Self Organization with Kinkless GTD

I’ve been a Getting Things Done (GTD) practitioner for more than two years now. For a simple overview it’s an organization system based around dumping every todo onto lists, organizing them into contexts and projects, and then reviewing on a regular basis to decide on the most logical think to work on right now.

Anyway my technical implementation has been with 37 Signals Backpack product for the past year or so and it’s worked fairly well. The pluses are:

  • It’s internet based so I can get to it from my work and home machines.
  • It’s good for capturing projects per page and adding related details.
  • You can organize contexts by using special characters for the first character. For example all of my GTD contexts start with @, all my work projects have a minus sign and all of my home projects start with a >.

The main issue with it is it isn’t really easy to handle next actions, and you can’t easily tie an action in a context to a project action without resorting to duplication with cut and paste, and it can’t be searched well.

I’ve finally gotten around to looking at a product I’ve known about for some time–Kinkless GTD. It’s a series of Applescripts to turn Omni Outliner into a GTD tool. I had avoided it before because I can’t use it at work, but I’m exploring it again because it appears to allow you to actually have next actions and tie actions in context lists back to projects.

Not very far in yet, but it looks promising. The intro screencast is very nice.

Leaderless Standups

I like the idea of leaderless standup meetings, but so far I haven’t found a way to pull one off. Pretty much everyone waits for the Scrum Master to start the standup and then keep the conversation passing around the room. Dave Nicolette mentioned on this in a recent comment:

Your choice of words caught my attention: “The tech lead was holding the standup meetings.” Ideally, no one “holds” the standup. The team stands up at the appointed time and they talk to each other. There is no leader as such, and anyone can get the ball rolling.

Two new ideas have occurred to me for some experimentation:

  • Have some totem to pass around the room between each team member. Anyone can pick up the totem and start the conversation. I think a rugby ball might do well here. Kane Mar calls this a talking stick.
  • Today I heard another idea from Doug Shimp on the Net Objectvives Lean Agile Podcast. This idea was to have the Scrum Master move around the room during the standup so the team members focused on speaking to each other and not the Scrum Master.

Horizontal Security

In a talk tonight at the SACJUG meeting Roman Hustad of Foundstone talked about a number of issues in writing more secure code. Luckily he comes from a coding background so much of the advice was a lot more relevant than the typical network security perspectives.

Foundstone has developed a couple of example applications to illustrate bad coding practices which include Hacme Books. He covered ideas like testing fields with a single quote character to test for SQL injection possibilities and something called a horizontal privilege attack. That’s an attack based upon gaining access to other users accounts with the same permission level so that you can steal there information or use their account. You might do this with a badly coded web application by simply changing the value of a user id URL parameter.

He mentioned two relatively recent texts on how to apply better security practices within a software development lifecycle. And both of the suggested books included ways to deal with it on an Agile project:

Overall a good introductory talk by a practitioner. One of his main points was that security was becoming something that you needed a few developers that specialized in so that you could keep a team up to speed on the newest techniques. Trying to make everyone a security expert just isn’t going to happen. And finally, a last point was that code reviews are a great place to inject secure software practices.

Signaling the End of a Standup

Funny story when I got back from vacation. In my stead the tech lead was holding the standup meetings. He went around the room one of the days and finished up with everyone reporting in under fifteen minutes. At that point there was just silence in the room for about two solid minutes. Turns out everyone was waiting for my apparent catch phrase of, “Well, enjoy your lunch everyone.” Finally someone got the nerve to ask if the meeting was over, and everyone got a good laugh realizing the meeting had ended two minutes earlier. So you can establish a rhythm on the project with the smallest of items, even a throwaway line to signify the end of standup.

Talking Strategy With the Business

Just before going on vacation last week I managed to meet with a few middle managers on the business side that I should have met with formally years ago. Building my team and their capabilities always trumped meeting with the business to discuss higher level strategy. I’m just as guilty as the next IT manager about talking about working with the business and then living within the walls of IT. Oh, sure I met with the business side many times in the course of projects I delivered for them, but rarely did we ever discuss strategy.

Scrum and other agile methodologies assume that you have close contact with the actual customers. It also brings organizational problems to the surface quickly. In our organization there’s not a lot of strategy discussion between the business and IT. Without much discussion IT often assumes that the business doesn’t have a direction and makes assumptions that they should drive the process. The business often assumes that IT doesn’t have capabilities to deliver solutions and searches for silver bullets in package solutions.

Exploring potential strategies by just sitting down and talking to the business appears to be a reasonable first step.