Trust is an essential part of negotiations for knowledge workers. It is so important, that it may even be considered the true goal of the 8 principles I describe in Extreme Contracts! In 2011 I had a horrifying “clients from hell” experience that pushed me to investigate how I could craft better agreements with my
One of the key motivations that led me to Extreme Contracts was the need for more freedom. This article is the first in a short series to explain why I think we are less free as knowledge workers than we usually think.
Hey folks! On 14 February I published a guest post on Vasco Duarte’s Scrum Master Toolbox website. It is about how I like to build trust with my customers even before the relationship has started. Enjoy! How to build trust with clients and stakeholders while getting what you deserve for your work: a story about
Eventstorming is an amazing technique/tool invented by Alberto ‘Zio Brando’ Brandolini to investigate a software process, which I also use to investigate an organization’s culture. I wrote this article to introduce a video in which I describe some Eventstorming nuances I had the chance to play with on a few real customer projects.
Last spring I had again the chance to negotiate an Extreme Contract as a freelance consultant and it went amazingly well, with a true win-win outcome for me and my customer. I really loved every bit of the story I am about to tell you and I hope it may give you some clue on how a freelance knowledge worker like me could get better deals than usual.
So it happened. I have attended Nassim Taleb’s workshop in New York City on risk modeling and taking. I produced quite an amount of articles around this event and this post is meant to make them all available to you.
In February I will attend a 5-days workshop held by the Real World Risk Institute, to get a full immersion training on risk taking, management and analysis with Nassim Taleb and a few other risk practitioners.
In last Steve Denning’s article on Forbes titled “Can The 21st Century Corporation Operate Without Agile?” we read: The new industrial revolution may be enabled by technology, but it is not being driven by it. […] Trying to exploit digital technology or the Internet with the management practices of hierarchical bureaucracy that is pervasive in big corporations today
Do you create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty? Do you think any contract will make the project more likely to succeed? Are you even an employee? C’mon, don’t be a turkey! Yes, a turkey!
I had this blogpost in progress for a long time. A few weeks ago a tweet by Nassim Taleb – along with the essay attached – made me think of it and so… here it is.
You are going to meet a customer tomorrow. You will discuss about developing a new product. You know she will ask for a bunch of features, a deadline and a budget. She will ask for estimates.
As a freelance I often face the request to report about my delivery, to assess the effect of my actions and suggestions. During my years spent as an employee though, I learned to ask my colleagues for an assesment with the aim to become more valuable to them. If we all agree business must be user-centred, then why not being user-centred when working as an employee too?
On May 8 I joined Juego Serio, Sparkling Strategies and Cocoon Projects in Barcelona to attend a LEGO Serious Play (LSP) Facilitation training. I had been waiting that moment a lot. I met the method in 2013 when I had the chance to help my friend Stelio facilitating some LSP- based workshops designed by him.
A few weeks ago I attended a NoEstimates workshop held by Woody Zuill and Vasco Duarte in Helsinki. It has been an intense and fruitful day and here is the main insight I brought back home. The day was led with a very nice pace, the two speakers showing a very different style in explaining
It was only yesterday that I incurred into this old tweet by Kent Beck: the *craft* of programming begins with empathy, not formatting or languages or tools or algorithms or data structures — Kent Beck (@KentBeck) February 13, 2015 This message resonates with many reflections I have been through lately. Tree huggers First, this made
It has been an intense May and among the several nice things happened to me I had the chance to attend XP2015, in Helsinki, to talk about LiquidO, the open governance model shaped within Cocoon Projects. The XP conference series is among the top conferences worldwide about agile methods and lean thinking. What do I
After the rewarding premiere held in last March, on June 23rd I will be holding again a full-day session about agile contracts in collaboration with Alberto ‘Zio Brando’ Brandolini’s Avanscoperta. It is going to be a very important day for me, considering the chance I am having to re-think the workshop based on the super
After the chat I recently had with Greger Wikstrand about Extreme Contracts, another nice video was made by Greger with Joakim Lindbom, both Enterprise Architects from Capgemini. In the video they discuss the nice behavioral and economical patterns emerging with the use of such contracts which I forged a few years ago when I was
The goal As I wrote some time ago, we want our deals to be compliant with three main criteria: We want to reach a wise agreement, in order to generate value for all the parties involved. We want the deal to be efficient, because time spent searching for a good deal is not generating value:
Tonight I dreamt of Giorgio and Danilo. They were ticking me off. They were upset. The build was broken and they had just found a bug, introduced months before by me while refactoring some remote legacy area of our codebase. They were speaking words of reproach about how hard it would be to fix the bug now, being that code as legacy as untested code can be. They were blaming on me because I had introduced a bug in a hard-to-manipulate area of the code. How hard would the fix be now? Why, should I have ever refactor that untested code at all?
If you are a developer and you were born in the 80’s or in the 90’s, it is very unlikely that your mum and dad pushed for you to start coding. If you are even older it is close to impossible then. Parents from the 20th century were – and are – usually more concerned