Tim Gregory » LinkedIn

My first real LinkedIn spam

Tim — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 05:20:05 +0000

Just got my first piece of classic spam through LinkedIn this morning.
Not a random job offer or a networking request from someone I’ve never met – this is the real deal.
The link goes to a pitch for books and seminars on “Infinite Banking” (whatever that is).
It looks like this is a fake profile that is then added to a couple of groups, and the direct contact facility affoded by group membership used to send the spam.
Anyone else started seeing this?

Is there a place for criticism of Scrum?

Tim — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:05:13 +0000

It seems as if the Scrum folks really don’t like anyone asking questions about the real-world implementation of Scrum…

Firstly, we use Scrum every day at 24.com. It’s changed our development teams, and has had a significantly positive effect on our business.
I regard myself as a Scrum advocate, and enthusiastically recommend Scrum to teams that have not tried it.
We have been using Scrum for about 2 years now, and I regard our Scrum teams and processes as mature and stable.
I am a member of the Scrum Practitioners forum on LinkedIn, along with 8000+ others.
I’ve been watching one of the threads with some intererest – it is titled “Who says they are doing Scrum But?“.
For those unfamiliar with the term, “Scrum But” (or “Scrumbutt”) refers to the commonly heard expression “oh yes, we’re doing Scrum, but we (insert some tweak to or deviation from the process here)”

The debate on LinkedIn has been swinging back and forth, and participants seem to be divided into a few basic camps :

True believers – there is a Scrum answer to everything, and if you you can’t make the process work in your environment, then you are not trying hard enough, you have no discipline, and you need to go read some books or watch a video. Or maybe pay for some Scrum coaching / training / certification. Don’t like discussion with the Pragmatists or the Critics. Prefer to speak to other True Believers at Scrum Gatherings, and to dish out “try harder” advice to Strugglers.
Pragmatists – adopt the term Scrum, but are happy to inspect and tweak their processes for their environment. Sometimes they are unable to make the sweeping structural changes that would enable all the elements of Scrum. Sometimes they can enhance the performance of Scrum for their environment. Seem unperturbed by the True Believers or the Strugglers. Mildly interested in what the Critics have to say. Happy to share real-world experience.
Strugglers – these are teams that are trying to adopt Scrum, but haven’t really grasped the principles. Their processes are not working, they have entire sprints failing, and the promised productivity increases are not being realised. Typically, these teams have tweaked Scrum in a way that breaks the process completely, like not actually having shipping software at the end of a sprint, or doing twice-weekly standups, or not bothering with retrospectives. Looking for answers, but don’t know who they should listen to. Like what they hear from the True Believers, but don’t seem to be able to actually follow good advice, regardless of where it comes from.
Critics – these are the most dangerous of the lot.. these are people who understand the Scrum process well, have used it in production environments, have used Lean and Agile principles outside of the Scrum framework, and have worked with both disfunctional and high-performing teams. They have a few bones to pick with the Scrum process, and they want to do it publicly
Indifferent masses – These are the 8000+ people in the LinkedIn group who have some interest in Scrum, or perhaps they use it sucessfully. Don’t really care about the discussion. Just want to be surrounded by lots of Certified Scrum people

I’m being deliberately provocative, but this is still a fair summary of the landscape.

I was completely astounded to see a post today from a member of the Board of Directors at the Scrum Alliance threatening to leave the group and the discussion because he was tired of seeing debate and challenge around the Scrum process.
Part of the reason put forward was the time-pressures of the upcoming Scrum Gatherings (i.e. gatherings of True Believers).
In his post to the group, it was suggested that the name of the group should more appropriately be Scrum Debaters or Scrum Challengers rather than Scrum Practicioners.

Amazing… any discussion, debate, and criticism amongst people who are actually evaluating, implementing and using Scrum is now too much to bear??

So I looked a little further afield to see what was being said online about Scrum, and whether I was alone in thinking that it was a very lightweight framework, and needed significant input to make it workable.

And I found a gem of a post that perfectly and lucidly pulls together some of my criticisms of Scrum called It’s time for Scrum to evolve. It’s built around a series of points raised on the Scrumdevelopment Yahoo! Group by Uncle Bob Martin, and repeated here:

No technical practices. Scrum is great at giving project management advice, but provides no technical help for the developer. Any good implementation of Scrum needs to borrow technical practices from some other method like XP. The suite of technical practices that should be added probably include: TDD, Continuous Integration, Acceptance Testing, Pair Programming, Refactoring.
30 day sprints are too long. Most scrum teams have either shrunk them to 2
weeks or perform some kind of midpoint check at the two week mark. I know of some teams that have two 2-week “iterations” inside a single 4-week “sprint”.
The difference being that they use the sprint for reporting upwards, but use the iterations for internal feedback and control.
The tendency of the scrum master to arrogate project management powers. This is not a problem with Scrum out of the box so much as it is a problem with the way scrum sometimes evolves. Perhaps it is related to the unfortunate use of the word “master”. Perhaps the XP term “Coach” might be a better word to use. In any case, good implementation of scrum do not necessarily correlate scrum masters and project managers.
The C in CSM (Certified Scrum Master) is unfortunate. Again, this is not so much about scrum out of the box as it is about the scrum community. That letter C has gotten far too significant for it’s intention. It is true that the people in a scrum team need to be trained. One of the things they should be trained about is the role of the scrum master. The problem with the C is that it changes the notion of scrum master from a role into a person. It is the person who has the C. In an ideal case, the members of the scrum team will rotate through the scrum master role the same way the members of an XP team rotate through the coach role. This rotation is never perfect, and sometimes the role sticks to one or two people more than others. But the idea was never to raise up a particular person with a rank. We never wanted that C emblazoned on their chests.
Scrum provides insufficient guidance regarding the structure of the backlog. We’ve learned, over the years, that backlogs are hierarchical entities
consisting of epics, themes, stories, etc. We’ve learned how to estimate them statistically. We’ve learned how and when to break the higher level entities
down into lower level entities. Epics->Themes->Stories->Tasks.
Scrum carries an anti-management undercurrent that is counter-productive. Scrum over-emphasizes the role of the team as self-managing. Self-organizing and self-managing teams are a good thing. But there is a limit to how much a team can self-X. Teams still need to be managed by someone who is responsible to the business. Scrum does not describe this with enough balance.
Automated Testing. Although this could be considered a derivative of point 1, I thought it worth calling out as a separate point because it is so
fundamental. Scrum doesn’t mention this, yet it is the foundation of every agile effort. Agile teams work in short cycles because feedback only works well
in short cycles. But short cycles aren’t enough. You also need objective measurement of progress. The most reliable way to know how much a team has
gotten done is to run automated tests and count the tests that pass.
Multiple teams. Scrum has little to say about the coordination of multiple teams. This is not a failing unique to scrum. Agile itself is virtually silent
on this issue. Scrum talked about the vague notion of a “Scrum of Scrums” but that idea really hasn’t played out all that well. Scrum-in-the-large remains in
the domain of certain consultants who claim to have an answer. There is no real consensus on the issue.

Bravo. Nicely put Bob. And I’ll add my own to the list -

Managing multiple stakeholders

Large organisations rarely have a single person who is true Product Owner and has executive decision-making powers.
An individual with this power is likely to be far too senior to be co-located with the development team and dedicated to the Product Owner role.
And even when there is a dedicated Product Owner, that person is still usually not a technical manager, and unlikely to ensure that good engineering practices are adhered to or that technical maintenance is performed (system upgrades etc.)
So just by having a technical manager involved you already have more than one person who has a stake in the backlog.
I haven’t even got onto the topic of performance management, discipline and reward on the Scrum team.
Scrum is silent on this point, and advocates usually waffle about “self-managed teams”. As if somehow the team is going to create the budget, recruit team members, manage performance and rewards, and discipline / dismiss underperforming team members.
I know that Scrum doesn’t say that team self-management means no managers in the organisation, but the relationship between team managers, Scrum Masters and Product Owners is not clear.

I don’t think Scrum is broken. I don’t want to throw it out or replace it with something else.
But I think the Scrum community should face up to the challenges in the spirit of the Agile movement that created Scrum, and should not be afraid of change.

I welcome your comments below – is Scrum perfect? Does everyone do Scrum-but? Have you tried Scrum and moved to something else that works better for you?

The things we weren’t told about Scrum

LinkedIn profitable, Facebook not so much

Tim — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:26:51 +0000

Spotted two interesting links today.

In the first, The Guardian says that Facebook now has 350m users – and there’s no point in advertising to them.

The premise is that in spite of having a massive userbase, one that is now larger than the population of the USA, Facebook is struggling to extract financial value from their audience.

The second link is a Silicon Valley Insider interview with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, in which he claims that LinkedIn is still profitable with ad revenues up 50%.

LinkedIn has 3 main revenue streams, with online advertising being only one of them.

Weiner doesn’t give any breakdown, but implies that a significant portion of LinkedIn revenues are generated by their premium subscription business and corporate recruitment solutions.

I blogged this week with a throw-away thought that LinkedIn could possibly be built today as a Facebook application, but now I’m not so sure… it’s clear that LinkedIn have managed to build a profitable business quite different to the type of business that could be created inside Facebook’s ecosystem.

What do you think? Will Facebook become super-profitable?

What if LinkedIn was a Facebook app?

Tim — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 06:00:26 +0000

Facebook has seen extraordinary growth in the last year, and now boasts over 350 million users, with 50% of their active users logging in every day.

It’s clear that their platform strategy is paying off, with more than 350,000 active applications deployed on the Facebook platform, and more than 15,000 websites, devices and applications implementing Facebook Connect in the past year.

Some applications have managed to build massive audiences, with Farmville clocking up 69 million+ active users, Causes attracting 34 million users, and Cafe World serving in excess of 30 million users.

After 6 years of investment and growth, LinkedIn has managed to grow to somewhere north of 50 million users.

This raises a question for me – if LinkedIn were to launch today, with the benefit of seeing how the Facebook Platform has grown to dominate the social networking space, would they create a new service, or would LinkedIn be a business networking and recruitment app built on top of the Facebook platform?

I’d love to hear your thoughts – drop me a comment below…

SEO and your personal brand

Tim — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 14:13:56 +0000

I am currently studying for my MBA through Henley Business School, attached to the University of Reading in the UK.
Right now I’m working through the ‘Strategic Marketing’ module. During the course of our module workshop, Professor David James spoke a bit about ‘Personal Branding’, the process of marketing people and careers as brands.
He got a mixed response from the group… some thought it was a practice bordering on deception. His pitch was that it’s important to present the elements of your professional and personal life that were most important in a consistent, understandable and marketable way.

It struck a chord for me, and I started to look more critically at my own personal brand online.

To date, I’ve done a terrible job… I’ve been online for 14 years, a professional in the Internet and Web Publishing industry for 12 years, and yet a Google search on Tim Gregory turns up:

Tim Gregory the actor on IMDB
Tim J Gregory on Facebook
Tim Gregory, the New Spaces host from Ohio
Tim Gregory ,the Associate Director at the Catholic University of America
Tim Gregory, the amateur photographer from the UK

And so on….
You get the picture – despite the opportunity I’ve had, I’ve not tried to ensure that I own my name online and shape the content associated with it.
An even more alarming case than my own of an individual who failed to actively manage his personal brand comes from RJ van Spaandonk, of the Core Group.

Now the Core Group has recently been under fire for their high prices and their public attacks on parallel imports of Apple products through their ‘stopgrey.co.za’ website. Instead of engaging meaningfully with his customers, RJ van Spaandonk launched a bizarre campaign of Twitter posts that made him look like a raving lunatic.

This campaign backfired horribly – his posts were picked up and reposted throughout Twitter and blogs, and further entrenched his reputation as an arrogant monopolist out of touch with his customers. It seems he thought social media was somehow still a one-to-many medium, and he could actively manage his convoluted campaign without anyone responding to the conversation he had started online before he was finished speaking. You can see his actual Twitter posts preserved at The Mac Blog
The result was predictable… the prolific bloggers and SEO experts that he “sought to engage with on their own territory” simply had to repeat his misguided utterances, and now a Google search for “RJ van Spaandonk” returns his regrettable statements in all their glory.

Google search for RJ van Spaandonk on 5 July 2009

Perhaps his first mistake was assuming that “journalists” were somehow different from “bloggers and twitterers”? RJ, a tip – as I’m sure you’re learning, it’s all the same thing on the internet.

In case I have to spell it out for you, Mr van Spaandonk has lost control of his personal brand online, and he’s going to have a tough time reclaiming it. And instead of showing some humility and seeking to open the conversation with his critics on more positive terms, he chooses to alienate them further, claiming that he “overestimated the wit and sense of humour” of his audience. Poor RJ.
For examples of people doing an excellent job of creating and maintaining their personal brands take a look at Google searches for my colleagues Brendan McNulty and Matthew Buckland. Most of the first page of results for these guys is all about them. Brendan goes as far as buying Google Adwords for his own name, which I imagine costs him very little as I suspect the bidding activity around the search term ‘Brendan McNulty’ is pretty low.

Moving on… So what am I doing about my own poor showing online?

Registered a vanity domain (tim-gregory.com)
Started blogging again. It’s about time I stood by my own thoughts and utterances
Applied some basic SEO techniques, like using dashes in my domain name to show the search engines that those are separate words
Leverage online profiles and social tools – follow Tim Gregory on Twitter, view the Tim Gregory professional profile on LinkedIn and the Facebook profile for Tim Gregory.
Continue to build a strong network of relevant industry professionals through LinkedIn
Start contributing across the ‘blogosphere’, leaving relevant comments against articles for blog posts where I have some industry expertise – most of them allow you to link your own site when you enter your name and email address against a comment. (Can get you some traffic, but not great for SEO because of the ‘nofollow’ command usually given to the search engines in comments)
Set SEO targets – it’s my ambition to knock the actor, host, and amateur photography off the top positions for MY name online
Look for media mentions where possible

If you have any interest in this SEO and personal branding experience, and would like to see whether an outsider can overtake established personal brands in search engine results, please link to my blog using my name, or simple post a link to this article. Feel free to drop comments about your experience maintaining your personal brand online.

If you have a website and would like to help me claim my name, please insert this into your site somewhere:

Tim Gregory Blog

Thanks!

Updated: Marcia Netto sent me a good link – Searcher Behaviour Research Update – “What about the branding aspect? The study found that 36% believe that companies whose websites are returned at the top of the search results are the top companies in their field.” Can we can infer from this behaviour that the top-ranked individual for a given name/term is regarded as a leader?