I’ve been playing a lot with Wordpress recently. I touched up the Arthemia theme on the Agile Edmonton site, moved my site from the Copyblogger theme to the Vigilance theme, customized the Vigilance theme a bit and then wrote up a couple of widget plugins for my sidebar.

One thing that I really like about the Wordpress framework is that I can play around with it quite a bit despite the fact that I’m just learning PHP. The ease of customization was actually an unexpected bonus – I chose Wordpress because of the number of themes that are available for it. While I like playing with design, I’m not very good at it so it was a bonus for me that Wordpress has such a huge number of available themes.

There’s nothing worse than working with an architect who is more concerned with developers following his plan than he is with allowing his plan to evolve. On the flip side, there’s nothing much better than working with an architect that is actively engaged with the team and helping to determine the solution.

Dan Bergh’s take on the role of an architect sounds refreshing:

So, at the bottom line: I will not enforce architecture. I will not help enforcing architecture. I think it is a bad idea to enforce architecture. I think that if you want to enforce architecture you are working in the wrong direction.

From Mike Cottmeyer’s Leading Agile:

As a community… we are trying to get folks to embrace change and to embrace uncertainty. We’ve got to recognize that we might be asking folks to embrace more uncertainty that they can likely handle. The reality is simply that many folks would rather be wrong than be uncertain.

For many people transitioning to Agile, the focus on clarity in the short-term is a real deal-breaker. Some people just want to spend the time (and this is usually lots of time) to get a full picture. This work rarely provides something of value and usually just ends up being busywork that puts the project even further behind. I’m definitely not against taking the time to plan the goals of a project but there comes a point where planning needs to shift to doing and most projects are slow to make that transition.

I don’t know anything about the Real Options theory that Mike is talking about in this article but I’m always interested in tools that can help to soften the blow of Agile adoption.

Maybe this aligns more with the way I’m thinking these days or maybe it’s just a byproduct of our current economic times, but there seem to be more people talking about lowering the bar on expectations as a means of increasing happiness.

From Getting Rich Slowly:

I used to feel that I deserved to have nice things, that I was entitled to have a new car and a big house and the latest gadgets. I wanted to have what my parents had — but I wanted it when I was 30 instead of 50. Because my expectations were high, I spent to meet them.

My high expectations led to lifestyle inflation: As I earned more, I spent more. But I wasn’t any happier.

Once I learned to embrace frugality, I found that I could not only be happy with what I already had — I could be happy with less.

And from Zen Habits:

See, the cause of our stress, anger and irritation is that things don’t go the way we like, the way we expect them to. Think of how many times this has been true for you.

And so the solution is simple: expect things to go wrong, expect things to be different than we hoped or planned, expect the unexpected to happen. And accept it.

This idea certainly resonates with me. I often find that the movies I enjoy the most are the ones that I had the least expectations from. Recent examples include Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, The Hangover and RocknRolla.

Any other examples of finding increased happiness by lowering the bar?

From the UK Guardian:

IT is a very immature industry. With a small project, with good people, you can get a good solution. If it’s big, people typically lose control.

An interesting article on the world’s biggest IT project which is currently 5 years behind schedule and budgeted to £12.7 billion (~$23.8 billion CAD). It makes a project that’s $998 million over budget look like a drop in the bucket!