Category Archives: Uncategorized

Planning Events with Covid-19

I’m going to go a bit ‘off-topic’ from my typical Agile, Leadership, Lean, Software, etc. topics and try and provide some information that may help people in these communities. With so many states starting to open up businesses and such, you may be wondering how you can decide when you can plan your conference or meet-up to start meeting in-person again.

So we’re going to focus on a formula that George Mason economics professor Alex Tabarrok wrote. You can find the details behind this at his post COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planner. This assessment planner focuses on the US population in its risk assessment. One of my primary concerns is to help people that plan regional events and meet-ups.

Stand by, we’re going to be doing some math….

In that article, there is a formula:

1-1(1 – c/p)^g

from COVID-19 Event Risk Planner by Professor Alex Tabarrok

Where c = the number of people carrying the disease, p = the population, and g = the group size planned for the event.

He has a nifty graph also that shows this for the US. (Though we now have gone off the scale on the left hand side, so it would be worth extending it.) Note that this is a logarithmic graph, so I’d recommend recreating it on logarithmic graph paper.

When planning a regional event like a meet-up though a calculation at the US level (or any other country) is probably inappropriate. Here is how you can extend that to a regional view…

I am going to do some calculations based on two meet-up groups here in Virginia as a start. First is the Games for Agility, Learning, and Engagement (GALE) meet-up we hold at Excella. It is based in Arlington, VA and draws people from a few surrounding counties and cities (DC, Alexandria, and Fairfax County mostly). [Note: I’ll show what happens if I add in Montgomery County in a moment.]

So first I need to know the populations. Some googling gives me the following:

City or CountyPopulation
Arlington237,000
Alexandria144,000
DC702,000
Fairfax1,010,000

These numbers were from 2019 projections taken through google search results and rounded up to the nearest 1000. These should be good enough… So the total population about is 2.093 million. We’ll set that aside for now…

Next we need to figure out the number of carriers. For this I am going to turn to the wonderful graphics from the Data Wrapper page on 17 (or so) responsible live visualizations about the coronavirus, for you to use and in particular the map portrayal titled: Number of confirmed COVID–19 cases in US counties. (You will need to scroll down about 2/3 the page – the page has lots of graphics on it, so expect it to load a little slow.) I’ll zoom in a bit and scroll over to Virginia.) This data gets pulled daily from a set of data at Johns Hopkins University.

We’ll pull the ratio that reflects the ratio of the population that is infected. I could pull just the number known I suppose, but it states that number has or had, which means it includes deaths (people no longer around) and recovered (people who no longer have the disease). I get this by hovering over the appropriate dot. So here is an example:

Let’s add this information to our table:

CountyPopulationRatioCalculated
Carriers
Arlington237,0001:1801317
Alexandria144,0001:150960
DC702,0001:1205850
Fairfax1,010,0001:2204591

This makes the total number of carriers we’ll use as 12,718.

We need one more number before we can run the numbers through the formula. The size of the group. So using GALE first as our example. Our largest in-person meet-up size was 16 (we’re a small niche interest….). This goes in for the g in the formula, which you will observe is a factorial. As Alex writes in his Risk Assessment Planning post, this is the biggest factor in determining risk as it is bringing people from the population that has been exposed together.

Running the numbers…

1-1(1-12718/2093000)^16=.092… or about 9%

So if I ran GALE today, there is an almost 1 in 10 chance someone in the crowd would be bringing the disease (unknowingly) into the meet-up group. Personally, I’d want this to be below 1 in 500 (0.2%) before I’d feel comfortable (that’s a meet-up group of 3 in case you are wondering).

Let’s now look at how the DC-Scrum User’s Group would look. They regularly have 50 people showing…

1-1(1-12718/2093000)^50=.262… or about 26%

This means they have better than a 1 in 4 chance. Yikes! But wait, they regularly pull people in from Montgomery county, MD also. Mongomery county’s population is 1,051,000 with an infection rate currently of 1:170. This yields an additional 6182 carriers. So for the same size group the formula looks like…

1-1(1-18900/3144000)^50=.260… or still about 26%

Not much change. But if 60 people decided to come I’m now at about 30% chance of someone being a carrier.

If you are deciding to restart your in-person meet-up, the guidance I would advise on this is to cap the maximum number of attendees AND be transparent on the percent chance someone would be a carrier. (If you could set-up the meet-up such that it had social distance as a part of it and perhaps specified masks you might be able to allow a slightly higher risk than what the numbers may indicate as the formula isn’t factoring those things in.

If I were planning a multi-state regional event, I would use the population and ratios of the states attendees would be coming from… plus the ratios of the counties or cities of where speakers were coming from… if different from the attendees. So for example, Agile & Beyond frequently gets attendees from not only Michigan, but also Ohio, Pennsylvania, Ontario, Indiana, and Illinois. I’ve spoken at Agile & Beyond (so factor in Fairfax County, VA if I am selected); so has George Dinwiddie, so factor in his county as well.

I’d consider at this point calculating a straight average of the infection ratio and throw out any that were outside a significant factor different. Example, all my ratios are between 1/120 and 1/330, but two speakers come from places where ratios are 1/2730 and 1/1850; I would throw these low ratios out. I would not throw out an outlier at a higher ratio. This averaging with throwing these out would actually bias it to be conservative and thus safer for everyone.

For international events, you can use the countries from where people are attending.

How can we project when we can return to in-person events? The COVID-19 tracker at Virginia Department of Health provides a hint. If you look at the Number of cases by event date graph it is showing a downward trend, but we need this graph with the total number of infections in the population, not by event (which is a daily number). Then one can use the rolling average on the rate of change over say 3-7 days to project how the # of carriers will change. Perhaps you could do this with the number of daily events; I just don’t feel comfortable with that projection as the disease persists and daily events are more sensitive to social distancing, business closures, and other lockdown policies.

Another place to keep your eyes on is the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME.org), they are the organization producing the models that forecast deaths, hospital usage, etc. and these take into account changes in patterns of mobility and social distancing. Hopefully we’ll start seeing some additional projections of rates of changes in infection rates actually being produced.

I hope this is helpful for people that are trying to figure out when and how to plan in-person events again.

A Principle for When Not to Estimate

Based on a prior post, I was ‘asked’ to extract this into a generalized principle. (I invite you to read that in full, so you understand the context.)

Of course, one has to open your mind that the value of estimating has to be questioned in this circumstance and what you are trying to accomplish with estimates and how they may or may not contribute to your work. And I would be remiss not to mention 3 things:

  1. My push on the #noestimates tag is not one of #neverestimate; on the contrary, I am interested in circumstances where estimation may need to improve OR it may need to be ditched to increase value production. I would never advocate to never estimate under all circumstances, yet at times estimation may be wasteful and should be eliminated. Depending on risk understanding, one may absolutely need to estimate. The more potential (in terms of probability and impact) for loss of life or loss of money, the more need to estimate. I do have a keen interest in when estimation may not be needed though beyond just dropping story points.
  2. If you decide to apply this principle, also determine the circumstances and how you would detect that perhaps this principle doesn’t apply in your context. Ask yourself, how does this apply? What will tell me whether I applied it incorrectly, and lastly what possible paths should I take to rectify the situation?
  3. Lastly, this whole set of arguments or debate is very binary. (I’ve only ever seen actual dialog on the topic at Agile Dialogs.) #nobinary is something I advocate on a variety of subjects and you can learn more about how to drop binary thinking and contribute to interventions at Agile Brambles (an evolving site). If your mindset is one where you only see your point of view, then you may find thinking through the paths on the site fruitful.

OK, onto the principle….

When the estimate is not going to be used, regardless of how quickly you can produce it, don’t create one.

Looking back at my context briefly, the old way was to estimate all work that came in and then regardless of the answer, we did the work.  This delayed the start of the work and actually digging into really understanding it by doing it. It doesn’t matter whether you are using a super sophisticated model or a simple guess. In my case it at a minimum delayed work by a week and in some cases more. From a any form of value production standpoint (like weighted shorted job first), the estimation part of the process was hurting the organization. I’m certain many of us can think of times when an estimate wasn’t used and really had no intention of being used.

Be sure though that it truly will not be used. This is important. If this is the case, then it has some degree of importance and then the level of accuracy and precision should be quickly assessed and the estimate done at that level. This brings us to a corollary:

Only estimate at the level of accuracy and precision required (or that has no incremental cost above what is required).

Often estimation takes time and effort. When estimation is needed to understand risk, then only do it at the level required OR if you can do it more accurately/precisely with no additional effort, then go ahead and do it the higher level. This also goes into thinking about creating sophisticated models or simulations that may be used. Bring these in when the situation warrants it, a good prioritized backlog of work, projects, etc. will reveal whether there may be a future for using one.

You may notice that both of these boil down to –

Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.

Hmmmm… I’ve seen that before.

One last principle:

Question whether this principle (or its corollary) continues to apply.

You may have determined you needed an estimate or perhaps you determined that it wasn’t needed; be sure this still remains true on a periodic basis.

I’ll close, ‘anecdotal’ circumstances are evidence. If you find that you don’t need to estimate under some circumstance, then that is a set of evidence showing a different reality. It’s very similar to observations made by Galileo and Copernicus that indicated that a geocentric view was incorrect and a heliocentric view was more accurate. Or perhaps an even better metaphor would be when Einstein was able to explain observations being made through relativity theory. It didn’t negate how classical mechanics worked under most circumstances, but there were circumstances (context) when mechanics needed to be replaced. If we never examined observations (anectdotes), then everything would remain status quo.

Facilitative Leadership Overview

IMG_1414

In my last post I brought up the concept of a facilitative leader; so what do facilitative leaders do and how do the effectively lead?

What facilitative leaders do

I won’t go into exhaustive details here as this itself could be several posts, however it is important to have some idea what makes a facilitative leader distinct and that is the behaviors they exhibit. We’ll discuss this as if the behaviors are in the upper right of the Leadership Quadrant.

So in this space, a facilitative leader exhibits a desire to serve others, much like a servant leader as described by Robert Greenleaf. They also are participatory in nature, thus rather than say define a plan for a group to do work towards a goal, she or he will help the people create the plan so that is theirs. Thus a facilitative leader is one who helps the group collectively solicit and select creative ideas for the work and committing to complete it.

They also help individuals cope with their ever-changing roles and responsibilities as the team organizes and executes the work. They act as outside observers and offer improvements to the group and overall organization at large. They help the group gain clarity in the goal. They lead through influence.

How facilitative leaders effectively lead

As we explored in the last post, in order to be an effective leader, particularly when using influence as your primary mechanism, one must maintain good will with those you are leading.

Will_Equation

When your actions are opposite of what you say you will do, they work against each other and your will approaches zero. Since influence is based on will, this reduces your leadership effectiveness.

Here’s a few examples, I say I have an open door policy and will listen and attend to people’s needs. If people bring these to me and I never listen, perhaps always finding ways to dismiss their needs, or I never take action when I say I will, I am undermining my will and thus my ability to influence behaviors, my primary mechanism to lead.

If on the other hand, I state I will observe where people appear to have roadblocks and help them through them, followed by attending stand-ups hearing of impediments outside a team’s control and visibly taking action on them, I gain will to get things done.

Side note: for most of this article, I called people a group, that was to emphasize two aspects – 1) this can be done in a non-team environment, particularly if you are a leader that has authority. And 2) you actually don’t need to have authority to influence folks through will; this generally not true where you are directive in nature, there you needed to have been granted authority in some manner.

Organizer’s Take Note: a Plea for Improving Unconferences

This is a follow-up post from my previous post “What is the Matter with Unconferences“; if you haven’t read it, please drop by and do so – we’ll wait…

…dum-de-do-barumpadum…

Back? great!

As one other clarification, here is a Wikipedia extract that outlines what a BarCamp is, which is what most of these I have been to is based on…

They [BarCamps] are open, participatory workshop-events, the content of which is provided by participants.

After seeing issues at both UXCamp and ProductCamp, I’d like to offer some suggestions.  What saddens me in particular is that so many sessions at this past ProductCamp were presentations.  While I like that at least the type was known to me beforehand, even some pitched as workshops weren’t hands-on.  And the presentation ones seem to leave little time for true discussion.

To provide some details on the disturbing trends and to offer some unsolicitied advice on changes to make:

  • People getting scheduled before the conference. I think it is OK to find out people’s passion beforehand, but let’s not schedule sessions before the unconference; unconferences are more than just crowd-sourcing topics
  • Using voting as a method for choosing what topics are in or out. People will follow their passions; I’ve been at sessions where I was the ONLY one that showed up as the convener; that’s OK.  I either went to another session or captured my thoughts quietly; I’ve also had others come join me after about 10 minutes from the start as they tasted a few competing interests and found the conversation we created more interesting.
  • Don’t provide A/V equipment for sessions. No mikes, no video. To have participatory sessions, the sessions should self-constrain themselves to being small where microphones are unnecessary. Unlike big formal conferences, we’re not interested in trying to determine speaker or topic popularity, people self-determine that… Several workshop sessions at ProductCamp were set-up auditorium style and the participation was limited to getting small amounts of input from the audience. The default format should be open discussion; workshops should be essentially the second option.
  • Don’t have any session format connote different levels of expertise; no panels of experts or ask the expert. Unconferences are awesome because they promote peer-based discussions. That young guy out of college may have more innovation in them than the greybeard of 30 years in the industry. You are not going to unlock that by placing one over another via a self-proclaimed or given title. Let that expertise emerge from the group and people will learn what they want to use or not. If a panel of people want to convene one, that’s fine, but don’t let people call themselves experts; it’s still a conversation.
  • Consider what a Keynote does; it constrains thinking and lowers energy. If you are going to have a ‘keynote’, consider building the schedule (in Open Space, we would call it a marketplace) before the keynote.  This then captures the tone of attendees without influence.  If it isn’t aligned with the keynote, so be it; now you know what is on people’s minds.  As soon as the keynote happens, people begin constraining what must be important is centered around it AND having someone talk at me for 45 minutes to an hour lowers energy levels for proposing sessions. Also, let everyone have a chance to propose a topic before letting others offer a second one.

Select a style and focus on it beforehand: Camps tend to be more hands-on workshops.  Open Space and World Cafe formats more discussion-oriented.  Also, can I ask that space be considered a bit better?  While I thought the digs at both the Goethe Institute (UXCamp) and LivingSocial (last ProductCamp) were cool spaces, they were not conducive to moving around or running an effective unconference given the number of people; perhaps decrease the number of attendees.

I’m going to be watching what these two camps in particular do next year; I may set-up a competing model that truly emphasizes peer conversations if this is the trend for these two.

PS – This is NOT considered a knock on the organizers – who did a wonderful job at the format that they decided to do, but either they do not fully understand (or want to execute on) what an unconference (Camp) is, OR they are being seduced by ever greater number of attendees/sponsors they can get in exchange for sacrifices on the format.  I’d invite them to consider their own personal motivations and perhaps incorporate them explicitly into their message.

Improv Games for Innovation – #InfoCamp Session

This was originally posted 2 Oct 2011.

At InfoCampSC, I decided to host a session on using Improv Games for Innovation to share some of what I learned from Mike Sutton at Agile Coach Camp.  It was a hit!

We played 3 games; I used the machine as a warm-up.  With 12 people, we had a nice machine running.  This machine was dubbed “The Library Stamper”.

We then moved into a game where I had 4 folks describing what they disliked or problems using MS-Excel.  Teams of two folks would cherry pick these problems and run and create a potential solution for the problem and then create a further idea off that one and so on until they had 4 ideas.  Then they were to go cherry pick another problem.  We really got some creative answers.  By using improv, it focuses you on just creating ideas and not judging them.

We next used teams of two taking turns to create a story line.  They had 30 seconds with their first round and then 15 seconds the second round.  The story line was quite creative (I feel sorry for Google) and fun.

(The photo of this seems to have gotten lost; if I can find it, I’ll re-add it…)

I summarized how the concept of Yes And… is the way to create new ideas building on each other.

We closed with creating a picture of how folks thought the session went. Each person got to add one line.  Here is the result…

maori_dragon-improvgame_result

We concluded it was a dragon (perhaps with a Maori bent)…

What is a Matter w/Unconferences

I’m sitting at an unconference and really feel compelled to write a note about what is wrong about MOST unconferences I attend…. Here is a definition so we can focus attention on what’s wrong:

An unconference is a conference organized, structured and led by the people attending it. Instead of passive listening, all attendees and organizers are encouraged to become participants, with discussion leaders providing moderation and structure for attendees.

Definition from http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/unconference

The disappointing thing I am finding is almost all of these have too many presenters or panels discussing ‘at me’. There is no true peer-to-peer discussion and/or hands on learning. And more and more of these are having their sessions being planned in advance.

One session at the one where I am currently had the title stated such that an audience was supposed to make decisions on what would be discussed yet the speaker had slides! How in the heck could this person know what was going to be proposed? Rather it was a case of twisting the proposals into what they desired to present.

I want folks planning these to be more conscious of this; please do not call your conference an unconference if you are having people talk at me.

Of course not all unconferences are falling into this trap, but most of those that are not are seeming to be open space events; I love open space, but a good unconference doesn’t have to be this format.

If anyone has a way of finding out beforehand where unconferences actually are falling more into a typical conference format, let me know…

Agile Coach Camp: Exhergizing

So it’s now roughly 24 hours since the circle was closed and after a good night’s sleep, I am physically recharged.  I was mentally recharged during the hole time…

Our Canadian friend Bryan Beecham (@billygarnet) tweeted out how he was simultaneously inspired, refueled and energized and Mike Bowler (@mike_bowler) tweeted out that he was exhausted.  I feel this way after just about every Agile Coach Camp, so I’ve coined a Boosism (think strategery but only better): Exhergized – the state of being simultaneously exhausted and reenergized at the same time – usually the exhaustion is physical and the reenergized is cognitive in nature, but I suppose they could be reversed.

I’ll be posting more about the Camp in the upcoming days, but thought I would get that tidbit out there…

Helping Managers Become Personally Agile

This post originally appeared on 5 October 2011. I thought it fitting to repost this as I go into the next Agile Coach Camp.

I held a session at Agile Coach Camp for folks to discuss how to get management to become agile on a personal level as a means to help them understand at least some of the aspects of being Agile as a team.  This was based on my experience of using Personal Kanban and the Pomodoro technique. ( See http://agilescout.com/how-to-be-agile-now-with-tomatoes/ )

I was interested in not only spreading this ‘gospel’ so that those coaches that worked with management could begin utilizing these techniques ‘with management coaching’, but also in finding other techniques I coudl use.  The following is a summary of my session:

We explored some things to consider:

  • mid-level management may be more open to adopting various techniques than senior management
  • start with helping managers understand what the last responsible moment is
  • encourage face-to-face communication overe email and other written forms
  • set-up regular standing management meetings (preferably as stand-ups)

The first big highlight for me was using a timebox for the meeting and using a Meeting Kanban for managing the agenda items discussion.  Have every manager place items in the ‘to be discussed column as they come in’; late? You don’t get to add to the agenda. As the items are discussed, they go into the ‘being discussed’ column and then finally to the ‘discussed’ column. (This column has a WIP limit of 1.)  A separate action items Kanban is where action items go. Undiscussed items roll to the next meeting to go in the the ‘to be discussed’ column again.  This gets updated at the next meeting. I’ve done this now twice with my boss and once at our weekly Branch meeting.  It seemed to move us along more efficiently.  Thanks to@topsurf for this suggestion.

We brainstormed a little about how to ask the questions around identifying the last responsible moment.  Do we have to make that decision now?  Do we know enough to responisbly make that decision now? What if wait on making that decision?

Another item we discussed was playing the Elimination of Waste game to help create the understanding of a win-win.  The idea is time saved on wasteful activities is usually demoralizing to team members and costs the organization money.

Back to meetings…

Use a speaking token? Use it for granting someone the opportunity to speak on a subject, but not a something to force someone to speak (at least most of the time).  The idea is that everyone has an opinion, but not the same one; help those opinions be heard.

Also encourage the use of idea cards, question cards, topic cards at meetings as ways to get information and opinions out in the open.  Dot voting encourages group participation.  Perhaps do this on-line?  That way no one can see how the boss votes ( Seehttp://www.dotpoll.info )

We discussed around some question on what Agile may need in order to succeed and be sustained in the organization. The real reason why we care that management picks this up…

We concluded that without both top down support and grass roots motivation, Agile will not succeed in the organization.

We concluded the session with some othe quick hit items that we discussed around helping Agile succeed:

  • adopt the terms of the organization and not force those of Agile (or a particular approach)
  • perhaps try out some of the Agile strategy mapping Dave Sharrock discussed in a prior session

Welcome…

This is my new blog, replacing my older one, BoosianSpace, which will remain on Tumblr for a short while.  I’ll be replicating some content from that one over time, updating my articles as I do.

On this blog, I’ll explore various Product/Portfolio Management, Agility, UX, and Leadership concepts and how to implement them.

So why Nimblicious? Well I want to Make Agility Taste Great!