Drunken PM

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Just before Christmas I got the chance to interview BrentBeer from GitHub. Brent and I met while we were both at Øredev last November presenting during the conference.

If you aren’t already familiar GitHub, the interview provides a quick overview of it’s capabilities and what it does. If you are a PM and you use Github, Brent is currently working on reaching out to the PM community learn more about of how project managers can leverage source control applications to make their jobs easier.

During the conversations we had in Malmo, one of the most interesting things Brent and I discussed was how GitHub works from a distributed employee standpoint. They are based in San Francisco, but 70% of the staff work remotely. If you are struggling to cope with the challenges of distributed teams, check out the interview to hear some of the ways that GitHub has managed to establish itself as an organization that was able to function in a distributed way.  Brent shares a lot of the critical things that GitHub does to make sure the relationships and interactions are deeply established despite the virtual nature of the organization.

One of the exploding lightbulb moments for me during the interview was at 9:40 in when Brent says that during the previous day he had been “trying not to work”. This struck me because I often struggle with the same thing when I am home, and I wonder if this will be a new challenge distributed organizations have to learn to cope with. When you have a group of highly motivated, energized people who work for your company, and they enjoy what they do so much that the hard part is getting them to stop and take a break, how does that impact sustainable pace? In the same way that teams are sometimes forced to work all night and all weekend, I’m wondering if we may reach a point where we have to stop teams from working all night and all weekend.

Here is Brent's Twitter

Brent's Github Page

Free Training on GitHub

Brent's Øredev Presentations

GitHub's You Tube Channel

Click here for the interview

David J. Anderson is the leading voice in IT when it comes to taking the practices introduced in Lean Manufacturing’s kanban system and adjusting it to serve software development with Kanban (capital K). He’s also the driving force behind Lean Kanban University.

In this interview David shares the primary goals he had when beginning to work on his version of Kanban, how the practices have changed, and how they have evolved over time.

With respect to scaling Agile, David provides an update on Lean Kanban University’s new programing for advanced practitioners of Kanban who want to use it at an enterprise level. He also shares his thoughts on how some of the other popular approaches to scaling Agile are trying to make use of Kanban. 

Here some of the links mentioned in the interview:

Alistair Cockburn’s article on the end of methodologies
Klaus Leopold's Flight Levels of Kanban
David J Anderson @ Associates
Lean Kanban University
David’s Books on Amazon
David on Twitter

Non-Violent Communication is something that is not the easiest thing to define. The part of my brain that has a degree in Communications wants to explain it as a framework for communicating. This is sort of like saying that Eric Clapton’s custom built “blackie” Stratocaster is a guitar.

If you look on the Center for Non-Violent Communication site, you will learn that it is a way of communicating/interacting that is “based on historical principles of nonviolence-- the natural state of compassion when no violence is present in the heart. NVC reminds us what we already instinctively know about how good it feels to authentically connect to another human being.”

Non-Violent Communication was initially developed by Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, in the 1960’s “as a communication process that helps people to exchange the information necessary to resolve conflicts and differences peacefully”. Dr. Rosenberg is the author of a number of Non-Violent Communication and a number of other books on NVC.

There are aspects of NVC that touch on how we speak, how we listen, and how we bring compassion and empathy into our interactions with others. This past Spring I had the chance to interview Dr. Judith Hanson Lasater, the author of a number of books, including What We Say Matters. She explained it as:

Non-Violent communication is more of a process than a thing. And it begins first with understanding within yourself what need you are trying to meet before you speak. It’s also a process of learning how to listen to what the other person might be saying with their heart, not to get caught up with what they’re saying with their words.

And none of that sounds like it has much to do with Project Management. Except that it does. More and more, PMs on both the traditional side and Agile side are coming around to the importance of empathy in their work. As they realize that the job involves more than just getting people to do things, they are realizing the value of acknowledging that we work with human beings and that these individuals deserve more than just being told what to do.

It would be easy to say that NVC is a pattern or framework for how we talk and listen to people, but just following those practices isn’t going to mean you are really practicing NVC. As one friend said to me, “if you don’t have it in your heart, it is not the same”.

I believe this is a very important topic and it is especially important to those working in the Project Management area. If once upon a time, our focus as PMs was telling people what to do, and that has been evolving more towards the individuals and interactions focus, this is an indicator of a next stage in looking at how we approach working with others.

A great example from my interview with Dr. Lasater was when I described part of the role of someone leading an Agile team as being to empower people and “give people autonomy”. Dr. Lasater questioned me about my phrasing because it expresses my way of thinking. To say that a leader empowers, or gives autonomy means that the leader does not see the recipient as having those already. In fact, each of us has autonomy and is empowered… we (or others) may just not be aware of it. Or, as Dr. Lasater put it:

My words reflect my thoughts, my thoughts reflect my beliefs, and my beliefs run my life, especially the unconscious ones. So if I have the unconscious belief that I am some how giving someone autonomy, that's going to leak out in my words and my body language, my expressions and the rolling of my eyes and whatever I'm going to do. I have to first understand that they have autonomy and I recognize that. So I might say in that situation, “I'm feeling uneasy because I have a need for mutuality and shared power in this creative endeavor and sometimes I feel worried that the group does not move in that direction. I am wondering if you would be willing to tell me if I have said or done anything that may have inhibited your trust?”

Her explanation of how to express the message is a good example of how people often speak when using NVC. This is the opening post of a series I am going to be working on related to NVC. As a project manager, it is something I have been working towards coming to terms with for a while now. In the coming posts I’ll be writing about my attempts to gain a deeper understanding of it, my attempts to practice it and all that I learn along the way. Throughout the series I will be working in elements from my conversation with Dr. Lasater and I am also hoping to interview others who are practicing NVC while working with teams and with other trainers who are practicing it in the classroom. (Many of the Certified Scrum Trainers are now participating in NVC Friday each week.)

If you are practicing NVC and are open to being interviewed about your experiences with it, I would love to hear from you.

And, if you’d like to learn more about Non-Violent Communication, here are some valuable resources:

Center for Non-Violent Communication

Marshal Rosenberg’s Amazon Page

What We Say Matters

At the DigitalPM 2013 Summit, Rachel Gertz gave a presentation called “Your Clients Matter, So Put Your Team First”. During the presentation she made the case that if you really care about giving the client your best, the most important thing you can do is make sure that the people who create the stuff you give to the client are well cared for. Deep with the Servant Leadership is this one.

Rachel’s approach to project management is heavy on the empathy, individuals and interactions “agile” side of things. But what makes Rachel’s work even more unique is that over 90% of her interactions with people are virtual, and most of that is just voice. So, if you are among the crowd who has been struggling with the communication challenges that come with distributed teams, theStrayMuse=Yoda.

Rachel works at Louder than Ten 
She tweets as The Stray Muse 
She blogs here  (warning, not always 100% SFW)
And she’s all about the unicat