I was reading ConfusedOfCulcutta the other day who had blogged about Cluetrain and this geek version of the 95 Theses. The Cluetrain Manifesto has some interesting ideas, witty observations and a very healthy amount of rant against the establishment (one of the authors created RageBoy). But it is not for everyone, example here.

Whatever your take, there were some interesting anecdotes and points in Cluetrain that have some relevance from a social networking and collaboration perspective in financial services, and specifically technology in FS. The truth is that our industry is really not that big in terms of the network of people within it, and therefore the relationships we have and cultivate are critical to building a successful business. Close relationships are built on trust and a record of delivery. Once you have them, you have to protect and nurture them. If you lose them, game over. 

One of the main themes in Cluetrain is that of the markets being conversations. I do agree with this, however I think that conversations and the human/social aspects are the fuel that drives the markets and instills a sense of belonging and community — but from a business perspective you also need to have a product or service that has value, is differentiated and can be delivered well.

Another thing they talk about is the use of the human voice over mass-marketing and corporate messaging. This, I totally agree with. None of the people we work for, nor those we would like to work for, want to hear the sales-pitch and marketing fluff. They want to hear what you do, how you do it, as well as your view and opinion. They want to understand and relate to you as a person, and as a proxy for the other people in your organization. They are humans too and will make judgements, have emotions, opinions and sensitivities. Ramming some corporate marketing-speak down their throats is not what they are looking for -  especially when the conversation is technical. A more honest, open and candid approach has always worked better for me when talking to clients, partners, journalists, analysts and other market players. Respect and trust are earned, not bought. In the (partial) defense of marketing though (which gets a good old kicking by Cluetrain), I do believe that it can add value in places such as helping to formulate valuable strategic partnerships (yes, via conversations!) across the market to create interesting service oferings, or providing a support function to both the sales and engineering organizations. Marketing can also help to foster internal communications as well as exposing the company’s real people to the outside world (via blogs, for example).

There is a lot of discussion about an employee-led organization versus the command and control modus operandi. This is where I think some balance is needed. First and foremost, I believe that maximizing transparency to everyone in the organization is important to fostering an open and respectful environment in the workplace. This has to be opened up across all functions (engineering, projects, marketing, sales, recruiting, etc) so people can really get to see what everyone is doing, how they are doing it, and question why they are doing it at all!  Today’s social software is a key aspect that extends much of what is said in Cluetrain (specific elements of which, such as wikis and blogs etc, were missed in Cluetrain as it was written in the late ’90s). This social networking will help to foster open communication, feedback and innovation within the company and even (but not always!) with clients. It is nice to see some companies such as Dresdner adopting social networking as a corporate policy (they use Socialtext for their wiki).

[Sidenote: Open source communities are a great example of where borderless collaboration rely on natural human dynamics to innovate and develop technologies that we can all benefit from. It is nice to see (finally) that some financial services institutions are relatively wholesale in acknlowledging that these tools & frameworks (Spring and Hibernate being obvious examples) can and should be leveraged, but maybe that is because a) the maturity of the technology has progressed and its adoption has "crossed the chasm"  and/or b) the cost-structure outweighs their natural risk adversity !!!]

Getting back to employee-driven organizations, where people want to get involved in many aspects of the company they should be encouraged (within reason). Where people do not want to broaden their role or responsibilities, that’s cool with me as well. That said, I think there are some things that do require a certain amount of “control” albeit with the appropriate amount of feedback and insight from the ranks. Things like finance, legal, HR and certain aspects of sales do require a certain amount of sensitivity and confidentiality. For me, the most important thing is to leverage people for what they are good at and to support what they would like to do. Imposing articifial barriers, filters and restraints is counterproductive to both innovation, as well as delivery of the company’s services. We want leadership over management !!

From a project delivery perspective, I have always subscribed to some of the same human/social aspects of agile development. Self-organizing teams that have been given the reigns to get the delivery done, but supported by a “facilitaor / impediment remover”, aka the Scrum Master in Scrum, demonstrate how well the theory can play out in practice — when executed properly. Over several iterations, the language the team speaks, the dynamics, the comradery and their productivity simply improve in orders of magnitude. Some of this is due to improving their understanding of the business or technical domain and the use of certain solid engineering practices (continuous build & integration, refactoring, code reviews, etc). But I think most of it is down to the social and interpersonal dynamics that come from the close collaboration with end-users, regular feedback, daily stand-ups, and team retrospectives. As I also previously mentioned, wikis are brilliant in supporting iterative development.

At the end of the day, if you provide a collaborative, challenging and fun workplace for your people, they will help you communicate with and deliver for your clients and their people. I am not suggesting that it easily results in the ultimate, most heavenly blissful corporate paradise that some would have us subscribe to, but it would certainly make our life (at work) that much more rewarding and certainly a lot more fun….

It’s official .. the new Lab49 London office is up and running with a bunch of new clients, projects and employees. Within two months we are over a dozen people and racing upwards. Some of the work and pipeline is from existing US clients wanting to do transatlantic projects, while we are seeing quite a growing demand from the local UK market.

Press Release here on Finextra, and here on Bob’s Guide.

We have been executing a new client project using a set of iterative development tools & techniques, with Scrum as the overarching management process delivering on 30-day deliverable cycles. Accordingly, the burndown chart has been updated daily based on the work effort remaining for each task the team has defined in its iteration backlog.

In general, when we show and examine burndown charts with clients for the first time, there is definitely a “wow” factor, as this simple visual display contains almost all of the information they need to readily understand the project status. When we then present this information to clients via a Lab49 client wiki page (we use Confluence ), which contains a continuously updated set of issues & impediments, it tells a very detailed account of the project and gives the clients more transparency than they have seen before.

For this particular iteration, we thought we would try using Google spreadsheets to manage the tasks & work remaining — this has been decent tool to allow a single-point for the entire team to update progress and Google’s (AJAX?) front end offers a decent chatroom function for those viewing the spreadsheet. Like a few other collaborative spreadsheet services I have tried (such as Num Sum) the lack of charting is a pain as I have to export the data to Excel but all in all the benefits of the collaborative data management outweighs this. I have tried other agile tools such as XPlanner, but often pefer the simplicity and flexibility of a spreadsheet.

Going back to the burndown …. most traditional project management techniques do not provide an intuitive and simple way for the team (and client) to review how the project is progressing on a daily basis, nor do they provide such a granular level of refactoring of estimates of work remaining. 

One of the interesting things in looking at the burndown is the easy nature by which the team can see how far ahead/behind schedule (relative to a ”perfect burndown”) the iteration is at any point in time. (This key feature is not readily available in traditional techniques). However, the daily inspection of both task-level work effort and iteration progress provides a higher frequency of datapoints, which in turn drives a really granular view of trend shifts where small deltas in the overall trend might actually highlight underlying issues and risks that may have otherwise have gone unnoticed. In other words, the trend is can be more insightful as the data itself.

What I would really like to have is a truly collaborative online spreadsheeting function that contains more powerful formatting, analytical and graphing functionality, that I can then reference in-line from my client wiki page to provide truly dynamic updates. I see (one example here) that Dan Bricklin ( the co-inventor of the original spreadsheet - VisiCalc) has developed WikiCalc has some ideas in motion, including working closely with Socialtext. Other suggestions welcome …

We are all aware of financial institutions using grid networks to provide massive amounts of compute power to run complex risk calculations and simulations  …. but here is an interesting way to be part of a grid project yourself: Africa-at-home runs projects to allow computers across the world to contribute to African humanitarian causes, the first of which is MalariaControl.net, an application that models the way malaria spreads in Africa and the potential impact that new anti-malarial drugs may have on the region.

This is another example of “volunteer computing”, the largest of which is the SETI project which hooks up computers across the internet to analyse the data of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. BOINC was the originator of many of these projects.

Interesting article on the growth of the carbon dioxide emissions market in Europe, and how the US market is a “Wild West” show waiting to happen. Seems like Europe’s attention to conforming to the Kyoto Protocol has driven the market forward while there has been a lack of regulations, and hence liquidity, in the US.

In this slightly bizarre marketplace, companies can trade emission allowances and offset credits, so if you are stinking up the joint, you can buy allowances to make it all cool !!! And if you are being a good citizen and taking carbon out of the atmosphere, you can sell your emission credits to the smelly guys…

I wonder what the correlation is between the CO2 emissions market and the weather derivatives market ..?