Intrinsic Motivation - way of managing a high performance team

Today is a big day for me, I have been given responsibility to manage a high performance team. For me, it is very important to understand what makes a team highly performing and intrinsically motivated. Creativity is a product of Intrinsic Motivation. Theorists Malone and Lepper define intrinsic motivation more simply in terms of what people will do without external inducement. Intrinsically motivating activities are those in which people will engage for no reward other than the interest and enjoyment that accompanies them. Malone and Lepper based on their research put together a list of factors that create  intrinsically motivating work environment:

• Challenge - people are best motivated while working toward personally meaningful goals whose attainment requires activities with optimal level of difficulty. The goals should align with people's self esteem.
• Curiosity - Simulating sensory (introducing abrupt changes) and cognitive curiosity (wonder about something)
• Control - everyone has a tendency to control, what happens to them, enable people to believe that their work will lead to the powerful effects.
• Fantasy - mental images of things and situations that are not really present to stimulate the behavior
• Competition - people feel satisfied when they compare their performance favorably to that of others. This has to be carefully balanced in a team setting.
• Cooperation - for some people, it is more satisfying by helping others achieve their goals.
• Recognition - people are satisfied and motivated when others recognize and appreciate their accomplishments. 

I am going to be working very hard on creating Intrinsically motivating environment for my high performance team. Any tips or suggestions is highly appreciated.

New Gmail features you do not want to miss

On May 23, 2010 I blogged about 3 Gmail tricks , today I would like to post some new Gmail features which have made me productive and more secured. First thing, you may have noticed that the gmail url is https:// now. This gives users extra confidence as far as security is concerned. Now about features:

1. Insert Invitation in email: when you compose a new gmail, you will notice Insert: Invitation link beside Attachment link. This is a nice piece of work for gmail calendar integration. If your friends use google calendar, you will be able to see their availability, when you pick a time for the event. Also, your friends will have your even added automatically to their calendar. 
2. How many times you regretted sending an email in hurry because you either click Reply All where as you wanted to tell the secret to just one person or just sent to wrong Larry. The undo features under Gmail Labs let you correct your mistakes in 5 seconds. Its too short but much better than nothing. Try enabling under settings -> Labs link. 
3. Call any phone from gmail: Notice a Call phone link which brings up the phone dialer as shown here. I haven't tried International calls but google says its dirt cheap. 

Google is bringing innovation to our daily life in the form of these easy to use technologies. Few years ago, I do not remember any free email provider bringing any new feature or innovation this quick. If you like any of the long lists of beta features under Labs link, please share with our reader by commenting below. Happy gmailing !

Creativity and unconciousness

A last couple of days, we were trying to come up on some innovative and creative solutions to a problem at work. Being distracted by myriad of things, I wanted to pause and take help from some of my favorites self help books. I have said before that I am a big fan of self help book like 59 Seconds by Dr. Richard Wiseman. He claims through various studies done in the past that when it comes to innovative ways to look at the world, there goes a lot more to your unconscious mind than you can imagine. When it comes to getting solution to the challenging problems, he suggests taking a break and let your conscious mind fully occupied by some word puzzles or Sudoku game. Before starting to play word puzzles or sudoku, just jot down the problems you are trying to solve. Once occupied by the game, simply without thinking too much, jot down possible thoughts and solutions to the problem.
Dr. Wiseman also provides some tips from his another book about creativity Did you spot the gorilla?
The three techniques he described are as follows:

1. Prime your mind: He suggests that after working feverishly on a problem or a project , give yourself a release of effort by doing something totally different such as visiting an art gallery, taking a train journey, or simply randomly browsing the internet without pushing yourself. Simply immerse yourself into novel ideas and experiences and leave your brain to find connections and create fortunate discoveries.
2. Change Perspective: According to Dr. Wiseman changing perspective helps find novel solutions. For example, thinking how a child, stupid, friend, artist or an accountant will approach the problem. He also suggests to apply analogous situations to your own problem by applying the "is like" rule. So, finding a bug in this code is like spotting deficiencies in a high performer employee. Thinking about how the problem will be solved in those situations and can this idea be applied to your situations.
3. Perceive: He suggests to switch your brain from auto-pilot mode to manual mode. When things become routine, brain turns to autopilot mode. Bring it to manual mode by bringing your curiousity towards life. Why do people laugh or why banana is yellow

See, if you can get in touch with your inner gorilla by practicing these. I am going to try and let you know if it worked for me :-)

By product of your smarter work

I am a regular reader of Jason Fried's column in the Inc. magazine. In general, I like his idea of sharing his work ethics, his best practices and his entrepreneurial skills with the readers. It provides him a FREE advertisement for his company 37 signals and his products and establishes him as a credible business leader.In the current issue of Inc. he wrote about how a smart business can utilize invisible by-product to generate a hefty sum of income. He explained, just like the lumber industry can sell its sawdust (a by-product of saw mill) a knowledge based business can sell many by-products which can generate money.
He always makes his case by telling his own story with confidence and this time, he explains about how he started using his own company's rented space to conduct training and seminars for his customers and partners and got the entire year rent covered by running few of these seminars.
I have practiced this myself when 13 years ago, I was asked by my employer Pentafour Software to go to Kolkata (India) and setup a training organization for the company to fulfill the great demand for AS/400 developers and system administrators in India and abroad. There were handful of trained and experienced AS/400 and RPG programmers available and the need for those skills were increasing day by day.Though my company was an IBM partner for hardware and software solutions, I don't think we were authorized training partner for AS/400 platform. That means we did not have access to IBM supplied training materials and course work. I was responsible to setup everything from scratch including setting up private network of student terminals connected to one server, creating training and lab exercises, instructing the students and helping them with lab work. It was trualy a one man show. On the first day of the program, I started with few hand written foils and my own coded sample programs. Slowly, I started to identify the by-products of our group effort when I encouraged my students to write their own creative samples and project report. I picked handful of creative samples and reports and selected them to include in my printed materials for the next batch. The by-product of our daily class discussions and random quizzes would serve as end of module tests and final exam. Needless to say that by-product of our daily work was giving us the value that I leveraged to instruct future courses.
Through out my professional engagement, I have used this model, sometime knowingly but sometime unknowingly. I used to speak frequently at COMMON user group conferences in the past and all those topics were by-product of my current work. My advice to folks who are wondering, how do they identify the by-product of their daily work or business they run:

• In software development, testing or services, if any problem in your day job has given you a severe headache and you were successful in resolving it, then there are good chances that a lot of other people might be looking for the solution too. Here, you got an opportunity to write about it, publish as an article or post in a forum. If solution is a novel idea or approach then it may be a candidate for patent. 
• If you have developed a nice system or processes to better support your customer, better supply chain for your products you sell, then chances are your system and processes have a market value too. You can very well productize them and make a good sum of money like Jason did.

If you have more ideas and would like to share, please do so by posting comments. Thanks!

Predictive analytics is the future

As the barrage of data grows - tweeter feeds, diabetic test(insulin meter) upload, billboard face recognition, website visits, facebook activities, traffic and weather information. Today businesses want to extract value from these data and the raw data itself  is becoming a key commodity. According to the Beuro of Labor Statistics estimate, there will be 20% job growth in the area of statistics and predictive analytics. IT companies are looking ahead and spending tons of money in this space. Recent acquisition of Unica by IBM($480 million ) proves that IBM is committed to lead in the area of Business Analytics.

• In March of this year IBM closed aquisition of NISC (National Interest Security Company) which strengthened IBM in public sector specially in the area of health, energy, defense and homeland security. 
• In June 2010, IBM announced IBM SPSS Decision Management product which was an upgraded SPSS analytics product. 
• Unica acquisition was announced a couple of days ago. Unica brings the predictive analytics for Marketing. 

Google has opened its own predictive analytics API for developers and businesses. Known as Google Prediction APIs, it provides simple interface to upload, train and predict on your own data at google's server. So, what are the skills and training needed to get into this growth market?

A good Java developer with solid database programming skills will be the winner. In addition working knowledge of Hadoop/MapReduce, Interactive query languages like BigQuery, JAQL will distinguish one from the crowd. NOte: The above links will provide navigation to developer's website where plenty of tutorial and exaples are available if you would like to have some hands-on experience with the technology. 

Create 3D images of your digital photos - Free

start3d.com morphs a couple of your still images taken at 3" apart into a lifelike 3D picture at its website free. You can view your pictures online for free and also order 3D prints online. Take a look. 3D is everywhere now but this website is one of the kind and was also awarded "Best website of the month" by Popular Science magazine.

Think a little, Change a lot !

I am a big fan of self-help books that offers tips and techniques based on solid scientific study. Richard Wiseman is no stranger for readers who relate personality, luck and human psychology. I have read his famous book The Luck Factor and when his latest book 59 seconds became available on Amazon, I didn't have to order it, my wife did before I could.
In this book, Dr. Wiseman offers very helpful distillation of pshycological research that can be applied by anyone. He is a master in presenting scientific studies on humans to convey very tough concepts in a language that everyone can understand. The book is divided into the chapters:

1. Happiness
2. Persuasion
3. Motivation
4. Creativity
5. Attraction
6. Relationships
7. Stress
8. Decision Making
9. Parenting
10. Personality

Here is a good one from Chapter 10 - Decision Making:

How to decide whether people are telling you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth

Dr. Wiseman points out that in his recent survey conducted with The Telegraph, a quarter of the respondents claimed to have told a lie within last 24 hours. According to his other studies, about 40 % of people have no problem lying to their friends and deception at workplace is a major problem. So what does Dr. Wiseman suggest in 59 sec?

He says...forget the old idea that liars have sweaty palms, fidget and avoid eye contact, instead look for a person suddenly becoming more static and cutting down on gestures. Recognize the sudden decrease in detail, increase in pause and hesitations, and the avoidance of the word "me", "mine" and "I" but an increase in "her" and "him". If someone becomes very evasive, press for a straight answer. He also suggests using a technique that researchers call an "honest baseline". Before asking questions that are likely to elicit deceptive answers, start with ones that are far more likely to make the person answer honestly. During these answers, develop your understanding of how they behave when the are telling the truth such as body language, choice of words etc.. During the trickier questions, observe the behavioral shift.

I am reading this book again...let me know, what you liked ..if you have read this book. 

Happy India Independence Day !!

Orthogonal Defect Classification - different approach to software defect classification

Software quality has always been a concern and bottleneck to enabling change in business. It is belived that software has not been able to keep pace with improvement in hardware and services, even though it is the biggest part of the the total IT cost a business has to  bear. There has been a lot of research in the area of software reliability and measurement in academics and industry. ODC or orthogonal defect classification is one of such schemes that came from IBM research almost 10 years ago. To understand ODC better lets understand the two proven way of measuring software reliability, Statistical defect model and qualitative causal analysis.
Statistical defect models are used to predict the software reliability by classifying the defects in the field, its severity and growth rate and detection rate. This is sort of defect report card which keeps track of whats happening but has very little value to the team that is developing the product. On the other hand, Root Cause Analysis or RCA is  a defect prevention method, using which defects are analyzed individually by knowledgeable person. The qualitative analysis of each defect is very human intensive and limited to the human expertise and not to mention very expensive.
ODC bridges the gap between the two extremes mentioned above. The technique was inspired by the study conducted at IBM which identified the measurable cause and effect relationships (semantics of defects and their net result)  in the software development process. When defects were uniquely categorized by a set of defect types representing the semantics of the fix/solutions, it was possible to relate changes in the rleibaility growth curve to the specific type of defects. These defect types could be associated with the various activities of the software development process. It was found that the group that got more than average intial defect had a 's' curve inflected. Also some functional defects started to question design problems. These kinds of in-process measurements are key to shifting development strategies on time. ODC helps capture the semantics by providing the categorization of a defect into classes that collectively point to the process that needs attention.
What do you need for ODC to work?
A well designed defect tracking tool such as IBM Rational ClearQuest, eucation for the team and process to apply in specific area are critical to the success. More information on ODC and its application can be found at IBM Research: http://www.research.ibm.com/softeng/ODC/ODC.HTM