Blog Posts

Last week I presented Scrum@liip to a very interested audience. 40 people at 8am was really impressive. It was great to see how people feel that we really pushed Scrum to a very high level. Even if we sometimes feel that we could do even more and faster. But all is very relative... below an extended version in German. Here you get to the slides.

Die Einladung von Peter Stevens zum Thema "Scrum in der Firmen-DNA" habe ich gerne angenommen und letzte Woche gut gestaunt, morgens um 8h rund 40 Interessierte in der Industrieperipherie von Zürich anzutreffen. Offenbar hat das Thema viele angesprochen, denn entsprechend war auch der Austausch, der bis Mittag in hoher Intensität angedauert hat.

In der eigenen kleinen Welt kommt manchmal das Gefühl auf, mit den angestrebten Anpassungen - die natürlich nie aufhören - an Ort und Stelle zu treten. Macht man dann bei Gelegenheit einen guten Schritt zurück und präsentiert den aktuellen Stand einem interessierten Publikum wird deutlich, zu welcher "Güte" wir Scrum bei Liip mittlerweile getrieben haben. So ist das konsequente Besetzen aller Rollen ohne Personalunion heute selbstverständlich, die Methode innerhalb der Firma absolut unbestritten und die Zusammenarbeit mit dem Kunden transparenter denn je.

Feste Teams mit etabliertem Flow und beständiger Velocity und die Konzentration auf Business Value befähigen uns heute, Projekte von Beginn mit maximiertem ROI (Return On Investment) anzupeilen. Mit traditionellen Methoden ein Ding der Unmöglichkeit.  Dazu notwendig ist aber auch eine Firmenkultur, die den Umgang mit jedem Individuum im Sinne einer Meritokratie und nicht verlockend herkömmlich als Hierarchie lebt. Viel davon ist wohl durch unser langjähriges Open Source Engagement sowieso fest verankert.

So freut natürlich die Einschätzung von Peter, die kaum völlig falsch sein wird:

"My first external training and coaching customer was Liip AG. I gave them their first introduction to Scrum back in 2007, and helped them with some additional training and retrospectives over the years. In no company have I done less and seen more come of it than at Liip (my suspicion is that they already had Scrum Values in their DNA). In any case, they are growing rapidly and organically while going from one Master of Swiss Web to the next."

Und hier noch die - nicht ganz Corporate Design kompatiblen - Slides.

Two weeks ago, the first edition of the Agile Tour Lausanne took place. Luckily, Liip proposed me to sponsor some of my working time in order to prepare it.

It was the first conference I ever organized and I must say that if you are interested in doing something similar, just go for it! It is really a great experience!

Thanks to my co-organizers Yann Lugrin, Jonas Vonlanthen and Frédéric Noyer, we managed to get more than 60 attendees - which was beyond our expectations.

The Agile Tour organization

As introduced on its website, the Agile Tour organization aims to "massively communicate about Agile, share their visions of Agile, federate and support people and local businesses in regions" once a year during October and November, all around the world.

Each event is self-organized and should involve as many local people (organizers, speakers, attendees) as possible; the goal to keep in mind being to "create leaderships" in a lot of regions of the world in order to "impact the professional world".

The last part of the previous sentence is the most meaningful to me as it's exactly what we try to achieve every day at Liip.

In Switzerland, Lausanne is the third city organizing such an event - after Sierre and Geneva. Nevertheless, we thought there was enough space between Sierre and Lausanne to not overlap too much and also because the Agile Tour is not about competition, but about acting as a community.

In that spirit, we were even coached by the already existing Agile Tour Sierre team (thanks again Jean-Pierre Rey!) to benefit from their experience.

The conference - a short summary

We prepared the day so that it was mainly focused on real world experience feedbacks of Agile practices, and more specifically Scrum.

As we were expecting part of the attendees not having any background knowledge about the Agile topic, we decided to start the day with theoretical presentations.

It was a very good choice because it created a common knowledge basis for the following discussions which happened during lunch and coffee breaks.

Then in the afternoon, we organized talks showing real use cases. Companies like jobup.ch, l'Etat de Genève and Liip presented how they deal with Agility in their daily business.

If you weren't able to join us, you can easily go through the speaker slides that you can find on the Agile Tour Lausanne website.

The conference - follow-up

As the attendees know, we asked all the participants to fill an evaluation form in order to gather feedbacks.

Hence, we will have soon our retrospective (an Agile event has no choice but to use Scrum itself) to check what people thought of their day and see how we can improve - and maybe an Agile Tour Lausanne 2012 will be announced afterwards.

I'm just back from the J.Boye Web and Intranet conference in Aarhus, Denmark. I went there to participate in the IKS Semantics UX contest that I had the honor to win. This invitation gave me a great opportunity to be a part of this unique conference. I would like to spend some time to share my thoughts with you on it.

The conference

Why is this conference unique? Because it focuses on the Web and Intranet from a user perspective. It is the perfect place for large organization members to share experiences, ask questions openly and discuss a broad range of themes that varies from going mobile to health oriented intranets. The talks were thus not really made for me and as much as I found them clear and well presented, they didn't rock my world. But that's fine, because I'm not the target audience and it's also my professional responsibility to be informed and on the front of the wave. On the other hand and as you can imagine, being a vendor in the middle of all these users was really great.

The social aspect

I didn't try to pitch for Liip so much because it was clear that this went against the spirit of the conference. What I tried to do was to be as open as the rest of the crowd and try to participate and help answering some questions and problems that most of web project managers, social strategists and intranet managers have. The effect has been tremendous, I ended up having enlightening and rich discussions on many different aspects of the business I'm in. I was surprised and astonished to see how much Liip and my professional experiences generally seemed to interest and impress others a lot. I heard many times "Oh really, and I thought there was no way to get this done...".

Conclusions

Here is a small list of some conclusion I could make after so many discussions.

On Mobile strategies:  Niwea is the trend governments and large corporations adopts for their intranet strategies.

On User Experience practices: Doing the workshops that Liip does (the 5S model) and integrating the UX process into SCRUM clearly appealed to the people.

On CMSs: Decoupled components and going away from a monolitic block is the future of CMS, open or not. We try to reach that with Symfony CMF

On project management: Successful project with SCRUM were common contrary to more traditional approaches that brought mostly cost explosions and years late delivered projects. 

I have more examples but what I would like to share here is that this conference has been an incredible chance to get a strong validation that Liip has a great strategy. It's difficult to phrase the overwhelming feeling that I constantly felt during the conference. Liip is doing the right thing, answering real needs and in the perfect way. The best part is that's it's not me saying this, it's the sum of validation I brought back with me.

On top of that I met some really great folks, inspiring, sometime challenging, always interesting and extremely open. This openness is the main speciality of the conference and make it totally worth it. It's my take home message. Be open minded, don't close yourself in a mentality and keep listening to other, there is everything to win doing that!

Few weeks ago with some liipers we registered to watch the web performance summit. This is a conference taking place on the web, which is nice as you don't have to physically travel to some remote location to attend the talks. The downside of it being obviously that you cannot meet and talk to people.

The conference runs for a full day (8 hours worth of presentations) and can be viewed live or later on. We didn't manage to stay up till the end of it as the conference was schedule for happening during American day time, which more or less translate to European evening.

Anyway we have already watched a good part of it and another viewing session is about to be schedule soon for those who couldn't attend it.

In general the conference was interesting and the talkers made a good job at presenting their content. I personally found the following talks of particular interest.

Achieving Better Image Optimization by Billy Hoffman

This talk is about how you can gain performance by properly handling you image resources. Billy goes in every detail to explain us which file format to choose and what compression options are available. In most case he claims that you can reduce your images size by a significant percentage without losing any [viewable] quality.

It is known since some time that compressing your website's assets (js, css, html) is a good thing to do in order to make it faster. What Billy is pointing at, is that, although it is good to compress your css and js and you should still doing it, it would be much more efficient to start compressing your images as they usually represent the biggest part of the bandwidth used to transmit data from your webserver to your the web clients. Usually images account for about 75% of your page weight so reducing this amount will have a bigger impact than reducing the 25% page weight of the other assets.

Then a good part of the talk is dedicated to how to reduce your image size while keeping as much quality as possible. I would recommend any of you to have a look at this talk or at the slides. Even if you cannot remember all details just being aware of those concerns will be of great help to make your site faster.

Improving Request and Response Headers by Kyle Simpson

In this talk Kyle Simpson talks about all those request/response headers that are of little value and can be sometime a waste of bandwidth. Of course anyone would argue that headers are usually small enough to be insignificant compared to the html and images of a web page. But Kyle points out that those extra bytes sent and received can represent a large bandwidth consumption when we are talking about a website with a large audience and many thousand of HTTP requests per day.

One of the biggest waste is due to cookies. This header can get [relatively] big on many website (on average around 200 and 400 bytes). Although every one knows the usefulness of cookie, it is rarely acknowledge that they are useless in 80%, if not more, of your requests. Can anyone tell me what use of cookie can be done when getting a css file or an jpeg image? Bear in mind that the cookies are also sent back with the response, doubling the uselessness of those couple of hundred bytes in such cases.

The solution to this is simply to have your static assets served from another domain than your website. Being on another domain the browser won't send those cookie information and you will save some bandwidth and increase your website speed.

You can have a look here to find a written down version of what Kyle talked about in this talk.

Performance in Business Terms by Joshua Bixby

This talk from Joshua Bixby somehow echoed the keynote I have seen at Phpday 2011 by Steve Souders. In both of them, one of the main argument is that performance is your website's number 1 feature. This is almost contradictory to the popular believe that speed is not important as long as you have a long list of feature.

Well apparently this is wrong. Speed is important and to such an extent that the revenue you generate from your website depends on it. Many studies done by different website and organization (including amazon.com) found a strong correlation between your website's speed and the cash it generates. This is mostly true for merchant website but not only. To make it more general: if your website is fast then users will have pleasure to use and so will use it more. And the more they use it, the better it is. This will trigger more sells, more ad print, and more widespread awareness of your website and so on. So all in all it is good whatever your site business is.

To wrap up I believe that we should get more awareness about those simple things that can make your website faster as we all benefit from it, our users are happier, we spare on resources (bandwidth, storage, electrical) and we have a chance to increase our business (in the most general sense of it).

I spent Monday and Tuesday in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress. It's Europe's must-attend annual gathering of the mobile industry. Spread over four days, usually over 50'000 people visit it.

On day one, i explored the massive exhibition area looking at some Impressive new mobile hardware:

• Samsung Galaxy S II Phone: 4.3" Screen, Dual-Core Processor, 116g, 1650mAh Battery
• Samsung Galaxy Tab: 10.1" Display, Dual Core Processor
• LG Optimus Pad: 8.9" Tablet, OMAP4 Processor, 3D-Camera
• Motorola Xoom Tablet: 10.1" Display, Dual Core Processor, 1GB RAM
• Motorola Atrix Phone: 1930mAh Battery, 4" Display, Dual-Core Processor
• HP Touchpad Tablet: 9.7" Screen, Dual-Core Processor
• HP Veer Phone: 2.6" Screen, 800Mhz Processor, 103grams
• HP Pre3 Phone: 3.6" Screen, 1.4 Ghz Processor

It's amazing if you compare a 5 year old PC with today's smartphones in terms of available computing power .. and you can carry that computing power around with you all day and hope that the battery will last.

On day two, i explored the software side more:

How can a phone possible replace a PC, a notebook or even a Settopbox for our TV? At the Motorola booth, i saw a possible answer:

The Atrix Phone can be docked to a docking station or even a notebook shell (just keyboard and screen). You then start a separate work environment on the Phone (called WebTop) that comes with a Browser, OpenOffice and other Applications. When the Phone is removed from the dock, the state of these applications is saved. When the phone is docked to a docking station connected to a TV, you can start the Entertainment Environment, which is basically a MediaCenter interface, but also running on your phone and controlled with a remote.

At HP's booth you could also see interesting ideas how to interconnect different devices (Phones, Tablets):

- "Touch-to-Share" let's you place your phone on your tablet and then the URL of the website that is currently open on your tablet is transferred instantly to the Phone. 

- After tablet and phone are paired and share the same account, you can read SMS received on the phone on the tablet or even make/receive phone calls on the tablet (routed through the phone)

After the international LIFT11 NIWEA workshop in Geneva, the conspiracy is coming back to Zurich: join us for the NIWEA Briefing Zürich, a TechTalk in the "Internet Briefing" series. Hannes will be introducing the idea of "native interoperable web apps", we'll demo and discuss that third way in between good old web pages and the "there's an app for that" world strongly tied to Apple & Co. What do those mechanisms mean for developers, what's a sustainably tech and business strategy in this more-than-dynamic environment?

• When: 2011/03/01, 11.30-14.00
• Where: Ristorante Falcone, Birmensdorferstrasse 150, Zürich
• How much: free for "Internet Briefing" members, but 80.- for the rest of us. Sign up here.
• Too much: we can get some of you guys on the guest list though, so leave a comment or a tweet (with a name and your motivation, perhaps). 

The Web is dead? Well if so, it's one cute happy zombie :)

Last week, a happy dozen of Liipers boarded Lift11 - and had a most awesome time. The array of people we met during session breaks, at the coffee station or in workshops was downright impressive. It's the place were you eat lunch with some random guy - and understand only later that this was Claude Nicollier, the legendary ONE and ONLY Swiss astronaut. Learning: pay attention to people without badges... they may be important :)

What did the Liip attendees get out of the conference? Thomas Botton for instance said that he "was surprised by the variety of people (age, gender, horizons) and the quality and diversity of lift topics". Jonas Vonlanthen "felt a relaxed ambiance with good timing and enough time for networking". Joël Bez summarized that "Lift11 was a blast of inspiration. A creativity boost I can bring back in my everyday job". Brian King mentioned that "While it's a technologically focused conference, the audience and speakers came from a wide range of backgrounds; the many different points of view lead to rich discussions". Sébastien Roche raised that "Brian Solis notion of social currency allow us to build our social capital, you are what you expose on these networks! So let's take the control of your online-you and stop complaining". Hannes' conclusion, after having seen Lucie (picture below), Jennifer and Honor on stage was a simple one: "Space Girls Rule!".

^{Lucie Green by http://photo.naepflin.com}

The initiatives, workshops and talks done by Liipers were very well received, too. Memi Beltrame's speech about his project Artypedia earned a tremendous applause. Jordi's and Pierre's forward-looking approach of a "Digital Media Consumption Manifesto" with appropriate distribution models was not only a workshop success but also got a lot of attention the last few days, and instantly won thousands of followers: see http://dontmakemesteal.com. Hannes' NIWEA (Native Interoperable Web Apps) workshop helped mapping the technology/innovation/money space of current app economies - results will be published soon, right here.

All I can add is that it just felt great to be at Lift11. With its openness, diversity and unique perspective on the future it certainly is the place to be - as curious individuals, and as a company as well... and leave our traces ;-)

Thank you Lift and see you in 2012!

LIFT in Geneva is one of Europe's leading innovation conferences, an annual gathering at the intersection of technology, society, media and culture. While Liipers have traditionally been attending LIFT since its very beginning, this year LIFT just happens to be pretty .. liipalized. There's going to be plenty of Liipers around, doing lots of stuff:

• Liip UX specialist Memi is presenting Artypedia in the Open Stage segment, a project redefining art, no less.
• Developers Jordi and Pierre will do a manifesto workshop called Don't make me steal.
• Managing partner Gerhard will be on site as well and taking part in a special workshop on the future of conscious energy consumption.
• Liip board member Hannes is going to take care of a workshop on NIWEA, helping with etoy's M∞ workshop, will be addressing the guests in the newcomer welcome session and is currently taking care of a little series on the LIFT blog called "Schwizerdütschi Startups" (see #1), too.
• Finally, Liip is also going to be present with some offical offline branding installation (you'll see!). Plus, Liipers Benoît, Brian, Joël, Jonas, Laurent, Sébastien and Thomas are going to be there, too.

So yes indeed, LIFT11: you'll officially be liipalized! :)

The conference promises to be awesome once again, so if you're going too, please drop us a line - we're all very much looking forward to seeing you in Geneva to sharing ideas, knowledge and, of course, a great fondue!