Pivotal Screen

A lot of the stress in teams comes from a single question. This can be presented in many ways like:

• When is it going to be ready?
• When are we going to finish?
• How long does it takes?
• Are we in course for meeting the deadline?

A lot has been written about agile estimation and the waterfall model, but using a single tool to do the estimation for you can alleviate much of the stress while keeping your team in sync. This post is not about a specific tool, but rather any tool that estimates when a task is going to get done.

You eliminate the possibility to blame a person for giving you an inaccurate estimation by using a tool. Moreover, you can play with different scenarios and priorities and adjust accordingly.

Working with real data instead of assumptions is even better. Therefore, A tool that takes into account what you have done in the past to estimate how long in going to take to complete a task in the future is what you are looking for.

Personally I don’t want to meet anything call deadline. This is a word that fires up a red flag in our client relationship system. It means that the client or team is not delivering sufficient value in a period of time; Therefore, it is sound to “kill” the project instead of keep spending without receiving any real value. The solution is quite simple, yet hard to achieve.

Producing value every week is the solution for this. You can say that you have a deadline every week, but it is not really the case since nobody dies if the deadline is not meet - no pun intended. It is just a week of work and it is a much smaller lost than killing an entire project.

People are going to end up doing the estimation, but on a much smaller scale - At the story level instead of the project level.  If we use tools to reduce the friction that hard questions present, we can work much more efficiently. At the end, responsibility lies within the team.

Let the customer or code do the work and tell you what needs to be done.

The reality is that every designer has a process, my process lives in Moleskine notebooks.

Another funny question I have been asked is ‘and how do you use a Moleskine’ and the answer is there is not right or wrong way, depends on how you feel comfortable working, anyhow, I will share my way…

ï To-dos: It is important to know what you have to do. This is key for me, every email I get, Basecamp message, phone call, etc. I erase and write it in my Moleskine. Why? Because if you only had one thing to do every I am sure you will not forget about it, but when you have several things to do, you will forget something. Anyhow, the secret of productivity relies on not leaving anything to your memory. Treat your mind, like you treat your computer, try to have it as free as possible so it can work faster on the tasks you need it to work on.

ï MITS: Most Important Tasks. So, out of those 029472393409274 to-dos you need to know what your priority is, some to-dos might need to be done ASAP, and some others might be done in a more relaxed way. Your MITS will let you know if there is something of urgency you need to do.

ï Briefs: A new project will always be briefed, what is the concept? target? keywords? tone? so many things to think about, that if you do not have all this information in one place so that you can organize your ideas, the quality and effectiveness of your project might suffer because you missed something.

ï Research: Gather information, nowadays that we live in an overload information world, it is a sin for you to not study your brand. Research the industry, who are the competitors, learn from them.

ï Unleash your thoughts: Create roughs, very very roughs, nothing pretty, nothing like the final product…just ideas. This will be your base so that you know what direction you are going.

“Moleskine was created as a brand in 1997, bringing back to life the legendary notebook used by artists and thinkers over the past two century: among them Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Bruce Chatwin.”? www.moleskine.com

Dave McClure at Lean Startup Circle from David Binetti on Vimeo.

Compete double is? the concept of competing in two completely different fields. By selling ads you’ll have to compete against Google, Facebook and many more for the advertisers; moreover, you’ll have to compete against other apps in your space. For example: If I was building an app to handle project collaboration, I’ll have to compete against Basecamp, Activecollab, Zoho and many more. On top of that, I’ll have to compete against many more for the advertisers money.

Be careful becuase monetizing is a slippery slope specially is your model is based on selling ads. It has worked great for Facebook or Google, but it may be a dead sentence for many because they’ll have to compete double and create the infrastructure to sell those ads.

What do I mean by creating the infrastructure to sell ads? It starts by having the proper technology in place to count, rotate and display the ads. There are many open source software that can be use for this purpose, but this is just deviating attention from the core product. People are needed to sell the ads or build that system to support it. It just adds a tremendous burden to the entire organization. Let’s assume the technology stack is already in place to support selling ads. I believe it is equally or more difficult to get somebody to pay for an ad that is to make people pay for your product or the vision of it.

What makes the perfect team? What makes it or breaks it? How does it function?

One cannot make it alone, in fact most biggest entrepreneurs tell you that for a business to be successful needs at least two minds into it. Teams should be small, but there should still be a team to support any project. This could be an active team, or may be a board of advisers, call it however you want to call it, but you need these different angles of seeing things.

So, being the freak I am with good TV shows, I recently watched all 7th season of 24, and really this thought clicked in my mind. You see it with the characters of this show in this season, and what they represent. Any team needs these:

Leadership - somebody to trust

Every team needs a leader. Somebody to offer options, the type of person that can make the most imaginable things happen. The leader is always somebody people look up to, might be because of his/her experience, achievements, or whatever reason. This person is off course Jack Bauer, this guy can come up with the most imaginable and risky moves, and finds a way that everybody ends up following him. The guy is always right.

Experience - somebody who has done it

You always need somebody who has done it before. Who knows how to do things, and knows this because he/she has done it. Again, this person can be in either your team or board of advisers. This character is played by Tony Almeida.

Good Management - somebody to put it all together

You will always need the organized person who can call the shots. The person who keeps the project going by knowing which step is the next one needs to be taken. This is what Bill Buchanan represents.

Technology - off course!

So, off course I can say this is a must, since I am very much into technology. But it is really true. The things you can do with technology, you would not be able to do without. All the information you can reach, people you can follow, etc. it is really invaluable. Off course none of the operations of 24 could have been done without Chloe O’Brian.

Apprentice - the drive to learn

You always need someone who you can pass your wisdom to if not the world would not work the way it does. There is always somebody that has the drive to learn, that is basically a sponge. They usually do not have the experience, but are eager to. This passion of the beginners does not have value. This is off course played by a newbie to this show, Renee Walker.

We had about six places in our application where the email-spec gem came into play with a nicely:

Then “thebaker@bakedweb.net” should receive 1 ?email

After implementing delayed_job they changed to:

Then “thebaker@bakedweb.net” should receive 1 delayed email

The question is: How would I go about implementing the step? I came up with the following:

Then /^"([^\"]*)” should receive 1 delayed email$/ do |arg1|
Delayed::Job.last.name[0..15].should == ‘Notifier.deliver’
end

I know my implementation is dirty and brakes if we are sending the email from somewhere else, but Notifier and it only takes into account 1 email. The real reason for this post is to pick you mind on how to better implement the step. How would you go about it?

Update: Kotrin from #cucumber came up with a neat regex for the step and tells us that we could probably expand on it to pick up on args.


Then /^"([^\"]*)” should receive 1 delayed email$/ do |arg1|
Delayed::Job.last.name.should match(/^Notifier\.deliver/)
end