Why are companies so afraid to Fail?

When I meet folks from companies, most of them want to implement Agile, but they want ready made solutions from experienced folks. Basically what they are looking for is a Dummy’s Guide to Agile Transition. They want a completed tested and proven approach (Best Practices) to adopt Agile. They want to make sure there is no room for failure.

Well I don’t really understand how can one learn new techniques/approaches without failing a couple of times? Isn’t failure an implicit part of learning? To really learn something, you need to understand its boundaries and test the waters yourself. Babies don’t learn to walk without falling/hurting themselves. IMHO, if you want a babysitter (Coach), all your life, you will never be able to appreciate and learn new concepts. I’m afraid you will learn how to be waterfall in a different way.

You could get a coach to help you avoid big failure and give a helping hand after a failure, but its unrealistic to expect that a coach will help you successfully transition without any failure. Hard learnt lessons stick around longer.

Currently I’m suffering from massively over-committing to conferences, community building activities and open source. With one conference every month and commitment on few open source projects, I’m finding it really hard to fulfill my full time job @ Directi. After thinking about this for a couple of weeks, I have decided the following:

• No more conferences for Naresh Jain in 2009 and possible 2010. I might attend may be one conference just to stay in touch with folks. I need to focus on working in the trenches and continue learning and innovating. Right now I feel I’m getting quite hands-off.
• I’m taking a temporary part-time break from Directi for the next 4-5 months. I’ll still continue to be an employee of Directi and I’ll also spend 1.5 to 2 weeks a month working within Directi. But my involvement on their products will be drastically reduced from leading some aspects of the project to consulting on them until these 4-5 months.
• For the next 4-5 months to sustain myself I’ll be open to consulting/training for 3-5 days a month. Hopefully this can fund me for the series of conferences that I’ve signed up for this year.
• In 2008, I’m already over booked, so starting now, I’m refusing all new offers to speaker at conferences.
• Over time, I’ll reduce my commitment on ASCI activities. I’ll try to keep my involvement to a minimum, mostly a coordinator/contact point for some activities.
• I’ll continue contributing to all the open source projects that I’m involved with, but over a period of time I might reduce the number of projects I’m involved with.
• I’ll continue to play customer role for the Penn State project, but hopefully I’ll be done with it in May.

If you have any suggestions or ideas to help me, please feel free to guide this blind man 🙁

After taking a nice break of 3 months, I’m back in business. I decided to move to Mumbai and join Directi as Quality and Community Evangelist. My new role would involve, but will not be limited to:

• Defining and Implementing organization wide processes and risk-reduction practices (borrowing upon Agile and other philosophy as appropriate)
• Building and growing a sizable QA team, whose task would be to percolate Agile practices and other Product Engineering philosophies across the myriad product engineering teams at Directi
• Organize country-wide open camps, conferences, rallies, shows, contests etc for knowledge sharing and community building

Luckily for me Directi’s Profile suited the kind of company I was looking for:

• Directi is a product company which builds innovative mass-market Web Products serving millions of Customers worldwide
• Started in 1998 by two brothers (Bhavin and Divyank) at the age of 19 and 17 respectively. Today the company is worth 400+ million dollars.
• Opportunity to work directly with the Brothers.
• The only bad decision at Directi is no decision. An aggressive, young company whose mission is “World Domination”
• The Brothers took a loan of Rs 25,000 from their parents to start the company. Directi has been profitable from its inception. All assets of the group are organically funded without any external debt or borrowing.
• Directi has been ranked in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 list consecutively for the last 3 years

If you are looking for a similar company to work for, please drop me a note, we are always looking for “Intelligent People & Smart Ideas”.

From today, I started biking (cycling) to work. I realized that there was no point in me traveling alone in my car when I can reach work in about the same time without contributing to the pollution and congestion. It is also a great way to burn some calories.

It takes me 10 mins to get to work and guess what, I don’t have to wait at traffic lights. 😉 I’m still concerned about rains and heat strokes in Mumbai. But that is certainly a few months away and I decided to “make hay while the sunshines”.

Starting Monday Jan 28th 2008 I’ll be based out of Mumbai. (I’ll have a Mumbai based cell phone.) Lots of people are amazed that I moved to Mumbai from Bangalore. Bangalore is the silicon valley of India. I’ve lived in Bangalore most of my life. But now I’ll be in Mumbai, my birth place.

Last 2 weeks have been crazy. I think next week will continue to be crazy. I saw 48 apartments before I decided to rent out the apartment I’ll be living in. This is my second stay in Mumbai. By now some of the agents know my taste. Last time I lived in Mumbai I had seen 102 apartments.

Real estate in Mumbai is sky rocketing. 2.5 years back I was paying 15,000 Rs rent. This time I’ll be paying 28,000 Rs rent. Its crazy.

Drop me a line if you are around Mumbai, I would be happy to hook up with you. If you are looking for accommodation and want to experience a home stay, you are most welcome to stay with my family!

I would like to share my experience of how I stared blogging. If you are not a blogger and feel a little left out from the elite blogging community, this might help you get started.

4 years back, while I was still at ThoughtWorks, there was a growing blogging community inside ThoughtWorks. There was a general feeling that you are not “kewl” if you don’t have a blog. I had ideas about software development and adventure sports that I wanted to share with others. So I wanted to blog and belong to the growing blogging community inside ThoughtWorks. But I was not motivated enough to blog regularly and I was probably not too disciplined to blog as well. I also had (and still have) a very big complex that my written communication sucks. This actually turned out to be a good motivation to start blogging. As a way to improve my written communication skills. Also I’m not good at reading, so I thought if I start a blog, at least that will force me to read other people’s blogs and write my own views.

So I found some motivations to blog. But what I was looking for, was a good topic that I could blog on. Esp. something that had continuity. That would make it easy for me to blog regularly. Finding new, different topics to blog about could be difficult to start off with. Luckily for me, we had just started an internal object boot camp at ThoughtWorks Bangalore office. There were lots of interesting things I was learning during the boot camp. Things like Getters and Setters break encapsulation. Such powerful thoughts! I wanted a way to capture this learning and share this with others. Also I want to record them to retrospect at the end of boot camp what I learned. So I found a topic to start blogging about.

Once I was motivated enough to blog and I had a topic that had a continuity, I wanted to figure out a place to blog. Most people don’t have their personal servers. At least, I did not have one then. So I asked a few people which is the simplest, free blogging site. JRoller and Blogspot were the famous free blogging sites then. I choose to go with JRoller. Was very happy with its services for a while.

After about 3 years I had got very regular blogging. I was surprised people actually read my blogs. Some people I met at conferences, knew me coz of my blog. I even got offers to advertise on my blog. By now there were so many blogs on JRoller, that it had become very slow. At that point I decided to get my own server and host my own blog. WordPress seems to be the favorite tool and I went with it. Very happy with the performance so far.

In retrospect I think there are 3 main ingredients to starting blogging:

• Motivation: Strong enough reasons to start blogging
• Topic: A topic that is modular and has continuity. A topic that matters to you. If you are learning a new technology or you are starting on a new project, it would be easy to blog about that.
• Tools: Some free blog hosting sites and easy tools to manage your blogs

Hope this helps!

From today onwards people will refer to me as TQer instead of a TWer. That’s right. Today, Nov 12th 2007, is my last day at ThoughtWorks. It has been a wonderful 4 years for me at TW. I have learnt a great amount of concepts at TW. Fellow TWers have really helped me refine my values and provided me with a vision which will last with me long after I’m gone.

For the next few months I plan to take off and think about what I would like to do next. In the mean time, I would be focusing on Agile India . I also quite a few open source projects that I need to focus on. This would be a great time to do so.

I’m really looking forward to starting the Uncertification Workshops in India.

PIN REVERSAL

If you should ever be forced by a robber to withdraw money from an ATM machine, you can notify the police by entering your Pin # in reverse.

For example if your pin number is 1234 then you would put in 4321. The ATM recognizes that your pin number is backwards from the ATM card you placed in the machine.

The machine will still give you the money you requested, but unknown to the robber, the police will be immediately dispatched to help you.

This information was recently broad casted on TV and it states that it is seldom used because people don’t know it exists.

Note: I think this information needs to be confirmed, because snopes.com indicates that this is a false story that has been circulating the Internet since last year:

http://www.snopes.com/business/bank/pinalert.asp

What started off as a 20 day “visit every conference in North America trip” came to a sudden and rather unexpected, but happy end today. After being stranded in Montreal for 3 days and having lived at the mercy of Air Canada, I finally reached home this morning. Oh Boy, what a trip!

I must admit that I got a tittle too ambitious and tried to do too many things back to back. This is how crazy, my schedule for this month looked liked:

• Oct 2nd – Oct 5th – Chennai, India – Agile Chennai Conference
• Oct 6th – Oct 7th – Pondicherry – Time off with Jeff Patton
• Oct 9th – Oct 12th – Portland, OR – Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tool Visioning workshop
• Oct 13th – Oct 14th – New York City – XP Day Manhattan
• Oct 15th – Oct 18th – York, PA – Teaching at Penn State University, York
• Oct 19th – Trip down to Boulder Colorado
• Oct 20th – Oct 21st – Philadelphia -Farewell to old memories
• Oct 22nd – Oct 25th – Montreal, Canada – OOPSLA Conference
• Oct 26th -Oct 29th – Stranded in Montreal
• Oct 30th – Bangalore – Home sweet Home!

Unfortunately, I missed the Agile Goa Conference from Oct 30- Oct 31st. I was planning to return back from Goa to Bangalore on Nov 2nd. This would have completed 31 days of “Life on the Road” episode for me. Well there is always a next time. 🙂

Agile Goa 07: This will be the first Agile India conference that I won’t be able to attend.

Initially I was very concerned about the fact that I won’t be there. But thinking through it, I’m not really concerned. I have a really strong team of people who will be running this event and I’m sure they would do a great job. Dr. Jyoti Pawar from Goa University is the main organizer and leaving thing on her shoulders seems fine to me. Also we have a great set of speakers who can setup and do the needful.

If this works, this could be something that I might explore more in the future. Right now I feel like I’m a big bottleneck in organizing Agile India events. For future events, I might try and find a strong person on the ground who could run the show, I can help them in coming up with the program and finding the speakers. Once the program is finalized and logistics are worked out, I can let the person on ground run the show. Also through ASCI website we can create a registration page if required. For smaller events, I think providing the email address of the person on ground, makes more sense for registrations.

This just reminds me of one song: Always Look on the Bright Side of Life from the album: A Faire To Remember

Some things in life are bad
They can really make you mad
Other things just make you swear and curse.
When you’re chewing on life’s gristle
Don’t grumble, give a whistle
And this’ll help things turn out for the best…

And…always look on the bright side of life…
Always look on the light side of life…

If life seems jolly rotten
There’s something you’ve forgotten
And that’s to laugh and smile and dance and sing.
When you’re feeling in the dumps
Don’t be silly chumps
Just purse your lips and whistle – that’s the thing.

And…always look on the bright side of life…
Always look on the light side of life…

For life is quite absurd
And death’s the final word
You must always face the curtain with a bow.
Forget about your sin – give the audience a grin
Enjoy it – it’s your last chance anyhow.

So always look on the bright side of death
Just before you draw your terminal breath

Life’s a piece of shit
When you look at it
Life’s a laugh and death’s a joke, it’s true.
You’ll see it’s all a show
Keep ’em laughing as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you.

And always look on the bright side of life…
Always look on the right side of life…
(Come on guys, cheer up!)
Always look on the bright side of life…
Always look on the bright side of life…
(Worse things happen at sea, you know.)
Always look on the bright side of life…
(I mean – what have you got to lose?)
(You know, you come from nothing – you’re going back to nothing.
What have you lost? Nothing!)
Always look on the right side of life…