Honest Advice on Starting a Company - Mark Suster

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2516

Enterpreneurship - podcasts

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html

Understanding Venture Capital

Description

As a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Dana Mead supports entrepreneurs and innovators seeking to make major impact through life science technologies and ventures. In this lecture, Mead talks about Venture Capital, offering great insights about Silicon Valley and life as a venture capitalist.

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2787

Leadership - communication

I heard recently in some radio:

"I can only take responsibility for what I say, but I can't take the responsibility for what you understand."

At the beginning I thought that this is very true, but later I realised that I spent a lot of time at work to make sure that people understand what I say. I believe that this is one of the most important skills for a good leader and a leader is a person who must take responsibility for that.

Robert Kiyosaki - practical thoughts

If you like to start a day with a practical thought check Robert Kiyosaki posts.

Jan Wojcikiewicz - another great businessman

Another great businessman, this time, native one :). Unfortunately the article is only in Polish:
Jan Wójcikiewicz, polski Conrad Hilton

Interesting article about getting things done

Just F... Do It, interesting article about getting things done:
What Makes an Entrepreneur? Four Letters: JFDI

Steve Jobs - an interesting speech

Steve Jobs is a great example of determination. I wish it everyone who wants to be successful in business. Very motivating speech:
Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

Innovation tutorial: Great ideas, where do they come from?

Earlier I thought that a great idea is something what appears out of the blue, only to brilliant people, immediately either great or bad. Not long time ago I realized that great ideas are also results of a process. Currently I'm using few simple rules which improves the creativity. Mostly they are based on my experience and observations but finding out how successful companies drive innovations helped as well.

Innovation process

1. Team work

One person can have a great idea, but when he/she shares it with others, has a discussion, the idea grows above any initial expectations.

2. Give it time

Earlier when I had to figure out something, I sat and thought about that as long as possible. Later on I realized that beside the conscious activity I should give a chance and time my subconscious. Thanks to that an idea very often appears "out of the blue". Even when it happens I start the process again though in order to find the best solution.

3. An idea can be developed further

Usually an idea can be developed further and further. Someone said once that if you don't have at least three solutions to a problem it means that you don't think clearly.

4. A simple trick

Few years ago I had to figure out very efficient algorithm. After I managed to do it I did a retrospective and tried to find out how I did it, so I could use the tool consciously in the future. I actually found out a simple trick. When you need to figure out something new, some solution the best way to initiate the process is to ask opposite questions, describe a problem in the opposite way.

5. Preparation

I still doesn't have a strong opinion about when is the best time to deepen the subject. The problem is that I'm afraid that if you start to read about others solutions you might set your mindset towards certain direction. Usually during the first phase I try to figure out things on my own, then in the further phases I gather knowledge about it and check what I missed.

Estimating Stories

Estimating Stories

Scrum Master Role

Scrum Master Role

What else is wrong with Story Points as a time unit?

There is one another point against considering a story point as a certain period of time (e.g. half a day). It is difficult to use special planning cards for a planning session because their values are like 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, etc. but the time in other hand is linear. So the problem is what to do if we estimate that something should take 17 days?

The original post with comments

Why Story Points should be abstract units?

Imagine that you assumed that 1 story point is about 4 ideal hours of work and you made all the estimations according to that assumption. When the sprint finished you divided a sum of story points of done stories by a number of spent hours and the result was that 1 story point is 6 hours. So how to proceed during the next sprint planning? If we assume that 1 story point is now 6 hours, we estimate stories in a different way than before. In other hand, keeping in mind that 1 story point is 4 hours, although we know that last sprint it was 6 hours is also confusing. In the described case 1 story point corresponds to some certain time, so it looses its real meaning.

Story points should be some abstract units expressing relations between stories in a way a team asses them. When they are abstract there is no other way to estimate a story than by comparing it to already estimated stories. Thanks to that, estimating is always the same, there is no confusion.

PM Professional Programme Completed

Yesterday was the last day of the PM Professional Programme in which I participated. It was a great training, considering the content, trainers, arrangements and of course our group. Now it is time for PMI C-Level certification ;).

I come from and usually deal with the Agile approach so one could say that such a training is waste of time. Not at all! I've learned interesting tools which can be useful also in Agile projects. I understand better the relation between a project management and Scrum which is very often hot topic. I'm going to write a bit more about that in the next posts...

"Towards Agile Product and Portfolio Management"

Few months ago I was on a seminar about agile portfolio management. The presentation didn't really appeal to me, maybe because I expected something different, maybe because of my background, but I could see that the investigation of the subject required a lot of work. Later on I got an email from the authors saying that they published their book about their research. I didn't have time to even review it, but I'm quite sure that it is very interesting lecture. The title of the book is Towards Agile Product and Portfolio Management and you can read it under following link:

http://atman.agilefant.org