David Alfaro: Scrum Costa Rica

     For traditional Human Resources department (well, the kind that maybe is still needed in textile manufacturer factories in the third world) the most outstanding sign of its success can be said in terms of: being kind, payroll done on time and deliver required Wage Statements with punctuality.

However, for a Technology Company, such achievements are not enough. How different is a Software company from a textile manufacturer factory?

1. Employees are Knowledge Workers:

a. Replacing a position is very difficult. It’s not just a prescriptive position; it’s also a lot of knowledge and expertise that is lost when someone leaves the company. So Talent Management (attraction and retention) becomes the number one concern for HR.

b. Psychology of Knowledge Workers is peculiar, complex. Programmers can be Systematic, Pragmatic and/or Opportunistic Programmers. We can be more demanding in the reason and effectiveness of managerial orders or “team building” requests: We can sense easily when HR is doing activities just for the sake of doing them, or just because HR wants to show off its power. HR needs to understand Geek culture.

c. Good Software Companies move at Internet Speed; the best move faster. That kind of movement requires embracing a lot of change and innovation. That means tolerance to continuous questioning of hierarchical structures and building self managed teams. Open discussion and constructive conflict, problem understanding and coaching. Exploring new ways of doing things and anticipating risks and opportunities on a daily basis. And very importantly, HR needs to understand and appreciate the needs and aspirations of sophisticated talent. The company is not supposed to dealing with a HR that has been left behind of technology and opportunities. HR is meant to be an adviser.

d. Employees are smarter. Like saying that my readers are smarter than me (why? Visit this wonderful article), HR must have healthy perspective of her ego and thrive for collaboration and dialogue.

2. Recruiting is a challenge: Any high performance company requires the right set of skills, among others things. Not only highly talented people but also highly agile people, able to work in an agile company, able to define and follow a reached approach and willing to inspect regularly such collaborative approach. In many cases a strict description of a job position is not useful, the kind of company I’m talking about have people able to contribute beyond the prescribed position. They are resilient. Where can HR find that kind of people? What would you do if you have a product and want to reach people that fit your persona description? GO WHERE THEY ARE! Where are the talented people? Where are people that keep up with technology? Web 2.0 is helping a lot. Don’t come whining saying you are not from the Technology world and those techie fads like blogging, LinkedIn and Facebook are unbeknownst to you. That’s the way talking today, whether you like it or not. Need to have any good idea of a candidate for a position? Take a look at her profile in LinkedIn, it is updated? Is she well recommended? Has a very remarkable blog? What can you see through all that? A LOT! Sure you have to do it wisely and good timed.

3. Information sharing is vital, of course, we deal with knowledge. HR needs to foster transparency of fluid communication between teams, between teams and managers/executive board. Sharing knowledge? Blogging has smooth conversations in many ways, especially inside the company. Where can you keep all you employees’ profiles updated? Again LinkedIn is by most the proven answer. More and more I hear about companies asking their employees to update their profile in Linkedin. Intranets must reflect such willing to communicate. Facebook can be an interesting idea, but whatever the choice is, invest to have a good intranet that ease the talking through the company.

4. Compensation packages must be based on performance, ROI, and must be transparent, understood by anyone. Remember, money is not the most important motivator. I highly recommend this article of Mary Poppendieck about it.

5. HR is strategic. HR is not just coordinating parties. HR is not meant to be in charge of merely operative aspects of managing people. It could be at the highest organizational level reporting to the CEO or even the Chairman. HR is an adviser. That means a complete awareness and constant contribution of company’s strategy. That means a complete understanding of technology market and company’s product portfolio and current strategic and future needs as the company evolves.

The speed of our technology world can be daunting; the HR Manager must help the company to embrace change, must help to be agile.

Recommended articles:

• Are You Ready for an Agile Future? by Susan M. Heathfield
• The New “DNA” of HR by John Sullivan

Do you know any HR Manager (who fits this description) willing to work in Costa Rica? Let me know.

I just finished the round #2 of Usability Tests of Aggiorno. It was amazing! I found out many important issues regarding how the user expects Aggiorno to behave given the Interaction Design it presents. And because I assume you are here to receive value I will tell you the generalities of doing a usability test and the general lessons.

I can’t show you specific details about the detected issues neither clips because of privacy matters outside of my control. However, in a near future post I can talk a bit about the design principles you always need to remember when designing User Interface.

The Process

The Usablity Test was conducted in a web development company called Cis-Solutions. From that company, five users were picked for this test. The selection process was based on a questionnaire where we were sure each user fits our target persona. The main aspects in this sample are:

1. College’s Bachelor Degree.

2. 20 to 30 years old.

3. 1 to 3 years working in ASP and/or ASP.NET

4. Uses Visual Studio Environment usually.

5. Develops sites of 16 to 50 pages

6. Maintains sites of +50 pages

Due technical problems during test executions, I wasn’t able to gather data to do a System Usability Scale (SUS). Instead of SUS, I resorted to ask the users to score (from a scale from 1 to 7) the satisfaction level using Aggiorno. Additionally, I asked them to score how useful Aggiorno is.

After a short but complete explanation of what Aggiorno is, does and how it is invoked, each user was asked to do some tasks with Aggiorno in a Web site already opened in Visual Studio 2005. Those tasks were carefully selected in order for us to see user’s behavior in our intended User Interface.

Conducting a Usability Test

Every time I conduct a usability test, I learn a lot and become more aware of more details. “User A is tapping his feet” “User B is humming” “User C is yawning” That’s behavior!! That together with “Think aloud” exercise allow me to collect the user is feeling (i.e. usability). I always ask the users: “Please pretend I am hot here (neither is any observer) so can swear freely in the case you want to.” I collected a big amount of notes in my chronological log. This is an art!

Finding patterns in raw data and reporting

Reviewing collected data is like drinking water from a hydrant. My preferred method for organizing that data into themes is Affinity Diagrams where each sticky note has a color correspondent to a user: User A has sticky notes in green and User B in yellow and so on. So I and observers (it would be great if any) organize in themes all the sticky notes. If a theme has all the colors available it means that that is a common issue, worthy to be noted.

Because the sticky notes are OBSERVATIONS, that is, OBJECTIVE NOTES, you have to describe consistently the behavior (crystallize the pattern) and make it an issue for the report.

What to do with that?

Soon I’ll let you know how to manage the Debriefing meeting.

There are so many details I am skipping in doing this post, so feel free of contacting me.

Why is User Studies so important for me? Because it means getting closer to user, being iterative, being open to the issues you are going to find and the potential changes they imply, learning to watch as an alternative to listen, inspecting over the collected data, adjust your course because of the lessons your learn from the tests. Do you follow me? For me THAT’S BEING AGILE!