Will the real Product Owner please stand up?

I repeat, will the real Product Owner please stand up?? Hello, I can't hear you…we're gonna have a problem here...where's the real product owner, the pig in the team that has influence and ownership across the board (represents the development team-on-the-ground and at the same time influences senior management)??

What's that then?? Huh, That's not how you roll? The Exec, king-of-the-throne speaks, and we scramble to deliver, deadlines can't be changed, we mere chickens are not empowered to influence at that level dude…Hey man, we operate Agile/Scrum localised to just our development team, we're not cross-functional yet, and we still have to respect the notion of downstream SI/QA teams. We manage our backlog as best as we can, but we know the roadmap can change in any quarter, so we adapt and go with the flow, despite our best intentions of reaching a steady velocity that can be used to better track, commit, and help influence the roadmap. We are like the blades of grass in the wind, we bend wherever the wind blows, sometimes, more often than not, the team hardly has a chance to catch their breadth before the next roadmap change that puts pressure on the existing team structures... Sound familiar??

A roadmap is not a commitment for delivery then. It's just an indication of ideas to consider, sure the team understands that, but when the grand executive sees the roadmap, all they see is committed dates - next to near impossible to get this mindset changed, because it is only us, in our little development world that are intoxicated with Agile/Scrum, but nobody in upper echelons of management seem to get it! What to do...

Instead of writing a long blog post on this, especially the typical challenges of a young outfit experimenting with Agile/Scrum adoption deals with the ambiguity of having just too many people involved with product management - making it hard to see who the Real Product Owner is...which should trigger conversations around really understanding the worlds of product ownership, and whether there is hope in achieving the nirvana of the Agile Product Owner, the one-and-only, unambiguous, owner and driver, champion for the product itself, but also protector of the foot soldiers (dev team)...

I'm experimenting with visual notes as an alternative to writing long articles. This is just take one, first draft. I'm a little rusty drawing freehand (but I used to be quite creative), so I used the PC to knock this poster together. I have set myself a goal for 2014 to sketch visual notes proper...

Will the Real Product Owner please stand up? Download full poster

PayTV Operators should STOP re-inventing the wheel and should NOT see Google as Evil!

I have been working within the PayTV Software & Systems space for almost fifteen years now, and from the very beginning with Set-Top-Box software, I really wasn't impressed by the software technology. Apart from the hardware being fairly interesting, basically a device for decoding video/audio/data streams based on MPEG / DVB / ATSC / etc protocols and standards, when it came to software, there wasn't really a "wow" factor in it. Of course, we can't forget the really crucial element, the heart of the system, the crown jewels, the revenue-generator, the very interesting & complicated black magic technology called Conditional Access (CA) which is really really cool, the rest of the building blocks was really around the Set-Top-Box user experience / application, which really wasn't all that new: 

• Essentially the device needed an operating system, a way to draw stuff on-screen, a user navigation interface, and some data source driving the application, traditionally called the Electronic Program Guide (EPG). The STB software thus re-applied knowledge well-known in the computer industry for decades (Model-View-Controller MVC design pattern emerged in the late 1970s), simple operating system and driver / hardware abstraction layers, C-code...

As all hardware devices tend to follow Moore's law at some stage, Set-Top-Boxes (STBs) have evolved to quite powerful machines allowing for migration to newer, modern software implementations (although nowhere near the computing power & rich experience offered in the latest smartphones & tablets - post for another day), the software too, has become more accessible than ever, with more STBs using Free Open Source Software (FOSS), particularly the dominance of the Linux Kernel as the popular operating system of note, displacing historical dominance of VxWorks, STOs, NucleusOS, uCos, etc, etc.

However, there are some components in the STB software stack that remain fundamentally closed: The STB Middleware, EPG, Conditional Access (CA) clients. Okay, ignoring the CA client, which has always been fundamental and will never go away for years to come -- the classic Middleware/EPG components really don't need to be that closed anymore. 

There is also the backend / headend information service data generators that are traditionally closed, although vendors purport "open protocols", the PayTV Operator generally obfuscates the openness by forcing business-specific modifications in the protocols, apparently unique to each PayTV Operator/Broadcaster...

Traditionally & historically though, these software components were provided by third-party vendors that PayTV Operators just accepted as the norm. Highly closed, difficult to integrate with open systems, these vendors capitalised on providing a closed system, to the extent of locking in the PayTV Operator to the entire stack, some vendors reaped the benefits of providing the end-to-end system, one-stop-shop for everything. Later, PayTV operators decided to take more control, diversify the ecosystem by enforcing the use of multiple components, not being locked-in by just one vendor, promoting open standards for integration, and more recently taking more ownership of some of the development and integration...

Yet, the models within which most PayTV operators continue to work - is still pretty much a closed one. There is an aversion to sharing, opening up technology to other parties with a view to extending partnerships as well as creating new strategic relationships. There is an huge element of mistrust, not-invented-here attitude, we-can-implement-this-in-house, etc, etc!! I am really dumbfounded with that approach...

Getting back to being creative again....

I find myself reminiscing about the past recently, and find it fascinating how time flies by so fast, that before you know it almost two decades passes you by, even though I can remember my teenage years as if it was just yesterday.  I am searching for a something, a past time, a time for myself where I can relax, do something interesting and gain some satisfaction from doing so :-) Of course, I am quite enjoying blogging, although finding the time is proving difficult - and I'm quite conscious of my blog becoming an outlet for being a humble brag - but I guess my blog can be seen as me reaching out, perhaps someone comes across my posts by accident which could set things in motion and change my life in ways I could never imagine ha haa, lol - I'm such a dreamer :-)

I used to sketch/draw back when I was in school, you could say it was a hobby of mine.  I would mostly draw from pictures, not from my own imagination though. I would also draw plants (our house was filled with pot plants) and flowers. I would enter art competitions, but never did take it quite seriously though - I couldn't see a lucrative future in art, neither our school teachers help to promote the arts/culture.  

After school, enter university, then work, then married life - I really didn't make any time to continue my sketching seriously.  But I am thinking about making a start, I think it'll be a good stress reliever...

I want to put my art out there, and would like whoever stumbles across it to give an opinion. Remember this is stuff that I drew about 15-20 years ago. Click here for the full picture

Hand-drawn replica of the cover from "The Best of Lawrence Green"

The above sketch was taken from a book that I'd received for a History prize in primary school, ended drawing this during the July school holiday in 1993... 

In high school I made some friends who were quite talented and interested in art. One of the guys was heavily into the 1940s war comics that featured classic fighter planes (of the like described in this blog post); we'd all have a go at sketching whatever we found interesting. Remember these were all free-hand drawing, not tracing (Click here, here and here for all the pics below):

I went through a phase of being fanatical of Bill Watterson's Calvin & Hobbes, through another friend of mine. I couldn't afford buying the books myself, but I made sure when I was working I bought every title there was :-) I sketched these during my last year of high school, in between studying and writing final exams:

Weirdos from another planet

The days are just packed

Something under the bed is drooling

Homicidal psycho jungle cat

Attack of the deranged killer monster goons

Yukon Ho!