Hamstaa!

I was having lunch with Adrian recently and we were talking about how people work with email. One thing he said made me stop and think about the different ways people treat email and the potential problems that can occur if they aren't aware of the differences.

What he said was, "e-mail is a conversation, not a considered media".

Now some people treat e-mail as a "considered media", I must admit I'm one of them. When I put together either a response to an e-mail or create a new email, I spend time crafting it and reviewing it before I send it. In a few cases, the people I send them too are "email conversationalists" and so I regularly get short responses that don't always address my entire e-mail. 

This reminded me of the Myers-Briggs "E" versus "I" categorisation and the confusion that can occur when they interact unknowingly.

'E' types tend to think by talking, whereas 'I' people tend to think then speak. As such, when an 'E' is talking to an 'I', the 'E' is looking for the type of feedback they would give that they understand. As the 'I' internalises this feedback, it is possible for the 'E' to continue way past the point the 'I' understood, causing frustration on both behalfs.

Understanding this makes for significantly more useful conversations between the two types.

So what happens when a person who treats email as a considered media gets a quick response from someone who doesn't. Well it's possible they read more into the response than was intended and hence draw the wrong conclusions. Alternatively, they get frustrated that not all of their questions were answered.

Equally, the other party can get frustrated with the "long" email and so skims, possibly missing important information or questions.

Next time you receive an email, consider the approach the person sending it may have taken and engage in the conversation appropriately.

In the final session of the ACS "Growing Team Leaders" course I started back in May was held last week, we attended a breakfast with some guest presenters giving insight into leadership. We heard from

• Peter Grant, CIO of Queensland Health
• Anne-Marie Birkill, CEO of ILAB
• John Puttick, Chairman of GBST Holdings

As seen in so many other parts of this series, the common theme was the value of people and of course how to inspire them to greatness.

Peter talked about his, now departed, mentor and friend, the university lecturer who fired him with passion for IT. Not only did his mentor introduce him the world of IT, but also taught him the value of being skilled in all areas, not just those you find interesting.

Anne-Marie talked about taking a leadership role in the (ICT) community by giving something back to it. It was interesting to hear, not only from a successful woman¹ and how she got there, but from someone who is in a field not directly involved in IT.

Finally John, talked about his early years and the power of IT in business. John as part of Software Queensland is partly responsible for the creation of the ACS course.

While each presenter had some great things to say, for me, it was Peters comments that spoke to me the most. Peter struck me as a person who understands fully the value of people and providing them with the tools necessary to do great things.

After the breakfast, we convened once more for a final wrap up. This finished with everyone committing to doing something towards growing their leadership skills. For me, I've chosen to embrace the opportunity of representing Ephox at Software Queensland and to work with our local Universities in growing the numbers of students studying ICT.

Discussions with the people at my table indicated that they had all taken something valuable away from the course. It's been an interesting and insightful series, with some very useful gems of knowledge. I'm very glad to have been a part of it.

1 – We need far more women in IT.↩

No, the Ephox Talking Car isn't some new form of Kitt from Knight Rider … showing my age there. The Talking Car is a token we are using during our stand-ups to not only indicate who's turn it is to speak, but to remind the speaker of what the 3 main points to discuss are.

As I mentioned in my recent post on "XP Practice Champions", in our first XP Adoption review we identified stand-ups as a practice to focus on and improve. The introduction of the "Talking Car" was one of the ways we focussed on improving stand-ups. So how is it used? In our case, the car is tossed to someone randomly, that person then talks about the following What they did yesterday What they plan to do today Any issues before tossing it to someone else in the group.

As part of our continuous improvement, we recently reviewed our stand-up and decided it needed to be more story focussed. So the new list of topics are

1. Done Stories
2. Not Done Stories
3. Today's Stories

With this list, we can address why a story wasn't completed, what we can do to complete it, advise the client of the delays and continue to communicate to the entire team what is being worked on. 

By focussing on successful story completion and communication of progress to the client  hopefully this will also help with our improvements to Weekly Iterations.

When we started having more people blogging, the first thing I did was create a blogging policy. I looked at a number of published policies from big and small companies to come up with the guidelines for Ephox. Basically it's all common sense, but a Blog Policy is a great way to ensure everyone is aware of the potential issues of blogging.

Adrian's recent post on EditLive! Dynamic being outed raised the question of how many points in our Blogging Policy were affected.

Point number 2, "Keep Secrets" seems to be the first one. The super secret project "EditLive! Dynamic" is discussed, albeit in no detail. (Bit hard when there isn't any)

Point number 3, "If in doubt, Ask" I know never happened as I'm still waiting for the "ask" part of the policy.

Finally, point number 7, "Think about the consequences" is the only one I'm sure he did follow as I'm sure Adrian was definitely aware of the consequences of his "tongue in cheek" post. He is "Chief Blogging Officer" after all

Ephox adopted eXtreme Programming (XP) at the beginning of 2006 when Doug joined the team. As part of our commitment to continuous improvement we have XP Adoption Reviews every few months. The aim of these is to review the XP practices with a view to rating our success with adoption of them. From this we choose 3 to focus on for the next few months.

In our first review, we identified Test Driven Development (TDD), Daily Stand-ups and Iteration Demos as the practices we would get the most value by focussing on.

To inject some fun into our practice focus, we introduced the "Talking Car"¹ for Stand-ups. For TDD one member of each team volunteered to be the TDD representative for the week, during the weekly retrospective. Their job was to remind the team during the stand-up that we were focussed on TDD. Finally, we made it the responsibility of the "client" to hold Iteration Demos to the business.

In our most recent XP review we have identified Root Cause Analysis, Planning Game and Weekly Iterations as the practices to focus on. We will continue to work on improving the previously identified practices, but we felt that as a team, we would gain the most value through the new practices.

The question is, how do we remind the team of our commitment to improving these practices?

Atlassian recently posted about their Agile Process and one thing they mentioned caught my attention. Chris explained that they "have practice champions for many of the more challenging practices".

I'm really interested in how we could use Practice Champions to help focus on and improve the 3 practices we have chosen. I'm hoping these champions can bring some fun and energy to the adoption process and galvanize the team behind improving some fundamental XP practices. 

1 – I'll explain the "talking car" in a future post.↩