Doug Theis - Leave your comfort zone.

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02
Jun 14

CIO.com – How to Save the Daily Standup Meeting

Years ago, in the bad old days, you had the weekly status meeting. You’d wait for your turn to talk about your status to the project manager; when other people talked, you’d either tune out to think about what you were going to say or, possibly, tune out entirely and think about that upcoming skiing trip.

All that changed with scrum and the daily standup. It was a breath of fresh air.

But something happened with the daily standup in many organizations. As its focus changed, people were driven to prepare a list of what they were working on and to focus on it.

I woke up one morning and realized that, at a current client, we were still doing those painful, low-value weekly status meetings. The only difference: Now we were doing them every day.

If you’ve experienced this, take heart. You’re not alone. More importantly, the daily standup can be fixed. This article explains how.

Answer Me These Questions
First, let’s look at the famous Three Questions of Scrum:
What did you do yesterday?
What will you do today?
Are there any impediments in your way?

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16
May 14

VentureBeat – Agile in the enterprise: To succeed, avoid the fundamentalists

I remember it as though it were just months ago, but it was early 2005 when a heated discussion rippled across our company. A new way to develop software had matured and had been growing fast since 2001: the agile software development approach. We knew that it would disrupt the very controlled way CI&T had been developing custom software for big companies for over 6 years, and that was scary.

Until then, we were exclusively implementing a formal process called RUP (rational unified process), a successful implementation of the ideas from the unified process framework. In our pitch we were purposely fighting the waterfall method that had been eroding the reputation of software houses over time. Studies were consistently showing that more than 65 percent of big software projects would fail.

Today, it comes without a single sign of pain to say that 100 percent of our projects are carried out using agile, but during that time we were uncertain about the future. That pristine CMMI level 5 certification we had conquered with so much effort over the years was, after all, going to be irrelevant for the industry. Not to mention the detailed processes we had built to align teams and clients in very well defined tasks and waves of work, would all be compromised by a novelty we would need to learn how to use from scratch.

Baseline – Why Can’t We Disconnect From Work?

Seventy-five percent of Americans do not take all of their allotted days off, and 15 percent of them didn’t take any vacation time in the last 12 months.

It’s obvious to most people that Americans are addicted to work. While Europeans nosh on tapas and sip wine after work hours and on weekends, we’re frantically creating the next PowerPoint presentation. While they’re enjoying a four-week summer break, we’re reading reports and responding to emails from our mobile office on the beach. We just can’t seem to disconnect.

Studies show that about half of all vacation time in the United States goes unclaimed. In addition, we’re the only country in the industrialized world that doesn’t guarantee days off.

Ponder these facts: Career site Glassdoor recently reported that 75 percent of Americans do not take all of their allotted days off, and 15 percent of them didn’t take any vacation time in the last 12 months. The leading reasons for not taking a break include: concern that no other employee could do the job (33 percent), fear of getting behind (28 percent), complete dedication to company (22 percent), the desire for a promotion (19 percent) and fear of losing the job (17 percent).

VirtualGeek – Understanding Storage Architectures

This is a topic that is a perennial one – and I suspect it will keep evolving. What is the right way to classify architectural models of storage? How does one figure out what the heck is going on through all the marketing and positioning of the industry players (including EMC for that matter)?

WARNING – THIS POST IS NOT FOR THE INTELLECTUALLY LAZY – OR PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT INTO READING 🙂

… Don’t say I didn’t warn you 🙂

It IS possible to have a taxonomy for storage/persistence architectures, a “phylum” (that’s the grouping of animals in biology, and translates from new latin as “class”) if you will. If you think of the “tree of life” (below – hey, that’s us Humans right next to bears and fungi!) as the world of technology domains, down the information persistence (vs. compute vs. network) “kingdom”, there are indeed “phylum” (classes).

This is an powerful intellectual tool – one that helped humans understand the living world around us.

When it comes applying this “phylum” idea to the topic of storage architectures, it lets you group anything new you see in the whole world of “persisting data”, and QUICKLY understand it’s core architecture, and therefore strengths and weaknesses. I challenge you all to put something on the table that doesn’t fit these broad based buckets.

On another note, as you might imagine, there’s been a lot of discussion over the last 24 hour about Cisco UCS Invicta (formerly Whiptail assets) inside EMC. It’s an old familiar player (Whiptail) on the field in new form, I’ll try to put them into this framework (input welcome!)

CIO Insight – The Future of Enterprise Mobility

To better understand the immediate future of enterprise mobility, CIO Insight recently spoke separately with Chris Hazelton, research director of mobile and wireless technologies at 451 Research, and Chris Marsh, a principal analyst of enterprise mobility at Yankee Group. The pair discussed mobility trends, device vendors, mobile ROI, and related developments for the enterprise in 2014 and beyond. Here is an edited version of the one-on-one interviews with Hazelton and Marsh.

What are the most important trends affecting how IT handles mobility today?

Chris Hazelton: The two biggest trends driving the way that IT handles mobility are the limited ability to control the devices that employees are using and the increasing amount of corporate data that is going across these devices. This dynamic means IT must control a growing use of corporate data in an environment in which it is steadily losing control.

As IT has ceded ground to users in terms of the devices that are used, the invasion of mobile apps will need to be a rallying point for organizations to regain control of mobile by managing the enterprise data, apps and work environments on mobile devices. Users can control the device, but IT will need to be the gatekeeper for data.

Neovise – 12 Things IaaS Providers Don’t Advertise

The industry is teeming with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers, each marketing the unique capabilities and benefits of their services. It would be great if service providers also highlighted their solutions’ shortcomings. But this is rarely the case, especially when competing solutions share the same feature gaps.

When evaluating and purchasing IaaS services, you must be aware of the things cloud service providers don’t advertise, and may not want you to know. To help you avoid surprises and setbacks, we’ve constructed a list of 12 considerations.

1. Many IaaS providers oversubscribe their instances

When service providers host multiple tenants on shared hardware, the combination of virtual resources they’ve allocated to each tenant is usually more than the total hardware capacity. This can result in poor performance – and inconsistent performance – when competing instances get used heavily. Some providers avoid this practice, or offer dedicated instances, but charge a premium price. For some applications, the premium is worth it.

SimpleProgrammer.com – My Secret To Ridiculous Productivity. (I’m Using It Now)

In the last year, I:

Created and produced 30 full length video courses for Pluralsight
Wrote 56 blog posts
Produced 40 episodes of the Get Up and CODE podcast
Created 50 YouTube videos
Published a book
Spoke at 4 events
Billed over 100 hours of contract work
Created a full product, that I am about ready to launch
Ran 5 kilometers 3 times a week, every week
Lifted weights 3 times a week, every week

I’m not saying this to brag–although I am certainly proud of these accomplishments. I am saying these things to prove that I know what I am talking about when it comes to productivity.
Being super productive

Right now–as I type–I have a timer ticking down. The clock shows approximately 14 minutes before I’ll take my next break. I live and die by this clock.

Live and die by clock thumb My Secret To Ridiculous Productivity. (Im Using It Now)

You may have guessed it, but the clock is a Pomodoro timer. For the last year, I’ve been religiously using the Pomodoro technique to not only stay on task, but to plan out my days and weeks.

If you aren’t familiar with the Pomodoro technique, the concept is remarkably simple. So simple, that I first dismissed it as ridiculous. But, thanks to my good friend Josh Earl’s success with it, I decided to give it another try.

You basically set a timer for 25 minutes. During that time you pick a single task to accomplish and work on that task, uninterrupted. After 25 minutes you take a break for 5 minutes and then begin again. After 4 cycles, you take a longer 15 minute break. (There are some variations on this, but that is the basic idea.)

Like I said, it seems pretty simple and unremarkable, but I can’t even begin to express how powerful this technique is for getting things done.

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07
May 14

The Virtualization Practice – Will Scale-Out Architectures Kill Enterprise Storage?

In 1980 I was working for Datapoint, a vendor with proprietary client hardware, proprietary server hardware, a proprietary LAN, and proprietary systems software. In 1983 IBM introduced the PC, and in 1985 it introduced the PC-XT with a hard disk. 3Com introduced Ethernet, and Novell created a network operating system. All of a sudden, Datapoint was on the wrong side of history in the computer business. In five short years, Datapoint went from six thousand employees to sixty.
Is Shared Enterprise Storage on the Wrong Side of History?

To date, shared enterprise storage has been the beneficiary of two huge trends in the computer industry: data center virtualization (which basically needs shared storage for certain highly valuable features such as vMotion to work), and big data, which produces so much data that large-scale arrays are needed. Shared enterprise storage arrays also sport a variety of highly attractive enterprise-class features like redundancy (no single point of failure), deduplication (saving on disk space and cost), and the ability to move bits around as business needs dictate. These arrays also have a huge amount of hardware engineering behind them, designed to allow them to offer excellent performance at scale to their customers.

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06
May 14

CIO Insight – How CIOs Really Feel about Technology

You live it. You breathe it. But do you actually like technology? Yes, apparently you do. At least that’s the impression cast by a new survey from The Harris Poll. While you may spend your entire day immersed in pursuits of cloud, mobility, data analytics and other IT innovations, the research provides a welcome opportunity to take a step back and assess how you truly feel about the impact of it all upon society. And to add comparative value, the survey contrasts the responses of CIOs and other tech leaders to sentiments of the general U.S. population. Certainly, there are differences of opinion. But on topics such as tech’s overall impact on our lives and its capacity to spark innovation and creativity, you’ll be happy to see that perspectives are fairly positive overall.

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.