Roundtable Includes Global Services Magazine Editor-in-Chief, CEO of Delphi Group, Harvard Business School Professor and 6th Sense Analytics CEO
MORRISVILLE, NC � November 1, 2006 — Offshore development has been embraced by the vast majority of commercial software vendors and enterprise application development groups, supported by the belief that a world flattened by globalization makes it possible to improve competition by taking advantage of low-cost, high-quality technical skills. Unfortunately, despite the cost advantages, the practice of sending development offshore introduces a whole new series of risks and unknowns. 6th Sense Analytics, a pioneer in improving software development metrics, will host a free webcast roundtable discussion on globally distributed software development. The event will feature industry leaders including Rusty Weston, editor-in-chief of Global Services magazine; Thomas Koulopolous, founder of Delphi Group, managing director of Perot Systems Innovation Labs, and author of Smartsouring; Robert Austin, Harvard Business School professor and Cutter Consortium Fellow; and Greg Burnell, CEO of 6th Sense Analytics.
The free webcast, "Software Development in a Flat World," will be broadcast on November 16, 2006 at 2:30 p.m. ET. "As a practical rule, organizations need to be ready to address an explosion of challenges when software development efforts are sent offshore," said Greg Burnell, CEO of 6th Sense Analytics. “Without accurate visibility into software development processes, the decision to send projects offshore can quickly introduce new business risks."
During the free 60-minute webcast, attendees will gain insight into the specifics of what it takes to make offshore or distributed development successful. Articulate, expert practitioners and visionaries will lead a series of thoughtful presentations and a moderated roundtable discussion that will enable businesses to ask the right question when it comes to creating a global development environment. Ten attendees will receive a complementary copy of Smartsourcing, a new book by roundtable participant Thomas Koulopolous, exploring the radical social, organizational and economic impact of globalization and innovation.
"Many IT organizations lack a true understanding of their internal costs and service levels, and just put money into IT because that was the cost of doing business," said Thomas Koulopoulos, author of Smartsourcing, founder of Delphi Group and managing director of Perot Systems Innovation Labs. "Unfortunately, the costs are often buried and there are no benchmarks, so those businesses must know the right questions to ask."
The host of the roundtable, 6th Sense Analytics, offers a powerful and unique solution that arms development organizations with accurate and up-to-date visibility into development processes. With easy-to-use and highly configurable reporting capabilities, teams can quickly aggregate the collected data, clearly understanding development trends, relationships, opportunities and risks across distributed development teams. All of this allows software development teams to improve their ability to deliver successful project outcomes, critical to the overall success of a globally distributed software development effort.
Registration Information
Register for the free 60-minute webcast online at (http://www.6sa.com/webcast/). The event will be held on November 16, 2006 at 2:30 p.m. Eastern Time.
Continued from this post.
In my final blog post in this series, I want to explore conversations related to exploring 6th Sense Analytics data with an eye towards developing your Personal Improvement Plan. Here we'll look at contrasting your personal data against group data:
Group Analysis
Virtually every suggestion I made in the last post can be extended towards comparison with your teams' and community data. Everything should be focused towards seeing how you stack up against the group in a constructive way. Look for strength areas that you can leverage to increase your contributions, project impact and overall visibility within your teams.
Remember that the data can also serve to support your performance in personnel reviews. You can use it to drive powerful discussion within your leadership team regarding your project contributions and capabilities.
Beyond the analysis points in the last post, there are some unique perspectives you can gain from analyzing broader data. You can extend your vision beyond that of an individual contributor by taking interest in more broad issues across your projects. This broader influence can often be rewarding and add significant value to your projects.
Realize that your value isn't solely tied to your direct contributions. You can also make a big impact by showing your awareness of the big picture. There are several ways to do this. One is by analyzing Project Active Time by Activity from a group perspective. Look for trends that indicate how the overall project is performing or how the team is supporting the schedule.
For example, you can view group Active Time velocity and map it against the project schedule. If you see some trends that are of concern, bring them to the attention of your boss or the project manager. The same analysis can be made from a methodology perspective. For example, look for code construction or testing activity percentages to align with your specific SDLC. If you find the work not aligned with your process, raise a flag for analysis and a readjust.
Compare your performance data against the team. Look for areas where you clearly are ahead of the team norms, for example, in breadth of technology used, or tools capabilities, or simply delivering quality work. Look across the team for those who are struggling in your strength areas and try to mentor them towards improvement.
Believe me, this sort of unselfish mentoring will get noticed--within the team and by leadership. The more you can engage the team in overall improvement and strengthening the stronger you will develop solid leadership skills.
- Another area to make a difference is by analyzing how the overall team is performing within the project from a Flow Time perspective. 6th Sense Analytics data can be immensely helpful in providing insights into the internal dynamics of your team. Look for areas of improvement and serve as a catalyst for changes to improve productivity and efficiency.
Remember that increasing your value and skill isn't solely a technical pursuit. In My Job Went to India, Chad Fowler makes a fairly compelling case that many programming skills are becoming quite commoditized by the global economy. In order for us to grow and thrive, we need to reframe ourselves in different directions. Of course while also leveraging our natural strengths.
Taking a broader view to software development projects from a methodology and leadership perspective is another way to shift your value proposition. Consider this when you're crafting your Personal Improvement Plan.
Continued from this post.
In the final two blog posts in this series, I want to explore two conversations related to exploring 6th Sense Analytics data with an eye towards developing your Personal Improvement Plan. In this one, we'll first look at analyzing your personal data:
Personal Analysis
It usually starts by analyzing your projects. Analyze each project you're working on by average Active Time by file.extension. This will explore the technology mix associated with the project and start to sensitize you to where you�re spending the majority of your time specifically by technology type.
You'll want to compare this against two things: Where you thought you were spending the majority of your time and where �the project� thinks you're spending the majority of your time. You're looking for disconnects or gaps. Also look to see how these percentages map to your strongest technical abilities. For example, if you're core strengths are developing low level J2EE server code and your spending 90% of your time writing Javascript, then you are clearly not leveraging your strengths. You should look to migrate towards your strengths.
Beyond the technology part is workflow or work balance. I think of this as the question that asks: (1) where are you spending the majority of your time; and, (2) does the mix reflect where you should be spending the majority of your time?
In order to sort through this, you'll want to look at relative Active Time by Activity across all of your work and probably also by specific technologies and tools. You're looking for patterns in this case. For example, what is your average balance in pre-development (analysis, research, TDD), development (coding), and post-development (unit testing, debugging, check-in) and is it appropriate for the sort of things your team is building
One thing I think is truly important is to check your overall effectiveness--not in terms of counting lines of code or other module-level counting. Instead, I'm talking about understanding how adeptly you're able to focus by analyzing Flow Time. You'll want to fully understand the dynamics of your personal Flow Time per day of the week and over specific activities. For example, are you more likely to get into the flow when you're coding versus when you're testing? If so, you might look for opportunities to improve your testing focus by perhaps changing offices or working from home.
While reviewing your personal metrics is a significant aspect of how you'll grow, it's only part of the insight puzzle. You really need to see how you stack up against your team, organization, or overall community. That's where we're going next...
Who works in a learning organization? OK - what is a learning organization?
That’s the subject of Peter M Senge’s The Fifth Discipline, which explains organizations most likely to survive against the competition are those that encourage and capture new patterns of thought and nurture an on-going desire to learn from past experience. This helps repeat successes and avoid failures.
The Fifth Discipline outlines the five steps organizations should take to become smart learners. As the title suggests, it is the fifth discipline that’s the hardest to master: combining all those smaller experiences and wisdoms into one big picture.
Senge’s book has proved something of a management classic since first appearing in the early 1990. However, the book’s message applies strongly to application development. It’s that ability to record and learn from experience gained in previous software projects that is so basic and yet that has proved elusive.
Thinking like Senge’s marries with the 6th Sense philosophy. Giving organizations visibility into projects using metrics and tools helps capture past performance and will help turn IT shops and businesses into dynamic learning organizations.
Importantly, 6th Sense helps make that difficult fifth step - connecting the dots. Senge-like thinking and 6th Sense practice are going to become indispensable as software becomes more critical to the running of business.
I left off the last post discussing the need to be receptive to feedback. Following from that is the revelation that feedback can come in many forms.
Another revelation from my early career is that feedback can come in many forms. Written, verbal, what's said and even what's unsaid. Even verbal communication has nuance from the words, to the intonation, and the associated body language. Did you know that the rough percentages associated with those bits are 10%, 40% and 50% respectively? Surprising isn't it? But it does explain why we have so much difficulty communicating by e-mail.
With the introduction of 6th Sense Analytics, feedback now comes in another form. You now have access to two very powerful layers of performance data. First, you'll gain access to your own development patterns via Active Time and Flow Time measures. You can use this data to fully understand the nuance of your own development patterns�gaining insight into your strengths and weaknesses.
But that's only half the equation. In order to truly accelerate your impact on the organization, you need to compare yourself against it and the industry. In that way, you can understand the breadth of your gaps and the core strength and competency areas that you bring to the table.
As I said in the beginning of this series, strength amplification and finding opportunities in your work to leverage your strengths effectively should be your prime directive.
How can 6th Sense Analytics help you here? First you can compare yourself against groups within your own organization. While we mask out (intentionally) individual characteristics, you can gain tremendous insight into the dynamics of your teams and organization--looking at how you stack up.
We're also aggregating data from all of our clients. Part of our vision is to create an ever increasing community of shared data that can be analyzed for insights across technologies, organizational models, software development methodologies and even continents. This is truly the sort of community data that will allow for comparison against the industry.
How do you leverage such information?
I can think of some clear steps. First is using it to refine your Personal Improvement Plan. You have one don't you? This is the plan that does the following:
- Assesses generally your specific professional / technical strengths & weaknesses
- It identifies the core requirements for your current position
- It does a gap analysis on your current role versus your strengths�looking to determine if you�re in the right role
- If you're not, then there is an Evolution Required section where you explore the right positions for you that amplify your strengths and a roadmap to make the transition.
Data in your PIP should be gathered from all of your traditional and now 6th Sense Analytics data sources. In the 6SA case, you'll want to gather personal, immediate team and community views towards performance that mirrors your primary focus.
In the next few posts in this series, we'll walk down two conversational scenarios where we interrogate 6th Sense Analytics data for PIP planning and mapping. As in the old Project Management adage -- you get what you plan for�
In a recent pair of posts on Creating High Performance Teams, I put the onus on the group leader or manager to develop their teams by truly focusing on and amplifying the team's strengths. However, that's only one perspective to it. It's also incumbent on today's software developers and testers to commit to understanding and improving their own skills.
The emphasis here truly is on understanding your performance, your strengths and weaknesses. Even more importantly are two other considerations:
- How do you stack up against others at your project team level?
- Are you in a job that accentuates your strengths? Where you truly make a difference?
Going back to my blog entry on creating high performance teams, I want to again reiterate that success is not about schlogging to improve your weakness, as Buckingham and Coffman eloquently and compellingly point out. And please don't construe this as a license to ignore your weaknesses. It's not. Instead though, true excellence and true difference making is gained from finding your strengths and amplifying them. To quote the Army, to "be all that you can be" should be your goal.
But there is an important first step to consider. How receptive are you to feedback?
First, Be Open Minded to Feedback
I remember when I first started as a development group leader my boss pulled me in for my first performance review. In my particular case, I'd always been a pretty fair developer, which led to the increased responsibility of leading a small team. I took my coding very seriously and really worked hard at my craft. I guess I was also a bit of a perfectionist.
Given that, I didn't like to listen to criticism and usually construed anything outside of positive feedback to be such. So during my review, I received some great comments -- keeping in mind that I'd just been promoted.
However, we also began to explore areas where I could improve. Sort of picking at my contributions on recent projects and using them as examples. From my point-of-view, he was simply nit picking--searching for anything negative to comment on because he had to point out improvement areas somewhere. I became quite animated and agitated by it all. Ok, I became defensive and somewhat argumentative.
We finally closed what should have been a very positive meeting in a very negative manner. We were both frustrated and the tension lasted for quite some time. What's the lesson here beyond the fact that I had some growing to do? At least for me, it's that it takes effort to properly receive feedback. However, it's crucial that you learn to do it well.
In performance discussions, if you aren't open minded and receptive to feedback--literally from anyone--your boss, your peers, your project manager, and your team--eventually they'll stop giving it to you. It's simply not worth the effort to give it. However, this is the worst possible scenario. Your performance gaps will still exist; just nobody will be talking to you about them.
So what's the point here? As you'll discover in later posts in this "series," I'm setting the stage for your learning from your own performance. However, in order to do so, you need to be receptive, inquisitive, thoughtful and willing to take action to change your focus and adapt to feedback. As illustrated in my example, this isn't always as easy as it sounds�
Mark Twain once reflected on the relative nature of numbers, popularizing the phrase: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.”
Anyone whose ever commissioned or read the results of a research poll will know numbers can be sliced in different ways, to produce different meanings or interpretations. Twenty five percent of people like the taste of New Coke can be taken as quarter of consumers like the taste of New Coke or three quarters don’t like New Coke. (On this one, at least, we can say we know how consumers really felt.)
ComputerWorld’s Jerri Ledford has been ruminating on the nature of
meaningful metrics. Jerri’s conclusion is simple: the value of the metrics depends on the job at hand or the problem you are trying to solve. That’s not exactly rocket science, but its a useful check point.
According to one blogger responding to Jerri’s piece, to get meaningful metrics the metric definition process itself should be a journey not a destination. In other words, keep refining your metrics and re-modeling the benchmarks that use your numbers. He advises revisiting metrics quarterly or semi-annually noting the “relationship between information consumers and producers should not be taken lightly.”
That’s sound advice. Often, in software development, there’s a temptation to monitor and steer projects using benchmarks from third parties or by re-using metrics from other, older projects. No wonder things can, and do, go wrong. The reporting software might say everything is going well, yet you are experiencing slowdowns and the software is late. That’s no great surprise, if the metrics your system is calibrated on are old or irrelevant. It’s like navigating using a faulty compass.
For metrics to be meaningful and helpful in software projects, organizations should never assume they have all the metrics they need. Continue to harvest new data and refine the model that project assumptions and projections rely on. In short: never reach your destination, just enjoy the journey.
[metrics] [software] [development]
North Carolina's Research Triangle area is afforded many unique advantages that make it an exceptional place to start and grow a company. Carolina Blue skies, an enviable quality of life and access to first-class talent are just the beginning of what makes this place unique. There's also true breakthrough innovation happening in RTP today.
This was strikingly evident at this week's Tech 2006 conference, sponsored by The Council for Entrepreneurial Development (CED), the largest entrepreneurial support organization in the nation. CED handpicked 27 local vendors to show off their wares at this year's event--and 6th Sense brought home the hardware, taking 2nd Place in the People's Choice Award for best product demo. The drumbeat continues for 6th Sense!
In addition to the breadth of commercial innovation on display, there was also lots of interesting discussion and debate on the main stage. David Bonderman of the venerable private equity firm Texas Pacific Group discussed trends in the private equity and venture capital markets. iRobot CEO Colin Angle lent perspective on the remarkable success and the more-than-meets-the-eye vision of his company. Salesforce.com president, Jim Steele, spoke convincingly on the wisdom of software as a service (we couldn't agree more), and the radical transformation we're seeing in how software is built, sold and experienced.
All in all, an exceptional day for 6th Sense and the RTP market--further proof that 6th Sense is onto something very big and RTP is more than blue skies and good barbeque.
Related Links:
http://carolinanewswire.com
Rick Smith of the Triangle NC area tech news site localtechwire.com, asked 6th Sense Analytics about the company and our solution for restoring reality to the mayhem of software development in the following artice:
http://www.localtechwire.com/article.cfm?u=15179
