Author Archive

Constant improvement is a Team Sport

November 13, 2009 · Filed under Point2 - Process and People · Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

We focus pretty heavily on constant improvement here at Point2.  Improving our company, improving our departments, improving our teams, as well as individual improvement.  There are many things that we do well at the team and department levels, but they don’t always filter all the way down to the individual level.

The first thing to recognize is that while the desire to improve is a great first step, it doesn’t amount to anything unless you translate that desire in to action.  There are many different ways to do this, so i’m just going to stick with my favorites at the moment.  I generally hear people give the advice that you should write down your goals because it increases the likelihood that you will follow through.  Writing it down is a good first step, it forces you to accurately articulate what you are trying to do.  However, just writing it down isn’t enough motivation if you ask me.  If you really want to make the improvement, you need to tell people what you’re trying to do.

Trust your peers. They care about you and your improvement!  (if they don’t, find a new job!)  Telling your peers what you are currently trying to improve on will greatly increase your chances of success for two primary reasons.

The first reason is simply that you won’t want to let your peers down.  When you tell your team that you are trying to achieve a goal, they want to see you achieve it.  If you work on a great team that promotes improvement, you’re team now has a vested interest in seeing you make your desired improvements and reach your goals.  You’ll be much less likely to give up or procrastinate while they’re watching your progress.

This leads directly to the second reason telling your peers about your desired improvements and goals is beneficial.  As I said, they care about your improvement, and they have a vested interest in seeing you succeed, so they will HELP YOU.  All too often, people try to make improvements and reach goals in a vacuum.  You work for the team, let the team also work for you.

There is no medal or gold star for making an improvement solo without any outside help.

By: Chris Dagenais

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Why don’t people like my ideas?!

June 9, 2009 · Filed under Point2 - Process and People · Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

frustration1 Have you found yourself asking that question?  I’m sure many developers have, although this topic applies universally to anybody in any profession (or personal life for that matter).

http://agileshoptalk.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/why-dont-people-like-my-ideas/

By: Chris Dagenais

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Failing Should Be Easy

May 14, 2009 · Filed under Point2 - Process and People, Point2 - Technical · Tagged , , , ,

failSounds kind of crazy doesn’t it?  Why would you want failing to be easy?  There’s actually a pretty simple explanation.

http://agileshoptalk.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/failing-should-be-easy/

By: Chris Dagenais

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Overview: Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky (Part 2)

May 5, 2009 · Filed under Point2 - Technical · Tagged , , , ,

herecomeseverybody Part 2.

In part 1 I focused mainly on some of the changes to how things can get done with the new tools at our disposal.  In Part 2 I will talk about some of the fundamental paradigm shifts that are happening because of those tools.

http://agileshoptalk.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/overview-here-comes-everybody-by-clay-shirky-part-2/

By: Chris Dagenais

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Overview: Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky (Part 1)

April 28, 2009 · Filed under Point2 - Technical · Tagged , , , ,

herecomeseverybody Part 1.

I started reading this book because I’ve always been interested in people’s behavior, and in particular how that behavior is modified when people are in groups.  I’ve read some of Clay Shirky’s work previously and have always found it very interesting and well thought out, although usually it is a bit long winded.

Here I’ll overview a few of the main concepts that Clay discusses in the book that I found the most interesting and what my thoughts were on them.

http://agileshoptalk.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/overview-here-comes-everybody-by-clay-shirky-part-1/

By: Chris Dagenais

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Avoid the Jack of all Trades trap

April 12, 2009 · Filed under Point2 - Technical · Tagged , , , , , , , ,

focus

Key ingredients to success and career growth, at least the two on my mind right now, are focus and determination.  Why are these things important?  I’ll tell you why, because when most people are asked how to be successful, focus and determination will probably slip off their tongue, however if you were to actually observe them at work and in their personal life, you would most likely see a lack of one or both of these.

Lets start with determination as it seems more obvious.  Determination isn’t really something in and of itself, it’s more of a measurement of what lengths you are willing to go to in order to achieve your goals.  So being very determined to accomplish something really just means you are willing to do certain things to get there, which usually will consist of things like:

  • Practicing
  • Researching
  • Learning
  • Looking for teaching/coaching
  • Anything else that makes sense.

Many people may say they are determined to accomplish something, but what they really mean is they really wish they could just wake up tomorrow and be at their destination.  That’s an exaggeration for most people, but for many it’s somewhere between that and what’s actually required to reach their goals.

Focus on the other hand is something that most people probably don’t think about enough.  Determination by itself is not good enough.  The problem is that when your goals are to become an expert at anything, no matter how determined you are you won’t be able to accomplish that goal without focusing on it.  You’ll need to cut out distractions, and stop trying to focus on improving skills that are not related to the skill you wish to be an expert at.  There is an old saying you’ve probably heard before “Jack of all trades, master of none”.  It’s relevant in all industries, and IT trades are definitely no exception.  I’d say it may be worse in IT but that wouldn’t really be an informed opinion so i won’t make any bets on it.

So, if you take my word for it, lack of focus will result in a jack of all trades.  To be more specific, a lack of refocusing will result in a jack of all trades.  The reason for that is because at the beginning of your career you won’t know what you want to focus on besides becoming a better developer, business analyst, sys admin etc.  Sticking to the development track because it’s what I’m most familiar with, you’ll initially need to focus on how programming works, basic skills related to the industry, and probably try to get a basic level of knowledge on as many things as possible.

So now you’re done school and ready for your first job.  You start out by soaking up as much information as possible, learning everything you can.  You learn about things like object oriented design, service oriented architecture, domain driven design, database design and performance tuning etc.

Skip forward 3 or 4 years, you’re quite competent in every aspect of your job, you’re a go to guy for your team, you can become competent at a new skill in short order at the drop of a dime.  You have basically reached the epitome of most peoples career – broad competence with the ability to pick up new basic skills quickly.

Now you’re faced with the decision everybody in the industry runs up against, and most people don’t even realize it.  Do I want to keep getting better, and if so, how?  The answer to the first question is a factor of determination.  How much are you willing to do in order to keep getting better?  The answer to the second question is focus.  Up until now in your career you’ve enjoyed getting better at everything, making constant improvement in everything.  Bad news – that’s not going to last forever.  You’re going to have to pick a skill, or subset of skills and focus on improving those skills.  The side effect of this is that you’re going to have to “defocus” on all skills not related to the ones you’ve chosen to focus on.  It’s a large hurdle for most people to jump because it’s easy to understand but hard to accept and work with.

This will be a turning point in your career.  You’ll either accept the hurdle and jump over it, taking a turn down the road to becoming highly skilled in narrowly focused areas, or else you can understand the hurdle but not choose to jump it (lack of determination) and decide to take the easy path which unfortunately leads to the dead end of being average, the jack of all trades trap.

So to sum up the thought, you’re going to continue to refocus your skills throughout your career.  Every so often you will zoom in on a new area that you’ll specialize in.  Once you have reached a certain level in those skills you’ll zoom in your focus again on yet another area to become more specialized in.  Only you can decide when you’ve focused enough.  The less focused you are the more skills you’ll be able to maintain a specific skill level at, at the expense of increasing that skill level.  At some point the only way to increase skill in some area you’re interested in will be to defocus on another skill and allow your ability in that area to lapse.

Focus and determination.  How determined are you to reach your goals?  Determined enough to allow your skills in something you used to be good at to lapse?  Willing to not be the go to guy for a laundry list of skills?  How many are you willing to drop, how much are you willing to work at the ones you’re going to focus on?  Keep asking yourself this question, it will play a key role in your career development.

By: Chris Dagenais

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Communication is harder than you think

March 31, 2009 · Filed under Point2 - Technical · Tagged , , , , ,

TelegraphCommunication, what does that really mean?  Conveying ideas, opinions, directions to another person.  That sounds like a good starting point to me.  Two people talking to each other, or is it?  Communication has been possible in many forms throughout history.  Cavemen writing on cave walls, lighting fires on watch towers to send a danger signal faster than any enemy could travel, music, and finally the written word.  All of these serve a single purpose, to transfer a message to another person.  Other differences can be identified between transfers that occur on a one to one format, and others that occur in a one to many format.

New forms of communication spring up every day, but none of them serve any kind of new purpose.  They all fulfill the same function, just in a new way.  Blogs are a one to many form of communication, just like newspapers or the pictures on a cave wall.  They intend to take the thoughts of one person and make them available for others.  New technology simply broadens the audience and shortens the delivery time.  Email is a letter that you can send without the latency of the post office, and with the added ability of being able to send to multiple recipients.

So with all these advances in technology giving us newer and newer forms of communication, why is it still so hard?  Why do people still so often misunderstand what we are trying to say?  It would seem that as communication gets easier, understanding what is meant gets harder.  Why is that?

Perhaps as the cost of communication approaches zero, so does our respect for it.  For example sending a telegraph in the early 1900’s was not easy and probably not cheap.  When somebody wanted to send one, I would presume they would put quite a lot of thought in to the words they used because they were doing something important.  Specifically, they would not be taking what they were doing for granted.

Today, it’s quite easy to take communication for granted.  If I want to send an email to another person, I don’t think twice about it.  I just quickly type out what I want to say and fire it off at little or no cost to me personally.  This blog post itself is being made at little cost to myself, although with more thought being put in than the average email would receive.

So why do we take easy forms of communication for granted?  It could simply be a matter of quantity over quality.  With the amount of communication we have to deal with every day, we simply don’t have time to give each individual communication event during our day as much attention as we’d like to.  Imagine how much time it would take if you put enough thought in to each communication you had every day to carefully pick your words and do everything you could to ensure your message was transmitted clearly.  My guess is you wouldn’t have time for anything else.

What can you do to help mitigate these issues?  The first thing you need to realize is that “perception is reality”.  It doesn’t matter what message you intend to convey, the only thing that matters is what message is received.  If you realize that, you are well on your way to improving your communication skills.  It is important to think about how others are going to interpret what you are saying.  There are a few things you can do that aren’t very hard.  Firstly try to focus on quality instead of quantity.  Pick the most important communications to participate in and make sure you take the time to think about what you are saying with special attention paid to what the receiving parties will be likely to interpret it as.  Second, prefer methods of expression that include multiple simultaneous messages.  When you send an email, you are sending only a single message, the message contained in the words.  When you talk to a person face to face, you are sending the message in the words as well as the message included in your tone, body language, volume, etc.  The more streams you can send your message in, the less likely the message will be interpreted incorrectly.

The next time you are communicating with somebody, think about the message you’re sending, and do what you can to make sure it is received as you intended it.  You might be surprised how big of a difference it will make.

I welcome any discussion on this topic as it’s of great interest to me, and one that doesn’t get nearly enough attention.

By: Chris Dagenais

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BCIT Career Fair

March 24, 2009 · Filed under Point2 - Technical · Tagged , , , , , ,

Today Joel and I spent the day in Vancouver at the BCIT Career Fair.

“We don’t hire smart people so we can tell them how to do their job, we hire smart people so they can tell us what the best way is to get the job done .”

That was my catch line that I came up with this morning for describing Point2’s development philosophy relating to Agile.  It seems like a punchy and yet very accurate way to describe how things work at Point2.  It invariably was followed by some chuckling after the first half, and then a look of intense interest after the last half.

The BCIT career fair is a fairly large event with 115 companies participating from a wide variety of fields ranging everywhere from healthcare providers, RCMP, to IT and Software Development.

We got out booth set up this morning which was fairly considerable to many of the other larger companies that were attending the event.

BCIT Booth

BCIT Booth

The first half hour or so of the event was reasonable with a person coming by to talk to us every couple minutes.  It turns out that there are a few fairly specific IT type courses at BCIT, and some of them matched up great with the requirements for our systems administrator positions we’re currently advertising for.  By the time the career fair had been going for an hour we were flooded by a constant deluge of students from these programs asking us “hey are you the IT guys so and so told us about?!”.  We literally had a line up of people waiting to talk to us for the entire day.  Whenever we finished talking to one person, 2 more were in line waiting.

So what did we learn by attending this career fair?  A few things stand out for me as quite obvious:

  1. Even in Vancouver competing with Vancouver IT companies, our company is set apart from the competition because of our development practices.  Agile and XP practices are very attractive to young developers and the fun relaxed atmosphere of our company helps a lot as well.
  2. Even though Agile and XP are nothing new, most people in school still haven’t heard of them, however once explained to them, they love the concept and want to be part of a company that uses them.
  3. Most people still have not heard of pair programming or TDD.
    Most people love the idea of pair programming, especially when combined with Scrum team practices.
  4. There are FAR more specific programs available with regards to systems administration and web development than there were when I went to school.  There are courses that teach web development that cover java, C#, ajax, asp.net, css, webservices etc etc.  Nothing like that existed 10 years ago.  It’s great to see.
  5. The market for jobs in Vancouver is getting dry.  We had many people talk to us who didn’t care where they had to move to find work, they just wanted work.
  6. There were way more women than I expected showing interest in both the systems administrator role and the software developer roles.  I’m interviewing two women tomorrow for positions that both seem promising.
  7. Moving to Saskatoon is not as hard of a sell as we thought it would be.  I would say that about 10% rejected the idea outright, 40% were open to it but not sure, and 50% said it was no problem and they would move to wherever they could find a good job at a good company.  The guy running the booth across from us said that we should be on the City of Saskatoon payroll for all the recruiting we were doing for the city, are you listening Don Atchinson? :)

Those are just off the top of my head.  There are other thoughts i’ll be able to put together later once i have more time to think about it.

So programs from BCIT, I can’t believe how many are available.  CSIT seemed to be the most common one from the people we talked to.  It turned out that our job description for a System Administrator pretty much matched line for line the curriculum for their course so most of those students were quite excited.  You’ll have to look for yourself at the wide variety of things offered as the list is quite extensive.  BCIT Computer Courses Offered

Tomorrow will be another exhausting day.  I managed to line up 7 interviews for developers tomorrow that i’ll be conducting in our Vancouver office.  Joel has 4 interviews for sysadmins as well.  It’s obvious to both of us that there’s a lot of talent in Vancouver, we just need to move some of it east :) Opening a Vancouver development office is starting to look more and more attractive….  maybe some day.

By: Chris Dagenais

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