Managing Product Development

I just returned from Tokyo, where I keynoted at JaSST, the Japan Symposium on Software Testing. 10 years ago, when they started the conference, maybe it was just about testing, but now it’s evolved to be about quality in the organization.

Some highlights from my trip:

• Everyone (and everything) I met appeared quite orderly. Everything had a place and everything was in its place. I saw this at the lost-luggage counter, in the hotel, and at the conference.
• I was pleasantly surprised that the subway ticket machines had an “English” button so I could buy my ticket and know what I was doing. The maps were in English as well as Japanese, so I could know in advance what my trip would be and which stop to get off at. I had a little trouble with which track, but that’s probably because I was jet-lagged.
• I was pleasantly surprised to see evidence that the simultaneous interpretation for my keynote worked fairly well. I could tell because people laughed when they were supposed to :-)
• For the tutorial, I did not allow enough time for the consecutive interpretation or for the questions about agile, so I needed another 20 minutes, which I did not have :-(
• I was a little concerned that when the panel prepared for the questions, I thought we might be boring. Nope, we were thought-provoking and funny.
• My Japanese hosts were amazingly solicitous and helpful for my entire experience: to/from the airport, to/from the conference, to/from sessions at the conference

I had a blast. I hope I have an opportunity to return to Japan. Now, all I have to do is get enough sleep so I’m awake during the day…

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I work hard on my speaking skills–not just how I present myself on the platform, but also the content of what I say, and how I present that. I’ve almost converted to Keynote, but occasionally still use PowerPoint.

For AYE, we don’t use any PowerPoint (or equivalent) at all. Here’s why. If you scroll down, you’ll see Dwayne’s reference to Life After Death by PowerPoint by Don McMillan, an engineer turned comic. (I laughed out loud.)

At Better Software, I’m doing an hour-long thing (not quite a full workshop, but much more interactive than an hour talk) about how to be a better speaker. I was going to mention all the points Don makes, but I might just play the video.

Some of the additional points I was going to make are:

• Don’t drone on about you or your company. Set the context in less than 30 seconds.
• Make eye contact with the people in your audience.
• Use a microphone.
• Understand that the people in the audience want you to succeed. You don’t have to think about them as naked (icky, yucky, blech), just as people.
• Market your session all through the conference.

Do you have any pet peeves about speakers? Anything else I should make sure to include?

Labels: conference, humor, speaking

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I’m leading several sessions at SD Best Practices, Sept 11-14, 2006. Here’s the list:

• Monday, Sept 11: Coaching Your Peers and Staff to Excellence (half-day experiential)
• Wednesday, Sept 13: Predicting Project Completion
• Wednesday, Sept 13: Develop Your Interviewing Skills
• Thursday, Sept 15: Managing the Project Portfolio
• Thursday, Sept 14: Successful Software Management: 15 Lessons Learned

I’ll also be signing books, but I don’t know when that is yet.

I hope you decide to come to all or part of the conference. If you register as a VIP (all week pass) before September 6, 2006, you can save $400 off the regular price. The priority code is 6ESPK81.

BTW, I don’t think that what I do is “best” practices, but practices that make sense in a bunch of situations. I try to include enough detail in my talks so that the participants can make the approaches best for their context and themselves.

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I’ve just returned from the last of my spring conferences. And, I’m struck again by how much training is available to people at conferences and how cheap it is. You may be shaking your head, saying, NO JR, Conferences are expensive, about $5000 per person for the week, once you factor in travel along with the conference fee. How can you say they’re cheap??

The value of a conference is partially in the tutorials, partially in the sessions, and partially in the networking you do with other attendees. Here’s a way to qualitatively measure value of a conference, assuming you attend for 5 days, taking 2 tutorials, and 2.5 days of sessions:

Days 1 and 2: Participate in a tutorial from 9-5. Take away three things from each tutorial you can apply next week. Network with and meet 3 other people (in each tutorial) in similar circumstances to you. Days 3, 4, 5: Attend sessions, some in your area of expertise, some not. Attend one session with interactivity of some sort. Meet 3 new people each day. Take away 3 ideas each day. At the end of the week, you have 15 new ideas, and 15 new people in your network. If you just stopped there, you’d have received plenty of value for your money. It will take you months to try each of the 15 ideas and see how to adapt them to your environment. If you also continue to correspond with your 15 new colleagues, using them for support, mentoring, and coaching (which goes both ways), you’ll received peer consulting of tremendous value. I don’t know how to quantitatively measure this, but it seems to me that 15 new ideas and 15 new colleagues can help you make at least some progress on what appear to be your intractable problems. If you can even partially solve one problem, you’ve regained the cost of the conference.

But you can use conferences in other ways too. You can meet experts in your field, learn what you can from them, and continue to contact them throughout the year for quick feedback. At the conferences, the speakers and famous experts meet with people at mealtimes formally and informally, through BOFs or Open Space or other informal discussions. I had an Open Space session last week that only had 3 people (one of which was Esther, so the participants got to hear from two of us how to identify appropriate skills and questions (and write ads) for bringing people into an agile team and into a highly technical test team. One-on-one consulting for 2 hours — included in the price of the conference. That’s unbelievably cheap.

Conferences re-energize people. Conferences with highly participatory sessions, such as the AYE conference help you learn by practicing while you confer. But as long as there is space in the conference to discuss issues with new-found colleagues and speakers, you have the opportunity to learn at a conference.

Don’t dismiss conferences as a waste of time or a boondogle. Speakers (whether they are consultants or not) use conferences to articulate techniques to solving problems. They may even be able to help you adapt their solution to your problem.

So try a conference this year. Local one-day conferences are extremely cheap (a few hundred dollars at most). If you do attend one, make sure you know how to contact the speakers, so you can follow up with questions later. If you want more than one day, but you’re not sure about an entire week, try a shorter conference, or go for just part of the week. Wherever possible, choose interactive and experiential sessions because you’ll learn more by discussing the problem with your peers and practicing solutions than just by thinking about or listening to how someone else solved the problem.

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