Growing up in a small Baptist church, I was bored on a regular basis during church, and especially during the sermon. Sermons typically went on forever and there was very little of practical value contained in them, especially the longer ones which were usually exercises in ego-mania by the self-absorbed preacher who was delivering them. How many countless minutes and hours did I spend waiting, waiting, doing anything to take my mind off the ridiculous rhetoric and mind-numbing interpretations of the Bible or other social commentary.
This boredom and disgust caused me to avoid church for most of my adult life. While I did spend some time in United Methodism raising my family there, sermons were still rarely thought -provoking beyond an occasional shallow reminder that perhaps we were not living as well as we could. Most of my life I avoided the church and found spiritual enlightenment through the study of philosophy and science.
I have to admit that today I heard the best "sermon" that I have ever heard. It was given by Karen Epps, who is the Senior Minister at Unity Church of Dallas. Her lectures recently have been based on the book, Spiritual Liberation by Michael Beckwith. The talk was stuffed full of profound insights, inspiritional statements, connections with other religious traditions and challenging, cerebral metaphysics that definitely raised my consciousness.
"Intention to attention to intention" was one of the core concepts. Basically, we need to live with intention. We need to do things for a reason and purpose. What is our purpose? In order to know that, we have to intend to give attention to living with intention. The foundation of realizing this as reality is meditation. We can't over-meditate. Meditation allows us to go to the inner place where we find the source of our spiritual power and puts us in tune with the Universal Mind so that it is expressed through us as an authentic self-expression within the constructs of time and space that we live.
She also tied together the components of Unity and Religious Science from ancient Hindu and Buddhist focus on the God within, transported through Western classical philosophical frameworks, extended by scientific and 19th/early 20th century transcendentalist and spiritual thought, and connected with the true thread of Christ-conscious thought in the Gospels. This metaphysical package has been refined throughout the 20th century to become the foundation for a practical and effective and realistic expression of Christianity for the 21st century.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Friday, August 14, 2009
Holacracy
I was introduced to this concept a couple of weeks ago. It is a different way of viewing organizational structures. Traditionally we view things hierarchically with single lines of command and control and rigidity. Holacracy builds on Agile approaches to team process and scales the fundamental underlying concepts across the entire organization. The fundamental underpinnings are trust, communication, focus and urgency. Several of the higher conceptual layers are interesting.
At the highest level, holacracy views the organization as a collection of overlapping team circles of increasing scope. Each team circle is a complete cell with its own governance and processes. Each team circle is not self-directing, but takes flowdown from the next scoping level for direction. Each team circle elects a representative to link up to the next higher scope team circle. Each higher level team circle elects a representative to link down into the next lower scope team circle.
Another interesting concept is that of rhythm, the temporal heartbeat of an organization. Rhythm granularity is consistent for the overall organization as well as in the microcosm of each individual team. There are daily, weekly, monthly and larger scale rhythmic pulses for meeting frequency and structure. Daily standups are for quick fast-firing communication of what is to be accomplished that particular day. Weekly tactical meetings are for dealing with the necessary things to be done on a particular week.
Iterative tactical meetings organize execution for multiple week sprints that break projects down into manageable chunks. Monthly governance meetings are for discussing how the team/organization will work together and what changes need to be considered. Strategic meetings can occur quarterly or 1-2 times per year to look forward across a longer time horizon to adjust direction at a more macro level of control.
Holacracy is positioned as a new operating system for the organization. It embraces short bursts of activity toward a long term goal with frequent feedback loops and adaptive mechanisms for quick fine-grained steering. It draws from successful processes that have been pioneered at the team level and embraces, extends and scales these concepts up to the level of the organization.
At the highest level, holacracy views the organization as a collection of overlapping team circles of increasing scope. Each team circle is a complete cell with its own governance and processes. Each team circle is not self-directing, but takes flowdown from the next scoping level for direction. Each team circle elects a representative to link up to the next higher scope team circle. Each higher level team circle elects a representative to link down into the next lower scope team circle.
Another interesting concept is that of rhythm, the temporal heartbeat of an organization. Rhythm granularity is consistent for the overall organization as well as in the microcosm of each individual team. There are daily, weekly, monthly and larger scale rhythmic pulses for meeting frequency and structure. Daily standups are for quick fast-firing communication of what is to be accomplished that particular day. Weekly tactical meetings are for dealing with the necessary things to be done on a particular week.
Iterative tactical meetings organize execution for multiple week sprints that break projects down into manageable chunks. Monthly governance meetings are for discussing how the team/organization will work together and what changes need to be considered. Strategic meetings can occur quarterly or 1-2 times per year to look forward across a longer time horizon to adjust direction at a more macro level of control.
Holacracy is positioned as a new operating system for the organization. It embraces short bursts of activity toward a long term goal with frequent feedback loops and adaptive mechanisms for quick fine-grained steering. It draws from successful processes that have been pioneered at the team level and embraces, extends and scales these concepts up to the level of the organization.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Retrospect: First Agile Iteration
Friday marked the end of the first iteration for the team. We finished respectfully, completing about 84 points of work with 82% story acceptance. These metrics will likely be adjusted Monday morning as we evaluate the status of the last few items to see what might actually be finished in the Monday morning build. The Monday build is the official Iteration 2009.2 build and should be archived for posterity.
Now that we have the first one out of the way, we have a start toward measurement. We can use the points completed in the iteration as a first estimate of how much work the team can finish in a 2 week period. We will get data for about 3 iterations and start averaging the number of points completed to get a baseline team velocity.
There were several learning moments in the first iteration. First, we did not do a great job of defining stories and acceptance criteria. While stories were created for bags of work, and some acceptance criteria was included, we did not create precise expectations around the format or the granularity of stories. Several team members are still struggling with the concept, since there is no such thing as a story template that is universally accepted. Stories are varied and customizable to the particular circumstances.
We also had questions around when the actual finish date for the iteration should be. Since the iteration ends at COB on Friday, many developers talked about needing to be done coding by COB Thursday of the last iteration week. This allows a day to fix any defects found by the test group on the last day of the iteration. Then, the official iteration build is the one created on the following Monday morning.
This week we do it all over again making incremental improvements on what we learned the last two weeks. We will have the team planning meeting tomorrow morning and cover the standard format for story description in Rally. This will include more precise information about what the story should do. We'll do a better job of having acceptance criteria meetings with sub-groups. Here we will refine the description of the story and add test cases as we discuss it. We will also do a better job of hourly estimates and individual capacity so that more of our tracking views will be accurate this time around.
Now that we have the first one out of the way, we have a start toward measurement. We can use the points completed in the iteration as a first estimate of how much work the team can finish in a 2 week period. We will get data for about 3 iterations and start averaging the number of points completed to get a baseline team velocity.
There were several learning moments in the first iteration. First, we did not do a great job of defining stories and acceptance criteria. While stories were created for bags of work, and some acceptance criteria was included, we did not create precise expectations around the format or the granularity of stories. Several team members are still struggling with the concept, since there is no such thing as a story template that is universally accepted. Stories are varied and customizable to the particular circumstances.
We also had questions around when the actual finish date for the iteration should be. Since the iteration ends at COB on Friday, many developers talked about needing to be done coding by COB Thursday of the last iteration week. This allows a day to fix any defects found by the test group on the last day of the iteration. Then, the official iteration build is the one created on the following Monday morning.
This week we do it all over again making incremental improvements on what we learned the last two weeks. We will have the team planning meeting tomorrow morning and cover the standard format for story description in Rally. This will include more precise information about what the story should do. We'll do a better job of having acceptance criteria meetings with sub-groups. Here we will refine the description of the story and add test cases as we discuss it. We will also do a better job of hourly estimates and individual capacity so that more of our tracking views will be accurate this time around.
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