ONE

Metallica once wrote a song called ONE. It was about loneliness and how it feels being without any connection with the surrounding world. The background was the terrible WorldWar I, where millions of people were killed for no reason at all.

Some corporations seems to be in the same mood as Metallica in ONE. They have no contact or feeling for the surrounding environment the live in. This is the absolute opposite to being ONE with your customer as Stefan Engeseth lays out in his book ONE.

What does it mean being one with your customer? What does it mean being one with your supplier? Being ONE with your company?

I can see several examples where people are not ONE with even themselves ;-)

My main issue here is how to become ONE? I think that it is both a mental state. If you are ONE you always try to understand the customer (even if you don't always agree). To understand a customer you have to live and breathe the same air as your customer. This can be to use the same shoes as your customer, live in the same kind of neighbourhood, shop in the same shops etc.

When it comes to projects (which is the main topic for this blog) it is very important that the project involves the customer. This can be done as in XP/Agile where the customer should sit on the project to be able to answer questions as they arise, in real-time. RUP and PMI focuses much on requirements gathering and processes around handling changing requirements. The RUP and PMI ways are more formal than the XP/Agile methods. So the method you should choose in your project depends a lot on the requirements on the project. But they all have in common that they focus on the projects and stresses the importance of customer involvement, the project being ONE with the customer.

Can machines think, and what do they think?

Can machines think? If they can think, what do they think?
I believe questions like these are quite important to ask. Today reasearch into artificial intelligence have stalled. Not much new knowledge is created these days. It's mostly around robots helping elderly people or as games with children (Tamagottchi etc). So I believe it's time for a new era! (Not that I can bring that much, but anyway).

Lately I've been reading "The man who knew too much" by David Leavitt. It's about Alan Turing and his life and inventions. I've known the basic facts about Turing that he invented the computer and broke the German Enigma code during WWII. But I never really knew what he actually did. When reading about his first definition of a Turing machine and how to program it, it strikes you how similar it is to today's programming languages. Imagine a guy during the late 40's inventing a programming language without having seen any similar thing. James Gosling, who invented Java, had several others to get inspired from. Turing had none. The other thing is his definition of an intelligent machine and the Turing test. The Turing test determines if a machine is really intelligent or just plain stupid. The funny thing is that Turing sometimes implies that humans will be taken for being a machine. What an irony! So he thinks that it's not machines that are smarter than humans, it's the other way around, humas who are more stupid than a machine ...

So can machines be smarter than humans? If you look at the human being it's not the individual human that is smart (not very often at least), it's the sum of all humans (ie. the society) and the sum of all thoughts that have been written down, that makes us smart. When James Gosling invented Java he stood on the shoulders of those who were before him (including Turing). When a thought strikes you, it's in the discussion of it with others that improves it and eventually makes it a useful thought. And finally, it's our physical connection and tools that makes us able to do what we do today, building high rise buildings etc.

So it's not if machines can think, it's about:

• What kind of external communication do machines have. Are they to be like humans or something totally different? Will we understand them at all?
• What will the machine society be like? Without a society where they can share and debate thoughts they will never be able to build up an intelligent society
• What kind of culture will they develop? Which drivers and motives will make them push forward? Will it be power or helping humans?

So I believe we have to create the initial thinking machine. Then it's up to them to communicate with each other, develop a society and culture. What kind of intelligence they will develop will much be depending on their physical equipment. Will they just be able to think (more like a lame person) or also able to act?

I would very much like this to happen and start developing machines that can think. Not because they can help us, but because it would be very interesting to see what will actually develop.

So, go out there and create thinking machines that will live by themselves, not just for us!

How chopping wood for the winter can learn us a few thing about Project Management

This summer I've done the usual chopping of wood for the winter. It's hard to imagine that it will soon be cold again and without wood you don't survive. What I like most about chopping wood is the piece at mind you enter when hitting the piece of wood with your axe. You put up yet another piece of wood and aim the axe, try to hit the small crack that indicates a possible easy hit. If you're lucky you will nail it the first time. Usually the wood is to big to crack the first time but by hitting it over and over again it finally gives up. Then when you're finished it's ready to be stacked in the wood shed. And later on it gets cold, that's when you're really thankful that you really did all the hard work of chopping wood.

What can this learn us about project management? Well, not much to be honest was my first thought. Then, after some thinking it hit me that perhaps it could. Not that it is in any way remarkable, but still it can give us some placeholder for remebering the important things while doing a project.
First of all we have to plan. Without planning the collection of wood and then where to chop and finally where to stack it for best drying there's no way to succeed. Careful planning is a good start.
Then it comes to the careful selection of tools. Without a good axe you're lost in the wood chopping business. There's no way you can even succeed with the first piece of wood if you don't have a real good axe. I personally prefer "Gränsfors" which is the Rolls-Royce among the axes. Select the tools you need for the project, train yourself to use them effectively and you can improve the possibilities of a successful project several times.
Iterate over and over again. If it's one thing you learn from chopping wood, it is to iterate. You pich up the wood, chop it in two pieces, pick up one of the pieces and chop it again. Repeat this until all the pieces are small enough to fit in the stove. Then pick up the next piece of wood and repeat the same procedure.
A colleague of mine once said to turn every wheel on the project a little bit one at a time until all wheels were turned 360 degrees. Then the project is finished, not before. It's exactly the same when chopping wood. Do it one piece of wood at a time until you've done them all.
Continues process improvement is seen in chopping wood. For every piece of wood you try to find the best crack and hit it as hard as you can. Every time you fail you try to figure out what could I've done better and the next piece of wood you practice that new knowledge. After a while you get better and better at it. It's exactly the same in project management. To be a great project manager you need to continously improve the project and it's processes.
Finally you have to think through the whole product lifecycle, not just the project lifecycle. If you fail to chop the wood in the right size they wont fit in the stove during the winter. You have to fix the wood by cutting it into smaller pieces while the family is freezing inside. That's the same thing you do in software where you fix the bugs during real production. No, have the whole product lifecycle in front of you and it gets much easier to plan and execute the project.

To summarize what I've said here. Compare project management with the art of chopping wood. Handle these parameters in your project as during chopping wood:

• Plan the project
• Select the right tools
• Iterative project, rolling wave planning
• Continous process improvement
• Have the complete product lifecycle in mind when doing the project, not only the project lifecycle
  

Thoughts while travelling in China and Singapore

Once again I have stepped over the threshold of Kuntai Royal Hotel. Somehow you get used to staying in a hotel all time. You recognize the scent, the different kind of people working in the hotel and the rooms. This is China so there are plenty of people around, each one only doing a very small and limited task. The first occasions I stayed at Kuntai we were on floor 15. This is a very interesting floor since it is almost on the top. It was one of the last floors to be built and the plumbers experienced a lack of drain traps and used straight tubes instead, thus leading to a nice smell of s**t in the bathroom. Never mind it is the executive floor … The new room on floor 12 is much better, smaller, but without the smell of s**t. Instead there is a faint smell of vomiting, you can’t have it all, can you?

While going to floor 12 I noticed a strange thing, no floor 13 and 14. The same for the rooms, 1212 and then comes 1215. But if it means unluck to live in room 1313, is it really connected to the sign on the door or is it connected to the actual physical room. I mean, the magic creature that is able to determine if one is lucky or not, can it really read the sign on the door. I think it more calculates which floor is 13 and which room is 13 on that floor and then pour unluck into it. Perhaps that explains the smell of s**t on floor 15 since it really is floor 13, unluck smells s**t. The same was on the flight here from Bangkok. No row 13. In Singapore they had taken it seriously and removed floor 13 and 14 completely (in line with my reasoning above), thus leaving a hole in the building. These guys are serious, not amateurs as at Kuntai.

Tomorrow is Sunday and I’ll try to get some relax in the Spa. They have massage, sauna, aerobics and more. Talking about massage, the last time I was here the phone rang early in the morning and a hoarse lady asked if I wanted to get massage. “Why would I like to have massage early in the morning when I’m sleeping” I thought and said no. When I woke up I realized that it was probably some other kind of “massage” she offered. I’m just a stupid naïve Swedish guy. If I just known I’d said yes of course, who can turn down such an offering ;-) At breakfast I told Per about the call and he said she called him earlier in the night. He was a bit quicker than I and asked her in Chinese if she’s ill, since the voice is so hoarse. She just hung up. Why, he was just caring …

I saw that the Eclipse group has released a communication framework for developing client applications like Y! etc. Wonder when they will release a SIP client stack and API. That would be really interesting since it allows people to really write new applications and make use of the technology without having to care so much. In the future I think it will be all about communication. A bank won’t be a bank, it will be a communication company that handles people’s money and transforms their fixed assets to cash. The same for your supermarket, it will have to communicate with all its customers and make itself part of their lives. The tricky thing is how they should do it without pissing all theirs customers off. I don’t believe in some of the visions you can see in movies where there are screens everywhere that shows personalized messages as you pass by. It is more of a situation where you get it when you want it, to simplify your life. It will be interesting times to live in when these systems has to be built and delivered.

Talking about supermarkets, I paid a visit to the local hypermarket today (don’t really know the difference between a supermarket and hypermarket, but who really cares) to see what was offered. Some of it looked exactly as home, other things were quite different. The sell living fish in aquariums for example, although some of them were swimming upside down … I don’t know if I really would call them alive, maybe warm (at least warmer than the fish on ice). The also sell pig feet, chicken feet and cow stomach. My first thought was, wow this is really disgusting (no, I don’t have a cultural controlled opinion, no way) until I realized that we use these things in sausages (especially English sausages). They also had a lot of tea and candy. The tea ranges from 1€ to 70€ per kg. The more expensive tea is very good; you can use it over and over again. Something I recommend if you come to China. Sam did the ESDK training in January and then we visited a tea shop with special rooms with chairs and tables designed for letting you taste all their different kind of teas. That was really an experience!

While discussing tea, Per and I had afternoon tea at the bar in the hotel earlier today. It was a very tasty green tea served in glass pot and glass cup. We really enjoyed the company and the place, discussing the project, life and everything in between. This was until the bill came, 12€. That is something, for two cups of tea. The dinner we had later was composed of 4 dishes, tofu, beef, mushroom with vegetables in strong chili and dumplings (the content was unidentified). At the restaurant they had living fish (in better condition than at the hypermarket) and living big frogs. It looked very cute, with big eyes. I couldn’t point at it and have on the plate. I noticed that both of the frogs survived our visit. The whole dinner including beer was around 8€. It was a bit better price performance than the tea, although the bar had a better atmosphere.