Tag : agile

While scanning a recent study on crowd behaviour I started to ponder the hows and whens of launching a web service; how can we best drive an idea into the crowd?

The study begins by reminding us of a fairly obvious fact about opinion and crowd feedback, assuming wisdom is what you're going for (the crowd could equally decide your idea is doomed to failure, which is probably a good time to get out) this is pretty useful information:

[…]certain conditions must be met for crowd wisdom to emerge. Members of the crowd ought to have a variety of opinions, and to arrive at those opinions independently.

Makes sense, this is why we expend so much energy testing on diverse user groups before releasing a service into the wild. However, it then goes on to conclude that the wisdom of crowds can be polluted by the cross-pollination of opinions:

Not so long ago, Neil Perkin invited me to speak at the event he was arranging to take place at Google UK HQ. Neil was keen to explore what Agile Planning means and the event, named FireStarters, brought together a 100 or so planners to share in the discussion. What followed was an excellent evening that included Mark Earls giving us What She is Having and many breakout sessions on various themes over beers. Neil has a great write-up on his blog.

This was a great chance to expand on the Lean Startup based approach we are using at Made By Many and introduced at Planningness in NY back last September. Since then we have learn't alot and the presentation I gave (embedded after the jump) introduces what I think can become some best practice for developing "Lean Agencies", agencies built from the ground-up to search for innovation. 

(or How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Obvious)

(also know as ‘The empty hamburger dilemma’)

Most new products and services fail. This is a depressing reality to swallow, however I am amazed by how few people ask why this happens. Or worse still all the people who have an in-built assumption and acceptance that most new things should fail. This shouldn’t be the case.

Here is a sad graph showing total product failures.

Why all this failure?

I’ve swithered about posting these notes, given their visual inferiority to Tim’s. But what they lack in beauty, I hope they make up for in utility. I certainly had fun making them. And as someone more adept with a viola in hand than a sketching pen, I’m not too ashamed of my efforts.*

Enjoy.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve put everyone at Made by Many through a day of Agile Training with Simon Baker and Gus Power from Energized Work.

These guys really are the Penn and Teller of agile software development, and I thought the session was excellent. Most of us here have been trying to work in agile ways for  five years or more but this was an opportunity to get better at it by broadening our knowledge and understanding. Another post follows containing some more considered takeaways, but I wanted to share these sketch-notes I made during the day. They petered out towards the end of the day as proceedings became more discursive.

There are 10 pages in total, including a ‘page of evil’ where I tried to capture all of the things that we decided one way or another were EVIL.

See the whole set —->

Justin’s ‘Agile versus Strategy‘ post has tapped an excellent debate.

One of the most interesting comments comes from R/GA’s William Charnock, who makes the point that traditional ad agencies got rid of ‘the makers’:

They outsourced production to directors, photographers, digital technology specialists etc and carved off media execution to separate media agencies. With no ability to prototype, experiment or execute in the real world, the only option for them was to focus on ‘conceptual thinking’ or ‘BDUF’.

Some forward thinking agencies seem to be addressing this, if only on a small scale, setting up labs for experimentation (a la Ogilvy, BBH, Media labs etc.); creating partnerships with content creators, VC’s and start-ups (who truly are the leaders in market agility and fast fail learning/prototyping).

As William and other commenters say, it’s the start-ups who are the true leaders in this space – not least in terms of overall value creation. Indeed, you could argue that the ‘start up culture’ of high-growth tech start-ups has become a defining (and disruptive) force in work cultures well beyond tech, marketing and media.

You can talk and think about stuff for ages and ages before doing something or other. Why not just do something straight away and learn from that?

London was basking in unexpected sunshine and Tim Malbon (aka @malbonster) and I were wolfing down some fish and chips in Soho. His off-the-cuff comment stopped me cold – chip halfway to mouth – and in one way or another I have been thinking about it ever since (it was 6 months ago!).

‘Doing over planning‘ might be the simplest way to summarise the Agile philosophy that Made by Many so fervently pursues (a great non-tech articulation of the Agile approach to web apps is Getting Real by 37 Signals).

This Agile has a capital A. It can also have a lower case a, in which case it is an adjective, to be lean/nimble but that’s not what I’m talking about. Agile with a capital A is a noun, a name used for the philosophy described in the the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and the suite of methodologies primarily used for software development such as SCRUM and Extreme Programming.

Tim’s post on Agile as a ‘Cargo Cult’ highlights a problem in the adoption of Agile, not only for software development but for creative and business processes. Everyone is trying to adapt to a rapid and disruptive world screwing with business models in every category. Organisations are looking to close the gap with nimble digital start-ups who are out-innovating them at a fraction of the cost-base. Agile seems to offer a well-packaged magic ability to compete in a new way.

Magic Hands by ShironekoEuro's under a CC licence

In our rapidly converging media world, we hear the word “agile” bandied around a lot these days – sometimes, it has to be said, by people who don’t actually have a scooby about what it really means to work in an agile way. From the outside, agile can look simply like a process for getting things done really fast within less silo-ed teams.

That’s the line that unpacks ‘Planning-ness‘ – an ‘un-planning’ conference held recently in San Francisco.

The idea of “making” things as a way of exploring ideas and developing and articulating strategy is close to our hearts at Made by Many and Planning-ness sounds like a veritable Festival of Awesomeness. I’d love to go next time.

But it was this provocative deck by Jason Oke and Gareth Kay that got us really excited. It’s about the failure of ‘Connections Planning’, the discipline’s historical context, and what it seems to be mutating into – or at least needs to turn into in order to continue mutating.