Peter Lübeck

I got back from Malmö and the Øredev conference this Friday night, feeling quite tired after three days filled with lectures, of a varying levels of awesome. The conference focus was Efficiency, which of course fits very well with the stuff I’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks. Now I have a lot more material to take into account when thinking of how to best implement Agile on an enterprise level.

I went to a lot of sessions focusing on different variations of Agile implementation, from small (5 people) to large (14.000 Nokia employees). I got some useful information on best practices and lessons learned, which will come in handy in my near future. This however, was still largely things I already have a fairly good theoretical knowledge of, so it was good to find some other session gems for me to attend.

For example I attended a session called the Pair Programming show, in which two coders aimed to present the benefits, and problems, associated with pair programming. The presentation was rocky at best, but the message was clear and strong and I found myself really thrilled about trying to incorporate pair programming into the every day culture of The Company. The benefits feel obvious, although I can see the difficulties in introducing a radically new way of working to a crowd of solo-oriented coders. A worthy challenge I guess, especially since I am not a coder mysel!

It is good that I had two coders with me during the whole conference so that they also got to experience all the interesting stuff, as well as me getting someone to discuss things that might be outside my “area of expertise” with.

Another concept that was frequently talked about during the conference was Time boxing, which isn’t a new concept but something that I feel that I should really look into more. So today I started using a variant of Time boxing called the Pomodoro Technique, in which you basically decide a task to work on, then set a timer for 25 minutes and only work on that task for the duration of the timer. After the 25 minutes are up you take a five minute break and then either continue with the task or select a new task. It feels awesome, since you focus intently on a single task for 25 minutes, and you hinder yourself from dragging stuff out, which I tend to do sometimes.

I am actually using this technique right now as I am writing this blog post. 25 minutes to write, read, correct and publish. Seems like a nice time box, and I won’t get to chance to start thinking too much about what I am doing. As soon as I am done writing this post I will select another task and do that for 25 minutes, and tomorrow I am going to try this at work. I am counting on it to allow me to perform wonders!

When working on my personal guide to running an Agile company, I have focused a lot on the company’s responsibilities towards its lifeblood: the individual developer. Yes, you know, that person who goes by many names, such as employee, worker, agent, cog, slave, or the one I dislike the most: asset. Calling someone an asset just makes me feel like your are planning to use the person as you would a tool, with no regard to who they are, what they think or what they want. This just seem wrong to me, so I prefer to use the term associate, which my integrated Leopard Dictionary defines as:

a partner or colleague in business or at work

That’s definitely how I want to look at the people working with and/or for me.

I have come to realize that while I have focused a lot on a company’s responsibility towards its associates, I have neglected to reflect over an associate’s responsibility towards the company. And by that I don’t mean the corporate company that’s only an abstract entity consisting of managers, blurry visions and broken promises. Resorting to my dictionary once more, I find three different definitions of the word company:

1. a commercial business
2. the fact or condition of being with another or others, especially in a way that provides friendship and enjoyment
3. a number of individuals gathered together, especially for a particular purpose

While number one is of course a key aspect of any game studio, I myself personally lean more towards number three being the thing to focus on, and hope that number two will come naturally when you put awesome people together in the same room.

Anyhow, this week I have begun reflecting on all of the above and am now going to add a new section to the part of my “manifest” focusing on the individuals. For this section I will look at what I would expect of any reasonably awesome person come to work in my dream Agile environment. I already have a number of ideas that I want to delve into, if only I can maintain any sort of focus on this for the near future.

My focus has been steadily waning since the first week I allowed chance to set my focus, since I am now into my fourth week on what was supposed to be a weekly focus. I have not yet decided on how I am supposed to go about my other focus areas, perhaps I will shift to another area next week. Who knows!

My little focus experiment has turned out to be a lot more effective than I initially planned for. It has been so effective that I this week ended up ignoring my new focus area and continued with the one from last week. After being so involved with something for a whole week my mind just wouldn’t let go, and so I decided to just go with it.

I didn’t see the point of working against myself just to stick with an idea, and I am glad I came to that realization. Otherwise I wouldn’t have begun putting the things I worked with last week towards creating a draft of a kind of company wide, agile strategy with an almost flat hierarchy where the whole organization, including management, is using and following the same methods and principles.

My goal is to create a plan for my vision of the ultimate, team driven, agile game development company where the individual is never forgotten and where openness and honesty are the key virtues. Sound a bit too much kumbaya? Well the main challenge of course is to create this kind of open climate and still maintain a strong focus on profitability and effectiveness.

I am borrowing heavily from Agile, Scrum, Lean, XP etc, my focus not being to create THE best methodology but rather to nail down my dream way of working. This is based on my ideals and views on quality, creativity, communication, respect, honesty and focus, among other things.

One of the key goals of this vision is to create a working environment where an individual is never more than one step away from top-level management, in the natural order of communication. This means minimizing the need for dedicated managers and creating a more organic management structure. Managers, possessing one or more key competences, will mainly serve in a more supportive fashion, working alongside self-organizing teams. Instead of managing a single, specific team, managers instead make up their own agile team, each manager in turn serving a number of teams that have use of their particular competences.

In the spirit of a great manager, my aim in the long run is to build an organization where my position will practically be obsolete. Before this is realized though there is a lot that needs to be done. In particular this needs to be field tested in order to work out all the quirks, which hopefully is something I might get the chance to do in the near future.

I’ll just leave it at that for the time being. I don’t want to spoil it by revealing too much in the early stages. Instead I will put my time towards writing all my initial ideas down and start looking at the whole. I might report back with the progress in the future.

Getting Things Done, abbreviated GTD, is “an action management method created by David Allen” (Wikipedia).

I happened to stumble across GTD when I was looking for useful and rewarding audio books to listen to while I was running, and while it hasn’t exactly changed my life it has definitely made it more easy to live in.

At the time (about a year ago), I was living and working in a very stressful environment. I had just started my first game studio (Black Drop Studios), together with three others, as well as begun the third and final year of my Bachelor’s program in game design. It is safe to say that I was in dire need of action management in order to maintain any semblance of sanity.

So what is this fabled action management you say? Well, what David Allen proposes is that you implement a system in which you place all of your projects, thoughts, actions, ideas etc. The main purpose is to get EVERYTHING out of your head and into a system that you can trust to keep track of all your data.

The definition of stress, at least for me, is lack of control. When I have an abundance of things floating around in my head that needs my immediate attention I tend to get stressed out and then my efficiency and focus levels drop accordingly. So with GTD, as soon as a thought pops into my head I write it down and get it into the system. This could be any thought at all, e.g. something to do, something to read, someone to see or somewhere to be. It doesn’t matter what it is, I just write it down and get it into the system. This is called Collecting, and is the first of the five different phases of the GTD workflow.

Once you have collected something you place it in your Inbox, which can be either a physical box or part of a digital action management application. Since I am quite tech oriented, I mainly use digital tools, but I have recently begun to use physical Inboxes both at home and at work. The collection process should be as quick and smooth as possible, so that when you remember that important, mission critical data, you can capture it instantly. You don’t want to find yourself in a situation where you have no means of collecting the data, so always have pen, paper, or your digital organizer, close at hand.

When you collect data this way you don’t deal with things as soon as they appear. This might seem like a sure way to get stressed, but the thing is that as soon as I capture a thought and put it into my Inbox I can relax, because I know that the thought is now safe and that it will be dealt with. This part of GTD is definitely the one that I have managed to really incorporate in my everyday routines, which has resulted in heaps of data that needs processing.

This leads me to the next phase of GTD, namely Processing, but that is for a future entry.