Company Lunch

We have company lunch each Thursday. We get out all together and have lunch at some place. Sometimes we just order the lunch and have it at the company. This company lunch thing has been a strong team builder. Expenses of the company lunch are way lower than costs of turnover which this weekly event helps in reducing.

Employees Adapting

When interviewing for a vacancy, you try to pick someone who fits the profile of the job and of the company culture. However, you have to put in mind that even if the person you are interviewing does not have all the personality traits needed, he or she may still change and adapt after joining the company. This change can be affected through an induction program made for new recruits.

We once recruited a guy who had terrible communication skills and was a hard liner, yet we still recruited him because we were in need of the technical skills he had and we were unable to find such skills easily elsewhere. So we recruited him knowing his communication and other related problems. A few months later, this employee did not of course turn into a first grade communicator, but at least he changed a lot. He started to adapt slightly after a few weeks of working at the company. Gradually with time, his communication skills started to improve as well as his attitude. Again I say he has not turned into a skilled communicator, but at least his communication skills have advanced noticeably. Although we did not provide him with communication skills training, yet a weekly seminar program in which each employee has a turn to deliver a seminar helped enhance everyone's communication skills. A note is due here, this employee was aware of the communication skills issue he had after we informed him of it and accepted it. Not only that, but he did a continuous effort to improve himself in this regard.

Sure I am not asking you to recruit people with poor communication skills, yet my point is that people can change with time specially if you guide them and put them in the right environment to help them change. When conducting an interview, you should look not only for current skills and traits, but the candidate's potential to grow and change.

T-Shirts and Team Building

It's surprising how some simple things such as distributing t-shirts with company logo on employees can go a long way in building a team spirit. Today we asked our team to come pick t-shirts with the color, size and style of each one's choice. It was like a mini-party where each went through the different t-shirts checking for an appropriate size and a color that he liked. After that we all had a group photo, actually many photos together. It was very nice. Then several of us got their camera phones and kept taking still more photos of us together. When we went back to our desks, still wearing the shirts as none seemed to want to take them off even after we were finished with taking the photos, everyone appeared to get back to work with a better spirit. That's what I call team building. It's amazing how simple things as t-shirts with company logos given to employees can go a long way in inducing a team spirit.

Zedny

Zedny is one of the many entities that have sprouted quickly in Egypt over the last few years delivering human development training. Zedny is by large the most popular, and I believe, best of them all till this date.

Zedny started a few years ago by providing human development training courses such as time management, job hunting, CV writing and the like. Zedny offered low cost training sessions for a large number of youth. A training session may be attended by 200 or 400 attendees. It is more like a seminar. The large number of attendees makes up for the low cost of the 'course'. Zedny made good use of the Internet to spread its word among youth. It used mailing lists, groups and the power of forwarded emails to spread its word among the rapidly growing Internet-savvy youth population of Egypt.

Currently, Zedny is operating from the premises of Rabaa Mosqe, which is located in Nasr City, Cairo. They have an office their and they used the wide halls present next to the Rabaa Mosque. Anyone who wants to attend one of the courses pays a minimal fee, something like 20 LE or 40 LE to attend a course of perhaps 8 sessions (around 2 hours for each session). It varies from course to course but this gives you an idea of the price and time range of courses offered by Zedny. Courses focus on human development topics and topics that are of interest generally to the youth. One of the courses for instance was how to select your life partner.

If it is the first time you are attending a course at Zedny, when you go and pay for that course you fill out a form with some info about yourself (name, address, phone ... etc) and they make you an ID card which you go get it from them at a later day. If you later go and register for another course, you use this same ID card. The interesting thing about this ID card is that it has a barcode on its back, so whenever you enter a session that you have registered for, they just pass your ID card in front of a barcode reader, much like the one used in a supermarket by a cashier on a product, then you enter to attend the season. It's a cool way of keeping track of attendance in an easy way and verifying who is registered in the course, given the large number of attendees.

You can find information about courses currently available at Zedny and who delivers them at their web site Zedny (the web site is in Arabic). Those who deliver the sessions are volunteers, they do not receive any monetary compensation for their efforts. The money goes back to Rabaa for charity purposes. Al Ahram Weekly has an article about Zedny: Concept Promotion. Zedny also have a group online: Zedny Group.

The word Zedny stems from the Quranic verse "Wa koll Rabbi zedny 3elman" which means "Ask God to increase your knowledge."

Ethics 3

Dr Sherif's sessons are a model for how to deliver training, the kind of training which leaves an effect on the minds and hearts of people and moves them to positive action. It's the kind of training that not only leaves people hoping and wishing they should do so and so, but makes them go beyond that and actually move and do what they see has to be done.

Dr Sherif uses a lot of stories while he is talking, real life stories that he has either experienced first hand, learnt about through a friend or knew about through other sources. The session he delivers is composed mainly of questions he asks to the audience, stories he narrates and comments he provides on the answers the audience give or the storied he narrates. His comments comprise the smallest part of the session content, while stories and questions directed to the audience compose the bulk of the session.

Dr Sherif derives his conclusions from the voting or response of the audience and from the stories he narrates. This method of stories, audience feedback and delayed or audience-derived conclusions are what make his words convincing to the mind and soul and drive people not action. Another thing which helps produce this effect is that he does not talk in idealistic, theoretical and impractical ways, instead he talks real-live, he talks day to day events and actual scenarios.

Dr Sherif, Ethics

Dr Sherif mentioned 5 mental tests that help you find out if an action is unethical. I remember 3 of them now:

1. Put yourself in the other person's shoes. Do you find this action okay if you were in the shoes of the other person? If so, then the action is ethical, if not then it is unethical.
2. What does religion say about this action? If religion forbids it or says it is bad, then it is unethical.
3. Imagine this action is generalized and is now done by all people. What happens to the community and the world if this action is generalized? If the world falls into chaos due to this or is harmed, then the action is considered unethical.

Zedny, Training and Ethics

Yesterday I attended my first session at Zedny. The session was delivered by Dr Sherif founder of Resala, a rapidly-growing youth-fueled Egyptian charity organization. The subject of the session was Ethics. Dr Sherif used to deliver a Work Ethics course at Cairo University.

The content of the session, which was about ethics, was fine but what really interested me and was exceptional was the way Dr Sherif delivered the session. His method of delivery and the instructional tools he used were a model to learn from in delivering training.

The sessions was more like a workshop, despite the large number of attendees which was nearly 400. Dr Sherif kept relating many stories along the session, true stories that happened to him, his friends or his students. He gave a break during the session. He asked the audience a lot. He let the audience give their views. He listened. He then reached his conclusions after listening to what the audience said. He also took votes and used the whiteboard to jot down what the audience said or condense it.

Daily Scrum

Today as we were just about to start our Daily Scrum meeting, we discovered that one of the team members has switched to another team! After getting over our initial astonishment, we reassigned him to attend the daily scrum of the other team he has now joined. If it was not for the daily scrum, this team member would have been working with the other teams for several days without the rest of us even knowing about it! That's a demo of how Scrum practices lead to high visibility.

Retention of Software Developers

• Working on developing interesting and challenging software solutions.
• Using cutting edge technology, tools and methodologies to develop such software solutions.
• Continually learning new things and improving ones technical abilities (knowledge and skills).
• Getting a fair salary within the lines of the competition of the local market.
• Seeing a career advancement path, expecting promotions and reward for performance.
• Getting recognition, feeling valued by the company and having an important role in the project.
• Having a say in the design and direction of the project. Exercising ones creativity and being heard.

Egyptian Labor Law

Here is a sum up of the 'new' Egyptian Labor Law by Business Today Egypt: Egyptian Labor Law.

Bluetooth

My cousin told me about bluetooth a couple of years ago and he was so excited about it telling me how the 'new' mobiles can do all sorts of interesting things with it. A popular example of bluetooth use was pinning a bluetooth enabled pin on your shirt upon entering an exhibition and as you pass by every booth, those in the booth can automatically read information stored in this pin on your shirt using their bluetooth enabled equipment. Looked and sounded exciting at that time.

Although I've not seen myself this example in practice, the bluetooth pin used at an exhibition, yet I found bluetooth to be a very interesting technology when used on mobile phones. After taking several photos with my Nokia 6630 I then went near my computer and transferred all photos and videos from the phone to my computer without connecting any wires. It's cool.

Starting our First Sprint Backlog

Today we created and started writing in our first Sprint Backlog. After two Daily Scrum meetings, we decided we can make use of a Sprint Backlog to get used to writing in it and get a better feel of the project progress.

We used a single spreadsheet in an Excel file for the Sprint Backlog. We share this single file through SharePoint so we can all have read and write access to it without conflicting with one another (by using check in and check out).

After today's Scrum meeting, I passed by the team members one by one each at his workstation (there were 9 of them) and showed him how to use the Sprint Backlog, how it fits in the whole process and what each of its elements means as well as its significance to the whole process of our project.

I believe again Scrum has proven to be good and showed promising signs. I believe now by starting to use two of Scrum's elements, Daily Scrum meetings and a Sprint Backlog, we are starting to reap some of the benefits already. I believe Scrum could be our way to go in the next phase of the project. I believe we can start implementing it fully by then. The good thing is that by then we would have a stronger grasp of it having used it, if only partially, at the last part of our current phase of the project.

Our First Daily Scrum Meeting

Today we had our first Daily Scrum meeting. We all stood up in a circle (similar to the standup meeting in extreme programming). We were 10 all together: 9 developers and the 10th was myself, acting as the ScrumMaster in this case.

Each developer mentioned what he has done since the last Scrum meeting, what he will be doing till the next Scrum meeting and any obstacles that stand in his way. Although the team were not yet that comfortable with the Scrum meeting and did not talk in the best way, yet they started to get the feel of it. As the ScrumMaster I guided them through the process by first reminding them of what the Daily Scrum meeting is all about and how it is done. I had already given them a brief training session about scrum in the previous day. During our first Daily Scrum meeting, I tried to keep them on track by guiding them to mention the 3 things required (what they did, what they will do, obstacles facing them) and keeping them from talking about things that are not to be talked about during the Daily Scrum such as how to solve specific problems they faced or discussing alternative paths for some elements of the project.

Although it was our first Daily Scrum and we did not actually do it in the best way, yet I feel we did benefit from it. I think now team members will be more motivated to do useful work each day because they will be mentioning what they have done in front of the rest of the whole team. It also keeps everyone informed of how the project is progressing and how its different elements are going forward. Furthermore, two pairs of developers found out they need to meet after the today's Scrum meeting in order to further discuss specific things in their project to resolve problems that showed up during the Scrum meeting.

I believe the Daily Scrum meeting is a very good idea. Although we have not yet implemented Scrum in its entirety and only started by implementing this small part of it, the Daily Scrum meetings, yet it is already showing promising effects. Perhaps gradually we can introduce the whole of the Scrum process to our team and start using it fully by our next iteration of the project. Bottom line: Scrum looks promising and we will continue to integrate more of it in our work till we fully implement it. We feel that this will result in better productivity and better project management of our software development efforts.

Outlook Nightmares

Been using Gmail for quite a while now. My hotmail and yahoo accounts I just keep in the background and try to dry out by not using as much as I can. I use Gmail for all my email communication and all my serious needs. I've come to depend on it now totally and got used to its cool way of organizing information (aka: conversations, labels and easy search).

At work now I have to use Outlook to check and send email from my work email account. It is utterly a nightmare! No conversations in Outlook! That's extremely terrible. When using Gmail I can easily follow up on back and forth emails between me and another person. I do this so easily. On Outlook however, I keep digging my way trying to find the scattered emails that went back and forth between me and another person. That's utterly terrible. I really need to have Gmail-style conversations in Outlook so I can find it palpable.

Scrum

In my search for a software development methodology to help us out of fighting with deadlines and long working hours, I've stumbled upon Scrum after being interested in XP and trying to figure out what MSF is all about. Scrum turned to be interesting specially after it has been refocused more towards project management of software projects repositioning itself as a complement to eXtreme Programming (XP) rather than a competitor. While XP focuses on the software development itself and its details, Scrum focuses more on higher level activities such as project management.

I'm trying now to understand more how Scrum works and then I can try borrowing some of its elements and implementing them gradually to enhance our project management practices. Perhaps we can start benefiting of XP as well later on and integrate both Scrum and XP into a system tailored for us that works with us and improves productivity.

CVs to Interviews Transition

If a CV looks promising:

1. Call the candidate on his mobile. Arrange a time and date for an interview.
2. Add his name and mobile number in an Excel file.
3. Enter the time and date of the interview in the Excel file.
4. Make an appointment in your Outlook Calendar.
5. Send the candidate an email with time and date of the interview and the address of the company.
6. Move the email (containing the attached CV) to the Promising folder.

Screening Software Developer CVs in Egypt

In order to help me create a mental image of an applicant upon scanning his or her CV, and to help me quickly classify the CV in my mind as a preliminary step for further deeper examination, I look at the following pieces of information in the order presented below:

• Name, gender
• Location of residence.
• College and university.
• Graduation project, what it is about and technologies used in it.
• Previous employers, role and achievements there.
• Date of birth.

This enables me to create a mental picture of the person behind the CV. After that, I scan for specific technologies needed using the Find command. Examples of specific technologies I scan or are: web services, XML, AJAX, JSP, struts, Linux, JavaScript, CSS, UML … etc.

This quick way of scanning the CV helps me quickly weed out unsuitable applicants and sort out the promising ones. After that one can start having a deeper look to see who will be asked for an interview.

Visual Studio Team System 2005

VSTS 2005 has some cool features supporting MSF (Microsoft Solutions Framework).

Benefits of using MSF features in VSTS:

• Reduce time wasted by developers asking, figuring out or arguing about how a feature should work. By using and sharing scenarios such wasted time would be eliminated.
• Tasks can be divided and followed up easily by project manager. This enables tracking of progress and also helps measure productivity of each developer.

Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF)

I've started wandering around MSF (Microsoft Solutions Framework) in hope of grasping the essence of it. I've went through MSF version 3 and MSF version 4. I've been to VSTS (Visual Studio Team System). I've gone through MSF for Agile and MSF for CMMI. I've read about MSF Formal. I've been reading in the guidelines, in Microsoft's view about UML and all that stuff. Bottom line: I've immerged from a lot of confusion to still more confusion but then at the end things started to clear up a bit for me yet still are somewhat vague.

Microsoft's MSF though seems to be interesting. I've started today writing a Vision Statement and a file about a Persona. I plan to start writing next about scenarios then quality of service after that.

Windows SharePoint Services

I've often heard about Microsoft's SharePoint but did not really think high of it. I just recognized it as an over-hyped new thing by Microsoft but not really something useful. Yesterday, this view of mine changed.

I remember once working at a huge place where communication was extremely bad. We had and internal phone system, internal email, actual physical mail boxes as well as office boys that can pass paper messages around. All those different media of communication we had in our hands but they were used in very inefficient way. I really hoped for an intranet with a web portal that could make communication between the large number of employees easier and streamlined. Yesterday, I discovered that SharePoint can be the answer for my long sought dream.

We have not yet fully used SharePoint or even made use of some of its features, but I've started to realize its potential. After playing around with SharePoint trying to figure out and use its features, I realized I need to learn more about it to be able to discover its features and potential. I started reading in a book about SharePoint and the first few lessons were interesting and of benefit. I'm more aware now of what SharePoint is capable of doing.