Peter Pilgrim :: Java Champion :: Enterprise Blog

It is a simple question. So why don’t you get more training? Do you feel that you operate already effectively? Is there no more stuff to learn? Do you think that you are already “good”? Sometimes,  just when we are walking about and we feel everything is going smoothly, then the bottom drops out of the bucket, our world suddenly of positivity, in the situation, our lives, family and friends, takes a nose dive to the other side. When our world changes to tragedy, conflict and controversy those times,we all experienced, can be really depressing and shockingly awful. These are the times when we start to kick ourselves, probably. We reproach ourselves with, “I should’ve done this. I could’ve done that.” Well the question at the beginning still stand, why do you not care about any changing the train, saving for a rainy day, and could of all of this tragedy be avoided. They say, prevention is better than the cure. We could all have done with some forewarning, some training. If you are expecting a company to train you in all things; then that is great, especially if you are a star performer on the ye olde balance scorecard, getting 100% in the 360 review, and if your boss is terrific, he and she will send to you training. If the company has the money to invest in you, when you are brilliant and company thinks so as well then they will continue to invest in you. For the rest of us mortal souls, though, we are not perfect creatures and probably never going to be fortunate for the big golden handshake of continuous personal development and abundant budgets. Some companies do care about their employers and give them a fair crack of training budget. Sadly, the training budgets for the common worker, developer and designer team are reducing month by month, and it is one of the first thing that are cut in a downturn. So if you are waiting for a company to send you on splendid trip to conference to JavaOne 2013, with all expenses, flights, hotels and tickets, paid; good luck with that. In the next section, I thought about some insights in to the gaining personal training, divided in two sections. The company does not want give you the training you really want, what can you do as alternative.

1. Spent your own personal money and funds; if you believe in it and then you will do it
2. Negotiate with the training company, they might be able  to cut you a special deal on a early bird that far enough in the future.
3. Find a user group who are doing a coding group or the practising the skills you desire
4. Find another organisation to work for, watch the job adverts for up and coming talent and especially firms with attractive starting gifts like those willing to throw in a Retina edition mac book pro; trade that in for the training instead as a condition of joining
5. Find another job that pays more money and then personally fund the training you need
6. Trade skills with a pal. Suppose you have reasonable advanced knowledge in No SQL databases, like Mongo DB, and want to learn better JavaScript then try good old-horse trading with a colleague might just be way to get training on your side as well as theirs
7. Don’t accept the classic answer from the boss, “How does X help the business?”. If the training is relevant to you achieving a goal of being a much better software engineer and designer, then, of course it is relevant. These types of answers are just excuses to keep you, bedded down; to just give in and accept the status quo, which, of course, is utter nonsense. Perhaps, the time has finally come to find better job.
8. As a last option and certainly one that I personally can testify for is, you could become a contractor instead of an employee. As contractor you find, organise and pay for your own training, because it is up to the contractor to stay up to data and learn new skills. Training counts as unpaid leave or can taken between subsequent contracts. Contractors may have certain tax advantages for training and materials, and of course, more money means you can attend more training and conferences.

Ok let suppose you are the boss, you are the line manager and you have a good team.

1. Fight for your team and their training; fight for your team’s budget and don’t let the senior management take it away
2. Give up your personal training for the entire year and suggest that they allocate the extra budget to training for your team members
3. Perhaps, it is time to evaluate the relationship with the preferred supplier of training, if your company operates like this. Have your firm been getting decent value from the PSL (preferred supplier list)? No, then try an independent trainer, a famous speaker or find a lone runner, who is much smaller than the big training business, but can deliver bespoke training to you company. Procrastinating on a bad PSL is a waste of everyone’s and your business’s time.
4. Find alternatives to training like brown bag lunches, collaborate with other businesses
5. Get on the old blower (the telephone) to the training company and use your managerial skills to negotiate rate especially for early birds far into the future
6. Take the sword for the team when your boss says the training budget has to be cut. Say that you will resign if the team’s training budget is cut. They will probably think hard and fast, the cost of recruiting another person just like you, training somebody else up in your role equates to training for about 4 or 6 developers.
7. Don’t be idiot and attempt to coach or mentor in the training yourself, especially if you have no idea what you are talking about. Don’t go cheap, go for the quality training for team member.
8. Use so-called creative accounting and budget, stick too fingers to human resources dictum, find an independent trainer not for you, but your team. Use the magic entry in the budget cover the training. Insist to HR afterwards that you wanted your team to be best, be productive and get the job done with higher quality. If HR still don’t like it, then perhaps it is time to be a manager in another firm, because your firm would have shown their idea of value of people in the organisation. (If you are going to leave, think about taking your best pal with you.)

Without commitment to training and learning new skills there can be no continuous improvement, which is one of the prime directives for Agile and Lean engineering. I hope that I have given you some great ideas. Everybody needs training and self-improvement; don’t let the government or business tell you otherwise. +PP+Tweet

I have called this piece: Can’t Change, Won’t Change. It is about what I found in recent years working in the financial services industry, in particular inside investment banking. I witnessed Agile adoption inside these organisations. Sad to say, it did not happen. Instead, lip service was paid to say SCRUM, for example. A lot of banks talked the game of Agile with a big “A”, but in truth their efforts was in a very small “a”. Daily stand-up meetings were actually, in fact, sit-downs. They did not less than 15 minutes, typically, but were regularly overtaken by database integration and production issues, project management tasks, and ran for almost an hour, whilst the whole team was wasted by business as usual matters, which most of the team did require the whole team to be present. Agile adoption was a complete waste of time, because banks did not have time for user story boards, nor did their employees or contractor really want to stick paper and/or cardboard tickets onto any type of board. The heart was not in it to begin with. There was a lack of space for even for user story boards. It was impossible to stick papers to glass windows and the modern building architecture. Their game was just to rely heavily on JIRA or TRAC, there was a distinct lack of motivation, opportunity or innovation to extend the electronic task board beyond the machine. In the end, they  continued to fail in any way to get close to a self-organising team. Even if there was buy-in from the senior management, sometime leading by authority could have helped, but there was somebody in the lower management that torpedoed any attempts for better agile adoption. In the end, there was no chance to practise agile software development with a big “A”; and if you wanted to try your hand at pair-programming and pragmatic test driven-development then the answer was a resounding not a hope of a chance, ever. Therefore continual improvement was at stand-still.

I have found out now that if you really want to learn how Agile with a big “A” is done, then step away and outside of an investment banking environment as I have done this year. My advice is to find organisations that do practice what they preach and not dream, where there is true transparency and integrity. In the past few years, it has become more important that developers and designers have some experience of Agile techniques and not just lip service. It is sad, but true. I can change and definitely I want change.Tweet

Hi Everyone!

I am sorry if this has taken longer to announce than when I first tweeted it on Twitter on Sunday 25th August 2011.

I am organising the first Collective Sumer Camp UK, which inspired by my experience of attending the JavaPosse Round Up for three years in a row (2009, 2010, and 2011). The Round-Up is an open space technology conference created by The Java Posse, four experienced Java developers and designers, famous in the community, who have a regular podcast, and also long time technical book author and thinker, Bruce Eckel. The Round-Up is a normally a five day event and takes place in Crested Butte, Colorado. Very recently, the Round-Up expanded to Summer Programming Camp.

I had a lot of fun attending the Round-Ups, as you can see here and here. I thought and asked the question, why can we not doing something similar to the Round-Up here in the UK? Why not? Indeed.

Let us do it, instead of dreaming about it! Here is an audio-boo, which I recorded a few days ago, that has my essential ideas. I apologise here if it is a bit rambling or fast.

START SMALL

Let us go for the low-to-medium risk. We scope the requirements small in order to delivery the best result.

BRANDING

I have tentatively called it THE COLLECTIVE for a very good reason. I am personally no longer in the business of organising or running user groups. I am in the business of networking with other people, getting functional programming adopted in the industry, and welcome continuous learning. We are called THE COLLECTIVE of Java platform, who are about pushing it forward.

THEMES

The content of the open space conference is up to those who attend. However, I strongly feel that we should be learning and educating ourselves about Functional Java, Scala, Clojure, JRuby and Groovy.

SPLIT CONTENT

Because we only a full Saturday. I thought it would be best to split the day into two halves. In the morning we have the open space sessions, then we would break for lunch. In the afternoon, we can have programming exercise for the new JVM language and /or including functional Java. (I went to the London Clojure Dojo on Tuesday night, and it was really well run and a good experience. I should like to model these Dojos for the Saturday afternoon [Experts or advanced coaches / users should apply w/ interest!] ).

REGISTRATION AND SURVEY

You will find a Google Form to register your interest in The Collective Summer Camp. Thank you!

DATE AND TIME

The day of the Conference will be a Saturday either 30th July, 6th August or 13th August. It will be full day. See the registration and survey form.

PAID

The UK is going through the most dire and severe economic recessions at the moment. So I understand many of you, like me, do not have loads of money. The Collective Summer Camp UK ought be low cost. However, we cannot expect every single event to be a free ride. Someone or something has to be paid for their time and effort. Venue and location to be decided. The money goes to the organisation and any thing left over will go to food, pizza and soft drinks, and we can decide what to do with the rest of the money, like donate it charity or something.

HASHTAGS

#CollectiveSummerCampUK and includes #BeyondJava, #ScalaLang, #Clojure, #Groovy, etc .

Please retweet #CollectiveSummerCampUK and self-promote the event.

INCENTIVE

I need at least 25 people to register to make the event viable. Please your register interest for the event with the Google Form.

HELP

I need help to organise this event. Please enquire with your ideas today!

That is it for now. I am so pleased to come out of stealth-mode. The next bit will be to decide on venue, which most likely looks like most people like central London and that will drive the cost. Stay tuned. +PP+

Twitter: @peter_pilgrim or electronically at peter dot pilgrim at gmail dot com

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This article is sponsored by TLC Powertalk and written by Peter Pilgrim

Presentation Courses, 121 Communication Training, Personal Impact, Speaker, NLP Skills
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If you have one member in a SCRUM team that is not an effective communicator than your team is performing sub optimally.

The benefits of good communication are important to todays software developers, designers and architects. If you look at the world of business you will find that almost all job specifications and advertisements require a degree of communication ability. Technology is not a panacea.

Let us think about that dirty word “Agile” that some people are upset about the over-usage these days. Agile is the ability for the software development process to have a feedback mechanism for the ultimate users of the product that we as engineers are creating. In any control system with a feedback one can think of an interaction. If we are people in the software business need to interact, then it stands to reason, we need to able to communicate.

Pair Programming / Code Reviewing Sessions

In order to pair-program effectively, we need to use all of our senses: listening (audio receiver) and talking (audio sender), reading and writing (visual sense), and also discuss the objectives of the code (feelings), and for the majority of our time put away our emotions when as individuals we do not agree with the code as where we would have like to write it. In other words pairing requires individuals to work and communicate as a team. There is a team goal and that is the delivery the best quality software to the stakeholder. Developers need effective communication in order to efficiently work in a self-organised team. If you have one member in a SCRUM team that is not an effective communicator than your team is performing sub optimally.

Let us take the daily stand-up or sit-down. If the SCRUM master is not disciplined enough with the team, or rather the team is not self organised enough, then it is possible for the meeting to drag on longer than 15-20 minutes, because members of the team add different items to the agenda.

When the communication is poor in a SCRUM team, then you can be sure that the velocity is going to be affected. The evidence will show as the team will be slow to build to trust and self-esteem in the team itself. If the team is pairing then it could be worse, because much like professional football teams there is no gelling in the team. There will be a lower awareness of the big picture of the project. Concentration of the team will dip in and out on a day-by-day basis. It will take longer time to develop software in a high enough quality that the product owner ( if he or she remain loyal to the team) will accept the requirement as being done. And of course, given the state of the software, whether it shipped or in UAT lifecycle, there will be more bugs and errors. Burn-down of the overall product backlog will be approaching flat. Effective communication inside the team at least provide knowledge share and the chance that team can improve whereas in non-communicating team this possibility is zero.

Presentations

In speaking to an audience during a presentation, we need to be able to communicate effectively in these situations as well. Presenters must capture the mood, the profile the audience, the occasion and the environment. The presenters need to write an abstract, design the content and if necessary write the demos. Finally, there is the whole aspect of delivery. Communication is extremely important for presentations. It can make the difference between you and your performance being reported back to the management as a damp squib or as a rousing rockstar.

If you are working in global team, where there are separate sub teams working together in different time zones around the planet, then having good communication and delivery is very important. If you cannot communicate the ideas of about the software changes, change order requests or the bug tickets, then there is risk of the software quality decreasing rapidly and that the delivery of the project being late or misunderstood or both, because different located teams have differing perceptions of the entire whole picture.

Interviews and Informal Chats

Going for a interview today or tomorrow? In job interviews you are nowadays assessed on your cultural fit into the business.How well you answer competency questions and how you perform? How does one prepares beforehand? How do you write your elevator pitch? Candidates must know how to answer questions from the interview, as well as knowing the essentials of body language and building rapport. Communication is important here.

Let us switch tables, now suppose you are the interviewer. Do you get frustrated by the way you ask what seem to be perfectly valid questions and the candidates are confused? Perhaps it has to do with your body language. Could it be that you are too competitive? Perhaps your body language could be changed so that the candidates feels that you are approachable and open to a conversation? In a hard economic climate, it perhaps does not matter too much that interviewing technique is not too perfect, but what happens in the boom times or when they will return. Finding the correct and suitable culture may have to a lot to do with with the way you communicate to the prospective top talent that you hope to persuade to join or contract into your firm.

Development Leaders

Being a development leader, whether technical or team lead, is all about having good communication. How do you motivate a team? Do you understand what to do when a team member is not making the grade? Or on the other hand what if you have an outstanding individual in your team, how do you keep them interested and running in the long game? How do raise your game? How can you lead by example if you have a lack of confidence about being vocal yourself? Do you listen to issues when members of your team raise them or do you have the habit of dropping the ball? Are you approachable or indifferent? How well do listen both upstream and downstream levels of authority? And do you have the respect of your team? How do you resolve conflict?

As you can see above, software development today has become increasing people-oriented over the decades. The computer whizz kids of yesteryear have given way to digital social literature members of society, in the work place and communal living. There is no longer acceptance for communication ineptitude in the commercial world.

Communication is also down to your way to approach digital media. Do you respond effectively to call to actions? What is your response time to an email request?

In a nutshell, if you want get on, then you need to have good communication skills and it does not matter whether you are an engineer or a manager. For a software developers, communications is the giving, receiving, sharing of a ideas, knowledge and feelings about a software application, a website, module or automated system – and most importantly about the effects of those systems on people who must operate with them on a daily basis. The value of communication is key.

For more information on Communication Essentials Training, Presentations Skills and One-To-One Coaching Skills training in London and Glasgow visit www.tlcpowertalk.com.Tweet

Today, I know for a fact, that the market is dead. It is easy to see why it is, and why everyone involved agile or agility or so bloody confused.

The Tale of Two Agilities by Barry Hawkins, XtraNormals. 

Explicit material over 16′s only: adult, swearing, alcohol

• We do Agile at my job
• We have the Scrums, there is one everyday
• They are called compound statements. Books have lots of them. They are typically mastered from the age of three or four.
• Do you teach Rails?
• I have been to RailsConf, it was awesome, there were flags and chicks. Rad!
• I have told my Agile boss that we need maintenance programmers
• It is waste for me to do maintenance programming
• Maintenance programmers are cheaper, hardware is cheaper too
• We are agile we can change what we are doing every time, we don’t plan, timelines are useless
• You talk for long times

PS: Barry Hawkins played this amusing YouTube video at the JavaPosse Round Up 2011 lightning talks.

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I, hereby, declare that these statements below are, now, my own personal “corporate” values:

• In any new organisation that I work with or be involved with, I will work inside a team of people that heavily influence the engineering, the broad scope and design quality of the products.
• Any new organisation,which could quite be possibly in the financial services sector, must be able to demonstrate proactive changes to technology change including tangible innovation, that is not only invested in Java, the technology, the platform and language, but is also looking to move Beyond Java as a programming language.
• As a certified SCRUM master (circa May 2010) the only organisations that I will even consider, from now, are those which are working with a well known Agile methodology (such as Iterative Driven Development, SCRUM, Lean/Kanban,etc) or moving towards it in the extreme short-term.
• I realise that we are all in an era where people skills are of paramount importance. To that end, I want to improve my business domain knowledge. Being part of a solid development team, I would like to listen and learn too; and be educated by other talented team members.
• In any new organisation that I might consider, now or in the not too distant future, they shall be moving to or actually already practising sustainable software architecture.

Peter Pilgrim

Wednesday 15^th December 2010

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