Gorillas can be Agile with any project

Some days I was so thankful for the fact I worked in a three story building. It made the urge to toss myself off it, to end the misery, so much less. Unless If I  was really lucky I'd just end up hurting myself and that would just add to the miserable condition I was in.

Hogarth was right... Oh how I hated to think those three words. It was becoming such a common occurrence that I was considering adding to the law's of nature. The sun comes up in the east, politicians are lying when their lips are moving and Hogarth is always right. This time it had to do with my implementation of Agile. Agile may be the silver bullet of development but I hadn't had the first idea how to properly implement it.

So I'd swallowed the pill and went out and figured out just what Agile was. Leaning back in my chair I took in the remains of that discovery. Highsmith was leaning on Adkins and the two were threatening to push Cockburn off the desk. Larsen and Cohn were glaring at me from under the coffee cup perched on them. The books stared back at me mutely, mocking my pain and despair. Tilting my head back to stare at the ceiling I moaned. "Kill me now..."

"What and miss all the fun?"

I kept my eyes closed and used every ounce of my will to imagine away the voice that had spoken.

"Not gonna work," Hogarth replied. "Your subconscious really likes me, so you're stuck with me."

Pulling my gaze from the acoustical tile I fixed Hogarth with a baleful gaze. "Remind me to schedule myself for a lobotomy."

Hogarth was perched on the large window ledge. His black fur shimmering in the afternoon sunlight and his face was split with a contended grin. "Now why on earth would you want to give up all this?" His huge paw swept in an all encompassing arc that took in my cube and then the rest of the office beyond.

"Because there is no way on earth I'm going to get the company to adopt Scrum for real!" I poked at the stack of books. "It’s a far cry between some structural artifacts and the real meaning of Agile and the company is about as unagile as you can get."

Hogarth nodded, "Well yeah, I think we covered the whole artifacts part already" He snaked an arm out the open window and broke off a branch from the tree outside. Snacking on the branch he said, "You've recognized the real problem so what's the issue?"

"There is no way on earth I'll ever get this company to go agile."

"Agile or Scrum?" Hogarth asked.

"What's the difference?" I shot back.

"A single sapling a forest does not make..."

Scrum is an Agile Framework - Scrum is not the only way to practice Agile.

When these kind of comments are thrown out, the typical response is something like "Well of course, there's Kanban, Lean, or XP."  And those folks are right, these are other frameworks or methodologies  of Agile. And at the same time I think we end up missing the bigger picture. To understand this, we need to look into the roots of Agile.

Agile has two foundational roots. The most obvious is the gathering of software luminaries that created the Agile Manifesto. Agile wasn't some earth shaking new concept. What it was, was the joint thinking of seventeen software developers who had been practicing various lightweight development methods and how what was the common, foundational values of these methods.  At its heart Agile was a new language to explain long standing best practices, values and principles. If you think about it, in a light weight Agile way, it is the Agile PMBoK. (Remember that the PMBoK is also not a methodology, but a set of standard terminology and guidelines for project management.)

The other foundational root goes back to the precursors of Lean manufacturing, to the Toyota Way. Like the Agile Manifesto, it was not until 2001 that Toyota published the "Way." But in Toyota's case it was not for lack of use. Toyota revolutionized automotive manufacturing with their unique style and for decades US companies tried to match it. It's not as if Toyota was a walled garden. They cheerfully gave tours of their plants to any and all comers. Why? Because they knew the artifacts of their process were not the key. The key was their six underlying principles, such as "Respect for People," and "Add value to your organization by developing your people and partners."

So what's your point?

Ah yes, this is not a history lesson and I am trying  to make a point.

Today I read a great blog that sums up my point nicely. Ben Horowitz wrote about Lead Bullets, on TechCrunch. The kernel of this is to not go looking for the silver bullet solution, instead use the bullets you have and shoot better.

I've heard stunning success stories in the use of Agile Methodologies (Scrum, XP, Lean, etc.) In nearly all of these instances, the support and engagement was across the board high. It was the right time, the right people, the right need and so on. The Perfect Project Storm. In these cases the silver bullet was the only bullet and it was a dead shot.

And I've seen people try and use the Agile silver bullet and have the organization smother them alive. I like to remind people that silver bullets only work against werewolves. If you are facing a ghost, you're kind of out of luck. When faced with an organization that is highly resistant, highly process driven, highly dysfunctional, etc. trying to dive into the deep end of the Agile pool tends to only end up in the Agile project and team being drowned.

I'm even more depressed now, wasn't there a point?

Yes! The point is Agile isn't just an umbrella over methodologies,  like Scrum and Lean. Agile is a set of guiding principles that can be used ANYWHERE. Where is it wrong to have good teamwork? When is it wrong to make sure the customer is getting what they want? If the process plan says to roll the parts cart around the outside of the building twice, before entering, is it wrong to ask "Why?"

Enter the Agile Manager. You don't have to be using Scrum to be Agile. You can use the principles of Agile anywhere . You can make any team better, if you try.

In short, don't let bad methodology get in the way of good management.

Focus on the team and the project will improve. That's Agile.

Joel Bancroft-Connors

The Gorilla Project Manager

Want me to talk to your gorilla? Send me an email

You can follow me on twitter, @JBC_PMP

Who is Hogarth? Read Blog 001 to find out all about my personal gorilla.  

Indiana Gorilla and the Artifacts of Agile

"Okay and Eric, you were working on the shopping cart ordering story, right?"

Eric nodded, but remained silent.

"And tomorrow you should be done and moving on to the Wish List story, right?"

He nodded again, still silent. He was a good engineer, never spoke unless he really had something to say.

"Any impediments?"

Eric looked around the table at the other seated engineers. None of them met his gaze, intent on their own computers. Then he shrugged and turned back to me. "No."

"Ah, excellent!" I gave a thumbs up sign to the assembled team. "Great stand up, guys, I'll see you all again tomorrow."

I happily began entering data into my uber status report spreadsheet and didn't notice the engineers talking quietly amongst themselves as they filed out.

I was cheerfully humming away five minutes later, when Hogarth wandered in. I looked up and pointed at my uber sheet projecting on the wall screen. "Man, this Scrum stuff is great! I love the daily standups. Just great to have everyone giving daily reports on their status. Can you imagine? A year ago I had to hound them for their slide decks every week and I almost never got a full report."

Hogarth cast a glance at the screen, before he flopped down near the window. Reaching out the window he pulled a branch from the tree outside. After a careful examination of the branch, he used it to point at the screen. "Pretty picture, but you know its completely wrong, right?"

"What!?" I turned to stare at him. "What on earth are you talking about? The project is going great! Look at that burndown! I just cross referenced it with my detailed MS Project file and we are at least a week ahead of schedule. We're doing AWESOME!"

Hogarth shook his head. "Nope, all an illusion. Take Eric for example, he's got a massive database integration issue that's going to end up making all of his stories crash and burn. He's stumped on how to solve the problem and it is going to cascade into a total failure of the storefront in about two sprints."

I blinked. "What on earth are you talking about? Eric just walked out of here and he didn't say word one about any issues."

Hogarth nodded, pealing a long strip of bark from the tree branch. "Course he didn't, no point saying anything if you're not going to listen to him."

"What?" I said incredulously. "We just had our stand up! I was sitting right here! I didn't set up all these Agile meetings just to have things be the same as before!"

"Just because you have the magical artifact, doesn't mean you have a clue how to use it."

"What?" I hated it when Hogarth spoke in riddles.

Hogarth rolled his eyes. "You remember in the original Indiana Jones, the Germans had the Ark of the Covenant?"

I stared at Hogarth, "I don't have time for movie quizzes, Hogarth." He gave me a "humor me" look and I sighed in surrender. "Yes, I remember. It ended pretty badly for them."

Hogarth nodded. "Ayup, they had the artifact. But they didn't know how to use it. If you put a MacDonald's fry cook in the Iron Chef kitchen, he's not magically going to become a great chef. The tools don't make the chef, the chef does."

I stared at him for a long minute.

"Ah, crap…"

Agile Artifacts vs. Agile Values: Holding Daily Standups, planning work in two week iterations, and tracking progress on a burn down chart are all excellent tools for the Agile team. They are not  Agile. Agile is a set of values and principles. It's more about the how of team and not the what of the product.

You can't take a handful of engineers, start having them meet once a day, and declare yourself Agile. Like Hogarth's examples from above, having a tool (A Daily Standup is a Tool/Artifact) and knowing how to use it are two entirely different things. And the more advanced that tool, the more knowledge you need to use it.

Back in college I got a part time job at a little coffee shop/deli (Back before Starbucks took over the world). The owner was a quiet Turkish man who wouldn't let me touch the espresso machine until after I'd learned not only the history of coffee but the why's of exactly how the machine worked (this was an old manual style machine, no automatic buttons or anything). I must have frothed gallons of milk before he let me pour a single ounce into a customer's cup. He told me, "To make good coffee, one must first understand coffee."

Success in Agile requires a look beyond the tangible of meetings, code drops, requirements documents and into the heart of how the organization runs. The values and principles are as much, if not more about the team and not the product trying to be made. Make a better team and you make a better product.

Throw around a bunch of Agile Artifacts, like a five year old using a Ginsu Steak knife set, and you just replace one bad process with another.

Joel Bancroft-Connors

The Gorilla Project Manager

Want me to talk to your gorilla? Send me an email

You can follow me on twitter, @JBC_PMP

Who is Hogarth? Read Blog 001 to find out all about my personal gorilla.  

Death by PowerGorilla

C… O… C… L… S… I… O… N…

The typewriter sound as each letter flew onto the screen gave me a satisfied grin. Nothing like great sound effects to go with some killer slide animation. It had taken me the better part of a week, but I was done with the quarterly report. It was my first report and I was determined to make it memorable.

I hit save and sat back to wait for status bar to creep towards complete.

"You misspelled 'conclusion."

"What?" I spun around so fast I nearly spilled my coffee.

Hogarth was perched in on the window sill soaking in the late afternoon sunlight. He pointed a half-eaten fichus branch at my computer, "you misspelled 'conclusion.' Easy to do when you put spaces between each letter."

I turned back to my computer and groaned in realization. He was right. To make a better visual impact I'd put each letter in their own text box and had them spaced across the screen. I was missing the U. "Okay," I said, "thanks for the catch. Soon as this is done saving I'll fix it."

"Done saving?" Hogarth's voice showed a level of genuine confusion I wasn't used to in his voice.

I nodded. "Yeah, should be another twenty seconds."

"How big is your file?" He asked. By now it was starting to dawn on me that he was really confused and I tried not to smile at that. For once I was in the position of knowledge over him. This was great.

"About seventy slides, but the file itself is around twenty-five megabytes."

A fine spray of chewed fichus leaves showered across my back, with no small amount of spray coming over my shoulder to coat my screen. "HEY!" I yelped. Turning about in my chair I looked at Hogarth. He had somehow managed to fall off his perch and was on his hands and knees wiping plant matter from his lips. "What the heck was that for?"

Picking himself up, he recovered the, mostly-eaten branch and looked at me. "I'm sorry did you just say twenty-five megabytes?"

I nodded, "yeah, animations take up a lot of memory."

"Any seventy slides? Don't you only have twenty minutes to present?"

I nodded again, not seeing where he was going.

Hogarth did some math on his fingers. "Let's see, that's an average of 3.5 slides per minute or one slide approximately every 17 seconds."

I shrugged, "Yeah, that does seem like a lot, but the project is miserable shape and we have a lot to cover."

"And you think if you bludgeon the execs over the head with a twenty-five meg file they'll be too senseless to ask question?"

"Huh?" I replied.

Hogarth sighed. "Slides are there to make a point, not to bludgeon your audience into a stupor."

"Huh?"

Hogarth looked heavenward with a "why me" look. Returning to look at me he said, "You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother."

"What?" I stared at Hogarth as if he'd grown and second head. "What kind of poppycock water cooler wisdom advice is that? That's got to be from some arm chair TV shrink, right?"

"Albert Einstein" 

"Oh…"

Sometimes it can be so very easy to make your point. And sometimes it can be so very, very hard. Unfortunately it seems that, all to often, the way we try and explain something is to throw more words at it. I'm certainly guilty of this one. Why try to explain something in ten words when one hundred will do?

Because by the time I get to thirty words, my listener is asleep, tuned out, moved on or made up their answer.

Man spent centuries practicing the art of communication. Great orators could empower a speech with nothing but their words and body language. When you think of famous speeches names like Kennedy, Caesar,  Churchill. These great speakers used their words and their gestures to communicate everything they needed to say.

Visual aids of course factored into even famous speeches and the advertising industry grew up around iconic images that conveyed an incredible amount of words, in single images. The crying Indian, the Marlboro Man, the hungry child, the oh so appetizing looking TV Dinner. But these were individual images. They were there to support the words being spoken, to anchor our minds to those words. They were not there to be the message.

Then suddenly it was as if man had forgotten the power of speech. The universe handed us  PowerPoint and we said, "this is good." We started putting everything into these mighty slide decks. Why show one table, when we could show twenty? Why memorize anything when we could put all the text on the slide. Heck, why even bother to present, just send the slides to your audience and ask for questions by email. And so came to pass the terms "eye chart" and "death by PowerPoint."

Did you know that Sweden has a political party right now who's sole platform is the desire to outlaw the use of PowerPoint in government?

PowerPoint is a visual aid. An aid, as in "to help or give assistance." Assistance, not to be the subject, but to assist the subject.

Manager Tools has a great podcast on slides for business presentations. They recommend no more than one slide for every five minutes of presentation time. Like many experts they recommend no more than five bullet points.  Don't use animation. They also stress that the slides are to support the conclusion not to present information. You don't show a graph of population data to let the viewer decipher. You show the specific result that supports your point.

These are great tips for a business slide deck and good starting guidance for a speaker deck. Speaker decks are more focused on backing up the physical speech and the rules are not as strict, you can even get away with some animations. Within reason. I recall Manager Tools describing a truly awful sales presentation. The woman had every single letter flying in, one at a time. And to make it worse, she had her computer piped into the auditorium speakers and every letter made a typewriter sound.

When I think of greater speaker decks, I really like one I saw recently by Bernie Maloney on building Rabid Rapport. It's  48 slides, which breaks the MT rules on one every 5 minutes, but the entire deck is focused on backing up the words Bernie spoke. Honestly I think the best speaker decks are the ones that make nearly no sense if you just look at the slide decks. Bernie's does a great job of that.

I'm currently working on an hour long speech for the PMI Silicon Valley annual Symposium. For a 9000 word speech, I have a slide deck with less than 550 words. Many of these are repeat words and only two pages exceed twenty-five words and only one exceeds 50 words. The animation consists entirely of replacing one image with another or with adding another, large image to an existing slide.

You can make your point with out bludgeoning your audience to death with your slides.

Joel Bancroft-Connors

The Gorilla Project Manager

Want me to talk to your gorilla? Send me an email

You can follow me on twitter, @JBC_PMP

Who is Hogarth? Read Blog 001 to find out all about my personal gorilla.  

The Angry Gorilla: Emotion is your choice.




Photo from Wikipedia



"I CAN'T BELIEVE THE NERVE!" I stormed into my office, barely catching the door before I slammed it for all it was worth. I compensated for the averted door slam by tossing my notebook across the room. Stalking after it, I noticed Hogarth reclining in the corner of the room. I didn't even look at him, I was in no mood to have my head shrunk by a pseudo- imaginary gorilla who'd watched one too many Dr. Phil episodes. "Don't even start, I am NOT in the mood."

I threw myself into my chair, threatening to topple it over in the process. I glared sightlessly at my computer monitor. I was too agitated to even scan my recent emails. It was all I could do to not grab the monitor and throttle it like I wanted to throttle Bob's snake-like next. Finally I calmed down enough to scoop my battered notebook up off the floor.



Photo by astrogrl - Flickr.com



Sitting back up I noticed Hogarth again. He was sitting in the corner of the room, not speaking or moving. He just sat there calmly looking in my direction. I snorted and tossed my book on the desk. "Not gonna work, hairball. You can't fix this with a few pithy sayings and making me twist my mind around to look at itself from behind."

Hogarth just sat there, unblinking. His placid face betrayed no hint of emotion.

I grunted and turned to my computer. I might as well get some work done.

Five minutes later I threw up my hands in surrender. Turing to the still silent Hogarth I said, "Fine, you win!"

Hogarth didn't respond. He just laid his hands in thighs and cocked his head to the side.

"The team just demoed the product to the CEO. He was really impressed with how the workflow was improved. He said 'Best damn idea I've seen in a long time."

Hogarth just blinked. Still I could hear the question. "So? So Bob took credit for it. Complete and total credit for it. The lily livered slime bag had the nerve to take credit for the work!"

Hogarth just looked at me.

I sighed. "Bob's idea for the workflow was a miserable failure. The team tossed it out and came up with something from complete scratch. Sure it fit Bob's stated user requirements, but it had nothing to do with Bob's actual ideas." I smacked the table in frustration. "And there wasn't anything I could do about it. If I'd told the real truth, it would have looked like I was tossing Bob under the bus. He may be a spineless product manager, but I'm not going to lower myself to that level."

I clenched my fists, fighting back the desire to pound on the desk. "Oh he makes me so MAD!"

And then Hogarth finally spoke. "No, he did not make you mad."

"What?" I stared at my gorilla with blatant incredulity. "I'm furious. I damn near took the door off its hinges and I think I dented my desk. How the hell can you say that Bob didn't make me angry?"

Hogarth spoke, his voice calm and Yoda-like. "Anger you, Bob did not. Chose to be angry yourself, did you."

I shook my head, not sure I'd heard Hogarth clearly. "Hogarth, he just took credit for the entire project and you want to tell me he didn't make me mad?"

My gorilla nodded his head. "Yes."

"Have you been sniffing the white out? That's the most ludicrous thing I've heard you say all month. How on earth is it he didn't make me mad?"

Hogarth folded his hands in his lap and leaned back against the wall. Speaking from under half-lidded eyes he said, "between stimulus and response, lies the ability to choose."

"Really, Hogarth, you need to stop buying self-help books at Kmart. What quack shrink said that?"

Hogarth opened one eye and looked my way. "Stephen Covey."

"Oh…"

Anyone who's ever said Project Management isn't a stressful job probably defines fun as "poking hot needles in their eyes." Project Management can be high stress, high conflict and highly political. Mark Horstman, Manager-Tool.com, points out "What junior employees call politics, executives call doing business."

So the stress and conflict are part and parcel to the job we do. What we do about it though, is completely in our control.

Stephen Covey says in 7 habits of a Highly Effective Person "Between stimulus and response, lies the ability to choose." It is the kind of phrase you might expect from a Zen master or Yoda and in his own ways, Covey is the Jedi teacher of business. It's an incredibly simple concept and as powerful as it is simple.

We project managers are bombarded from a hundred different angles every single day. We face reluctant teams, self centered sales reps, political managers, oblivious executives and more. At least that's what we tend to describe them as when in reality we are dealing with teams that are unsure of next steps or feeling insecure with their positions, sales reps that are paid to make sales and if they don't they don't get paid, managers who recognize business is a series of give and takes and executives that must make a hundred decisions a day to keep the company moving and you probably are only aware of three of those.

Human nature is pretty quick to assign emotional content to everything. Being an effective project manager means focusing not on the emotions but on the behaviors. Behaviors are the words one says, how one says them (tone and inflection), facial expressions, body language, and work product (timeliness, quality, documents, delivery, etc.).

• Bob's slouching in the meeting, that must mean he doesn't care about the project. No, what it means is Bob got two hours of sleep last night because his son fell off the porch and broke his arm. Bob was in the ER until two in the morning.

• Mary just wrinkled her nose. She thinks your idea is horrible. No, Bob smells like a sweat sock and Mary has a really sensitive nose.
• Alexi just called the project "bad and bloated," he's being insulting and condescending. No, Alexi is a native Russian speaker and he watched an urban comedy last night. He meant to say "phat" not "bloated" and was trying to say he thought the project was "cool."

Once we recognize that we should be looking at people's behaviors, without assigning emotional bias, then we have to start working on our own response. Maybe Bob did intend to completely undercut you and hog all the glory. Is slamming your door and breaking your desk going to make things better? Will your boss blame Bob for having to shell out money for a new computer monitor? More importantly, will anyone want to work with you? Bob may have been underhanded and greedy, but you are the one and only person responsible for your response to his actions.

Being a great project manager means taking the high road, a lot.

Just remember "The man poking you in the chest does not make you angry. You make yourself angry."

Joel Bancroft-Connors

The Gorilla Project Manager

Want me to talk to your gorilla? Send me an email

You can follow me on twitter, @JBC_PMP

Who is Hogarth? Read Blog 001 to find out all about my personal gorilla.

The patient Gorilla: When Risk Management means you wait

"Listen, Jake, I need something here." I leaned in over his desk, doing my best convincing look..

The development manager shook his head. "We're in the middle of a sprint. When the sprint is over I can pull Eric from the team for the next sprint and have him focus on this."

I sighed. He was right. No matter how important this was, we were in the middle of a development sprint. We couldn't pull someone from the team like that. I nodded, "Thanks, Jake. I'll touch base with you next week, after the Sprint Demo."

I sulked back to my office, chewing my lip. In a week things could change completely. In a week it might not matter or worse it might be a total disaster. I turned around twice, intent on demanding Jake do something right now. Each time I only made it two steps before turning back. There wasn't anything that could be done right now, not without tossing the entire project into chaos. But… But...But… There was no way I'd be able to concentrate on anything else for the rest of the week.

With an ulcer slowly building I walked into my office. Hogarth was sitting in the corner, a branch from my nearly dead fichus held limply in one hand and a parchment gripped in the other. Making a mental note to buy a new fichus I dropped into my chair. "What's with the royal decree? " I waved towards the parchment in Hogarth's hand.

He looked up. Pointing with the hand holding the branch, he nearly impaled the parchment. "It's a notice of my reality review. It's tomorrow."

"Reality review?"

Hogarth nodded. "Every year. It determines if I continue to exist. Or, if like Descatres when he was asked if he wanted another drink and said "I think not," I disappear in a puff of unreality."

I blinked trying to wrap my head around the absolute ludicrous idea that Hogarth could just vanish in a puff of smoke. It was as absolutely incomprehensible as… I looked at my personal gorilla again and shook my head. Right, as unreal as a manifestation of my own conscience as a physical gorilla.  With my brief bout with reality past I returned my attention to Hogarth.

"But, that means you might not be?"

Hogarth nodded. "Ayup."

"What can you do?"

Hogarth shook his head. "Nothing, the review is based on my past years existence. This is just the findings, they've already made their decision."

Neatly avoiding the whole "who are they?" issue, I said. "Nothing?" Oh, that was brilliant! Way to state the obvious.

Hogarth nodded. "Yep." And then he calmly rolled up the paper, put it away (don't ask, I know he doesn't have pockets and I try not to think about that) and began pealing the bark from the fichus branch. "Oh well, I'll find out tomorrow."
 

I blinked again. 'Oh well?..' "How can you not be stressed about this? What are you going to do?"

Hogarth shrugged, "Right now? Nothing."

"Nothing?" I yelled. "How can you sit there and do nothing? Your very existence is on the line."

Hogarth nodded. "Yep."

"And you're going to do nothing?"

Hogarth rubbed his chin with a leathery hand. "You know, you're right. There's this new vegetarian Vietnamese  place down on 5th. Maybe I'll give that a try."

My first response was almost over powered by the desire to ask how a gorilla intended to be served in a public restaurant, but the first response won out. "Dinner? How can you be thinking about eating right now? We need a plan, we need to do something!"

Hogarth gazed at me with his deep-brown eyes. "Do what?"

"Well, umm… Ahh." 

Hogarth said, "Can I do anything about it right now?"

I struggled to find a different answer, but in the end I shook my head. "No. The review is tomorrow and they already made their decision."

Hogarth nodded, "Yep. So I'm going to go have a nice dinner. Tomorrow will come, when it comes and I'll find out then."

Just like the sprint would end at the end of the week…

Managing risk can be a study in Pepto-Bismol. So many factors can impact a project that one can go quite literally risk blind with all the potential impacts to your project. Even if you avoid the "acts of nature" like earth quakes, terrorist attacks, total global meltdown, you can quickly spiral a risk register into the dozens of entries, all of them a major potential impact.

This post isn't about risk management. While I have a lot to say on the subject, this post deals with risk management gone wrong. Once you've done your risk management, you have to have a certain amount of trust in your work. Okay, you've identified a major potential risk. If it happens, it will happen in three months. You've put in place a mitigation plan, you've put in avoidance plans. Now what?

It's three months away, stop worrying about it. Review it during normal risk reviews, but don't let it consume you.

This extends beyond just traditional risk management. It goes to every aspect of a project that you have no control over.

If we had four new headcount, that would solve our schedule issue. But you know that there is no way on earth the company will hire four new heads right now. So stop lamenting and move on.

You won't know if the build works until the compile is done. It's going to take six hours and finish at 2:00 AM. Go home, have dinner, go to bed and find out if it compiled when you get to the office at 8:00 AM.

You put an offer down on a house. The bank is considering the offer, but it's Friday and Monday is a holiday so it will be Tuesday before you have an answer. Don't sit by the phone all weekend and worry. Go out and have a normal weekend.

It's by no means a new concept. Reinhold Niebuhr came up with the Serenity Prayer in 1937 and it has become an oft quoted and parodied prayer. No matter your religion (or lack of) the core concept remains the same.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.

If you can't change it, don't sweat it. Go have dinner and focus on something you can change.

Joel Bancroft-Connors

The Gorilla Project Manager

Want me to talk to your gorilla? Send me an email

You can follow me on twitter, @JBC_PMP

Who is Hogarth? Read Blog 001 to find out all about my personal gorilla.