Stories Connecting Dots with Markus Andrezak Markus Andrezak

"Calm down, take a deep breath and just talk to me“
 
Luke Hohmann’s new mission: Participatory Budgeting in Schools Luke Hohmann founded FirstRoot to advance participatory budgeting in schools. Let me get straight to the point: You can invest in this company in this early stage. You can also support the cause by talking about or by simply using the free software and talking about it in your kids’ school. 
Luke Hohmann and me go back a long time. I met him ca. 12 years ago in one of his trainings and was fortunate enough to co-train and facilitate with him. He wrote an early book „Beyond Software Architecture“ which to me is one of the best books on software Architecture (sic!) and was ahead of its time. He then got deep into Serious Games with his Innovation Games trainings and a great book on it. Also ahead of its time.
From there he was on a constant path towards which had to end in what he does now. Through his Innovation Games, he made it to participatory budgeting in communities, in the Enterprise and other important places. Also, he built an enterprise SaaS company to further bring his ideas deeper into Companies and also enable distributed Serious Games. Now, he founded FirstRoot, bringing participatory budgeting to schools.
(You will realize over the course of the pod, that we couldn’t constrain ourselves - we wouldn’t be Luke and Markus, then - from drawing all kinds of parallels to Quality of Software, agile, Portfolio Planning, Architecture, Comics for Story Mapping and what have you.)
The underlying problem that Luke is tackling with FirstRoot is inequality of chances by social background, financial illiteracy (lack of education on that topic in school in general) and economic disparity.
First Root is having its part in solving that problem by offering a five step process in facilitating Participatory Budgeting to pupils around the globe, based on a software solution.
Steps are:
Planning Gather Ideas Refine Ideas to proposals Voting (there will always be more ideas than we can afford - „a truism in life“ Projects in implematation In the pod Luke thoroughly leads us through an example to show us how it works and which impact it has.
I put the core of the idea at the beginning of the cast.
Again: If you believe in this story, you can also invest for as little as a couple of hundred dollars alongside of people like Alex Osterwalder, Lysa Adkins and many more. You also help by just using the software and bring it into schools. Just follow the „Invest“ link on firstroot.co

Timo Lutter und seine Frau Jule sind Deutsche, die in Oslo wohnen und arbeiten. Timo hat lange als Molekularbiologe gearbeitet und arbeitet jetzt in Oslo im Rikshospitaletals Mikro-Biologe. Jule arbeitet in Oslo als Kindergärtnerin. Beide sind höchstwahrscheinlich wahrscheinlich Covid-19-positiv und tragen die Krankheit in ihrem sogenannten „milden“ Verlauf aus. Die beiden berichten aus Ihrer Erfahrung mit der Krankheit, dass schon das ist nicht mal eben einer lockeren Virusgrippe entspricht.
Ich habe die Chance genutzt, Timo ein bisschen seines Virologen-Wissens zu entlocken und so kommen wir zu Erklärungen darüber
was ein Virus ist was es heisst, einen Virus zu sequentieren   warum sich Timo sicher ist, dass das Virus auf keinen Fall ein „Designervirus“ ist was Timo’s Einschätzungen zu den getroffenen Massnahmen ist wie sich Gesundheitssysteme aufgrund gegebener Umstände unterscheiden und welchen Einfluß das auf den Umgang mit dem Virus hat. Ich wusste vorher nicht, dass Tino so viel Vorwissen zu dem Thema hat und habe einfach diese Fundgrube genutzt.
 
Ich würde mich über Feedback freuen. Bewertet das Podcast wo immer Ihr es hört. Empfehlt es weiter!
Falls Ihr von weiteren Geschichten hört, die es lohnt zu Corona zu erzählen, meldet Euch gerne. Ich versuche gerne etwas daraus zu machen!
Bis zum nächsten mal,
Markus

This is the story of Peter Bihr and his family whoa actually wanted to visit a wedding in the United States, but instead got stranded in Costa rica. Peter and his family accidentally find themselves locked up in a place which turns out to be a bit of a paradise. There could, of course be better times and conditions to find and enjoy a paradise. But let’s listen how Peter perceives his current situation. If you know of other weird stories happening during these strange and difficult time, let me know and maybe we could make this another episode!
You can reach Peter for more on his great work here. 
He also publishes a fantastic, interesting and personal email newsletter. 
 
Have fun, stay healthy and sane!

Strategie Machen! Henning Wolf hat mich im Hotelzimmer bei einer Konferenz interviewt. Es geht um mein Thema Nummer eins, neben Produkt: Strategie Machen! Wir erklären, was an Strategie kaputt ist und wie man es fixen kann.
Wir erklären, was die drei relevanten Ebenen in Strategie sind und wie man sie wieder koppeln kann, um alles zu reparieren. Denn es ist das Koppeln dieser drei Ebenen, was Strategie repariert. Die drei Ebenen sind:
Marker: unsere Identität, ausgedrückt über unseren Antrieb, langfristige Ziele. Alles was ausdrückt, wer uns was wir sind und was wir in der Gesellschaft bewirken wollen. Unsere Identität eben.
Optionen: Das ist alles, was wir als nächstes tun könnten. Alle Möglichkeiten, die wir haben. Da wir nicht alles machen können, was wir gerne machen würden, entscheidet die beste Auswahl, die Qualität unserer Entscheidungen und Committments darüber, wie es uns geht.
Arbeit: Arbeit soll fliessen und es muss passend viel Arbeit auf gute Optionen angewandt werden. Arbeit auf schlechten Optionen ist nutzlos. Viel Arbeit auf guten Optionen bringt viel. Dies erklärt auch warum Output wichtiger sein kann als gedacht ;)
Arbeit realisiert Optionen, Optionen verwirklichen unsere Marker. Umgekehrt helfen Marker Optionen zu bewerten (und abzuleiten) und Optionen helfen Arbeit abzuleiten.
Wichtig ist, die stabilisierende Natur und langfristige Wirkung von Markern zu verstehen und akzeptieren. Ebenso ist es wichtig, die mittelfristige Wirkung und die Notwendigkeit von längerfristigen Optionen zu verstehen. nur Arbeit soll fliessen, nur hier gelten Flow-Gesetze und ähnliches. Mechanismen von Arbeit auf die anderen Ebenen zu transportieren, zerstört diese Ebenen.
Deshalb ist Business Agilität mit ähnlichen Mechanismen auf diesen Ebenen auch oberflächlich gedacht und toxisch.
Viel Spaß bei dieser Folge. Vielen Dank an Henning Wolf für die Zusammenarbeit und die Geduld beim Fragen unter widrigen Bedingungen im Hotel bei einer Konferenz!

Dan Vacanti - Rightsizing
I met Dan years and years ago in my active time in the Kanban community. Dan was part of the very beginning of Kanban in 2007! Since then he’s been deep into Lean and Agile. Dan authored two books, "Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability“ and "When will it be done?“. He is also the founder of Actionable Agile. Dan always had his independent thought. Most of all, he is a builder of bridges. He worked hard with Scrum.org on integrating the good ideas of Scrum and Kanban. Also, he organises the conference LeanAgile US which just happened from 25 -27 Feb 2019 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Possibly most noteworthy, Dan's twitter Avatar is not the usual egg provided by twitter, but a self made picture of an egg. 
Here excerpts of our conversation as a loose transcript. don't take it word by word, please!
Show Notes: 
The underlying idea for all of us is to maximise customer value.
Cost of Delay is a tool suggested as basis for ranking, prioritising and sequencing on a more objective base rather than gut feel. Hopefully based on basic economic fundamentals. 
An extension of that is WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First), which is defined by CD3= CoD / Duration. This is meant to give a shortcut to give an answer to which number does this item have in the sequence of things to be done. 
But here's the caveat: It is critical enough to get the number for duration right (how long does this take to be done? - The Estimate!). But the even more critical question is: "how do we even get the number for the value of the thing we are building?" 
This is where my research started, but "Let me be honest with you, and this is just me talking, nothing I found was practical or applicable in my world.“
"More importantly, I felt there we’re a whole bunch of assumptions going into this CoD number that didn’t reflect reality.“ 
"Let’s focus this discussion on the area of complex product development work. And we try to get that number even before start working on something. Which, by definition, is when we have the highest amount of uncertainty. And this is what struck me: How can this CoD number give us the right answer? And that’s were I started my investigation.“ 
Customers will always be able to ask things from us faster than we will be able to deliver them. 
There are fundamental assumptions in CoD to be in place for that to make sense. 
When there is uncertainty involved, we need a probabilistic approach. That means, we have to work with ranges. That means we have to think about CoD as a distribution across that range. The same is true for the duration. 
Those two assumptions are not fatal. There are mathematical tools like Monte Carlo simulation that help us to come up with an answer. 
BUT: If you are in a world, where you no the numbers, then CoD/D = CD3 gives you the right number. If you do not know these numbers, once you deliver the thing, these numbers could be completely different. 
So now CoD can change and as well duration can change. When you now run a Monte Carlo simulation, you will realise that this is not the best tool once uncertainty sets in. 
The best answer in this world is to do things by random sequencing. What matters is: right sizing items. What that means is, we need to break things up to a size where they reasonable flow through our system. So, CoD doesn’t make a difference. Duration doesn’t make a difference. What makes a difference is right sizing your items. 
This flies in the face of what’s lately been said in agile, where there is a lot of talk about outcomes over output. And what we found out is that it’s actually the other way around: It’s output over outcomes. It’s the output that generates the outcome. A metaphor here is gambling, where you would place as many small bets as possible to generate outcome. 
„We’re coming back to a fundamental principle of Lean, which is that value is defined by the customer.“ What is the

Part II  
This is part two of the conversation I had with Jabe Bloom and Marc Burgauer during the Devops Conference 2018 in Munich.
All information can be found in the show notes of part 1, which is Episode 21 of this podcast.
Here some short show notes on this second part.
Show Notes On Bid Data & being Data Driven "Russell Ackoff wrote a brilliant paper titled "On Data Mismanagement Systems and the basic thesis is: Managers need data to make decisions and the more data they have, the better it is. Of course, the answer is: Managers don't need more information, they need the right information"
"Of course, big data is a response to a particular problem and the particular problem is "Oh god, we made such big piles of data that no human can actually process it anymore. And now we have to come up with an algorithm to summarise the data for us."
On Change & Culture "By definition all future things are stories. They don't exist. That's why they're in the future. You can't measure them. You can't use data to understand them. You can only use data to understand what exists now."
"People think that you have to change people's thinking first. You change what they think about things and then they change their behavior and that will change the output. And that's absolutely wrong. You have to change what they're looking at and that will change their thinking. And when you want to change something, that's when you need to create those models and give people new things to look at."
 
Is speed still an advantage? "Right now everyone goes rushing towards high cycle time, high frequency: spin as fast as you can. If everyone is playing to the same time cycles, there is no advantage to doing that. … In fact, the advantage will be having the discipline … of having long term vision and connecting them to the capabilities of having a short cycle time. That's the next competitive advantage. We need people to be able to understand how to make commitments beyond two weeks. Period."
"We need to create space for commitments. If everything is an option you have no commitments. If you had no commitments, you have no identity."
Autonomy vs. Agency "I hate the word autonomy. … I think autonomy is individuating. … The way I hear the word and I think other people hear it - and I might be wrong and other people hear it differently - but the way I hear it is "I have the right to make my own decisions. I have the right to make my own rules."
"If you look up the etymology of the word it means "the owner of the rules". (Whereas) Agency is my ability to chose in that environment and to see the result of it. Autonomy as the ability to act without responsibility is my concern. The ability to act without considering the feedback loop of what s the effect of what I have done.
Thanks for listening!
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