What I did last year

I've worked for nearly 1 year now at my current job, as head of IT. Time to make a summary of the improvements I have helped achieve (credit goes to as much to the team and the company as to myself!):

• the team used have at least as many projects as there were people. Everybody basically worked on their own projects. I changed this by introducing two teams, one focused on front end work and one on .net project development. Every project was tackled by the team, not by an individual. The number of simultaneous projects became limited to a two or three.


• the IT department had a bad name with regards to completing work. In fact, it was hard to name a project that was completed on time and on budget, if completed at all. There were projects of a couple of months running for over three years. Together with the team, I introduced Kanban, focused on limiting work in progress, made sure small pieces of business value were delivered as soon as possible, made work in progress visible. The IT mission statement became "we deliver" and the team set a target for the year in terms of number of rolled out projects which they though was ambitious, but which they had already made after the first 3-4 months.


• Evaluations were a mess and severly demotivating for the team members. Basically, the former heads of IT would grade everybody once a year on 16 ill defined criteria, using an ill defined score between 1-10. That's 160 scores you have to give meaning to! I got rid of this pointless exercise by developing a 360 degree evaluation together with the team and carrying this out every quarter. This meant that team members gave each other a grade along with feedback, and also that the company at different levels gave feedback to the IT team as a whole. I as head of the department still give a grade on three criteria. This was a compromise as I would rather not have graded people at all, not even via 360, as grades are by definition demotivating.


• Instead of a yearly evaluation, or even half yearly as it has become, I sit with every team memeber in a 1-1 every three weeks. this gives short feedback times and ample opportunity to discuss how things are going. By the time the evaluations take place, there are no surprises for anyone.


• The salary increase process was unclear, there was no direct link to the evaluation process. I improved this process by making explicit what grade led to which salary increase, and by defining the various salary scales more clearly, especially how one moved from one scale to another.


• The IT department was primarily being outsourced to another company for development. Although the company claimed that IT was one of the three pillars, there was virtually no interaction between IT and the rest of the company. I started up a process of developing an IT strategy together with the team and company, and created projects that focused on automating manual work that non-IT employees did, as well as projects that directly supported the main business of the company and their customers.


• One of the main concerns the company owners had was that there were single points of knowledge/failure in the IT team. I resolved these bottlenecks by making everyone work as a team, doubling up the technical expertise, and promoting knowledge exchange.


• The morale of the IT team was low. By introducing team sessions, retrospective meetings, 1-1 sessions, team activities, trainings, and conferences, the morale has improved dramatically. The team has clearer goals, more control over it's own work and planning, and it's work is more visible within the company.


• I have grown the team from 6 to 8, with 2 people moving on in the mean time. I introduced a new interview process, consisting of a first meeting with me and HR, followed by a four hour hands-on workshop, and then a final meeting with the company owners. This process has served well to deliver good candidates.


• By estimating projects before hand using story points, by reporting on the used up budget during the project, and by evaluating the final used hours vs budget afterwards, the estimation process has become much more transparent. By enforcing that all estimates are made by more than one person, and by people who will do the work, the budgets are beginning to be met. Before, almost all projects went over budget, although nobody talked about it.


• The average grade given by company management to the IT team has increased by 45%


• I arranged that we are now Microsoft Silver partner, and this has sigificantly reduced the licensing costs of the entire company.

Book review: Mindset by Carol Dweck

This book is scary! If I had ever bothered to keep a dairy during my life, and managed to faithfully jot down my emotions and thoughts, then reflecting on those diaries now would I am sure have taught and shown me everything that Dweck has somehow managed to capture in her book. She has given words to thoughts and learnings I have only begun to learn for myself. This book has opened up a new world to me, a world that confirms more than ever just how similar we all are, and that feeling of being special is just an illusion we build to protect ourselves. It is an uncanny experience to read a book by a total stranger and to recognize almost every example in the book as something you have personally experienced. And yes, if you were wondering, I have a fixed mindset in many areas, or at least had to a high degree.

This is a must read for anybody who has ever been/felt a natural or a talent in some area. Most likely, such a situation will have fostered some form of fixed mindset thinking and most likely, this mindset will be blocking your further development in some way. This book will at least make you more aware of this, and hopefully give you a "mindset" to tackle and overcome these blockades.

This is not to say the book is The Truth. In fact, the simple split into fixed mindset vs growth mindset is I think a little over simplified. Personally, although I recognise most of the examples of fixed mindset in myself, I also recognise strong elements of the growth mindset in myself. Especially in different areas such as business, family, friends, etc different mindsets seem to apply, overlap, or flow into one another. For example, I tend to have a strong fixed mindset initial reaction to many things, but after some reflection and time, I tend towards growth mindset actions as a result. In short, it's not all as black and white as the book sometimes seems to suggest.

Book review: Management 3.0

"Management 3.0" is written by Jurgen Appelo, a dutch author with an active blog.

If you take a look at the blog, you'll understand where the book came from, most of the content covered in the book is on the blog in some form or other.

So, what is the advantage of the book over the blog? Well Jurgen introduces his 6 views on management and gathers/aggregates his blog entries under these 6 views, splitting each view into a chapter on theory and a chapter on practice.

The book succeeds in presenting alot of information, from a wide variety of disciplines such as chaos theory and agile. Quite often Jurgen gathers existing models and combines/modifies them to build his own model. Generally the thinking is good and gives some new insights.

I found the book hard to get through at times (and in fact I didn't quite finish it). There isn't that much of a "story" in it, and I find it could profit from some more real life examples to spruce it up. I do think it makes a great reference. If you ever find yourself wondering about this or that model, and how it all fits together with agile/leadership/managemment, then this book is a good book to pick up and flip to the relevant pages.

ADAPT and Switch

In Mike Cohns great book "Succeeding with Agile" he mentions the acronym ADAPT as the 5 steps necessary for an agile transistion in an organization(ie change). The letters stand for Awareness, Desire, Ability, Promotion, and Transfer. Very similar to Prosci’s ADKAR change model which describes the necessary phases for an individual to adopt a permanent change in their behavior and attitudes. The K an R stand for Knowledge and Reinforcement respectively. I guess in moving from an individual to an organization knowledge and reinforcement are replaced by promotion and transfer.

Anyway, I wanted to match ADAPT up with the steps in the great book Switch by the Heath brothers (see an earlier blog). So here goes,

Awareness

The reason why change is required should be clear (ie the problem that has to be solved).

This is related to "direct the rider", particularly "point to the destination". After all, the destination should be better than where we are now.

Desire

You may know a problem but still not want to fix it. Some unfinished chores in the house come to mind.

This is related to "motivate the elephant", particularly "find the feeling". Desire is after all all about emotion.

Ability

You may want to fix a problem, but simply lack the ability to solve it or make a positive change. Again, certain household chores spring to mind.

This is related to "Direct the rider, script critical moves"; after all, everyone can carry out simple instructions. But this is also related to "Motivate the elephant, shrink the change"; after all small changes are easier to carry out than big daunting overhauls. And finally, this is related to "Motivate the elephant, grow your people"; after all training, teaching and coaching will increase the ability of people and your organization.

Promote

In an organization, you need to motivate more than one person for a change to occur. This involves alot of communication (selling).

This is related to "Shape the path, rally the herd"; organizational changes require momentum to build up. Also, this is related to "Direct the rider, find the bright spots"; if positive change is working somewhere then celebrating it goes a long way to keeping momentum going.

Transfer

In an organization, having succeeded with change in one department, or team, or organization unit doesn't mean you are done. The rest of the organization will also need to adapt, otherwise organization gravity will simply drag the changed unit back down to the old state.

This is basically saying, iterate the ADAP steps again and again everywhere in the organization. In that sense, it relates to the Switch steps mentioned above. More generally, this relates to "Shape the environment".

Delegation checklist

The following useful delegation checklist inspired on a similar checklist in the book "Management 3.0" by Jurgen Appelo (which I'm currently reading):

- are you delegating a discrete chunk of work? Is the work delegable at all?
- delegate to a person, or to a team? Explain why you are delegating to them.
- how much responsibility do you delegate? From "do it like this" to "do it anyway you want", with "let's work this out together" somewhere in between
- is the person(s) Aware of the problem or goal? Explain the why.
- does the person(s) have the Desire to carry out the task?
- does the person(s) have the Ability to carry out the task? Think skills, experience, but also tools and documentation etc.
- does the person(s) know when successfull? How are results demoed and how often. How is progress tracked?
- are budget, scope, time, and quality constraints clear?
- who is the problem/product/bsuiness owner to help out and answer questions?

When things do not work out as planned, don't shout at your team, find the item on the checklist you forgot (or add a new item to the checklist)!

A shorter version of the above is: is your delegated task SMART (specific, measurable, agreed, realistic, timebounded).

Switch (the book) and Agile/Lean/Kanban/Scrum

"Switch, change when change is hard" is a great book about change (see an earlier blog entry). Now lean/agile/kanban/scrum (LAKS) is all about continous improvement, and all improvement is change (although not all change is improvement!). So after having read the book I started wondering which of the guidelines in the book are reflected in the LAKS way of thinking/frameworks. After all, LAKS is good at continous improvement so there must be significant overlap with the guidelines in the book. Here's a first stab (from my limited experience with primarily scrum and kanban).

Direct the rider, find the bright spots

In the retrospective, which is a meeting held regularly, what went well is a typical item on the agenda. This serves to assert the positive, but also triggers an awareness of things that are working and can be extended and improved upon for even greater gain.

Similarly, in the daily stand up team members tell what they did. This is an opportunity to share their work amongst the team, and thus also communicate about things that went well, problems solved, etc. Thereby creating awareness of the bright spots.

Direct the rider, script critical moves

During the retrospective, the most pressing problem is identified and tackled by defining (and carrying) out one (and only one) small step that will lead to an improvement. Typically this is *not* a complete solution to the problem, but just a first small step in the right direction.

Also, during the daily standup any impediments are identified with the explicit goal of getting these resolved as soon as possible with the product owner. This is an example of a scripted action that should lead to improvements (ie removal of the impediment).

Direct the rider, point to the destination

One of the goals of LAKS is to stabilize the velocity and then improve it. Having the velocity visible in charts (like the burndown) for all the team to see (and also the variability in the velocity) is key to making sure the team knows what they are aiming at.

Also the iterative development process with frequent demos and constant interaction with the customers and/or product owners ensures that the software that is being developed (the final destination) is constantly being realigned and redefined, and is constantly in the fore front of everybodys mind.

Motivate the elephant, find the feeling

Feelings in IT? Never! Still, nothing like a weekly demo for customers to cause a developer te break out into a cold sweat. Fear and the desire to please are strong motivators to deliver good software on time. Also, regular interactions with the customer and/or product owner go a long way to fostering and understanding of why the customer wants what he/she wants. Generally, this understanding will lead to improved software being developed.

Motivate the elephant, shrink the change

Refactoring and test driven development are great examples of shrinking the change. If you have unit tests in place, then improving your code (refactoring) is a breeze and nothing to be afraid of any more. In fact, it becomes a pleasure and something you do because it makes you feel good.

In general, LAKS avoids trying to "get it right the first time". Instead the focus is on building a small part as simple and as fast as you can, and then improve from there. A big software project is chopped into smaller user stories, all broken down into even smaller tasks, each task written test driven so that refactoring is easy going forward.

In terms of processes, LAKS provides a starting point only; a bare framework and a minimal set of guidelines. The whole point of LAKS is to begin with something (anything) and improve upon it continously. Finally changing the process into something unique that fits your business. The guidelines or framework are not contained in a complicated 400 page manual but typically fit on one A4. I'd call that shrinking the change.

Motivate the elephant, grow your people

LAKS is all about the team, not the individual. Team members are encouraged to become more multi disciplinary so that they can help out whenever bottlenecks occur and can cover for each other during holidays and illness etc. This requires growing both technical as well as team player skills.

Frequent interactions with customers extend the domain knowledge of the team, thus enabling them to build better software. In addition, code reviews and peer programming allow team members to learn from each other.

Typically, team members can pick their own work from the current queue of prioritised tasks. They are thus more responsible and have greater control over their own work. This is most often conducive to personal growth.

Shape the path, tweak the environment

The focus on the team typically means scrum or agile teams will be working together in team rooms. This fosters communication and mutual understanding, opening the road to frequent minor improvements, often too small to mention or pinpoint.

LAKS is often about making things visible, think kanban or scrum board (information radiators). This means that team members are confronted every day by the work in progress and waiting for them. They literally see it on the walls of their team room. Having the work visible makes it easy to talk about it, and this often leads improvements being discussed right infront of the board.

Shape the path, build habits

LAKS is all about habits. We have the daily standup, the retrospective, test driven development, refactoring, peer programming, code review, scrum planning meetings, demos, and more. As we have seen above, all of these habits are conducive to improvement. After all LAKS is a process, and a process is nothing more than a collection of habits we have all agreed to build.

Shape the path, rally the herd

The team focus instead of the individual focus is one form of rallying the herd. Peer pressure tends to drive people to carry out improvements they might not have done solely for themselves.

Also, the large and active LAKS community is a great source of motivation to improve should you find the team beginning to flag in enthusiasm. Nothing like a good conference or open space to get a team fired up again about making improvements.

LUMA Display Ad Tech Landscape

A slideshare presentation of Terence Kawaja's famous tech landscape chart.

LUMA Display Ad Tech Landscape 2011-03-07

Being new to the online marketing game, this slide and it's categories didn't mean that much to me. So I went to the trouble of trying to define some of the categories used, a sort of glossary for the landscape. Hope it helps you! (apologies for anything incorrect and improvements are welcome)

advertising agency
An advertising agency or ad agency is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising (and sometimes other forms of promotion) for its clients. An ad agency is independent from the client and provides an outside point of view to the effort of selling the client's products or services. An agency can also handle overall marketing and branding strategies and sales promotions for its clients

ad server
Ad serving describes the technology and service that places advertisements on web sites. Ad serving technology companies provide software to web sites and advertisers to serve ads, count them, choose the ads that will make the website or advertiser most money, and monitor progress of different advertising campaigns.

retargeting
Behavioral retargeting (also known as behavioral remarketing, or simply, retargeting) is a form of online targeted advertising by which online advertising is delivered to consumers based on previous Internet actions that did not in the past result in a conversion (in other words, the actions intended by the site owner, which typically include subscribing to an email list, registering for membership with a website, and/or making a purchase).

DEMAND SIDE PLATFORMS (DSP)
A demand side platform (DSP) is a system that allows digital advertisers to manage multiple ad exchange and data exchange accounts through one interface. Real time bidding for display online ads takes place within the ad exchanges, and by utilizing a DSP, marketers can manage their bids for the banners and the pricing for the data that they are layering on to target their audiences.
These are tools for media buyers: planning agencies, trading desks, creative optimization, data optimization, analytics and ad serving
Sometimes a DSP platform is white label and resold to others, for example Media buying desks.

creative optimization
dynamic creative production to enable real-time 1:1 personalized marketing. Automatically change background color, headline, steep discount, call-to-action, etc… for each targeted segment.

verification
A system that ensures every ad impression is a quality impression, every impression is compliant, and every ad was served and displayed exactly as intended.

media planning and (conversion) attribution
Media planning is generally the task of a media agency and entails finding the most appropriate media products for a client's brand or product. The job of media planning involves several areas of expertise that the media planner uses to determine what the best combination of media is to achieve the given marketing campaign objectives.

conversion attribution tracks all marketing interactions with users. To understand how users are engaging your company via advertising channels and how those channels work together to further your goals. In essence, you can begin to discover the proper Digital Media Mix that is required to make the most of your campaign budgets

measurement and analytics
Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage
Off-site web analytics refers to web measurement and analysis regardless of whether you own or maintain a website. It includes the measurement of a website's potential audience (opportunity), share of voice (visibility), and buzz (comments) that is happening on the Internet as a whole.
On-site web analytics measure a visitor's journey once on your website. This includes its drivers and conversions; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase. On-site web analytics measures the performance of your website in a commercial context. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign's audience response.

ad exchanges
Ad exchanges are technology platforms that facilitate the bidded buying and selling of online media advertising inventory from multiple ad networks

DATA MANAGEMENT PLATFORM (DMP) and data aggregators
These tools apply to both publishers and buyers — data suppliers, data exchanges, data aggregators and tools to manage data
Segments help marketers reach highly qualified consumers based on specific interests and intent. Collecting targeting data (behaviors, demographic, psychographic, etc.), qualifying that data, and aggregating into actionable segments to bring audience targeting to a new level.

Data suppliers
Tools to manage data, analyze it, enrich it, build up customer profiles. Also providers that collect and resell customer data

Media buying desks
Company that help advertisers buy the right media for the right price to maximize conversion. More and more these are moving towards DSPs, or going out of business.

Ad networks
An online advertising network or ad network is a company that connects advertisers to web sites that want to host advertisements. The key function of an ad network is aggregation of ad space supply from publishers and matching it with advertiser demand
1.Vertical Networks: They represent the publications in their portfolio, with full transparency for the advertiser about where their ads will run. They typically promote high quality traffic at market prices and are heavily used by brand marketers. The economic model is generally revenue share. Vertical Networks offer ROS (Run-Of-Site) advertising across specific Channels (example: Auto or Travel) or they offer site-wise advertising options, in which case they operate in a similar fashion to Publisher Representation firms.
2.Blind Networks (Horizontal): These companies offer good pricing to direct marketers in exchange for those marketers relinquishing control over where their ads will run, though some networks offer a "site opt out" method. The network usually runs campaigns as RON or Run-Of-Network. Blind networks achieve their low pricing through large bulk buys of typically remnant inventory combined with conversion optimization and ad targeting technology.

Advertising Management Platform (AMP) / Targeted Networks
Sometimes called “next generation” or “2.0” ad networks, these focus on specific targeting technologies such as behavioral or contextual. Targeted networks specialize in using consumer clickstream data to enhance the value of the inventory they purchase.[1] further specialized targeted networks include social graph technologies which attempt to enhance the value of inventory using connections in social networks.
Advertising management and delivery software that allows publishers to sell, deliver, report on and bill advertising inventory.

Performance (based)
No cure no pay. Affiliate marketing.

Mobile
Platforms for mobile advertisements.

Ad ops / Infrastructure
Ad Operations (aka "online ad operations", "online advertising operations", "online ad ops", "ad ops", and "ops" in the trade) refers to processes and systems that support the sale and delivery of online advertising. More specifically this is the workflow processes and software systems that are used to sell, input, serve, target and report on the performance of online ads.

Yield optimization
Yield management is the process of understanding, anticipating and influencing consumer behavior in order to maximize yield or profits from publishers ad inventory.

SUPPLY SIDE PLATFORMS(SSP) (not mentioned in slide)
These are tools for publishers: ad servers and optimization tools as well as inventory tools for both yield optimization and ad networks;