Testimonial
You may have noticed that I use a testimonial that I received from the managing director of my former employer, White October, a UK web agency, based in Oxford…
“Ed transformed our company and the way that we work…The quality of our work shot up; our relationships with our clients became closer and more constructive; our planning became easier and more realistic.”
— Dave Fletcher, White October
Ten years of WO
White October started in 2003, so this year marks the 10th anniversary of the company. I recently came across the interview that I embedded above that Dave did for BBC Radio Oxford, last month.
Since I left two years ago, White October’s doubled the number of employees, won an award, started not one but two tech conferences (jQuery UK and the brilliantly names All Your Base), and helped foster the web community in Oxford. Sounds like they are really going from strength to strength.
You might find the interview interesting to hear how he started up the business (from his bedroom) and some tips about how he grew to where he is today.
Dave was kind enough to say lots of nice things about me, so I’m not sure why I’m pulling such funny face in the photo of us.
Obviously, WO’s success is mainly due to Dave’s hard work and business acumen; building a great culture, getting great people, and finding stimulating work that sustains all of this. However, I like to claim a little bit of the credit for their continued success, even though I was only with WO for a year and a half out of their ten years 🙂
I’m really pleased to say that later in the year, on an trip back to the UK, I’m going to stop in and provide a bit of agile/lean training for my former colleagues and more recent arrivals. I’m really looking forward to seeing how the company has grown, and to inhabiting my old haunts in Oxford!
 By Ed Wong
 Category: Tabar, Training
 Tags: popular
I recently announced a new agile and lean training concept that I am calling Guerrilla Training. Here’s why I’ve called it that, and a bit more on the thinking behind it.
Unconventional, yet highly effective
Guerrilla (noun)
a member of a small independent group taking part in irregular fighting, typically against larger regular forces…
referring to actions or activities performed in an impromptu way, often without authorization…
When I started thinking about setting up a series of training days that do things differently, my naming options were either Café Training, or Guerrilla Training. In the end, I went for Guerrilla, because the venues don’t necessarily have to be cafés, the definition of guerrilla, and also because I liked the gorilla/guerrilla pun.
To me being agile and lean is about being adaptable; trying different ways to do things better. My thinking is that agile and lean training should be different and better too.
The idea is to be effective, professional and focused, giving a platform for some of the best agile and lean practitioners in Melbourne to share their knowledge authentically.
Similar to Guerrilla Diplomacy, a guerrilla training aesthetic “places maximum value on innovation and on creating and sustaining an atmosphere of confidence, trust and respect.”
Start as you mean to go on
We’ve gotten off to a pretty good start, with Neil Killick and Craig Brown running the first Guerrilla Training session on Lean and Agile Project Management using Scrum, just yesterday. A Net Promoter Score of 57 is a great start, as is a comment like:
after yesterday, I now have a renewed sense of purpose for my particular Agile mission.
There’s more coming, so if you want to know more, go and read the Guerrilla Style Training page, and…
sign up for updates
Why the gorilla?
 One of my favourite ever projects was in a team being intrapreneurial (the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization) within a rather large FT100 listed company. We had a lot of autonomy and purpose; far more than I had experienced before, and it was great.
At the beginning we bootstrapped like crazy, designing a logo ourselves, using MS Paint. Later when it became time to think more about branding our product, we discovered that we had a pretty close connection to Jon Hicks, a pretty prominent visual designer. He had worked at our company before furthering his career as a freelancer. Jon’s wife still worked there, so we casually asked whether he was busy at the moment. To my surprise and delight, he was willing and able to do some work for us.
Jon’s written a book about icon design, re-designed the Skype emoticons, designed the Mailchimp and Shopify logos, and is well known for working on the Firefox logo. Getting “the Firefox guy” to do a logo for one of my products remains a highlight of my career 🙂
He also did the gorilla logo for Clear Left’s “guerrilla user testing” app, Silverback, that you can see above. That’s why I did a little drawing of a gorilla and the cup of coffee.
I was thinking about Net Promoter scores today because of Bernd’s video from LAST Conference about the Net Promoter System for Agile Companies (link below), the NPS data we collected from LAST Conference, and also because the training session that Neil and Craig’s ran yesterday got a pleasing NPS. I was glad to hear this news, because it was the first training day in my new Guerrilla Training series.
What is Net Promoter®?
To recap, NPS is a method for gauging peoples’ satisfaction with a product, service, activity etc. You ask people the question, “How likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to your friends and colleagues?” Most commonly asking for a number between 0 and 10, with 0 being not likely at all, and 10 being definitely. Those that respond with 9 or 10, are Promoters, those who respond with 6 or lower are Detractors.
The score is worked out by subtracting the % of Detractors from the % of Promoters, to give a number between -100 (everyone is a Detractor) to +100 (everyone is a Promoter). A score of +50 or above is considered to be pretty good, according to the Wiki that knows.
You would commonly ask a second, open ended question asking why people gave their score, so that you can identify what you’ve done well and what can be targeted for improvement.
An example that I’m proud of, can be seen in the embedded tweet at the top of this post. It’s one of the responses from a Product Inception workshop that I co-facilitated with Cheryl, a couple of months ago. I was pretty happy with an overall Net Promoter score of 76.9!
I think Net Promoter is generally a pretty useful tool to use on a variety of things. What do you think?
Further reading/watching
Net Promoter on Wikipedia
Video of Bernd’s Net Promoter System for Agile Companies talk at LAST Conference.
Official Net Promoter website.
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