Impact!

Here are some books that I liked recently

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford is an inspiring and amusing argument for experimentation as a key strategic technique for the modern age. The book is full of amazing accounts of big plans that turned into epic disasters, from 19th century imperial Russian failures to organise mining to US military attempts to control Iraqi insurgencies and the recent meltdown of the banking sector. Harford compares those failures with successes such as the Spitfire airplane and Google's internet domination, suggesting the solution in the form of a checklist:

• Variation: seek out new ideas and try new things
• Survivability: try new things out at a scale where failure is survivable
• Selection: seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along

Harford calls this checklist the Palchinsky method, after an early 20th century Russian engineer Peter Palchinsky, who recognised that "real-world problems are more complex than we think", because of they have a human dimension and a local dimension, and are likely to change as circumstances change. I'm sure this will sound familiar to anyone who has ever been involved in a real-world software project. As the key aspects of this solution, Harford calls for adaptive planning and opening up lines of communication from the field to the planning office.

Harford focuses on innovation but also covers topics as diverse as the nature of mistakes, what causes latent errors that are not noticed until the very instant we can least afford them, strategic planning, effectiveness of expertise in today's fast-moving environment and isolating 'skunk-works' groups in large organisations.

This book deserves to be read by all business project and product sponsors, as well as anyone serious about delivering effective products and projects. If your boss needs convincing that lean startup ideas are good, and an explanation why It fits in nicely with the Lean Startup ideas, and explains why delivery plans should be more about options that could be explored instead of scope that is nailed down by committment. Authors strong views on climate change come through in the middle of the book where he argues about possible solutions, which I felt broke the reading flow and felt out of place in the book. However, the rest will surely be an interesting read for most people following my work. You'll be inspired by a ton of stories and great quotes. Here are some of my favourite ones:

Return on investment is simply not a useful way of thinking about new ideas and new technologies

Ideal way to discover paths through a shifting landscape ... is to combine baby steps and speculative leaps

For an organisation that needs to quickly correct its own mistakes, the org chart can be the worst possible road map

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure
Verdict:         
Author: Tim Harford
Publisher: Little Brown, Abacus
ISBN: 9780349121512
Pick it up from Amazon.com or Amazon UK.

Ellen Gottesdiener's earlier work on collaborative requirements workshops was a great inspiration for me while developing Specification workshops, so I was quite keen on getting hands on her new book. I'm happy to report that Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis, by Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman, is likely to be as useful and influential as their previous work. Discover to Deliver is their take on many modern trends in software product management and planning. The key idea in the book is that there is a tight coupling between learning about what is needed and delivering software, each activity informing the other. This is similar to what Dan North talks about in deliberate discovery or the ideas of delivering to earn or learn which I present in Impact Mapping. In particular, a big plus for this book is the insistence on delivery scope as a set of hypotheses that have to be proven through delivery, and for demonstrating how examples can be used to clarify ambiguities and discover better requirements.

Gottesdiener and Gorman's approach to discovery a structured conversation involving three different time-line views (now, pre-view and big-picture), three value consideration perspectives (customer, technology, business) and seven product dimensions (user, interface, action, data, control, environment and quality). Through different combinations of those aspects, they present how product partners (delivery and business) can collaborate on creating a product vision, delivery roadmaps and implementation requirements. The ideas of product partnerships and structured conversations will be familiar to anyone following design thinking, in particular the co-development and divergent and convergent thinking ideas. The authors add another dimension - confirmation - to divergent/convergent thinking, which nicely completes the whole picture. Answering the key questions to describe the product from those many dimensions is intended to provide a holistic, comprehensive understanding of different customer and stakeholder needs. If this sounds too complex, don't worry. The book provides several checklists and a nice visual template similar to the one in Business Model Generation, which will come in very handy to facilitate discussions. A table of "Focus Questions" is another important checklist that many readers will want to keep close at all times.

The first section of the book presents an imaginary case study through prose and dialogue, in which the authors demonstrate three important conversation types and show artefacts that are produced during those sessions. Lots of nice examples of personas, stories and role maps will be particularly useful to people who are aware of the key agile analysis and delivery practices but have not used them yet, or not used them correctly. I would have preferred to read a real story, instead of an imaginary one, but the examples are developed enough to make the concepts more concrete.

The second, third and fourth section go into details of the most important concepts from the authors' process, including the three aspects of product partnership, seven key product dimensions and the elements of the structured conversation. With plenty of examples and checklists to spark discussion, these parts of the book present the process of discovery at a relatively high level, with references to additional tools to explore.

The fourth part of the book is a relatively short introduction into how the overall discovery process fits into Scrum, Kanban, potentially Waterfall and how it can be adjusted for different types of products, including commercial software and regulated environments.

The fifth part is a quick high level overview of additional tools and techniques that fit into the discovery process, from user stories over use cases to value stream maps and given-when-then acceptance criteria. Each tool is presented with an example related to the imaginary company from the case study, and a high-level explanation of how it would fit into the overall process and when it would be useful.

The book is reasonably short, only around 300 pages. Apart from the dialogue in the first part that, given my attention span, I had to force myself to read carefully, I found the book easy to read. I was able to gone through the entire work on a not particularly long flight. It's obvious that there was a lot of love put into the visual design of the book, with lots of useful illustrations. A journey map, similar to public bus route maps, at the top of every page helps with navigation but is also a great tool for setting the expectations.

This book will be most useful to people who already practice agile delivery and want to improve their product planning or analysis techniques. The case study dives in straight into the gist of the matter, so it might be hard to follow for those completely new to the topic. The last two sections of the book, related to process adjustment and additional tools, are at a very high level, with enough information to put things into perspective and inspire further research, but not enough information to fully adopt or use any of the techniques. I think that the trade-off is good, as there are plenty other books on basic aspects of agile product management, and we needs more of advanced level material on these topics. Discover to Deliver will be an invaluable reference for anyone with a product owner or analyst role in agile and lean projects in the near future. You'll want to keep this book close as a reference and use it to pull out questions to facilitate conversations with your product partners.

Discover to Deliver
Verdict:         
Authors: Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman
Publisher: EBG Consulting, 2012
ISBN: 9780985787905
Pick it up from DiscoverToDeliver.com.