A. Life Challenges and Systems

Your life continuously presents new challenges. And your success directly depends on your ability to meet these challenges. You can choose various approaches – react on problems as they come, appeal to supernatural forces or seek for advise.

But how many times

• you didn’t understand why thing happen and what to do
• you found that reality and challenges are more complex than they seem
• your solutions create new problems and make things worse

Welcome to the messy world of complex systems that encompass your life and compose our Universe.

1. You can be the master of your life if you can understand and influence systems involved in your challenges. That means that you should become the Master of Systems Thinking.

Seasoned project managers will tell that delivery of software is result of many trade offs. The main trade off is between Time (when project will finish) and Scope (how much will be done). This post will show that using right tools you could gain improvement for both variables.

While it is possible to create orderly step-by-step process for increasing productivity of software teams, it will never be ideal – too many variations and situations will hinder it usefulness. I believe in set of useful tool that could be combined to craft custom optimal solution.

Strategies

There are several strategies that lead to increase in productivity – how many units of scope software team can produce within fixed time.

1. Increase Capacity (Capacity) - increase capacity by hiring more people or increasing work hours
   • productivity is increased as result of more resources and hours available
2. Improve Value Stream (Value) - increase added business value on each step and reduce waste and overhead
   • productivity is increased as result of optimized delivery of value
3. Adaptat to Reality  (Adaptation)- learn from practice and mistakes, validation of ideas by reality, adapt to changing situation
   • productivity increased as result of early corrections and improving how things are done
4. Empower Individuals (Individuals) - boost people knowledge, skills, morale and focus
   • productivity is increased as result of higher individual performance and motivation
5. Enhance Communication (Communication) - improve communication and mutual understanding inside and outside of the team
   • productivity is increased as result of availability of necessary information, clarity of what should be done and exchange of ideas for implementation
6. Organize Better (Organization) –  structure team and assign roles for better coordination and decision making
   • productivity is increased as result of better decisions and focus on important areas
7. Expand Expertise (Expertise) - increase range of skills and services offered by team
   • productivity is increased as result of better execution of necessary project activities
8. Scale Externally (Externality) – outsourcing and involvement of external communities
   • productivity is increased as result of involvement of more people outside of team
9. Tame Complexity (Design) – manage complexity and provide simple and well designed solutions
   • productivity is increased as result of reducing complexity burden on software development
10. Preserve Quality (Quality) – use defensive tactics to ensure high quality
    • productivity is increased as result of preventing system flaws and reduced effort to fix bugs

• People-oriented – people are the creators of software and have major effect on output
• Process-oriented – the way how people work has significant impact on outcome
• Development-oriented – development practices and approach to the system implementation matters a lot

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in·no·va·tion – introduction of new things or methods
im·i·ta·tion – the copying of patterns of activity and thought of other groups or individuals
in·te·gra·tion – an act of combining into an integral whole.

What is the best strategy for an effective developer – innovation, imitation or integration? Should you introduce new creative solutions, adapt other people ideas or just integrate existing components?

Software Development is an exciting intellectual endeavor without physical barriers. It is easy to start innovating – come up with new ideas and quickly submerge into their implementation. And I don’t mean here fundamental breakthroughs. I consider as innovation building of any non-trivial solution that is not directly stemmed from Google search results, development resources or available examples. And certainly, I pose the dilemma – innovate or not innovate – to skillful developers who are quite capable to innovate and who enjoy meaningful creative work.

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“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen” – John Steinbeck

• Improving relationship
• Flying to space to be the first man on Mars
• Overweighting and health problems
• Winning bodybuilding or beauty contest.
• Procrastination
• Learning new technology
• Making more money
• Building next Facebook or Twitter
• Raising kids
• Boosting career growth
• Becoming Olympic champion or billionaire
• Making the world a better place
• Planning a dream vacation
• Seeking for happiness…

We often are inconsistent in solving problems and cannot find a good solution. This post focus on effective and creative problem solving by offering systematic approach and wide range of techniques.

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cre·a·tiv·i·ty -the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations

Creativity can be developed and improved. Here is my Theory of Creativity in 3 parts

1. Prepared Mind – prepare your mind to be creative
2. Right challenges – know what challenges you should embrace now
3. Creative ideas – use powerful techniques to get new ideas

I. Prepared Mind

What should be the qualities of the mind to get great ideas and solve complex problems?

1. Knowledgeable - know problem domain and other fields that can inspire new ideas
2. Flexible - able to vary and adapt the ways of thinking
3. Forceful - eager and resolute to find a solution
4. Easy - clear and free from stress and fear
5. Playful - can surprise and break rules
6. Intuitive - come up with ideas without thinking and reasoning

You have 2 options to communicate your ideas:

Why should a programmer care about communicating ideas to other people?

It is true, the primary job of a programmer is to feed computers with ideas. But you cannot quietly hide behind a computer forever. You have to deal with other people:

Jason Cohen posted an interesting and provocative argument against Release Early, Release Often principle followed by many agile teams.

His main points:

• Ideas. The best ideas are not coming from users and they are bad in providing feedback (iPod). So, there is no point to release early to get their opinion and ideas.
• Features. Minimal early set of features could be unattractive for majority of users and will turn them down for future use (Apple Newton)
• Quality. A buggy and unpolished product could ruin your reputations
• Architecture. An incorrect initial architecture creates waste and serious problems down the road (Netscape, Twitter)

Therefore, Jason against releasing early and often. I don’t agree.

My answer: it depends!

Evolution is the process of small frequent changes to improve and adapt to environment.

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