The ratio of open agile development jobs to qualified candidates is 4.59:1, showing a market skills gap. While specific technical skills — such the ability to work with specific tools — are important, employers are more interested in knowing that the candidate has experience working on agile development teams and knowledge of that process more than of the tools themselves, said Joel Capperella, VP of marketing for Yoh, which is based in Philadelphia but has offices across the US.

One Yoh client is a big bank with 250 agile developers across 10 to 15 Scrum teams. (Scrum is a real-time process used by many agile developers.) Most mature agile shops like this one are willing to train newcomers on the technology needed but want to be assured that the newbie has actually worked in this fast-paced, team-focused process before, Capperella said.

A bad hire can have a ripple effect and hurt the company’s credibility in the tight-knit agile community, according to Yoh. So employers need to properly vet the candidate and need to make it clear just how mature their own agile process is at the outset.

Top companies in the market for agile developers include Microsoft, VMware, IBM, Northrop Grumman, UnitedHealthcare, and SAIC.

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The result for Getty was a 20 percent increase in the efficiency of its software development throughput. At Rally, they gained increased insight into what tools their customers need to manage portfolios of information technology projects.

Nina Schoen, Getty’s senior director, planning and program management, describes their introduction to Rally’s preview of its upcoming agile portfolio management offering, Rally Portfolio Manager, as an “amazing coincidence.” Explains Schoen, “We were about to start moving to this new portfolio management workflow, and a team member knew that Rally was interested in a portfolio management offering … the feedback loop was instant. I’d never participated with a software partner like that. Catherine Connor [product manager at Rally] has amazing listening skills. She was really able to fit into our shoes.”

Getty had started the transition to lean/agile software development three years before meeting Rally. Getty was excited about the benefits of the new development approach, but Schoen notes that they felt their business stakeholders were distrustful and frustrated with the process. “We used Alan Shalloway from Net Objectives [consulting services] to understand what was at the root of the business dissatisfaction,” Schoen says. “It wasn’t around the technology, but rather around how we organized the work. It hit every single way we organize the work — new roles, how we manage the portfolio of projects at the exec level, how we set expectations around delivery.”

The Rally/Getty co-design highlights how technology and organizational practice can be built together to achieve clarity around needs and expectations. Schoen says that before the technology and organizational redesign,

Our planning process was flawed. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do in Q1, Q2 …,’ but when we looked at the list it was probably four years worth of work. The priorities were unclear. Our businesses didn’t know who to contact to get what done and how things got decided. We had steering meetings where we came to consensus, but it was a very imperfect model.

The situation improved after the process change and the implementation of the Rally Portfolio Manager preview. “We now let lines of business set their own priorities,” says Schoen. ”There’s less disruption as things are more visible. Accountability is back in the hands of the business where it should be. We don’t set time frames until we’ve started something and know a lot more. So many companies build road maps that are just plain wrong. Now we have the trust from our executive team — things are going to change, we’re going to learn more …”

Schoen says that they didn’t receive any pushback from the businesses:

We’d gotten to a point where the problems had become clear to the company. This change was really a process change that had a toolset … Changing how people think about how things work is always hard, but we got through it. It helped that we have a culture of change at Getty Images — that [the businesses] have a voice.

Co-creation is a deep form of transparency. With transparency, you can see the project developing. With co-creation, you can tailor the design.

Getty was able to rebuild wireimage.com, a Getty Image website that is critical to the entertainment area of its business. Schoen says, “That site had a lot of functionality that was unique, but we wanted to make that functionality available on other sites. Because of the new workflow we were able to bring that to customers a ton faster, potentially six months faster, a bit of wild guess but probably true. And they love it.”

And what did Rally gain?

Rally could see the explicit and tacit needs Getty had in its process. “This led to the delivery of Rally Portfolio Manager, which makes Rally a single system of record for both business and agile development teams to gain visibility into development progress,” said Catherine Connor, product manager.

Co-creation, available to use through better communication and changing norms, is one more step in reducing barriers between what a business needs and what it can get from its suppliers.

How else can co-creation speed up and improve our professional relationships?

Image courtesy of Flickr user lumaxart.

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Is this “less is more” approach revolutionary? Nope. Evolutionary? Absolutely.

As designers, we admire Clear’s UI, and we think it ties into some trends we’re watching here at Fjord (a digital service design agency). We’re betting that we will see more of this stripped down approach in the near future thanks to three big industry trends:

1.   A “mobile first” approach to features

The small-screen real estate of mobile devices has forced companies to scale down the bells and whistles and extraneous content afforded by the web, prioritizing features and services that make the most impact for the business and customer experience.

This also means that, in order to be successful, these types of applications are focused on a very narrow subset of features. In the case of Clear, not only did the company select the most rudimentary functions in a to-do list, it also followed through with a minimalistic form in the interface.

A simple interface requires paring down interactivity to its barest essence. It requires prioritizing features and focusing on the essentials needed for the desired outcome. The challenge is to know how much you need to create a viable and desirable product, how much can be stripped away, and how to prepare for scaling up the product and service. It will be interesting to see how these applications evolve and scale (or choose not to).

2. Thinking in 4-D and making the user a magician

User interface designers are beginning to realize there is no longer a need to hang on to representations of real life objects and drag them into the digital space. Digital is something else. It gives the user magical powers. It is no longer the user, a mouse and a complicated ballet of hand eye coordination. It is the user directly manipulating a screen or an object to access a magical, four-dimensional world (time, space, people, information) that exists invisibly almost anywhere the user goes. Clear’s focus on gestural UI bestows this sense of magic by escaping the traditional paradigm of check boxes and text inputs that normally exist with digital to-do lists.

3. Getting Agile with it

Both designers and mobile platforms are pushing toward cinematic user interface designs. While motion is nothing new in every day life, appropriately and meaningfully adopting it into consumer-facing applications poses a new set of challenges for designers who are more accustomed to formulating designs using static wireframes. A new prototyping and blended-discipline approach to software and product development such as the Agile method and the new Lean UX movement are making it easier and more acceptable than ever before to create and communicate dynamic, looks-like, feels-like prototypes. This has allowed for a cinematic approach to design that employs more dynamic movement. And much like a good movie, the most crucial bits are often found between those still frames.

It’s exciting to see Clear’s bold interface and the new capabilities it presents. But the Clear app is just a hint of the exponentially more thrilling interfaces we are likely to see in a coming wave of more complex products and services that will go far beyond the to-do list.

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The Jazz platform is designed to improving collaboration across the software and systems lifecycle, and it seems to hit on all the foundational dimensions of success: Human needs and capabilities, appropriate technology features, and effective organizational support are all working together as a thoughtful mix.

The Jazz platform helps teams:

• Collaborate via social networking and virtualized team memory to overcome geographic and temporal gaps in the software lifecycle (addressing human needs and capabilities)
• Automate individual and team workflows throughout the software lifecycle, enabling standardized processes without adding overhead (technology features)
• Report on the overall process with real-time insight into programs, projects, and resource utilization (providing organizational support)

Gina Poole, vice president, Rational Marketing, IBM Software has been with the company for 25 years, starting as a developer. Much of that time she has worked on projects focused on increasing the quality of collaboration in the development process.  She says,

It’s not about teaching people how to use the tools, but understanding the people, their roles, their objectives. We focus on the build, working with clients to help them create new things: Design, develop, test — as well as embedded systems all along the application lifecycle…  including business alignment.

We have a pretty big software development team all over the world. The key is to make it easy for these teams to succeed. Make it easy for them to collaborate and integrate the roles and the processes across the lifecycle — provide a single version of the truth.

IBM also understands that the skills of collaboration can be helpful before entering the professional world. As a case in point, the company worked with Prof. Christelle Scharff of Pace University as she used JazzHub to support five grad students (two in the United States, two in India, and one in Senegal) using agile development methods to create a mobile phone app for first-graders to practice their skills in reading, writing and math. Poole noted that JazzHub provided the real-time daily communication flow needed for agile development.

These tools and methods are able to support agile development practices and agile’s strong focus on quick communication and incremental decision-making even in virtual teams. While agile development is seen as an effective practice, many have noted the problems with teams attempting to be both agile and virtual at the same time. Organizational practices and technology tools have to be ramped up when distance and time zones make communication more difficult. Rarely can a system sustain a big change to one dimension without needing to adapt across the remaining dimensions. The Jazz focus on community and collaboration seems to be meeting that need.

As we closed our conversation, Poole provided this key point: “Successful software development isn’t about having the best tools. It’s about the strong integration and optimization of the tech and practices, and finally, insuring that [the result] really supports the business outcomes.” This again highlights the foundational dimensions of success: Human needs and capabilities, appropriate technology features, and effective organizational support  working together as a thoughtful mix.

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RedCriter Tracker makes skill sets visible on employee profiles to make it easier for management to select appropriate team members. They app comes  with a default “master list” of typical software development and management skills but these can be customized to match company needs. Skills can also be embedded in email signatures and blogs so that competencies are kept top of mind during communication.

Management can guide employee activities through awarding of points: do this, get these points. These points can then be used in a “reward market,” with rewards determined by management. Rewards could be as simple and inexpensive as a gift card or office toy, or as heavy-duty as a trip or ticket to an event; it’s up to the company. Long-term efforts are acknowledged by cumulative points.

The badges (of which there are 50 different types) show off accomplishments automatically. Some expire (such as the “weekend warrior” badge, which expires after the week), while others can only be held by one person at a time, or may take six months to earn.

I love the transparency and self-selection of rewards that RedCritter Tracker supports. This approach takes a formal business need — project management — and integrates it with human interest in games and rewards, enabled by a clean-cut collaboration platform. The approach is thoughtfully applied in a way that allows management to guide efforts but still allows individuals to make their own choices.

Beatty offered this explanation as to the app’s approach, “Engage employees, support workplace morale, and subtly drive behaviors that affect the bottom line.”

RedCritter Tracker is set to launch later this month. If you provide your email address pre-launch, you’ll be offered a free four-user license.

See this video for a walkthrough of RedCriter Tracker and its features:

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That’s where DevOps comes in. DevOps is a new set of methods to encourage better communication and collaboration between corporate software development teams and IT and system administrators.

In an on-stage conversation on day two of the Structure 2011 conference in San Francisco, two of the DevOps movement’s biggest supporters — Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies and Opscode CEO Jesse Robbins — talked about how companies can use DevOps to streamline their internal operations and ultimately get more things done.

“DevOps is a cultural movement,” Robbins told panel moderator James Urquhart, a senior cloud computing market strategist at Cisco. “I come from a background in operations where I felt like my job was saying no.”

Indeed, removing knee-jerk no’s at the IT level is a crucial part of what DevOps tries to do. “It is about moving IT from being the gatekeepers of getting things done to becoming enablers [of productivity],” Kanies said. He compared DevOps to Agile development, the set of methods meant to encourage more productive software development. “You can treat DevOps as the best way to bring the Agile mentality of the world… into operations.” Just like Agile helps developers write applications, he said, DevOps can help companies push those finished applications to market as quickly and smoothly as possible.

But DevOps still has a long way to go before its adopted on a wide scale. “We are in the early stages of what will be a decade-long business transformation,” Robbins said. “However, there’s no standards, there’s no school, and it will take a long time for that to emerge.”

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This is what a day in my hectic life looks like — a never-ending game of Tetris (in which colored blocks are work and black are non-work). It’s probably a lot like yours, but with different labels:

The Millennials, for better or for worse, have grown up living like this, and apparently it comes pretty naturally to them. But what if you are from an earlier generation, or if you had crunchy granola parents who had a “Kill Your TV” bumper sticker on their old car and whose most sophisticated piece of electronic equipment was the toaster?

I think there are certain personality traits that many of us share that can help us to capitalize on the principles outlined in the Agile Manifesto. And they might not be what you expect:

1. You have to be lazy. Yes, lazy. Because lazy people find the most efficient solutions to problems in order to get the job done. (From the Agile Manifesto: “Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.”)
2. You have to be easily bored. Because then you’re exhilarated and stimulated by the constant turmoil rather than overwhelmed by it. (From the Agile Manifesto: “Welcome changing requirements.”)
3. You have to be curious. Because then you’ll always be increasing the breadth and depth of your knowledge, which will give you more/better marketable skills and enable you to diversify when the opportunity arises. (From the Agile Manifesto: “Continuous attention to technical excellence…enhances agility.”)

These are only a few of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto. I encourage you to read them all and envision how you can integrate these principles into your business practices.

What other characteristics do you think we need to deal with life and work in our constantly changing world?

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Here’s a few interesting notes from of Cagle’s analysis…

• Roadbumps On the Virtual Commute – social media, presence-based communications and web applications are helping to minimize the some of the issues around how people work together from different locations and time zones. Cagle goes on to point out the the technical limitations are now largely moot, with social limitations being of concern to most teleworkers.

• Telework and Agile Development -the notion of agile development, pairing experienced and inexperienced programmers through a mentoring relationship is beginning to spread to other non-software disciplines such as writers and marketeers.

• Risk Mitigation Through Telework – dispersing the physical and human assets of organizations can help build resilience and continuity into a business, mitigating the risk of potentially disastrous scenarios. Conversely, casting a wider net for talent and personnel opens new opportunities and ensure the best people can be engaged.

• The Green Telecommute – There’s a growing anxiety that teleworking simply shifts the carbon debt from organizations to individuals homes; however studies from Sun illustrate that 97% of an employee’s carbon footprint was simply due to commuting. Sadly, here in the UK telecommuting isn’t even part of the political debate on greening British cities.

• Telework’s Future - a rethink is required in how organizations manage people. Teleworking demographics polarize around those close to retirement and those early in their careers, each demanding a degree of flexibility in their lives. With estimates that around a third of the US workforce will demand to telework within the next four years, it’s clear organizations aren’t culturally attuned to manage a distributed workforce. I’d go further and state that government is tone deaf to the possibilities of incentivizing teleworking as a means to reduce the burden on congested transport networks.

Read Kurt Cagle’s full report here…

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I’m sure most of you have read, or at least heard of Getting Things Done by David Allen. He started a real productivity movement, and has millions of dedicated followers. He has excellent and practical advice for organizing your life and work, and there are a lot of tools available that you can use to take advantage of his recommendations… some specifically designed around his methodology. OmniFocus is one of them. At its core, OmniFocus IS “GTD” task management. Don’t worry if you don’t know what GTD is, fortunately you don’t have to know anything about it to become more productive using OmniFocus. For more information about Getting Things Done task management, check out David Allen’s website.

How OmniFocus is Different

OmniFocus categorizes your to-do items in two different ways, projects and contexts. At first this may seem to waste time, but once you get in the habit you’ll find that it’s amazing how simply you can manage your to-do’s this way.

Projects
Just as they sound, projects are anything with a desired outcome. You can probably think of many projects right now if you try. Everything from “file taxes” to “go to the beach” is a project. You’ll have projects related to work, and projects in your personal life.

Contexts
Contexts are where or how you get things done. To write an article, you might need to be at your computer. To file paperwork, maybe you’d have to be at your office. To call a client, you’d need to be around a phone. Contexts associate actions with the context in which you’d perform them, so you can group actions by where you will be or what you have access to.

OmniFocus for Mac

The desktop application is a fairly straightforward but there is a great video tutorial on the OmniFocus website and a quick reference card you can download. The home screen is comprised of a menubar at the top, projects or contexts in a sidebar on the left and tasks on the right. When OmniFocus opens it returns the context or project you were last viewing before you closed the program.

Inbox
The inbox is the “home screen” of OmniFocus. Here any uncategorized tasks without a context will be waiting on you to categorize them. This is similar tot he GTD inbox in that it’s just a temporary holding bin for tasks you need to record quickly. You should go through the inbox regularly and give each task a project (even if it’s miscellaneous) and a context.

Quick Entry Shortcut
One feature that I absolutely love about OmniFocus is the quick entry shortcut. The shortcut lets you quickly enter tasks, even when OmniFocus isn’t the frontmost application.

Email Entries
You can email yourself tasks when you’re on the road, and OmniFocus will grab them and add them to your inbox. I tested the feature and it works well, but since I use the OmniFocus iPhone application, I don’t really have a use for it. Blackberry or Treo owners will find it’s a lifesaver though.

Backups
OmniFocus might just be a little OCD when it comes to backing up your information (which is a good thing). It seems by default OmniFocus backs up your database twice daily and when you close OmniFocus. If you open OmniFocus several times a day, you can easily rack up half a dozen backups in a day. Of course, this is better than losing tasks you’ve entered due to a software or system crash.

OmniFocus for iPhone

I’m surprised that over a year after it’s initial launch, the iPhone still has no ability to sync iCal tasks. When OmniFocus released the iPhone application, I immediately purchased it even though I had never used the desktop version. I had already tried several free (and a couple paid) task management applications from the App Store and none of them worked well for me. After looking at the information on their website, and knowing it was built around GTD, I was comfortable spending $20 on a quality GTD task management system.

The iPhone application is simple, easy to use and has some great iPhone-centric features.

Adding New Tasks
Adding new tasks is the best feature of the iPhone application, and the one that will likely be the most used. When you’re in the car or eating dinner at a restaurant and suddenly think of something you need to do, what do you do? Take out a napkin or scrap of paper to write on? Then what? A week or two goes by and you lose the scrap of paper containing the note, forget completely about the task and only remember it when it’s almost (or already) late. Adding tasks in OmniFocus for iPhone is extremely simple, and the new task button is on the menubar in every screen. You can also attach a voice recording or photo to the task, which is a very handy feature. You can give the tasks a context and project or just let them sync to your computer and organize them later.

Location Aware
You can associate contexts with geographic locations. Office and home are two excellent examples, but you could do many more. Then just hit the location icon in the menubar to find all the tasks near your current location.

Syncing
To sync with OmniFocus on your Mac, you have to have the latest “Sneaky Peek” version, which you can download on this page. The full upgrade from 1.0 to 1.1 will be a free upgrade, so don’t let that keep you from purchasing OmniFocus. I’ve found the “Sneaky Peek” version to be very stable. It seems the only changes over the stable version of OmniFocus 1.0 is the iPhone syncing.

Conclusions

I have found few flaws in OmniFocus. I’ve managed to get it to crash a handful of times but that’s not really any different from any other application on my computer. I crash Firefox 2 or 3 times a day so I can’t fault OmniFocus too badly for crashing 2 or 3 times in the month I’ve been using it. I’ve used it day-in and day-out.

If you need better task management and want something that will work both on your Mac and iPhone, I highly recommend OmniFocus. My only caveat is the price. At $80 for OmniFocus, the $20 iPhone application hurts a little. I wish they’d give the iPhone application to registered users of OmniFocus. It would probably increase sales of the desktop client (and $80 is better than $20!)

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Blockbuster needs to do something to juice up its business because Netflix is eating its lunch. But getting into the hardware game will be an expensive endeavor, especially in an increasingly crowded field already packed with big names like Apple, TiVo, Xbox 360, Vudu and soon the Netflix LG box.

There is concern that forging ahead online could cannibalize Blockbuster’s existing real-world retail locations. But there’s a way for the two to co-exist — it should buy Redbox.

Redbox has 6,800 fully automated DVD rental kiosks across the country (more locations than Blockbuster) in stores like Walgreens, Wal-Mart and even McDonald’s (which is an owner, along with Coinstar). Instead of building and marketing another set-top box for the home, Blockbuster should adjust the Redbox kiosks to also digitally send movies to the set-top boxes people already have, like TiVo and Xbox.

Going out into the real world to download something may seem like an unnecessary step, but it’s actually more of a transitional one because it combines elements people are already familiar with.

First, people still go to video stores. In adding these kiosks to their real-world locations, Blockbuster would bridge the the familiar experience of browsing the aisles for a movie with the more unfamiliar one of digital delivery.

Second, by using existing set-top services like TiVo, people wouldn’t feel like they have to buy a new device, or worry about buying one that will die quickly (read: HD DVD).

Finally, by leveraging the existing Redbox kiosks in non-video locations like grocery stores, Blockbuster could take advantage of impulse renting. People are already used to the idea of DVDs being sold in supermarkets, this would nudge them a little further and into downloads.

The real-world may wind up giving Blockbuster the advantage it needs to leapfrog into the digital future.

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