Agile Lab - Training, Coaching and Consultancy

Globish-English dictionary

Globish-English.pdf Download this file

#food Ham and cheese sandwich, raspberry and white chocolate muffin

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#food two Kellogs Variety Packs Breakfast

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Lunch #food

Chicken Fried Rice
Tempura Prawns
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Dinner #food

Cous cous (200g pot from M&S)
Pot of Pineapple
Pasta with bacon Peas and Mint
Couple of handfuls of bombay mix
3 beers

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Breakfast: Muesli & Yoghurt, Fruit Salad #food

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Breakfast - yoghurt and muesli

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Playing the Game

"An amazingly high percentage of men, with absolute honesty, are astonished when they find that the verbal attacks they've carried out in the courtroom or at the conference are resented by a woman on the receiving end. THEY ARE NOT PRETENDING, THEY TRULY DO NOT UNDERSTAND. "Males learn very early that verbal confrontations are part of the necessary activity activity of their careers. They learn to admire the skilled verbal infighter, to keep track of the "one for you and one for me" scores as the confrontations go along, and they do not take any of this personally. (The man who doesn't learn this is the man who gets passed over again and again while less able people are promoted over his head.)

"Women are bewildered when they see two men who have just spent twenty minutes trading the sort of vicious insults asscociated with lifelong hatred go off to lunch together as if nothing happened. Men are equally bewildered when they find that the woman they just went through the same process with won't go to lunch because she's angy. They see it as roughly equivalent to refusing to go lunch with someone because you were just whipped at checkers."

The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense - Suzette Haden Elgin
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You do what you do

"You do what you do."

I'm tempted to crack the joke about the philosophers and Frank Sinatra - hang on a minute, lets see if I can find it. Here it is - apparently attributed to Kurt Vonnegut:

“To be is to do”–Socrates.
“To do is to be”–Jean-Paul Sartre.
“Do be do be do”–Frank Sinatra.

Well, I think "You do what you do" is more profound than any of those (sorry Frank and Kurt). And as far as I know, I made it up. Aren't I clever?

I know, I know, this sounds like one of things that is supposed to be profound but is in fact banal beyond all belief. But actually, in this case, I think it's the other way round. This is one of those sayings that is actually way more profound than it seems at first glance. And I so wish that someone had told me this when I was growing up.

What it captures is another piece of wisdom that I picked up from that great hero-shithead Richard Bandler. He points out, in one of his books, I can't remember which one, that the most powerful human urge isn't survival. Oh no. The most powerful human urge is to carry on doing what we're already doing.

That being the case, if you have any particular ambition in life, you should start doing the thing that you want to do, right now, this minute, and keep doing it.It means that if you get some idea in your head. You want to be a lion tamer, you want to be a belly dancer, you want to run the country. Whatever it is, you should do the nearest thing that you can to what you want to be, right now. You want to be a writer, get writing, you want to be an actor, get acting. You want to run the country get elected to something.

You are here...

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Amazon vs Google - Interesting from the point of view of strategy

Essentially this article (http://steverant.pen.io/) is saying what this book (Good Strategy/Bad Strategy) is saying.

What you need for success is a clear strategy, ruthlessly enforced.

Google had this when they wanted to become the world's best search engine. Now they don't have it.

Most Attackers

Most attackers are spoiling for a fight. They are overextended, and they need the victim to fight back to preserve their tenuous balance.

Aikido in Everyday Life - Terry Dobson and Victor Miller
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Fighting Back

Even as we write, we're conscious of the fact that Fighting Back is one of the most counterproductive responses in most conflict situations. Certainly it is the least wisely and most widely used tactic in the whole lexicon of conflict.

Aikido in Everyday Life: Giving in to Get your Way - Terry Dobson and Victor Miller
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On First Looking at thebookseller.com

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” - W Edwards Deming

1. I was in Foyles on Charing Cross Road, one of the best of all locations for a bookshop. A student was asking about a book - I think it was a fashion book. The guy at the counter, who might as well have been wearing a badge saying "I'm not happy to help." Looked the book up on his computer and said
"I'm sorry, it's out of print."
[Student] "So you can order it for me?"
"Duh!!!! No!!!! It's OUT OF PRINT. WE CAN'T ORDER IT"
I walked away vaguely wondering why the most unhelpful customer assistant in the universe couldn't have looked it up on the internet and ordered a copy for the customer, slapping on a decent commission.

2. My wife, who is a tour guide @greekguidetolon went, again into Foyles and asked if they had a copy of a book detailing locations used in the filming of the Harry Potter movies. She was rather abruptly told that no such book exists. She came home, found it on amazon.co.uk and ordered it, it arrived the next day.

3. I was in Borders in Cambridge, a foreign-sounding gentlemen had made the mistake of going in there to try to find a book. Again, he was quite rudely told that the book was out of print and couldn't be ordered. I took pity on him and wrote down the URL of abebooks.co.uk certain he would find a copy there.

What was it exactly that drove, or is driving these booksellers out of business? Was it really a perfect storm? Or was it perhaps laziness, rudeness? Appalling customer service?

I was very surprised and depressed on reading the news items and blogs at thebookseller.com. Rather than trying to engage with the amazing new technologies and maturing technologies, which offer all manner of opportunities for book creation, book distribution and book reading, it's correspondents seem to be able to do nothing but moan.

They moan about it not being the good old days when the state guaranteed them a living through a return to the net book agreement.

They moan about amazon.co.uk being competitive and having and excellent service at a low price (the bastards).

They even moan and take hoary side-swipes at their potential future customers expressing "understandable concern about the attention span of a generation encouraged to communicate in 140-character bursts" (there's only one correct response to that, it begins with F and it nearly rhymes with "duck cough.")

They don't talk about the new Kindles. Yes, that's right. They don't talk about the new Kindles. Good job survival isn't mandatory.

What I want to be able to do with an Agile Lifecycle Management Tool - some notes

Agile life-cycle management tools. My main experience has been with Jira, and it's OK for issue management, e.g. Tracking the status of an issue. What it's rubbish at is backlog management - keeping track of a backlog, prioritising a backlog. Things I would really like to know - how much work is there in a project? How much work was there in this project yesterday? It would also be great to see some animations of how the project started, how it got bigger and how it got finished. I'd also like end to end time to be a first class view. So on every issue, the first thing that you see is how long it's taken so far - but also, how long it's expected to take based on previous stories/defects/features.

Waiting - how long has this story hung around not being worked on? Again, just like end-to-end time, this should be immediately obvious for any issue.
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All work isn't the same

When all work is treated the same, and perhaps called by a single type, there is likely to be greater variation in size, effort, risk, or other factors. By breaking out work by specific type, it is possible to treat different types differently and to provide greater predictability.

Kanban - David J. Anderson http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0984521402/ref=mp_s_a_1?qid=1317465409&sr=8-1
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Average length of user stories

Within a couple of years, a template for writing user stories had emerged from the community in London.

As a , I want a , in order to

The use of this template greatly standardised the writing of user stories. One of the creators of this approach, Tim McKinnon, reported to me in 2008 that he now had data to show that the average user story was 1.2 days of effort and the spread of variation was a half-day to about four days.

Kanban - David J. Anderson http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0984521402/ref=mp_s_a_1?qid=1317465409&sr=8-1
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Average length of user stories

Within a couple of years, a template for writing user stories had emerged from the community in London.

As a , I want a , in order to

The use of this template greatly standardised the writing of user stories. One of the creators of this approach, Tim McKinnon, reported to me in 2008 that he now had data to show that the average user story was 1.2 days of effort and the spread of variation was a half-day to about four days.

Kanban - David J. Anderson http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0984521402/ref=mp_s_a_1?qid=1317465409&sr=8-1
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Untitled

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