To do or not to do, that’s the question.

One thing i learned during my SCRUM Master Certification Training was that: there is no such thing as “I am doing SCRUM but…”, there is no SCRUM BUT framework, either your are or you are not doing it.

There are some signs that could lead you to the sad conclusion that, after all, you are not doing SCRUM at all.

Some members of the team complain about the Daily Meeting usefulness

When one, or some members of the team start to complain about the loss of that 15 minutes during the day, that could mean that:

1. You team is not self-managed
2. Not ALL the team is focused on the SAME goal.

So, fixed or leave it, is my advise!

Alexandre Magno talked about it on Adpatworks blog post, Mike Cohn too, on his “Ssssh….Agile Is All About Micromanaging” blog post.

Well, this is my first off topic post, but i think it deserves.

Sarah Silverman, has, at least, a good point of view on this.

Have you ever think of this ?

Most of people that had a great or not so great idea decided to sart looking for funding, in order to support the transformation of the idea into something real, those people are wrong, they should be looking for interested clients instead of funding.

Some of the people i know, start looking for funding options under the VC umbrella even before having something to show, without personal funding, i believe that this is not the way it should be, have the following options under your eyes before start looking for corporate funding.

Self funding

First you need to prototype the product, for that your could use self funding. Use some savings on your own, probably you want to do this on your spare time. Another option, is to get some friends helping out to build the product, in exchange for a small stake of the business, you’ll not get money but you’ll get help, is there worst or better ?

Grow from revenue

You’ll get into a stage that you will need more money, either for product investment or for start dedicating yourself 100% into your product/business, for this bet on revenue funding. Now that you have already a product, you could start to partner with future clients, sell pre-payed packages, that will fund your development. STart a partner relationship, not a client relationship.

Raise funds from friends and family

Friends and family are a direct channel to get funding, after you have a product materialized and a projection of revenue, your friend and family will be interested on helping you out, in exchange for a small stake of the idea, you should consider this. Bringing more people in, will make you have more people giving you advices and controlling your decisions, that’s not unhealthy.

Only after this 3 funding ways got dry, you should be looking for the investment sharks, that will help you in exchange for a considerable percentage of your business.

My advise is, start by focusing in your product and only later get worried about dealing with corporate funding. Of course this works better when your product prototyping/development doesn’t evolve a complex and long time process.

This is the first week of the Friday Links Series, every week i will try to let you discover 3 links about a specific subject, this week i chosen “Successful freelancing”.

5 Steps to Winning Any Client Project from Freelancefolder.com

Mason Hipp, gives you 5 steps to help you to be the winner of that project!

8 Ways Doing Less Can Transform Your Work & Life from Zenhabits.net

Leo Babauta, offers you 8 tips, for free, that will help you to re-gain your life quality.

10 Reasons To Quit Your Job Now and Start Freelancing from Amberweinberg.com

Amber Weinberg, throws to you 10 reasons why you should be freelancing.

Have a nice weekend!

Just got the time to attend the Certified Scrum Master Training and Certification.

At the beginning i was believing that i would be there 2 days listening to the same topics once again, as i already had read about it on online presentations. Well, i was wrong! I got a lot of good knowledge from the Certification Training and i would suggest it to those of you who are trying to implement Scrum into your teams.

The Certification Training program was the following:

• Overview of Scrum
• Sprints
• The Scrum Master
• The product owner
• Product backlog
• Meetings
• Sprint planning
• Release planning
• Tracking progress
• The team
• Scalability

When you’re attending to the training many questions will pop up in your head, the main one that popped out on my head and in most of my class mates was “How will i implement this on my team ?”.

I will try to answer to this question on a future blog post, because that will need experimentation, presentations and mentality change over here on my company.

So, the first thing that i would advise to everyone that has this question over the head is:

Plan, Plan, Plan and Plan the implementation process.

If you are not familiarized with SCRUM, here you have some links about the subject.

• ScrumAlliance.org
• MountainGoatSoftware.com

I’m taking one week of vacations, and with vacations i always got some readings, i would like to share my choices for this vacations period.

Wisdom from Finding Your Own North Star (Hardcover)

How I Made It: 40 Successful Entrepreneurs Reveal How They Made Millions

How to Fund Your Business: The Essential Guide to Raising Finance to Start and Grow Your Busines

The Entrepreneur’s Book of Checklists: 1000 Tips to Start and Grow Your Business

How to be an Entrepreneur: The Six Secrets of Self-Made Success (Paperback)

My Big Idea: 30 Successful Entrepreneurs Reveal How They Found Inspiration (Hardcover)

See you in a week!

Are you getting the feeling that you work harder and get no cherry on top of the cake ? Are you entering on a failure spiral ?There are times on each one’s life when we feel unhappy, crappy and even feeling totally usefulness, and we can’t avoid this to happen, it’s something called demotivation, but you can get out of it quickly and improve you quality of life.

There are some tactics that you could use to get out of the well.

1. Be the master of you day
1.1 Write down every tasks you have to do for each working day.
1.2 Give a priority factor to each of them.
1.3 Order the list for priority level, ascending, meaning, more priority tasks on top.
1.4 Define what are the tasks that need to be done TODAY and the one’s that don’t.
1.5 Draw a line between URGENT = TODAY tasks and the others.
1.6 Now look only for URGENT=TODAY tasks and you got your daily tasks, your goal. When you finish this, just go home, and be a little bit more ambitious tomorrow.

Making this you will start to re-gain confidence and cultivate a success culture, you will also know what is the work load that you can handle each day.

2. Split work and personal life areas
Often we stay on office and try to be like superman, be the one to save the world, or end hunger in the world. Convince yourself that you cannot be that person, neither you, neither anyone. If you draw a strict line between working hours and off work life, you will get a balance that will allow you to reduce stress, fatigue and unhealthy factors that are killing your personal life and making you less productive tomorrow.

3. Find the love on what you do
You must think if what you are doing on your current work, is what you love. If you are doing something that you do not truly love, just write down the resignation letter and go somewhere else and be happy. Most of the times people get stuck in a place because they think that they are on the only place in the world where they can get money to pay the bills. That’s bullshit! There are plenty of places where you can get the money, and be happy at same time.

So, your plan of action, should be :
Re-gain control of your day, Draw a line between work and personal and Find passion on what you do.

I started to think, why there are still many companies not going into a telecommuting strategy, when everyone talks about lack of technological local knowledge.I could think of a dozen of reasons on why would companies embrace on telecommuting strategies, we can start on reducing our carbon footprint, passing by increase employees quality of live ending on getting the best specialists anywhere in the world. Although as always there are some dangers embracing a telecommuting strategy, i will try to explain both pro’s and con’s, in my personal opinion.

Companies should embrace a telecommuting strategy because:

1. Company should demand goals to employee not office hours

Company employees should be handled as adults, like they are, and they should be responsible to manage their own 24 hours of the day, targeting to attain company proposed goals instead of targeting to be 8/10 hours per day in a office.

2. Decrease office costs

Having employees working out of the office, the company needs in terms of space, energy costs or rental budget will decrease.

3. Decrease dependency on local expertise

Looking into the whole world as a probable hiring market will increase the company workers knowledge, increase the probability of having the best workers coming along. As opposite to have a small local prospecting and limited knowledge market.

4. Increase employees level of life

Giving the possibility to the worker manage their own time, will increase the employee level of life, commuting time on the begin and end of each day takes a huge amount of person energy. This energy will start to be applied into daily work tasks.

5. Became global and open the office 24/7

Accepting a telecommuting strategy, you will end on having employees on every corner of the globe, meaning that you will have the office open 24/7h.

6. Improve internal processes and documentation

Having a telecommute strategy makes the company to impose himself internal strict processes, as meeting schedule, documentation process, and others.

Although companies when embracing a telecommuting strategy should be careful with the dangers of:

1. Loose of human interaction

Lack of a constant office hours, and having all the company teams together will imply the loose of human interaction, loosing some of the daily discussions or over the coffee ideas.

2. Harder to measure employee work

Lack of physical presence by the employee will increase the need of strict metrics or goals definition, in order to be able to measure the employee productivity.

3. IT becomes more important than never

With lots of remote workers, company IT need to be more failure proof, security should be increased on internal networks, VPN is indispensable and systems should never be off-line.

Some interesting links about telecommuting:

• Telecommuting [Wikipedia]
• 2 big reasons to think about telecommuting for your company
• Honk If Your Company Loves Telecommuting
• SO YOU WANT TO TELECOMMUTE? PART 1 – BUILDING TRUST
• Open Teams
• Remote Developers

Over the past 12 years, i have dealt with several teams, in some i was leading in others don’t, so i got some conclusions, like the DO and DON’T about team motivation, that i would like to share with you.

1. Avoid the bad news

Spreading bad news should be avoided at all costs, people tend to demotivate quickly when they hear about bad news. Think that people often think they are giving their best, bad news is the recognition that wasn’t enough! If you really have to give people bad news, make it on a solid way. Explain people why that happened and how will it be avoided in the future!

2. Lead the direction

Is extremely easy to order people to do a task or something else, is harder to lead the way until the task is completed. Stay side by side with your team when shit happens and help the team to achieve the goal, don’t be the guy that measures the performance at the end, be one of the responsible for the team success or failure. Assume the failures and give the champagne bubbles to your team on success.

3. Teach when people do bad

Don’t point the finger out, don’t recriminate people, be a teacher to the team! Blaming someone else will make the blame syndrome to grow, and at the end you will never be able to take control back! Every team member will have fear to risk because they will be afraid to miss and be blamed. So, don’t blame, teach!

4. EXTRA TIP: Recognize and reward top performers

Recognize and reward who behaves great on the team, instead of punishing who behaves badly, have a positive attitude relating to performance, this will increase all the team morale. Everyone likes to be recognized among their pairs.

In every though times the team is the key factor to achieve success, so, be with the team, as a part of the team not as a team ruler.

As part of my “Productivity Series”, i started by helping you to get you productivity back on “Tips for getting your productivity back“, then switched to explain how could you optimise some of your tasks to get your work done on “Tips for getting things done“, now it’s time to explain where should you cut wasted time.

1. Turn off your blog readings at work

Remove the blog reading from your working hours, or at least, read the blogs that you are used too into the bottom of you daily pipeline, reading the blogs at the beginning of the day will make you unfocused.

2. Avoid usage of instant messaging

Use of instant messaging during work schedule will kill every productivity that you could have, if you won’t believe on it, just keep track of every IM interactions that you have during the week, the results will be obvious.

3. Restrict meetings

Meet only when you can’t handle the subject by email or phone, meeting are the foremost time expensive way in every company. If you really need to have a meeting, just schedule the meeting to the begin of the day, or near lunch time, do not break your day into half!

There are plenty more tasks where you are wasting your time, in order to identify them, just keep a daily time log.