Articles from June 2015

Value and output

For the past of 1-2 years, my life philosophy has changed. Let’s forget about the past of how i was. I will  focus on the present and the future I want to be:

VALUE and OUTPUT

Let’s talk about VALUE. It came from this valuable statement of Jim Rohn:

We get paid for bringing value to the market place

Jim Rohn quote

Everyone has his/her own value. And that value is evaluated by the market you are in. In my field, it is IT industry. Why do I talk about value here and now? Well, there are some:

  1. Because, I want to remind myself about “VALUE”. Therefore I am always aware of improving my value if I want to get more.
  2. Because, VALUE is the only thing you should put in the table when discussing your opportunity and your price.
  3. Because, you should give your price base on your VALUE.
  4. Because, you should NOT give your price base on your age. You are not get paid for your age or for your being old. NO NO, it does not work like that
  5. Because, I want to help people around me aware of the term “VALUE” and help them improve their VALUES.

For more, I suggest you listen to this life changing video

How about “OUTPUT”? What is it about? It is about your delivery:

Deliver result

I usually tell people that about my theory of this:

  1. You think you know 100 things
  2. When ask you to TALK about them, you can express using your speaking language 60-70 things out of 100
  3. When ask you to WRITE about them, you can write just about 30-40 out of 100
  4. When ask you to DO, you can do around 10 out of 100
  5. And you might DELIVER 1-3 out of 10 done

And many people I know (just the one i know, i do not speak in general) stop at step #1 and they think they have that value. Here is the phase:

I think I am good and I deserve better

And here is what I (will) reply:

OK. Wonderful, can you show me your delivery (output)?

Well, most of the cases, you know the result of the conversation.

So, my friends, if you are in such a conversation, make sure next time you will: Hey wait a minute, here are my deliveries 🙂 And you have a strong evidences on the table for the deal/discussion.

Have a nice weekend 🙂

Scrum Gathering 2015

I had a chance to attend the first Scrum Gathering 2015 in Vietnam. It was the first time of many things – more detail later. The event was about Agile/Scrum. Therefore, before I talk about my personal impression and feeling, you should clearly state about my background of Agile/Scrum:

NOT MUCH

I have been coding for long time and have been reading and applying (kind of) for quite a while. However, I am not applying Agile/Scrum as the scrum materials.

And I was not going to the event to learn Agile/Scrum either. I went because:

  1. It was an international event, speakers are well known – or at least I heard about them
  2. I have not ever been in any community conference
  3. Mind open: See how they are doing out there
  4. Meet new people

So, what did i feel? I felt good (event I had sickness that day 🙁 ). I felt involved. I met people from different countries, with different job titles. They were talking a lot about agile, about scrum, about processes, … They are truly professional. And I felt “LOST” in the beginning. I did not know how and where to get started. However, very quickly the community atmosphere helped me get started

Hey, man, you are here for a reason. Let’s open and talk to people

And I started to talk. Things just kept going as it should be.

However, there was one problem:

I do not know what to ask speaker

That was when I realized that I have many things to learn. I might write more about that in some later posts.

Next are some of the thoughts i had during the event, especially when people asked speaker of how to solve this issue, that issue, …

I started to think: Hey, wait a second! They focus a lot on this phase: Scrum welcomes changes. So they expect scrum to give them the tool to deal with changes from client/customer. And we also have the same philosophy in coding. We are as developer/architect told to design/code in such a way that: you can deal with requirement changes easily or less costly.

No one mentioned about that in the event 🙁 And when i mentioned about that in the discussion. They seems to ignore that, and show the gesture that: Yeah, we know and just move on with their discussion.

Everything comes to code, btw 🙂

PS: I had many things in my head after the event. However, the Mr. Bacteria knocked me down. Therefore, those are information that left in my head. I want to write them down before they’ve gone 😛

PS2: I will join this event next year for sure 🙂