Innovation requires skill, motivation and courage
Feb/100
Innovation is not just brainstorming with fancy techniques. Truly new business ideas need well grown skill, deep motivation to struggle through all the forthcoming difficulties and courage to put enough effort to make it successful.
A stereotype of an inventor is a mad man who works to create a perpetual motion machine. He has limited education to base his inventions but decades of hard work is a kind of substitute of that. Chances of success are limited because it is easier to be creative at the spearhead of science.
Motivation is a required because innovation is not just heureka moments in brainstorming sessions but persistent work to try different things, ideas and variations. Many of the ideas we get are indeed doable, but not commercially feasible or the manufacturing process is not feasible.
I believe in intrinsic motivators, but money is not totally out of the table, because we need money to fund the materials and inventor’s time for a long journey of trials and errors - inventors use empirical process control. Many useful inventions are out of reach of individuals, because of expensive equipment that is needed. On the other point view, governments typically overspend because too much money is chasing too few ideas. Just think of ITER.
Courage is important because new innovations break our barriers of thoughts. Something that we believed, was found to be not true. Saying that is not easy. It is easier to let it be.
So, employees have no reason to innovate. They get their salaries without and hunger overcomes the desire to create something great. People have ideas but they do not go ahead with them, because that will do harm. Remember that the majority of the ideas are not that great when studied more. And if it happens to be a success story, it is not just fair that your employer gets it for free. You might get a 100 € bonus 
Universities are thought to be sources of innovation. Ph.D’s have the theoretical knowledge to synthesize new ideas but current world is very eager to make sure that the big companies get the results. Tight research funding narrows the focus of the researchers. You must complete your Ph.D in four years. To do so, you take part of a large team that is sure of about the results when they start.
BTW. I found an academic study of this topic. Creativity and innovation in the Systems Engineering process [PDF].
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
Dec/090
I wish you merry Christmas and happy new year
It has been surprisingly strong upturn after the economic downturn in 2009. I have been running CSM trainings one after another - the public ones are just a peak of the iceberg.
Based on the statistics this blog is not dead though I have not written anything for a while. The backlog of topics that I would like to write grows larger and while I read a lot - web, books and discussion forums I get still more issues to comment. I don’t make a promise for the new year to be more active even though I feel that way now in my Christmas leave.
Scrum gathering Munich
Oct/090
I am taking part to Scrum gathering this week. This is fully booked though the economy is down. The talks that I have heard so far are encouraging and enjoyable. I am here to see friends and to hear their stories and experiences. There are many issues that I should rise (in this blog and otherwise) but I the thing near my heart is collaborative design.
Developers are still struggling with functional organizations. Product owners don’t talk with the developers and we have subgroups of developers who communicate only with specifications. This might be because of the early phase of the agile adoption but understanding the cross-functional teams might be difficult too.
September 2009
Sep/090
Work is continuing behind the scenes. August 2009 was surprisingly busy to me and to my customers. Nordea bank announced today that the economic downturn is over. This is something that the stock prices have predicted about a half a year. To those of you who are not familiar with its behavior, I like to remind that highest peek of unemployment normally occurs about half a year after the lowest economic output and that stock prices change direction before it.
We have still bumpy road ahead if the bottom is in the Winter. Businesses lack money, cash to invest. Reorganizing takes time when a lot of people is involved. Inventing new ideas might be happening when we have time for that but realizing them is difficult. We need to ask permissions.
Antti Tarvanen opened a new blog about agile acquisition that is julkiset ohjelmistohankinnat in Finnish. I try to be active there, too.
ScrumAlliance starts exams 1.10.2009. Find more at ScrumAlliance.org.
I have few courses before that. So getting a CSM status without the exam is still possible, but everyone assures that passing the exam will be easy.
I have now new versions of my favorite tools Enterprise Architect and Netbeans. EA is now capable of generating code from statechart diagrams. Netbeans 6.7.1 has interesting things in JavaFX, SOA and Webservices. I have been working with Debian flavors of Linux at home and I think that the progress in the open source area is also changing the world.
That is it now, folks. At 1:20 AM.
8 years of lean software development in Tieturi
Aug/091
Kalle Huhtala’s talk about practical experiences of lean software development is now down-loadable from the site of the Projektipäivät. It is in Finnish, sorry. Unfortunately I could not take part of this day but knowing Kalle, I am sure that it was a good talk.
Tieturi is a training and coaching house but we do some in-house software development to create solutions for eLearning. These projects are quite small and Kalle’s team serves multiple customers at a time. RePa is an excel sheet that is used to manage the tasks and resources. It can be classified as a kanban, because there is only one list of things to do. A dedicated one hour weekly meeting is used to have the coordination discussions in addition what happens ad hoc in the team room.
Experiences of RePa are quite good as you can assume when you hear that we have used that for eight years. Our process has helped us to balance the work in progress and resources that we have. Limiting work to capacity is important because failures or false promises are not an option in small projects that we do.
ELearning is the answer that queue theory gives to trainer’s value stream. You can start learn as soon as you have bought the solution and you can proceed on your own when you have time. There is no need to gather large numbers of students to classes. The solutions are smaller than several days that you typically spend to a class. You can spend just minutes to learn something that is very specific to your actual need. For example, if you want to know how to use links in Wordpress, you could just start a video that teaches to you to do it.
Agile and traditional requirements in Systeemityölehti
May/090
Our article about agile and traditional requirements is published in the latest printed Systeemityölehti 2/2009. Its content can be partially found in Tieturis discussion forum.. In Finnish, sorry
Then something that I did or did not say in this discussion.
The word “requirement” is harmful because business decisions about content and technical decisions about its implementation depend on each other. So, the business decisions can’t be done in a vacuum before any technical issues. This means that in a software engineering project there is no phases of requirement development, design and so on.
From lean we find that we should postpone decisions to last possible moment, because we have then more information and we can assume that we make better decisions with better information. We should even study carefully multiple options before we commit to any of them. And that is not waste. It is also important that we use scientific method in our decision making. For example we test the architectural choices before we continue.
The role of specifications is also different. We start with minimal specifications and use face-to-face communications to make sure that that the parties of the development understand each other. Specifications are not the maintenance documents of the forthcoming software because they change quite much during the development.
A month gone
May/090
I started this blog more than one month ago. I have written almost nothing about lean and agile software development. I mean here, because I do that almost every day at work..
The main reason for starting a new domain was to get rid of spam. It means that I change my email-addresses. It was a surprise that I take part in so many mailing lists. Most of my email was actually not spam but mails that I hope to have time to read. Updating an email-address in Software Engineering World, ECOOP and so on was quite easy.
Then I have bought a book or something 10 years ago and they still hope that I return. Finding all of them in my gigabyte of email might not be feasible. I don’t even try because I can find them again if needed. The same applies to registrations of products that I have bought.
My one-time registrations are collecting spam to free anonymous mailboxes. No problems.
I suppose that this all is done after summer.
Agile or Death in Tampere
Apr/090
I had a talk with the title “agile or death” in Tampere yesterday. We arranged that with Pitky.
The idea for the title came from the car industry where the Americans have almost lost the came. Hummer survives still in Baghdad (news in Aamulehti), but its really Prius that leads the car industry. So, I wondered if the bureaucratic ICT companies can survive without becoming more lean and more agile.
We had a good discussion, which is quite common in these kinds of happenings. One hint from the audience is worth of repeating. If you have 2 multinational sites, having a proxy person in the other site helps you a lot. For example, you have sites in Finland and India. Having a guy from India in Finland makes the communication to India much better. Knowing the people in the other site and speaking the same language is really that important.
Pentti