Agile MindStorm - Ideas, Actions, Results !!!

- Show what you can do

Promotion isn't just about doing what you're paid to do. It's not necessarily even about being the best "widget" maker you can be.
Promotion is about pushing the limits of your current position. It's about showing that you have outgrown your current responsibilities, and that you're ready to take on new ones.

Think about it! If you're busy working away, producing more widgets per hour than anyone has ever produced, why should I promote you? Clearly, your value to the company is your efficiency. If I promote you, my production output may suddenly fall!


- Understand your organization

To prepare for a promotion, you have to really understand the drivers of organizational success. It doesn't necessarily mean doing more things - it means doing more of the RIGHT things.


- Increase your responsibility

• Complete your work thoroughly and with as little supervision as possible.
• When you have questions for your boss, come prepared with solutions as well.
• Get up-to-date, and stay current in your field.

- Get innovative

• Demonstrate critical thinking.
• Understand the big picture, and incorporate it into your decisions and solutions.
• Look for things that aren't being done at all.
• Put forward your ideas.

- Set promotion goals

Just identify your goals and desires. You must know what you want to achieve.

- Communicate your desire

Let people know what you want, and then proactively work to achieve it.

After analyzing answers that i got from experts in LinkedIn (special thanks to Will Pearce) i made following assumptions.

- First of all typically some process is being utilized by personnel in a company whether it is documented or not, so it is very important step to gather all possible information how the work is done and what activities are performed. I think we need to do that to understand what we need to improve and change.

- Another thing which is not less important is to change working culture in a company. The thing is that people are used to work here in a bit chaotic way, so I must convince everybody within a company that we have to change in order to work successfully.

Also I've read some interesting articles posted by Bob Lewis about processes. Those are definitely worth reading !

How to make change happen

A matter of gravity

Six Stupid process controls

So, the steps that we are going to perform:
1. Identify current activities
2. Identify key processes (the degree to which they impact company's ability to reach desired results)
3. Identify all stakeholders
4. Document top priority processes
5. Describe process execution steps
6. Track process execution
7. Identify process improvement possibilities and implement them

Found a nice and easy way of preventing user from clicking several times on a button. Especially useful during long postbacks (f.ex calculating report or something like that)

please find the code below:
#region Prevent user from clicking during long postback
HtmlGenericControl style = new HtmlGenericControl("style");
style.Attributes.Add("type", "text/css");
style.InnerHtml =
@"
.WaitOverlay
{
position: absolute;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
left: 0px;
top: 0px;
background-color: White;

-moz-opacity: 0.25;
filter: alpha(opacity=25);
opacity: 0.25;

z-index: 9999;

cursor: wait;
}
";

this.Page.Header.Controls.Add(style);

Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptBlock(
typeof(string),
"showWait",
@"
function showWait()
{
var overlayDiv;
overlayDiv = document.createElement('div');
overlayDiv.className = 'WaitOverlay';
document.body.appendChild(overlayDiv);
}
",
true
);

//Page.Form.Attributes.Add("onsubmit", "showWait()");
Page.ClientScript.RegisterOnSubmitStatement(typeof(string), "showWait", "showWait()");
#endregion

To make it work all you have to do is just copy this into a page prerender event and it will handle ALL the postbacks. Isn't it cool ? :)

I want to thank all guys who responded to my question in LinkedIn.

As you can see my question “I want to implement a process in a company. What should I start from?” generated a lot of answers, so I am making an assumption that this topic is interesting and it is worth to discuss it.

Also I got some interesting questions from James Smith that I will try to answer. (In my opinion everyone should ask himself these questions before starting how work on any kind of changes, not necessarily related to process implementation)

Why do you want to make a change? (What is the benefit?)
I want to make this change to formalize the way we are working in a company. The main thing is to settle down the flow of information, because it is more like peer-to-peer at the moment. And I think that it can lead into a lot of troubles in future. But I want to note that bureaucracy is not a desirable state for our company. We don’t want to lose common sense.

Why is now the best time? (If it didn't happen now what would happen?)
This one is easy to answer. The company is growing very fast at the moment (staff, clients and etc). So as the company is changing, the methods and processes have to change also. We just must change/improve our current process, because in other case we will not be able to handle new challenges.

Does anyone else feel the same? (Are you the only one with the issue?)
It’s a very good point. Fortunately I am not alone who tries to implement this idea now, but I had to convince some people that we NEED this change and was the first one who said that loud. I fully understand that it is impossible to make any changes within a company without a support of key staff.

Is there another way? (List your options, get input.)
To be honest I didn’t think about that before. But I don’t think that there are some better approaches to solve the problem I described before.

How far are you willing to go to make it happen? (Commitment is critical!)
Well, I will be doing that till I will succeed or will be fired. :)

Today i got a link to a very good book - The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. W. Covey.

The most important things from this book:

• Be proactive
• Begin with the End in Mind
• Put First Things First
• Think Win/Win
• Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood
• Synergize (Working in teams)
  
• Sharpen the saw (focused on self-satisfaction)

I am really looking forward to read this book to increase my effectiveness :)

Recently launched a new web site - Creacity. Your comments and suggestions are very welcome.
Also please take a look into our portfolio.

Process implementation and improvement is a very broad questions and requires a lot of information. I am not going to get into theory ( describing what is process and etc ) because this information can be easily found in an internet. The good thing is that i was investigating these topics in my bachelor and master degree papers, so i hope that i have needed theoretical background :)

And finally i have a very good opportunity to use my theoretical knowledge in practice.

But since i am not yet an expert in this area i decided to gather some information on this topic.
So i posted a question in LinkedIn to ask experts worldwide to get useful advises.
You can see the question via following link "How to implement a process".

Also i am going to meet Antanas Mitašiūnas next week who is working in this area to discuss all possible issues.

His recent publications:
1. A. Mitašiūnas, A. Adamonis, I. Naujikas, S. Ragaišis, M. Reingardtas, Dependencies of Processes’ Capability Levels, Information technology and control, ISSN 1392-124X, 2005, Vol. 34, No. 2A, pp. 202-208
2. A. Mitašiūnas, V. Bendinskas, G. Mikaliūnas, S. Ragaišis, Towards Mature Software Process, Information technology and control, ISSN 1392-124X, 2005, Vol. 34, No. 2A, pp. 209-214.
3. A. Mitašiūnas, S. Ragaišis,Relationship between CMMI Maturity Levels and ISO/IEC 15504 Processes Capability Profiles, Lietuvos matematikos rinkinys, specialus priedas - LMD XLVI konferencijos darbai, 2005 (įteiktas spaudai)

In my next posts i am going to
- categorize gathered information
- describes steps that i am going to perform in my company

The main reason for this blog is that i want to share my experience and knowledge that i achieved during my career with everybody and also improve my skills.

I am mostly interested in management and processes, although most time of my career till this moment i spent in developing various software - starting from simple web pages to complex business solutions for government and private organizations.

I am currently working for a company which provides a complete solution for marketing activities - Adfrom. Company is growing, so we need to improve our organizational and software development processes to handle everyday tasks in the most effective way.

So the main focus for this blog will be dedicated to process improvement and i will try share how we are doing that, what steps we are performing. I hope that it will be useful for everybody and Your comments will help me to do that in the best way.

Let's improve it !!!

Hi everybody,

first of all i want to introduce myself. My name is Andrej Ruckij.

I am Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD), Database Developer and Software Architest in a wide variety of business applications. Particularly interested in client/server, SOA.
I am familiar with such methodologies and processes: CMMI, RUP, SCRUM, MSF, SPICE.
Also I am very interested in adopting processes within the company.

My specialties are: Software design and development based on Microsoft technologies. Organizational processes improvement.

You can also view my profile in LinkedIn