Judging by the low number of comments, my book tour travelog has been a snorefest so I’ll wrap up the remains in one post.

Friday 10/14: I dropped in at Razorfish and Google NYC and talked about user centered design, leading development teams and the challenges of making good things. One of the folks at Razorfish, Vincent Santo, was an Interactionary survivor and we chatted about that. Karen McGrane, my excellent host, was great and as cool as I expected. Over at Google I was hosted by Leslie Yeh, who worked on my team for awhile back at Microsoft. Their office near Broadway was slick: 3 stories cut away into a central opening, with enough room for two basketball hoops. My kind of office.

Monday 10/17: As a kid I walked by the Cooper Union campus dreaming about going there one day. Well the day came: I got to speak to 120 students and faculty about lessons I learned at Microsoft. It turned out much of the crowd were freshmen, so I quickly ditched most of my slides and let them ask me questions for an hour. It was a thrill and an honor: after a few jabs at MSFT the focus turned to business, innovation and the differences between being a student and a professional. Best question asked: Who would win in a fight, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs?

Tuesday 10/18: The full circle was complete: I spoke at CMU where I graduated in ‘94. Catherine Copetas was my fantastic host with CS department and set up two talks: a small informal talk and a big lecture. The lecture was in Wean 7500: A room I had fallen asleep in countless times as a student. Speaking in that huge cavern of a room was a right of passage. Bonnie John, the director of the masters program at the CMU HCI institute, and a former professor of mine was there and we chatted afterwards. It’s fantastic to see that what was a collection of courses when I left, has blossomed into an entire HCI group: they’re setting an example for other CS departments to follow.

Wednesday 10/19. Had I planned better, I’d have used this day to see more friends in Pittsburgh. But I was exhausted and mostly slept late at Faisal’s and then crawled out to Shadyside and wrote in a coffeeshop on Walnut Street. I ate a late breakfast at the legendary Pamelas, bought a sandwhich to bring home to my wife at the Peruvian place (La Feria), and spent a ton of cash on cool CDs at the world music store. Walnut street still has a special quiet hip charm hard to find in most cities.

Thursday 10/20: Homeward bound. By 4pm I was back in the woods and sleeping comfortably, with my dog Max, on the couch. 12 days, 3 cities, 9 talks, lots of cool new people and old friends, but time for sweet dreams.

If you want lesssons learned from this, my 2nd book tour, comment away. Otherwise I’ll leave the tour behind.

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This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #51 - Making handoffs.

Here’s this week’s situation:

I’m a lead programmer at a software development shop. My problem is handoffs: my group stinks at them. We have business folks that write requirements docs, but the way they hand them off to my team is a joke. They don’t involve us in the process and don’t help us resolve ambiguities in what they created. Then there are poor handoffs to test, and again to marketing. It seems almost every handoff is done poorly: it’s almost expected.

How can/does a team learn to make better handoffs with work that cuts across jobs/roles?

- Death by fumbling

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Short notice, but if you’re an amazonian working in Seattle, I’ll be speaking at the Friday speaker series today at noon on “Why smart people defend ideas“. Hope to see you there.

I’m promised a copy of the video of the talk and I’ll make it available online if possible.

Thanks to Jordan Rule and Werner Vogels for making this happen.

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Thursday was my first day off: a travel day. A short cab ride and I was in Boston’s historic south station. To my delight, they even had a bookstore in the center of the main concourse.

The train is a better experience than air travel, hands down. The stations are often beautiful old buildings with dramatic large spaces and high ceilings. Getting on and off doesn’t require snaking security lines and obsessive ID and boarding pass checks. Wandering around South station I kept looking up, entertained by the sheer size of the waiting area. They just don’t build buildings like that anymore. Unlike airports, you get a sense that you’re really somewhere, even while you’re waiting to go somewhere else.

On the trains themselves there’s more room, power access and a dining car (the food ain’t great, but you’re choices are better than airplane’s standard chicken or pasta). And unlike air-travel where there’s a rush hour panic vibe and people’s smelly elbows in your face, the train is downright civilized. Plenty of space. Wide seats. Quiet cars. I suspect the 8am train would have been crazier than my 11:15, but I had a most enjoyable ride.

Perhaps I have train envy. In Seattle, where I live, it doesn’t seem we’ll ever have train service of any kind. The history of mass transit here is a tragic tale than spans decades and is simply too sad to get into here. It’s a classic tale of bad project management.

3 hours later I arrived at Penn Station and had my ritualistic thrill of walking up to the chaos of the midtown NYC streets. That energy rush always gets a rise out of me: it’s the lovable insanity of home.

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One of the things stupid people do is this: Person A (aka Mr. stupid) writes a requirements document. He makes it super detailed and 50 pages long. He then throws it blindly over a wall (thud!) to person B and says “Do this.”

This is evil and dumb for the following reasons:

1. It guarantees resentment. Person B is being dictated to, which is less than fun (unless you’re a masochist). He is confined by person A’s (unnecessary) details. If ever person B has power over A, the negative energy will be returned.
2. It ensures poor quality work. Person B has no vested interest. The requirements are not his and he’s unlikely to feel positive about fulfilling them. I would not expect B to stay late, ever, to help fullfill requirements he didn’t beleive in.
3. It’s limiting. How does person A know that person B doesn’t have suggestions for making the requirements better? Or that his requirements aren’t completely insane and contradictory? He doesn’t.
4. It’s unecessarily territorial. Fighting over documents is absurd, since the document is not the product. Requirements, prototypes and wireframes should be fodder for collaborating on the best ideas, not for putting your pet ones in locked boxes.

Every time I hear about organizations that draft requirements in private, I choke. It’s a sure sign that creative thinking of any kind is seen as disruptive rather than constructive.

Requirements should be built in the open, with invitations to designers of all kinds to vet out requirements early on with rough prototypes and mock-ups to prove (or disprove) the assumptions made by the requirements. If quality requirements are the goal, there is every motivation to involve the people who will do the work in the their definition.

You want overlap of involvement in the production of any requirement (or document) between the creators and the users, as in this diagram. Ideas show flow freely between them. It should be a dance of analysis (business dude) and synthesis (designers/engineers).

You can replace the legend with any pairing of creators and consumers within a team and it still works. Programmers/Testers, Product managers/Program Managers, Designers/Engineers, etc.

You could argue that the lines should run in parallel for longer, with two or more people working as peers in the process until there is enough stability for a handoff. My point with the squiggly lines is that it fluctuates, but that it’s always clear who the primary driver is.

But the core of my point is overlap of involvement. Regardless of method (agile, waterfall, VP whim, utter chaos) you want to collaborate over important decisions, exploring alternatives and using cross-disciplinary perspective to draw the best thinking to the surface. There’s never a reason not to.

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I quickly lost myself in the MIT campus. It was fun to poke my nose into classrooms and departments observing everyone busily doing their things. I must have fit right in, as two different people asked me for directions.

The talk, Why software sucks, was nearly canceled. Someone was upset about the title and it was cancelled from the seminar series. I called (ok begged) the fine folks at the student run SIPB and they came through, rescheduling the talk and hosting me on campus. Kudos to Jeff Arnold and Jennifer Tu. They had posters up all over the place (see photo above) and spread the word.

There were about 100 people in the 54-100 lecture hall (see photo). Despite the size I had lots of good questions and a good two dozen people stuck around for a long Q&A session. I was impressed with how many questions there were about process and engineering. Someone asked about why certain bugs in Word (or other v 12 software) will never be fixed: and we talked about the challenges of platforms.. how the risks for certain bits of code can become higher than the return value in making changes (a reverse econony of scale for software). Somewhere in there is a business/engineeing case study waiting to happen.

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You always want the best people, but sometimes the best people don’t fit together into a harmonious team. How do you manage star egos? How do you build good teams, with or without stars? I answer these questions and more.

Teams and stars

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This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #50 - How to be the Wolf.

Here’s this week’s situation:

Imagine that you are made a job offer where you need to “whip into shape” the organization. You’ve been briefed on some of the issues they’ve been facing and are brought in to turn the team around. What kind of questions should you ask before taking such a job? What resources would you ask for? What authority would you need? How much information does a candidate need before accepting such a task?

- How to be the Wolf

fyi: The Wolf is a character from the film Pulp Fiction that comes in to save the day. . Also related to “The cleaner” from La Feme Nikita.

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Lifehacker has a good essay on decision making. It neatly sumarizes 3 or 4 of the basic and handy ways to make tough calls.

I’m more fond of pro con lists than anything else. They’re quick, dirty, and easy to share. Expected value requires to much math invention for my tastes unless I’m working with money or the pure P&L (profit and loss) figures.

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Robbie Allen has a great writeup from the Harvard University Startup school that took place last week. Speakers included people from O’Reilly, Apple (Wozniak), Yahoo, Google, Y combinator (Graham), Tripadvisor, Bloglines, Feedburner, etc.

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When I was a student at CMU, I thought of MIT as the school we wanted to compete with but who didn’t know who we were. It was kind of like picking a fight with someone twice your size: it’s not that you’d lose, it’s that they didn’t even care. So visiting MIT was a thrill: I’d read so much about the place, and the legendary hacks, that I had fun just walking around on campus. (It’d make an interesting contrast a few days later when I spoke at CMU).

I walked the 15 minutes from the ever swanky hotel Marlowe and met Daniel Jackson from the CS department. The Strata center, where his office is, is a wild Ghery designed skyline of buildings and it was a trippy thing to see early in the day. Jackson and I chatted about teaching programming and organizing teams, but soon I had to run off to talk at the Sloan school.

I had no idea what to expect: I’m entirely depedent on my host at each of these gigs to promote or advertise the talk, and for this one I expected to 8 or10 people and a small room, for an informal chat. Well, I was wrong. Yuntao Edward Shi (of the mediatech club), my host, filled the medium size room with nearly 100 MBA students. I was late to the building and scrambled to find the room, and had a sureal moment of “that room is really crowded it can’t be it. Wait. That’s it.”

Sticking with my plan I kept the talk informal. After a brief intro I asked the crowd what they wanted to talk about and let them veto entire sections from my slides. It was great. Someone asked about anti-trust, another about managing people smarter than you and the session just flew by. These guys are smart: looking forward to seeing what they do after they leave Sloan.

At 12:59pm we were kicked out by some TAs setting up for an exam. I had flashblacks to scrawling long missives in those little blue books they make you write in. I smiled inside, being so happy to never ever have to take an exam again.

The next talk at MIT wasn’t until 4:30pm. Robbie Allen, esteemed O’Reilly author and the man who made the talk possible, met me for lunch. Then I had two hours to kill before the next lecture on why software sucks.

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One of the fun things about doing no-frills book tours is how much I have to rely on the kindness of strangers. People can be cool if given the chance. Matt Belge, chair of the Boston ACM-CHI chapter, kindly offered to give me a ride to the meeting in Burlington, MA. We quickly hit real traffic, east coast traffic, not the wimpy arterial kind Seattlites are fond of complaining about. Matt wonders if we’ll be late, but then we laugh as we realize that with the chair and the speaker in the car, the event starts when we show up.

Stupid mistake #1: At Sun, the host for boston-chi, I realize I left my power cable back at Northeastern. Yes, I made the same mistake on tour #1. And yes, I am a moron. A quick call to Peter and there’s a shot it might still be in the room (it’s recovered later thx to him).

Nicole Yankelovich graciously donates her Powerbook, who’s screensaver provided entertainment at various intervals during the talk (I made up stories about the photos every time they came on: improv training comes in handy).

The crowd of about 50 people was great: they asked good questions, played along with my jokes and we had a fun time. I spoke about What to do when things wrong (slides / audio), a topic from the book.

Relying on kindness again, I snagged a ride from the rising design star Sam Aquillano from IDSA Boston. I see great things in his future. Plus he has an ungodly gift for finding his way through dark and confusing parts of Boston.

Back at the hotel at 9:30pm, I snagged another cab (#3 for the trip so far), met Peter at Northeastern, and then doubled back to the hotel, power cable intact. Back at the hotel at 10:30pm, I realize lunch at O’reilly was the only meal I’d had all day. I stay up late preping for Wednesday’s lectures at MIT and chowing down on the most expensive Turkey sandwhich in history via room service. 2 lectures down, 7 to go.

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