Agile Life

A recent conversation I heard got me thinking about Agile and how easy it is for people to misunderstand what Agile is all about. The word “agile” means to be quick or nimble. However, “Agile” is a set of principles for project management based on the Agile Manifesto.  The conversation that I heard went something like, “well, if you are really doing Agile, then you should be able to reduce or grow your team as necessary to meet whatever labor burn rate you need to.”  That is the kind of thinking that really gives “Agile” a bad name and shows a complete misunderstanding of what “Agile” really is.  A core feature that really makes Agile Project Management methodologies work is having cohesive, self-forming teams that have stable and predictable velocities that can be used to estimate work. An Agile team is retrospective and hyperproductive. The team is retrospective in that continuous improvement is baked into the process.  Hyperproductivity results from the cohesive team forming in a way that every member of the team can contribute to the absolute best of their ability without worrying about typical organizational conventions.  It should be obvious then that changing the team composition would destabilize the team’s velocity and have a negative impact on productivity.  Where does “agility” come into “Agile?” The answer is that agility is found in the ability to re-prioritize any work that is not currently in progress in the current iteration. That basically keeps good enough on the tip of the spear and focuses on what the customer needs. Agility is not found in treating people like commodities.

“Agile Life” can be taken to mean my life is agile  or that I embrace Agile.  Your choice.

In the United States of America we have term limits and very frequent elections leading to changes in leadership. At election time, from local to national, you often hear candidates offering “change.” However, I have been thinking about when our nation really experiences “change.” It seems to me that real change follows some event such as a stock market crash, war, or terrorist attack. Those events have a galvanizing effect on our society and make change possible because the nation in general for some period of time starts moving in the same direction. However, under normal circumstances, as old administrations depart and new ones arrive what we often see is not change at all but realignment. Realignment occurs when new leadership with different values takes over and starts aligning the people and policies with objectives that represent the values of the new leadership. Value-based realignment is probably a good thing because in a democracy the values of the majority are represented. However, there is another type of realignment that is territorial in nature. Territorial realignment basically takes the form of attacking the previous leadership’s accomplishments or works in progress. A new administration wants to make sure they completely own the success and will work to ensure that success can’t be attributed to the previous administration, especially when the values of the new administration are radically different from the old administration. What is the upshot of territorial realignment? Well, instead of making steady progress we are continually backing up and starting over. Instead of standing on the shoulders of those who have come before we are continually reinventing things. At what cost? I think it would make an interesting economic study to discover the cost to the American people of territorial realignment in the 20th and 21st centuries. Exposing that cost may get us to value progress much higher than we value marking our territory. Then again maybe it is just human nature.

The support of my loving wife of seventeen years and our four wonderful children has made the last two years possible.  Two years ago my company won a healthcare program of national importance, and I was selected to lead it. Now I’m finally packing to go home. I’ll be commuting up to DC a few days a week now, but home every weekend.  As I was packing up my office I took a hard look at a family photo that I have on my desk that was taken right before I left for this assignment. My kids look so little. My eldest son was shorter than my wife and my youngest son did not even come up to my elbow. Now my eldest son is taller than my wife by a good margin and my youngest son is almost as tall as my wife.  Where did the time go? What did I miss? Was it worth it?  Only time will tell, but if I was able to have any positive impact at all it was because I have a loving and supportive family who believes in what I am doing.

To my family… I love you more than you could ever know. Dad is coming home! Get the fishing poles ready!

Last weekend I attended the Artificial General Intelligence Conference 2010 in Lugano, Switzerland.  The train ride from Zurich to Lugano was like something straight out of a fairy tale with tunnels through snow capped mountains, rivers with huge boulders, Swiss chalets, and sunlight sparkling off of snowflakes during sudden snow showers.  That train ride could have been the highlight of the trip, but the conference was as interesting as the countryside is beautiful.

I became interested in AI when I was a computer science student and I ,after getting a glimpse at the conference of what the future may hold,  am now starting to imagine a future where there will be general application of AI. I really like Ben Goertzel’s simple summary of his theory of the mind,  “A mind uses perception and memory to make predictions about which actions will help it achieve its goals.”  Such a mind would be able to autonomously learn novel ways to solve a wide variety of problems. I think there is huge potential for such a mind in the healthcare field.

Today we are witnessing the birth of the health internet where vast stores of health information will be available for an AGI (or AGI+) to solve problems and achieve all sorts of goals for the benefit humans in particular and humanity in general.  There are many perspectives of study in the AGI field  including brain emulation, mathematical modeling using computing theory, and various cognitive architectures that use a variety of disciplines including philosophy, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, physics, and mathematics.  The AGI conference covered the spectrum, but there is strength in that diversity that is obtained by bringing all of these bright AGI researchers together to share their ideas.  I believe that in my lifetime I will see artificial general intelligence that will help solve all kinds of health problems for humanity by making constructive use of the totality of health information that is being made available through the safe and secure ubiquitous exchange of health information using technology such as the CONNECT solution that my team is building.

Imagine a doctor who could access all recorded health information to develop a diagnosis and who could then develop a treatment plan from total knowledge of every treatment attempted. Imagine a doctor who could develop new innovative theories, diagnoses, and treatments based on all of that information and contribute information back to the knowledge base.  If you can imagine that, then you can imagine a better world. For me that is reason enough to stay tuned in to Artificial General Intelligence.

I made a quick trip yesterday to Atlanta for the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference.  The sheer size of this conference is amazing.  I spent a good portion of the day at the interoperability showcase. There is a portion of the showcase that is dedicated to the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) and the federal open-source implementation of the NHIN Specifications, called CONNECT. NHIN and CONNECT grew from one small kiosk last year to forty stations this year that each demonstrate a use of NHIN and/or CONNECT that is in production or planned for production.  This is a solid indicator that healthcare interoperability is taking root in the USA. I feel honored to be part of something this important that is transforming healthcare and can positively impact the lives of people in America and the world. I also had the honor of escorting Gov. Jeb Bush through select portions of the showcase. He is interested in and excited about what we are doing.

I have a lot going on this year, and I almost decided not to attend HIMSS. However, I’m glad I made the time. Seeing the energy and enthusiasm of all of these dedicated professionals who are trying to really make a difference in people’s lives was inspiring!

I was stuck up in DC this weekend and was working a bit on Saturday when I decided to take a break and watch a movie. I started down what is a slippery slope for me by watching Taking Chance, a movie about an Marine Officer who volunteers to take a young Marine’s body back to his family. It has been a few years since I have looked at the faces of the fallen so after the movie I decided to look at all of the Marines killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan (see what I mean by “slippery slope”?).  I have a process I follow where, over a period of several hours,  I look at every picture. Of course it took me longer this time than a few years ago because many more have been killed in action.  After that I had what I describe as an overwhelming sense of sadness at the loss of my brothers that I know comes from Semper Fi being part of my soul.  If you are a Marine, you know what I mean.  Also, I’m not sure when it happens, but you hit an age where young people just look, well, young.  Many of our dead heroes were born after I was already out of high school.

Being a person of action and already slipping down the slope, an idea occurred to me.  Gunnery Sergeant Terry Ball and I served as Lance Corporals and Corporals together back in the early 1990’s.  Gunny Ball is on the list. He died from wounds received in action in Iraq.  He was an amazing Marine who became even more amazing, I found out later, as his career developed. He was a Drill Instructor and Senior Drill Instructor at Paris Island!  I really admired him when we served together and his death was a huge loss to the US Marine Corps and our nation. I decided that I would visit his grave.

I got up early this (Sunday) morning and took the metro from Vienna to Brookland/Catholic University.  I attended Mass at the Basilica and prayed for Gunny Ball and his family (he left behind a wife and three children). Then I went to the gift shop and bought two identical coins with a cross inscribed on one side and a prayer on the other. I took the metro to Arlington National Cemetery, where Gunny Ball is buried. I located his grave, placed one coin on top of his stone, and kept one as a reminder to me of the ultimate sacrifice he made.

From the Galluscio family to the family of  Gunnery Sergeant Terry Ball and all of our fallen heroes, “Please know that we are grateful for your sacrifice.”

Semper Fi, Gunny. Godspeed.

I graduated from Clemson University in 1995 with an MS in Computer Science. After working for a short time as a software engineer writing spacecraft command and control applications in C on Unix, I hit my stride as a software development manager and I successfully managed software teams of varying size across a variety of programs. The programs I ran were successful, but not without heroic effort on the part of the teams I led.  In 2006 I took a short break to run engineering for a start-up company where I acted as the product owner for a product being built by a team in India at Aspire. This talented team was talking about Scrum, and my response was, “I don’t care what process you use as long as my product gets built to specifications on time.”  Basically, over time my Aspire team taught me to work as an agile product owner. I managed the backlog and watched the product develop quickly in short iterations of potentially shippable product. Wow, I was amazed watching the product develop with no “big bang”, very little heroic effort, and very little stress. The product was built and brought to market on schedule.

I left my start-up in December of 2007 and went back to work on a proposal in the healthcare domain for a project of national importance. The focus of this project is to build a federally-funded open source implementation of the Nationwide Health Information Network specifications. We won the program and I was selected to lead it. We have since made six successive on time deliveries and supported multiple federal agencies going into limited production all using an agile project management methodology called Scrum, as required by our customer.

In December of 2007, before working on the proposal, I went to a training class to become a Certified Scrum Master. I had sort of an epiphany at this class. I realized what my Aspire team had been doing to so successfully build my product. I also realized that Agile in general, and Scrum in particular, fully embraced everything that I knew intuitively as a technical manager about what it takes to make a project successful. In particular, transparency is the key to customer intimacy, you have to “aim small to miss small”, and you have to keep “good enough” on the “tip of the spear.”  Transparency, tight spirals, and constant focus on priority breeds trust. Trust is the foundation of success.

That is how I became an Agile Project Manager. I’ll never go back!

I think an appropriate way to start off is to introduce myself.  My name is Tony Galluscio.  I’m from Indialantic, Florida. I’m married and have four children ages nine to fifteen.  I commute to DC where I work for Harris Corporation as a technical manager with a focus on Agile projects.  For more information you can see my bio at http://www.scrumalliance.org/profiles/23148-tony-galluscio.

My work interests involve open source software, healthcare interoperability, network communications and protocols, artificial intelligence, and Agile project management methodologies.

My personal interests include family, faith, fishing, 4×4 trucks, and reading. I am an avid reader. In fact, I was an early adopter of the Kindle 1 and just today I purchased a 2 gig SD card ($12, can you believe it?) because I filled up my kindle with books. Right now I’m reading a couple of different books including Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and The Hidden Pattern, A Patternist Philosophy of the Mind by Ben Goertzel.   I’m reading The Hidden Pattern in preparation for attending the Artificial General Intelligence conference in Switzerland in March.

Among the excellent advice I have received from Danese Cooper, the Open Source Diva (http://danesecooper.blogs.com/) ,  was a suggestion that I start a blog.  My intent here is to blog about subjects that have meaning to me. I’ll try to keep it short and stay on topic.   The opinions and musings in this blog are mine and mine alone. I don’t speak here for anyone but me.

I’m hoping this will be an excellent adventure. Let the blogging begin!