Guido Maliandi’s Blog

Last week we had a really interesting visit. Tobias Mayer came to our headquarters, where he acted as the facilitator for a series of agile workshops we hosted, organized by Agilar. On Friday he gave a talk in which he spoke about his personal experience as well as his vision on Scrum.

Then he kept speaking in an informal conversation, where I had the privilege of talking face-to-face with him.

Here are some concepts I found interesting about it. They cover some fundamental aspects of scrum, as well as some mindsets for effectively reaching the necessary creativity to succeed in complex environments such as working with emerging technologies.

• At first one might do some different, seemingly unrelated activities; then at some point in our life we experience an ‘aha’ moment, and we combine your passions into a task in which we unleash a large amount of creative energy.
• People neglect change, because it initially implies suffering, getting away of the ‘comfort zone’. For example, Tobias told us an example of a company making changes to its culture in order to implement scrum, which is an extremely complex process. He then said that in such cases, scrum can be applied, since scrum is effective for complex problems.
  (This diagram was inspired on Ken Schwaber’s book ‘Agile Project Management With Scrum‘ p5.)
• Adding constraints or rules can boost creativity to an unimaginable level; sometimes, changes must be done just to keep the spirit of change, keep the team alive (Idea from Martin Salias).
• If one can’t apply the traditional approach to complex/chaotic development processes, then we must redefine our approach, expectations, and mindsets, and we will increase our chances of succeeding. ‘If you can’t succeed, then redefine success‘.
• “Don’t sell scrum, do scrum; because scrum done well sells itself“.
• Scrum principles don’t transmit an answer itself, but rather a way of thinking than will lead us to reach our own answers. It gives us a set of rules, a framework, which we then implement in a different way, depending on the changing context and needs of the company where scrum is being implemented.
• Scrum divides complex problems in chunks, optimizes from the small.

Since here at Southworks we do work a lot with complex emerging technologies, it’s understandable that using Scrum helps us greatly increase our productivity and creativity in serving our customers’ to their highest expectations.

Now it’s quite clear that this book is worth reading. And, as Mariano Szklanny wisely said in his blog post:

Technology is a key part of culture, but technology on its own is not enough.

So it seems evident that reading a book that reflects our culture is a good idea. But why ‘The 7 Habits’?

Easy to work with

The very core mindset shared among Southies is to be easy to work with. This implies fundamentally an open communication flow, which results in a better understanding of the clients and partners’ needs in every stage of the business. As stated in of our values:

We desperately strive for understanding our customers and partners’ needs and for exceeding those needs and expectations by appealing to cutting-edge technology.

In order to achieve this, it’s important to seek first to understand and then to be understood. This way, before defining the guidelines for our activities, we focus on deeply understanding what the client really wants to be done; we take implicit assumptions as explicit quality requirements, and this is reassured by constant, fluent communication with the client.

Our people

Another point of coincidence with ‘The Seven Habits’ is the focus on people and relationships. A high level of teamwork allows us to benefit from creative cooperation to its highest degree: the performance of the team is considerably higher than the sum of the individuals’.

The fundament or basis of these synergistic contributions lay on the pride of workmanship (another important mindset we have), which guarantees that pursuing the integrity of every individual is a high priority.

Inside out

The fact that I have read this book as a part of my training reflects, in my opinion, an inside-out approach. In order to productively contribute to the company, first I must develop my personal and professional abilities; the company, then, develops itself constantly to serve the customers to their highest expectations. This is pursued with a long term, win-win mentality, keeping honesty as the center stone, which is what I think made Southworks reach where it is now.

I personally believe deeply in learning and constantly seeking improvement, so I’m relieved to find so many people who share this thought here!

Again, if you have any comment or suggestion about it, they’re highly appreciated~

Speaking of books that can change your life… I’ve just finished reading ‘The 7 Habits’, by Stephen Covey. Before actually starting to read the contents of the book, I took a quick glimpse at the chapters (I’m quite sure I’m not the only one who does that), read a few summaries, and then I knew it was going to change my views to a certain extent. To my great surprise, it ended up affecting me in a deeper way than I thought. But why?

What makes this book special?

Initially, the word effectiveness, understood as getting better results, suggested that the book would explain some methods or techniques shared among highly effective people, which is quite a recurrent subject in this kind of books (I mean, who doesn’t want to get better results?). Chapter names such as ‘Be Proactive‘, ‘Put First Things First’, ‘Synergize’ reinforced that idea. In fact, they sound like techniques, but they’re actually mindsets.

That is what makes this a great book. It doesn’t deal with task-specific superficial techniques, but it proposes a whole new paradigm of thought, based ultimately on the idea that even though you can’t always control external stimuli, you can decide how things affect you, and then decide how to respond, following your deeply instilled values.

I won’t make a summary of the whole book, since it’s already been done thousands of times (there’s a nice, brief summary on the second paragraph of this great post by Damian Schenkelman), and it would make this post larger than you and I would like it to be. Instead, I’d like to highlight some concepts I found throughout the book, which made the greatest impression on me.

Private Victory

Something I really like about this book is that it focuses on the long term, but with a particular approach. It says that if you dedicate enough time to important but not urgent things, you will develop a production capability that in the end, will have a great impact on your productivity, and will free you from the overwhelming pressure of important and urgent things, as these are mostly going to be taken care of beforehand. Managing the balance between production and production capability is a key ability to be effective in every task that can be done. By speaking of balance it assures that you don’t need to completely sacrifice short term productivity in order to achieve long term success.

This often involves knowing how to say no to unimportant matters; that is, in order to find time to do those vital important but not urgent things, you must abandon some unimportant activities. This seemingly difficult task needs two things: first, you have be sure what exactly is important for you, so your objectives must be clear to you; then, you must have the inner strength not to succumb to the temptation of doing unimportant things due to external pressure.

That is the general idea of the Private Victory, which is the key of achieving independence. But that’s not all that matters, as we live in an interdependent reality.

Public Victory

In order to benefit from the great results of effective, creative cooperation, one must first recognize the importance of relationships. Indeed, if you prioritize long term results, it’s a lot better to establish a lasting, mutually beneficial, trust-based relationship than to ‘force’ someone to do something by using techniques, recurring to your position, and so on.

In order to truly form this kind of relationships, one must understand other people before trying to make your point understood. This is absolutely essential, not only to foster fruitful interactions, but also to enrich your views with other people’s ideas and experiences. If you take the time to actually listen their ideas openly, instead of thinking only of what you’re going to answer, you’ll be surprised to find how many times this brings your thoughts to a higher level.

But being open usually leaves you in a vulnerable state, so you must be strong enough to face that risk. The source of both the strength required for that openness and the skills necessary to have effective relationships must be your integrity, and your inner sense of security and worth, which must come from inside, not from the ’social mirror’. People value that integrity, and if you try to bypass that by using techniques or something, they sense the duplicity and it’s impossible for them to trust you. Public victory is based on trust, cooperation and understanding, and as you imagine, it’s the key of achieving interdependence.

That is, basically, what I think the message this book communicates is about. In the following post I’ll explain how these ideas relate to the culture inside Southworks, and why I think I was given this book to read.

It’s fairly evident nowadays that software engineering is not a mechanical activity with only one possible outcome, but rather a creative process is implied as well.

With that in mind, it is expectable for the initial training process to be focused not only on the technical aspect of our formation as software developers, but also in the human aspect, as stated in Mariano Szklanny’s post. That is easily seen in the fact that the very first book I am beginning to read is “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” along with, of course, some technical programming books.

From what I’ve read of that book I can certainly say that it’s going to be helpful in both my professional and personal life. But what really does make a difference is that the technical and non-technical training is synergized as a whole integral training. There is no difference between them, as they are focused towards the same goal: quality in every aspect and stage of the process.

But, as Aristotle once said, “Quality is not an act, it is a habit”. And so, this approach isn’t followed only on the training process. The general work ambient is one of unobstructed information flow, open mindedness and a true desire to contribute. I can imagine it’s usual to have strict internal or external norms (such as ISO 9001), and to follow work methodologies (such as Scrum), but here the underlying source of the fulfillment of those standards are deeply instilled mindsets shared by everyone. The standards are guidelines and frameworks to channel the inner creativity and efficiency into productivity, rather than limits and minimum requirements. Again recurring to a quote, this time from Henry Ford, “Quality means doing it right when no one is looking“.

This, however, doesn’t necessarily imply that working here is easy. In fact, it really seems like you have to do twice the effort, because you are constantly working on a wider range of aspects, considering things most people usually don’t. But that’s the price of excellence, a price I gladly pay because I know I’m directing my efforts into the right direction.