed!) I wanted to give an update because I have that illusion that people care about what I say and want to know where I am.
BTW – CMMI is a gauge, a guide, a more or less academic set of guidelines that originated with the United States Government. It is not something to be emulated, just a mirror to view your organization. These efforts for CMMI for Agile are extraordinary and I don’t know how to say it, but you can imagine how I feel about it, maybe.
Feeling sassy today.
Check out this really slick graphic that I did not do (credit goes to Sarah Chong) depicting Social Media demographics. No idea how they got the data, but it looks slick. We dig slick.
Best,
Josh
Cue the Unsolved Mysteries Music….. UPDATE!
Thanks to Laura, who is practically gifting a brand new tablet to the MiT Team (right now, just me). When she has a site, I will link to her, but for now the world will have to wait for her design and advertising talents. She is busy. Doing stuff.
It didn’t, but it did allow me to apply for the CSP, which has substantive value and has me jazzed a bit. I will likely be kissing the Scrum Alliance‘s bum for the next few months at least while they evaluate my application.
I did get my own link: http://www.scrumalliance.org/profiles/86036-joshua-milane and web pages about me are almost always very cool.
Again, thanks to BigVisible for demonstrating the Agile tenets through their actions, even when nobody is watching.
I have to also give a big shout out to the Agile Alliance, and I will remain an Agile proponent above all else (I mean, besides my wife, pizza, and some other things).
Best,
Josh
I have to admit I do not fully understand the reason that I care so much about, of all things, the SDLC. I care more about building software than I care about Global Warming, Shamu, or almost anything besides family and trying to get big. There are a couple of potential reasons for this, and I want to list them not so you or I understand, but so the reason I have become an evangelist without a sponsor can be brought to light. It is a selfish post. Maybe you will have thoughts about it. Maybe they will be “dang this kid is a mess” or “boy, we need to hire him ASAP.” That is up to you.
1. Dad said to find out what you are better than other people at, and consider it as a career. He actually said something slightly different, but you don’t know Dad so you would not understand him as it reads.
2. The SDLC is what delivers software;
2a. Software can keep track of inventory or pay bills, but it can also bring hope to the hopeless and health to the sick. It can do real good, and the SDLC drives the delivery of all these little bricks that will build that world our children will live in.
3. My career has followed a path much like a river follows the landscape (or, if you like Hendrix quotes, like the Moon loves the Great Blue Sea). It evolved naturally, took on momentum, and I did not set a goal but instead chose a direction that would bring me closer to where I wanted to be, even though I could not fully articulate where I wanted to be. I did not choose to be this weird half PM half SDLC half Generalist person. I’d have been better off sticking with VB back in the 90′s and updating my MS skills along the way so I could present myself as a Technical Lead with crazy Visual Studio skills and mastery of all things MS. I’d be better off in regard to the availability of contracts where there is a very quantitative measure, at least. For me, that is not enough.
4. I react on a visceral level to fraudulent or insincere and profit-motivated actions in the Agile arena. This is probably a result of the aforementioned.
5. I was a philosophy major, and see no use in that which cannot be applied except to allow those who want to engage in cerebral debate that very luxury. I have not time for luxury, with so much work to do. We want to change the world here at MiT Consultants.
6. I love people who care about what they do, and the SDLC helps me help them. At the end of the day, I have made absurd amounts of money and felt good about a number, but I have also helped a kid in a really bad part of Boston find a job, and felt good about life. Huge difference. Agile and not just Scrum is simply the realization that the SDLC is a process unlike others and where change is expected, you must check in often. It is why babies are not left alone for days at a time; they need to be assessed. Hungry? Thirsty? Whatever else babies need too – I do not have any yet. I think they need like, hugs and stuff as well.
7. I abhor thieves and frauds, as stated, and the proper SDLC ensures a transparency that makes perpetrating something I consider criminal and other consider “business” near impossible. I have not always been an Angel. I will not lie. However, my word has always been good and I have never broken a promise. I also have always done what I thought was right, in my chest, regardless of the process’ dictum. Of course, first you try to change the process or rule, but failing that I simply will not tell a Client that “you have to pay 50 percent more if you want it to work with Internet Explorer; we never discussed that and it is not in the SOW.” Oh yeah – there are companies that do that. I worked for one. It still makes me stick to my stomach. I introduced informed estimates (which slowed down the estimate process) and Management was displeased until we started landing more projects despite submitting fewer bids. I abhor sloppiness and selfishness. I do so in a very selfish way.
8. OO GUI tools enabled iterative development and “Agility” during the Development Phase by breaking what was lines and lines of code into encapsulated and re-visitable, refactorable, replaceable components. PowerBuilder was a leader in the mid 90′s. They had the Data Window. I was part of that, and thought it was awesome. We did JAD sessions before anyone was talking about Agile. Agile is not some shiny new thing with infomercials. It is substantive. Before it was applied to development, people were using iterations. If you have ever drawn up a legal contract, you are familiar with documentation iterations and collaboration within a team environment.
There are more reasons, but that is enough.
I was recently in an interview when someone told me “you seem very sure of yourself. Is that ever a problem?” This was a Sr. VP asking me, so I wanted to be clear on what he was suggesting. I asked if he meant I come across as cocky. He said no. I then explained that I love to be wrong, and I love to be the dumbest person in the room. There is no one right answer. Look at my blog. Back in 2007 I was saying things with utter and rabid conviction that I would tear apart now like Mikey the Wonder Dog tears apart vitually every toy meant for “normal dogs.” I don’t take those posts down and try to instill some false sense of knowing the right answer all along. When I, personally, learn through experience or teaching, I learn it more “deeply” than if I read it and believe it. I digest it, and like a vitamin that I am deficient in, it is made part of the organism. The delivery method. Part SDLC, part Practitioner.
Fact: People don’t like change.
Fact: People like it when change is their idea much better than when it is imposed.
Fact: People want to do well and feel good.
Fact: Dictum is the opposite of adoption.
Fact: People are what software is all about. Even with MDA and RDF (support RDF please! And Stop. Trusting. Google. SERIOUSLY! (Great video, thank you Mr. Olivieri).
Start working WITH impartial standards) – it is ultimately about people. Stop trusting “experts” and become an expert. Nobody knows what you do like you do, and you can test expert theories, would be negligent not to, probabbly, but ultimately it is your (our) responsibility to take ownership. If I am speaking to a President of a 500MM dollar corporation, they are eyes and a brain with motivations and a mind that I have free access to. Why introduce bologna into something so powerful?
I don’t mean the bologna sandwich. A sandwich can make a lot of people really like you. It is how I got Lara to marry me. Romance at the Deli. I am quite the courtship artist. Ask her 
So here is another place I will contradict myself. I got into a bit of a beef with several Twitter folks (Twits) about the fact that they were “Agile Coaches” teaching Scrum. My reasoning was that Scrum is a process, and the Agile Manifesto expresses the need for people before process. In other words, no one process is best for all teams.
I still agree with that, but have thought about it. Even writing the Agile Manifesto was a *process*. Scrum happens to be very digestible and it sets guidelines for transition to Agile or refining of Agile/Scrum technique. It is bright and shiny and there are certificates that lend it authority and it makes sense to start with Scrum – but accompanied with the basic Agile tenets and the flexibility to introduce concepts like Kanban if the team reveals itself to be more likely to adopt it. Here we have processes and people, and the people are informing the processes, which in turn provide guidance or best practices to the people. It becomes academic and about semantics. Scrum is ready to go. XP is not as much. Kanban is really super cool to ME, but makes other people stare with that blank look. I think it is because I learned to be Agile even when working construction, then learned it as it applies to software in form of Scrum, and can see the value streams in the process through the eyes of a non-technical person, a technical person, and a change facilitator. This makes me that aforementioned Generalist, but is also pretty empowering. Basically, I want you and your team to have success. I want software to change the world. I want to be a part of that amazing movement where a glimmer in the eye of an entrepreneur becomes an applications with a million users. That is magical. My discipline is facilitating change and manifesting the abstract as real, repeatable, value-filled brick to build that future my kids will live in. In software, we have enormous responsibility. We must protect technology from big money lobbying and marketing and encourage the community to sing We Are the World and get stuff done. Get it done. Feeling good about yourself and your career will follow from getting it done.
Bless you, and thanks for your time today. It is a gorgeous 72 degrees here dead in the middle of Providence and Boston, and I am going to be changing my entire business model, inspired by the sun. I know which way to go. I know which way I need to go. And, more importantly, I know how to help you. Stay tuned, please.
Best Regards, and if you ride motorcycles, please remember it isn’t you that you have to worry about. It is the other guy/gal who is bopping along to The Cheeky Girls and driving like an idiot.
The Cheeky Girls will make you smile. Or, you will lose all respect for me. Click at your own risk. Not obscene, but they say the word “bum” a couple times and some of you are tightasses.
Josh Milane
