Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Looking At An Impediment From A Value Perspective


#SridharPeddisetty #Agile #Scrum #Strategy #Organizational Strategy #Impediment #AgileBestPractices

The old Master instructed the unhappy young man to put a handful of salt in a glass of water and then asked him to drink it. "How does it taste?" the Master asked. "Awful," spat the apprentice. The Master chuckled and then asked the young man to take another handful of salt and put it in the lake. The two walked in silence to the nearby lake and when the apprentice swirled his handful of salt into the lake, the old man said, "Now drink from the lake." As the water dripped down the young man's chin, the Master asked, "How does it taste?" "Good!" remarked the apprentice. "Do you taste the salt?" asked the Master. "No," said the young man. The Master sat beside this troubled young man, took his hands, and said, "The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount we taste the 'pain' depends on the container we put it into. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things..... Stop being a glass. Become a lake!"

By definition an impediment is a hindrance or obstruction in doing something. From an Agile perspective, an impediment is anything that keeps a team from being productive or reduces the progress of a well functioning team to achieve its goals. Some root causes of an impediment include
  1. Lack of team cohesiveness 
  2. Lack of domain knowledge 
  3. Lack of technical skills
  4. Limitations to environment 
  5. Lack of tools  
  6. Lack of well defined processes or
  7. Lack of managerial or organizational buy-in  

More often, an Agile team spends a lot of time in trying to categorize the impediment, be it trying to classify it as a feature, epic, user story, user task, bug or technical debt. Not undermining the importance of classifying an impediment but while looking at an impediment, its important to view the impediment in the context of delivering value rather than spending too much of an effort in categorizing it. Just to reiterate, categorization of an impediment sometimes helps to discover new impediments so its important but remember that it is in the solutions to those impediments where you find innovative ideas for your team to provide more value. In other words, remind yourself that impediments could be viewed as the tasks that need to be completed for user stories and then the tasks could be prioritized for the value. If needed, impediments can be managed in an impediment register where they can be prioritized as needed. 

Summary
To summarize, focus more effort on solutions rather than categorization of impediments. So when faced with an impediment, enlarge your vision of looking at the impediment from the perspective of delivering value. 

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Monday, January 11, 2016

DevOps Is Essential For Faster To Market Services


#SridharPeddisetty #DevOps #Kanban #Strategy #Organizational Strategy #DevOpsStrategy #Agile

“If you can’t out-experiment and beat your competitors in time to market and agility, you are sunk. Features are always a gamble. If you’re lucky, ten percent will get the desired benefits. So the faster you can get those features to market and test them, the better off you’ll be. Incidentally, you also pay back the business faster for the use of capital, which means the business starts making money faster, too.” 
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

It is no longer enough for organizations to merely build and release a better product to stay ahead of competition but in today’s disruptive era, the need of the hour is to build and ship faster than everyone else. In order to meet the demands of time to market features, organizations have realized the necessity to be Agile and are having a paradigm shift in the way they build and ship software. Agile SDLC with continuous integration and rapid deployment have now become a de-facto standard. In my earlier post Kanban & DevOps - Forming A Perfect Alliance, I had shared how Kanban and DevOps combine together to help bring down the silos between Engineering and Operations teams. 
Former Cisco CEO, John Chambers in his last keynote strongly put it forward that 1/3rd of today’s businesses would not survive next 10 years. Startup companies are already disrupting long established business models and they are succeeding mainly because of their ability to faster to market services. 

How DevOps Is Essential For Faster To Market Services?
DevOps formulates collaboration of Operations and Engineering teams to achieve continuous delivery by participating together in the entire service delivery lifecycle. In my earlier post DevOps Need Collaboration To Succeed As A Practice, I had shared how by adapting to the culture of DevOps, an organization is not only focusing on agility but also on reliability by eliminating waste, identifying repeatable steps and automating those steps. DevOps is not just about technology disruption but is about transformative Organization and its ability to deliver value to the end consumer. Technology has become core for most businesses and is now an essential for their survival in a highly competitive space. Large enterprises have to be more nimble and the need of the hour is to move away from their large & complex interrelated legacy systems to a more Agile based environment with DevOps fueling the collaboration delivery setup.  
Summary
Early adopters of DevOps have seen a significant increase in their revenue, faster time-to-market and improved customer experience with their success depending on their ability to deliver a continuous flow of value from APIs, new mobile apps and software innovations.

Previous posts you might be interested in

Saturday, January 2, 2016

Lake Argentino Day Cruise, Argentina


#SridharPeddisetty, #Argentina, #Calafate, #PeritoMoreno, #Glacier, #GlacierNationalPark, #Travel, #PlacesToVisit, #PointsofInterest
Below snaps are of day cruise in Lake Argentino, visiting various glaciers and viewing some spectacular ice bergs. 

























Ushuaia, Argentina


#SridharPeddisetty, #Argentina, #Ushuaia, #SouthernMostCity, #EndOfWorldTrain, #Travel, #PlacesToVisit, #PointsofInterest

Below snaps are of Ushuaia in Argentina, which is the southern most city of the world