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The next bubble bursting: could be student loans.
I think this piece will prove to be prescient.
Subprime college educations
By George F. Will
Published: June 8
Many parents and the children they send to college are paying rapidly rising prices for something of declining quality. This is because quality is not synonymous with value.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, believes that college has become, for many, merely a status marker, signaling membership in the educated caste, and a place to meet spouses of similar status associative mating. Since 1961, the time students spend reading, writing and otherwise studying has fallen from 24 hours a week to about 15 enough for a degree often desired only as an expensive signifier of rudimentary qualities (e.g., the ability to follow instructions). Employers value this signifier as an alternative to aptitude tests when evaluating potential employees because such tests can provoke lawsuits by having a disparate impact on this or that racial or ethnic group.
In his The Higher Education Bubble, Reynolds writes that this bubble exists for the same reasons the housing bubble did. The government decided that too few people owned homes/went to college, so government money was poured into subsidized and sometimes subprime mortgages/student loans, with the predictable result that housing prices/college tuitions soared and many borrowers went bust. Tuitions and fees have risen more than 440 percent in 30 years as schools happily raised prices and lowered standards to siphon up federal money. A recent Wall Street Journal headline: Student Debt Rises by 8% as College Tuitions Climb.
Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economist, writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that as many people perhaps more have student loan debts as have college degrees. Have you seen those T-shirts that proclaim College: The Best Seven Years of My Life? Twenty-nine percent of borrowers never graduate, and many who do graduate take decades to repay their loans.
In 2010, the New York Times reported on Cortney Munna, then 26, a New York University graduate with almost $100,000 in debt. If her repayments were not then being deferred because she was enrolled in night school, she would have been paying $700 monthly from her $2,300 monthly after-tax income as a photographers assistant. She says she is toiling to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back. Her degree is in religious and womens studies.
The budgets of Californias universities are being cut, so recently Cal State Northridge students conducted an almost-hunger strike (sustained by a blend of kale, apple and celery juices) to protest, as usual, tuition increases and, unusually and properly, administrators salaries. For example, in 2009 the base salary of UC Berkeleys vice chancellor for equity and inclusion was $194,000, almost four times that of starting assistant professors. And by 2006, academic administrators outnumbered faculty.
The Manhattan Institutes Heather Mac Donald notes that sinecures in academias diversity industry are expanding as academic offerings contract. UC San Diego (UCSD), while eliminating masters programs in electrical and computer engineering and comparative literature, and eliminating courses in French, German, Spanish and English literature, added a diversity requirement for graduation to cultivate a students understanding of her or his identity. So, rather than study computer science and Cervantes, students can study their identities themselves. Says Mac Donald, Diversity, it turns out, is simply a code word for narcissism.
She reports that UCSD lost three cancer researchers to Rice University, which offered them 40 percent pay increases. But UCSD found money to create a vice chancellorship for equity, diversity and inclusion. UC Davis has a Diversity Trainers Institute under an administrator of diversity education, who presumably coordinates with the Cross-Cultural Center. It also has: a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; a Sexual Harassment Education Program; a diversity program coordinator; an early resolution discrimination coordinator; a Diversity Education Series that awards Understanding Diversity Certificates in Unpacking Oppression; and Cross-Cultural Competency Certificates in Understanding Diversity and Social Justice. Californias budget crisis has not prevented UC San Francisco from creating a new vice chancellor for diversity and outreach to supplement its Office of Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity and Diversity, and the Diversity Learning Center (which teaches how to become a Diversity Change Agent), and the Center for LGBT Health and Equity, and the Office of Sexual Harassment Prevention & Resolution, and the Chancellors Advisory Committees on Diversity, and on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Issues, and on the Status of Women.
So taxpayers should pay more and parents and students should borrow more to fund administrative sprawl in the service of stale political agendas? Perhaps they will, until pop! goes the bubble.
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July 1st, the student loan rate doubles.
Might be worth re-reading your take in that thread.
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I went to college and paid as I went. A student loan was nothing that even entered into my mind. The time was different and I was interested in the education rather than living away from home and having the funds to live beyond my means. My parents weren't rich so it was all on me.
I would recommend to anyone going to college to do their first 2 years at a local community college and then do as much online stuff as possible. Spending as little time as you can living in a manner that starts you off owing more than you will most likely make in your first 5 years you have a job.
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The obvious solution is that lenders, including the DOE, need to examine the risk of the loan before offering it. By that I mean the major should be taken into account. Loaning someone $50,000 for a theater degree is not a responsible thing to do with taxpayer dollars.
In the private sector libs sometimes call this predatory lending, because the poor slob isn't expected to assess their ability to repay, only their ability to qualify, when they decide if taking out a loan is a good idea. Then the bank gets the blame when their eBay business doesn't pay the bills anymore.
So why is no one blaming the government for huge amounts of available credit for investment in poor career plans? Why are they subsidizing aka encouraging this?
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Never mind that the easy credit is why the cost of higher Ed continues to spiral
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The drum starts to beat.
Student Loans: Debt for Life
By Peter Coy
September 18, 2012
This much we know: College pays. You can lose your house to foreclosure, but never your education. Four-year college graduates' pay advantage over high school grads has doubled over the past 30 years. If money for tuition is tight, the advice goes, borrow what you need. Students have been listening. In 2010 student debt exceeded credit-card debt for the first time. In 2011 it surpassed auto loans. In March, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced that student debt had passed $1 trillion. It grew by $300 billion from the third quarter of 2008 even as other forms of debt shrank by $1.6 trillion, according to a separate tabulation by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In a press briefing at the White House in April, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said, "Obviously if you have no debt that's maybe the best situation, but this is not bad debt to have. In fact, it's very good debt to have."
If student loans are good debt, how do you account for the reaction of Christina Mills, 30, of Minneapolis, when she found out her payment on college and law school loans would be $1,400 a month? "I just went into the car and started sobbing," says Mills, who works for a nonprofit. "It was more than my paycheck at the time." Medical student Thomas Smith, 25, of Hamilton, N.J., is $310,000 in debt and is struggling to make ends meet even before beginning to repay his loans. "I don't even know what I eat," he says. "I just go to the supermarket and buy the cheapest thing I can and buy as much of it as I can." Then there's Michael DiPietro, 25, of Brooklyn, who accumulated about $100,000 in debt while getting a bachelor's degree in fashion, sculpture, and performance, and spent the next two years waiting tables. He has since landed a fundraising job in the arts but still has no idea how he will pay back all that money. "I've come to the conclusion that it's an obsolete idea that a college education is like your golden ticket," DiPietro says. "It's an idea that an older generation holds on to."
Even if you buy into the notion that education debt is good debt, at what point does it become too much of a good thing? Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org, which researches financial aid, estimates that student debt, compounded by rising enrollments, is growing by nearly $3,000 a second.
"The question isn't the debt per se. It's what the students are getting in return," says Richard Arum, a New York University sociologist who specializes in education. Many students are incurring heavy debts for an education (ethnomusicology, theater arts) that just isn't worth it from a strictly financial viewpoint. (Money isn't everything, but try telling that to the collection agency.) Education benefits society by creating a workforce that creates wealth, pays taxes, and stays off welfare. But state governments—whose schools educate 7 in 10 students—have raised tuition abruptly because of their own financial problems. So far the federal government has offset the state cutbacks by boosting financial aid, but Education Under Secretary Martha Kanter testified to Congress earlier this year that "this path is not fiscally sustainable."
There's a lot of speculation that college debt is the next bubble after housing, the latest sector in which prices leap above real value. American colleges may not be turning out the kind of graduates that employers want. In Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, NYU's Arum and sociologist Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia write that employers are being forced to turn to foreigners or graduate and professional schools to fill jobs that they once filled with homegrown college graduates.
That's the value side. The cost side is ugly, too. The economic slump that began in 2007 has forced people to pay more for college even as it has driven more of them into it as a refuge from an unfriendly job market. The National Center for Education Statistics projects that college attendance this fall will be up 19 percent from the fall of 2007. Meanwhile, state and local support for higher education last year was the lowest in 25 years of measurement, in inflation-adjusted dollars per student, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Two-thirds of college seniors graduated with loans in 2010, and those who did had an average of about $25,000, according to the Institute for College Access & Success.
The poor, who need the boost that a college education can provide, are suffering the most. Strapped colleges know that they can bring in more revenue from one student paying close to the full load than from a dozen low-income students. So some are bribing rich kids to attend with $10,000 a year they don't need—grant money that otherwise might have gone to the truly needy. That's just one of the reasons the lowest-income students are more than three times as likely as the highest-income students to be studying for a certificate or an associate's degree rather than a four-year degree, according to an analysis of data compiled by FinAid's Kantrowitz. That leads to lower-paying jobs. Equal opportunity in higher education remains more an ideal than a reality.
Ten years is considered a reasonable period to repay one's student loans, but many students take 20 or 25 years under extended repayment plans. The New York Fed found that in the first quarter of 2012, people 60 and older were responsible for $43 billion in student loans. It's not clear how much is from their own studies and how much because they co-signed on their children's loans, but whatever the case it's no way to head into retirement.
There are solutions, but each is bound to be resisted by at least some powerful constituency—students, professors, administrators, lenders, or governments.
One huge step would be to allow bankruptcy judges to wipe out education debt, as they could until Congress began to tighten restrictions in 1976. Under today's punitive statute, judges can discharge student loans only in cases of undue hardship, which in many jurisdictions requires proof of "certainty of hopelessness." (Congratulations, pal, you're hopeless!) "The law is much too harsh," says U.S. Bankruptcy Judge A. Jay Cristol in Miami.
Current law gives lenders no incentive to come to terms with overindebted borrowers. The National Consumer Law Center, in a July report, said "pursuing the most vulnerable borrowers until they die" is inefficient and imposes "significant costs to taxpayers." To help debtors avoid defaulting in the first place, the center advocates placing them automatically in repayment plans that make the payment a percentage of the borrower's income rather than a certain dollar amount. Under this "income-based repayment," which the Obama administration has pushed, any outstanding debt is forgiven after 20 or 25 years.
Colleges should suffer more pain when federal loans go bad, argues Alex Pollock, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. That would make them more careful about raising prices and encouraging students to take out government loans.
Better disclosure would help, too. Some financial aid offer letters don't even clearly identify loan components of aid packages as debt. Others abbreviate "loan" as L or LN. "Sometimes they have the excuse that they're limited in the number of characters," Kantrowitz says, "but they created the form." The Education Department is developing a form that colleges can use to give prospective students standardized information about how much they will owe upon graduation, what the school's loan-default and graduation rates are, and so on. In May, Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.) introduced a bill to make a standard form mandatory. The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators opposes portions of the bill.
School-provided financial aid, far from being charity, is a tool for legal price discrimination—i.e., charging different customers different amounts right up to the limit of their willingness or ability to pay. Most schools dole out grants based on how much they need to discount the sticker price to lure a given student to attend. Financial aid allows them to collect more revenue than if they had to charge every student the same amount. If oranges were sold the same way, a bag of them might cost one family $40 and another $5.
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Some of the nation's wealthiest universities—and some smaller schools such as North Carolina's Davidson College—have eased the burden on students by replacing all loans with grants in financial-aid packages. That's noble, but not a realistic solution for all of higher education. "Most colleges are not awash in money. It would be very difficult to dial back the competitive game" of doling out aid to maximize revenue, says Douglas White, a business consultant and higher-education expert in Richmond, Va.
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney says President Barack Obama encourages students to take on more debt, "sending them the bill tomorrow." But Romney is still living down advice he gave to college students in April, telling them to "borrow from your parents" if they need money for school or to start a business. (Parents' contributions are already figured into financial-aid packages.) Romney also favors reversing a 2010 decision under which the Education Department has tried to save $60 billion over 10 years by making all new federal loans directly, eliminating middlemen.
The most straightforward way to deal with the student debt problem is to bring down the unreasonably high cost of higher education, which forces students to go into debt in the first place. "We can't just keep shoveling money into a system that consumes resources at an ever-faster clip," Kevin Carey, then policy director of a nonprofit called Education Sector, told the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions last winter. Carey, who now directs education policy at the New America Foundation, told the senators about cost-saving initiatives such as those at Virginia Tech, where students learn intro math courses in computer labs rather than watching professors at chalkboards, and the University of Minnesota's new Rochester campus, whose classrooms and labs are in the former food court and movie theater of a mall. The Minnesota school collaborates with IBM (IBM) and the Mayo Clinic for advanced courses such as computational biology.
Removing the campus altogether is even cheaper. Online operations such as EdX, Coursera, Khan Academy, and Udacity, among others, offer high-quality instruction at no cost to the student—but don't yet award degrees. Accrediting agencies, dominated by incumbent schools, are skeptical. A survey published in June by Babson Survey Research Group and Inside Higher Ed found that 58 percent of professors surveyed have "more fear than excitement" about online learning.
Some day, low-cost online education that requires zero student borrowing may displace a big chunk of today's entrenched establishment. The fact that it hasn't yet says a lot about the durability of colleges and universities, several of which predate the country's founding. Rather than places of learning, colleges have become expensive screening mechanisms. It's not what you learn in four years at Harvard University that impresses potential employers; it's the fact that you got into Harvard in the first place.
So maybe the real problem is that credentialism has trumped learning. That drives people to get degrees simply to displace others who don't have degrees, says Richard Vedder, who directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. He notes that the U.S. has more than 100,000 janitors with college degrees and 16,000 degree-holding parking lot attendants.
Political scientist Charles Murray would get rid of the bachelor's degree altogether. In an Intelligence Squared U.S. debate last October in Chicago, he said education is or at least ought to be a lifelong process for everyone, diploma holders or not. "We are all engaged in the same process," Murray argued. "We are not divided into professionals and service workers or blue-collar workers. We all start out as apprentices. We become journeymen, and we all strive to become master craftsmen."
To tell the truth, though, many students are not exactly striving, if Arum and Roksa's Academically Adrift is correct. Five-year colleges would be a better label for schools, since that's the average amount of time it's taking students to get through them. Financial aid is part of the problem: Students equipped with big loan packages can play schools against one another—and what students seem to want is good grades for light work, according to Arum's research. To combat grade inflation, which has made college transcripts virtually useless to potential employers, Arum recommends that transcripts include the average grade given in a class next to the student's letter grade. That would be like grading on a curve without having to grade on a curve. Students will presumably study harder, he says, if they know that their grades contain real information for employers and grad schools.
As for paying it all back, it would be going too far to direct students away from, say, ethnomusicology just because it's less lucrative than nursing or petroleum engineering. Princeton University economist Cecilia Rouse points out that the liberal arts provide benefits to society beyond those that loan officers pay attention to. It's hard, though, to argue against a standard disclosure form that would tell students about the debt load, unemployment rate, and average first-year income for graduates of the school and the major they're thinking of committing their lives to.
It may be a while before it's all solved. In 1939, the New Yorker published a short story called "Ah, the University!" about a well-to-do man who orders his only son to become a professional poker player because he doesn't want to pay for him to go to college. "Certainly nothing in the world is more delightful than being at the university," the father says. "The springtime of life! Pleasure after pleasure! … However, I'm not going to send you there." Perhaps the gentleman was just ahead of his time.
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Using Kanban to Turn Around Distressed Projects
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This is a case study that describes how Kanban and lean development techniques were used to rescue a distressed project.
This particular project was a custom development project for a large client that had been in progress for about a year. The development team fluctuated in size from 10-15 team members.
The team started off the project using a typical waterfall development model. An analysis phase preceded the development phase. The analysis phase was supposed to take 2-3 months but ran over that time. During the analysis phase the scope began to grow beyond the initial understanding of both the client and the development team. Because the client insisted on getting the requirements "nailed down" and "signed off on" the analysis phase ended up taking about 6 months, which is roughly a 100% schedule overrun.
Despite the fact that the analysis phase ran over the originally planned time, the project end dates were not pushed out to align with that reality. As a result, the development team was pressured to deliver more-than-anticipated functionality in a less-than-anticipated time frame. The development deadlines were missed, and since testing was bolted on at the tail end and compressed, the quality of the developed solution was inadequate.
The development team operated in an interrupt-driven manner because the project manager did not manage the client to protect the development team from distractions. The typical pattern was that the client would yell at her about the quality issues and then she would just pass that through to the development team. So whatever was the crisis of the moment was what received the attention. The development team was never able to focus on a problem and drive it to completion before the next problem interrupted their work.
By the time I got involved, the relationship between the client and the development team was damaged and the client was refusing to pay. The solution was unusable by their users from functionality, reliability, and performance standpoints. The project had run over budget by hundreds of thousands of dollars. The schedule was blown by months. Neither the client nor the development team could afford the fallout of a failed project, so it had to be turned around.
Starting to Getting Control
The first thing to do when confronted with this type of situation is don't panic. In this particular case, the client was very agitated and had zero confidence in the team. The client was blaming the team and the team was blaming the client. Morale was poor, and it was getting worse because management was demanding that the team work harder to fix the problems.
One of the worst things you can do is to dig your heels in and keep doing more of what got you in the situation in the first place.
Experience has shown that the best way to start removing the emotion from these types of situations is to work with the data and facts. It is important to understand the root causes of how the situation arose in order to best craft the path forward, but initially it is not helpful to present the team with all the things they should have done differently. That only inflames the situation further.
In this particular case, the main fact was that the product quality was terrible. The number of reported defects supported this. We had to get the product to a point where the users could actually do their jobs. And the only way we could start to do that was to create the environment for the development team to be able to focus on one problem at a time.
Create a Culture of Quality
It seems strange to think that despite all the advancements in software development we need to keep re-emphasizing the importance of building software that actually works correctly. Yet this is one of the main areas where software projects continue to be challenged.
In the earlier part of the project, the development team spent months trying to document in great detail what they thought the client wanted. This led to the false sense of security that they (and the client) knew for sure what they were going to deliver in the end. In addition, the only team members that were engaged with the client in the analysis phase were the analysts. The developers were not brought onto the team until the requirements were "done".
This led to the following phenomena:
- The developers had to digest and interpret the requirements as part of a 200-300-page document as an atomic unit.
- The client continued to make changes to the requirements even after the analysis document was "signed off" by both parties, which meant that the developers' work was continuously being invalidated.
- This caused the development to push out beyond the originally planned development completion dates.
- Testing happened at the very end after all the development was "done". Since the original deadlines had passed, this meant that testing had to happen in a hurry.
- Quality was less a measure of whether the developed software worked correctly and more a measure of how frequently testers and developers interpreted the requirements the same way.
The ultimate result of all this was that many hundreds of defects escaped development and made their way in front of the client. Defects are the worst kind of waste because they are unimplemented requirements for software that has been developed already. This means the client pays for software to be developed and then they (or the development team) have to eat the cost of making it work correctly.
Clearly the way the development team was working did not put quality first. In fact, it put quality dead last. Since analysts, developers, and testers were matrixed onto the project to do their specific tasks they never really learned how to work as a cohesive unit that felt collective responsibility and ownership of the system quality. When problems arose they pointed the finger at one another. In short, they had failed to develop and embrace a culture of quality.
The single most important decision we made to start getting control over quality was to require acceptance tests to be developed for work items before a developer could write code. This is called Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD). With ATDD, we literally put quality first.
The way we made ATDD work on this project was that we required a set of acceptance tests to be associated with each work item in the backlog. This effectively documented the requirements that were unsatisfied by the developed code. It also forced the tester and developer to get on the same page before coding started. The developers' job became focused on making the failing acceptance tests pass. It is important to clarify that tests were developed on a work item by work item basis, not for a batch of work items at a time.
This approach takes the guesswork out of whether the developed code works properly or not. The test either passes or fails. Yes or no. True or false. Since each developer focused on one work item, the number of acceptance tests the developer had to understand at a point in time was never too many as compared with having to understand the entire analysis document up front.
The state transitions for an acceptance test were:
- Failed. The test initially fails because code has not been developed to make the test pass.
- Developed. The code to make the test pass has been developed. The developer identifies this transition as they implement the code.
- Passed. The testers have verified that the developed code does in fact make the test pass.
Using the ATDD approach alone had the most positive transformative effect on product quality.
In the first 8 weeks of using ATDD, we transformed the project form one that had no documented test coverage to one that had a library of tests and a documented history of passing tests that asserted the overall quality of the code being developed.
Eliminate Waste and Control the Flow of Work with Constraints
As mentioned, the development team started off working in a waterfall approach. However, things ended up breaking down into an ad-hoc approach once development began and the big-up-front-requirements document became invalidated by uncontrolled change. From there, it didn't take long for the line from the code back to the requirements to become blurred and then eventually erased.
The profile of the work assignment was a classic push system with a very large batch size. The development team was pushed a large requirements artifact from the analysis team. The test team was pushed a large code base by the development team plus the very large requirements artifact from the analysis team. During testing, when defects were uncovered, they were pushed to specific developers by a manager. When the fixes were made, a manager pushed them to specific testers for verification.
This approach resulted in a lot of waste. In the analysis phase, a vast amount of unimplemented requirements accumulated. In the development phase, a vast amount of untested code was developed. In the test phase, a vast amount of unimplemented and improperly implemented requirements were identified.
Decrease Batch Size
A large number of defects escaped development and made their way in front of the client. The origins of this phenomenon can be traced back in large degree to the batch size that the team was working with. The team simply did not have the capacity to move the entire batch forward as a unit in the timeframe in a way that maintained the integrity of the unit as a whole.
Trying to move such large work products forward resulted in each team becoming a bottleneck on the team that needed to perform the subsequent tasks. In the end, it became a Sisyphean task that ended up sending the work products collapsing backwards from testing to development to analysis. And the process kept repeating. In other words, all the work done up front getting the requirements "locked down" was complete waste because once defects emerged, the team had to keep asking themselves "now what was this supposed to do?" Even having to ask that question is wasteful.
Work as a Team
Breaking the destructive cycle and getting the team to a state where they could actually close work items and keep them closed meant changing the team structure and fundamentally altering the way that the team moved work items from Pending to Done. In fact, it meant changing their definition of the work "done".
The fact that the team members did not share a common sense of ownership of the solution was a major impediment. The first thing we did was to dissolve the matrix organization. Analysts, testers, and developers were now just part of the development team. Along with this was directly setting the expectation that it was their collective responsibility to deliver a quality product and that they all owned quality - not just the testers.
We also physically co-located all the team members in a large conference room. This further reinforced the fact that they were a single team with shared purpose. It also meant that now they had to actually talk to one another instead of emailing each other from one cubicle to another.
From Push to Pull
The next thing we did was to remove tasking authority from the project managers. That is, managers could no longer push work to the team. As mentioned, the team was operating in an interrupt-driven mode, wherein a manager would task team members in an ad-hoc manner, which resulted in a low probability that the previous task actually got completed.
To put some structure to the development effort and seal the exits on defects escaping development, we introduced a pull system using Kanban. The Kanban approach forced the team to work with smaller batch sizes. Initially, this was easy because the all of the work items that needed to be completed were defects, which are usually pretty small to begin with. It also forced us to define the word "done".
With this approach, work items (depicted as cards) made their way from left-to-right on a Kanban board through a series of states (depicted as columns) starting with Pending and ending with Accepted. Whenever a card was ready to be worked on a team member would pull it into the next column, which meant they were working on it. Team members had to apply their particular skill at the right places to keep the cards flowing. A work item was not "done" until it has passed through each of these states and ended up in the Accepted state. Done = Accepted.
Each column represents work that needs to be done to move the card forward. In order to decrease coordination costs related to communication of completed tasks, we added ready states to indicate that the previous task was completed and now the next task is ready to be performed. For example, when the acceptance tests have been developed, the work item is ready to develop code. So the Kanban board provides a simple visual mechanism that encapsulates the process that a work item needs to go through. It also provides a way to see the status of in progress work items at a glance.
The columns on our Kanban board are listed below. Note that the first task for each work item is to define the acceptance tests as described above.
Develop Tests
Ready to Code
Ready to Stage
Ready To Accept
In many cases a Kanban board can be drawn on a wall and the work items can be represented with sticky notes. In our case, the team was geographically distributed, and I wanted to make sure that we were constantly relying on the captured metrics to make more informed decisions about how to keep making the process better. We chose VersionOne as our Agile project management tool.
One of the most valuable tools that we used was the cumulative flow chart. This chart allowed us to look at the composition of work to see how the work items were trending towards Accepted. Since we were promoting builds to the client on a weekly basis, we could track the composition of work on a weekly basis. We could also view the cumulative flow in the aggregate across many weeks to understand broader trends.
(Click on the image to enlarge it)
The above chart shows the cumulative flow of work items over the eight-week period that we were turning the project around.
Each of the stacked bars on the above chart is the aggregated view of the following charts on a weekly basis.
(Click on the image to enlarge it)
These charts are the ones we looked at on a daily basis to see if we were on track to close work items for the week. We found that having a visual mechanism like this was much more helpful for the team than simply looking at lists of defects in spreadsheets like they did previously.
Eliminate Bottlenecks
We also introduced work-in-process (WIP) limits to control the pace at which work items could work their way through the Kanban states. We observed that the analysts were not able to produce acceptance tests at a rate that kept pace with the developers. Since the developers could not keep working on new development tasks without violating the downstream WIP limits, the analysts became a bottleneck in the system. This forced the team to work together to figure out how to even out the distribution of work to ensure a consistent flow of work items. Sometimes developers had to write and verify acceptance tests (not for their own development work). We had to add more analysts and testers to the team. In some cases we adjusted the WIP limits to work out unnatural wait states.
Ultimately, the team had to start working as a real team. They had to learn how to think about how to make the work items flow through the Kanban system. This caused a big boost in morale, and the team began to own the quality of the result as a team instead of pointing the finger at each other when they were simply matrixed onto the project to perform some specialized skill and then go back to the resource pool.
Decouple Planning and Delivery Cadences
Once we solved the problem of how to move work through the Kanban system, we had to get work items into the backlog and estimated so that the team could just pull the next work item with minimal interruptions.
Previously, the development team was simply told what work items to work on and when they were to be completed. In addition to the problems associated with the aforementioned interrupt-driven tasking model, developers never took the deadlines seriously because they had no ownership of the work item estimates. The project manager making the commitments to the client had no real understanding of how long it would really take to complete the work items so they just told the client what they wanted to hear. This resulted in deadlines that were rarely met. Eventually the project manager had lost all credibility with the development team and the client. By declaring everything an emergency, the PM ended up creating an environment where nothing really ended up getting treated with any urgency.
In Agile approaches, it is essential that the team doing the work perform the task of estimating the work it is being asked to do. Therefore, we had to also ensure that the estimation task itself caused minimal interruption of the development tasks.
If everything is important, nothing is. One of the keys to making a continuous flow, pull system like Kanban work is for everyone on the team to have a consistent understanding of what the next most important work item is. If everyone knows what work item to pull onto the board next, the team does not need to continuously absorb the coordination cost of figuring out what to do next.
The central mechanism for managing the full list of candidate work items is the backlog. The backlog is a prioritized list of all the potential work items that have been identified by the product owner and users. User stories and defects are kinds of work items. Users and other stakeholders can request a new work item at any point in time. When they do, those requests just go into the backlog. Addition of work items to the backlog will have no impact on the work that is currently being completed on the Kanban board. Rather, the backlog is a holding place for requested work items. New work item requests simply represent a commitment on the part of the development team to have a conversation about the requested change with the requester.
All work items in the backlog are prioritized relative to one another. So the work item at the top of the backlog is the one that has been deemed the next most important thing for the team to work on. If the product owner cares about the order in which work items need to be completed, they must play an active role to ensure that the backlog is properly prioritized. By the way, the relative priority of work items is constantly changing in response to changing business needs.
Previously, I mentioned that we revoked the development team manager's ability to task developers. We re-purposed the PM role to one of working closely with the client to force them to prioritize the work in the backlog. And yes, they had to be forced to do this since up until that point, they were accustomed to controlling what the team worked on by throwing a tantrum, which in turn exacerbated the interrupts on the development side. This ended up being a full-time job for the manager based on the large number of backlog items and the rate at which the client kept changing their mind about what they wanted next.
One of the rules we put in place was that a work item could not make its way from the backlog onto the Kanban board until it had been estimated. The reason for this was so we would not compromise our ability to report on the velocity of the team, which fed into our ability to make future commitments, based on the prior performance of the team.
Every Monday morning, we held an hour-long (time-boxed) estimation session for the team to collectively estimate the highest priority backlog items that had not yet been estimated. The team estimated as many items as they could in that time period. The estimation units were ideal days. The estimates accounted for all the activities on the Kanban board. Previously, what few estimates were done only took the actual coding into account.
By having the entire team do the estimates, they all felt more vested in delivery of the items within the estimated time periods. Since all the development activities were included in estimate it also forced them to understand more about what was involved in their teammates' roles. It increased their cohesion as a team.
By doing the estimation session at the beginning of the work week, we could get it over with and out of the way so the team could focus on delivery for the rest of the week and not be interrupted to do estimating when they needed to be doing development.
We observed that there is a dynamical relationship between prioritization and estimation because the product owner may choose to increase or decrease the prioritization of work items based on how quickly or not they can be completed. For example, a user story that the client thought was a high priority may end up not being as important once the client learns that they can get four of five smaller stories done in the same time-frame.
Projects get off track for a variety of reasons. Projects that start off using traditional, predictive planning approaches are more susceptible to derailment. This article has presented a high-level approach for containing projects that have become distressed. Some of the methods may seem counter-intuitive such as embracing change instead of trying to control it. The idea of letting the development team pull the next batch of work instead of pushing it to them may seem strange to some.
Using the approaches in this case study we were able to turn this particular project around from one that was on the brink of failure to one where the client was very happy with the quality software of they were receiving and the predictability with which it was delivered. We started seeing positive results in the first 2-3 weeks. After 8 weeks, the root causes of all the dysfunction on the team had been completely addressed and the team became largely self-sufficient and self-managing.
Equally important, the morale of the development team improved significantly. After years of being beaten down by a barrage of unmanaged interrupts and complaints about the quality of their work they were finally given the chance to prove to the client and themselves that they, in fact, did know what they were doing and could produce a worthy product.
The development team now uses the Kanban approach for all of its development projects. It allows them to more effectively set client expectations up front and deliver predictably on commitments.
Kanban is not merely a project recovery tool. The best way to keep a project from needing to be bailed out is to employ these methods from the beginning.
About the Author
Steve Andrews is the founder of Fountainhead Solutions, LLC. His vision was to create a company focused on developing innovative software solutions using Agile methods and contemporary engineering techniques.
Mr. Andrews has an extensive background as a leader of solution development initiatives for almost 20 years. He is an expert in finding ways to maximize the effectiveness of teams to develop working solutions for challenging problems as quickly and cost-effectively as possible while also improving the lives of developers and users alike.
Mr. Andrews holds BS degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from Vanderbilt University.
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little question, big question
Chris Riesbeck
Big: What was the people side of this? There must have been team members who bought in and led, and management that supported. What happened there? Seem like we need another long article on just that aspect.
Re: little question, big question
Steve Andrews
Big: Leadership of the company brought me in to fix this project. They had to accept that the PM they had originally placed in charge was not the same person that could pull the project out of the fire. The rest of the team was left in place. They also had to accept that the entire methodology they traditionally used to run projects was not sufficient. From the outset of the recovery effort, company leadership came in and admitted they had not given the team the tools they needed to succeed. I was given all the empowerment that I needed, and management agreed to stay out of the way. You are correct that this is a very involved topic in itself, and it has to do with establishing the initial conditions for project success. It involves a lot of tough, adult conversations and a willingness to let go of failed ways of working, and many companies are never able to get to that point.
Management role in setting up Agile
Yakov Becker
I keep top management technical position in my organization. I am more and more convinced that we have to switch to Agile culture in order to meet our goals and improve many things we have problem with. I've read many articles, listen to many lectures and read a few books on the Agile culture and methods. I miss one major thing -- what is top management role in the process to switching to Agile? What is best way to lead the change? It is also always presented in way that once you have Agile process it just work by itself and top management can relax and enjoy the ride. I somehow don't believe that it is so simple. What is your view on a top management role? How different it is from non-Agile developer organization management?
Re: Management role in setting up Agile
Steve Andrews
The role of top management is to establish the conditions and environment to enable sustained business viability for their company. This means structuring the organization, hiring the right people, and putting the right processes in place. In order to achieve sustained success, a business needs to constantly adapt to changing customer and business environment demands. Upper management has to have a finger on the pulse of what the business target is and continuously be challenging staff to meet those demands. While upper management has to establish the initial environment, they also have to figure out how to empower their employees so they can figure out how to best self-organize to keep adapting to the ever-changing business needs.
Right now lean and agile methods seem to be the best methods for software organizations to validate customer needs and continuously adapt and improve. Upper management actually has a tough job in enabling lean and agile projects, because they have to be assertive on the vision but nurture and enable their teams so they can execute the vision. Too much assertiveness on the execution side and they are micro-managing. Not enough and they are asleep at the wheel. It's a tough balancing act.
At a minimum, I'd say management needs to be educated on the Agile metrics so they can be plugged into the leading indicators of potential issues and intervene when necessary, but be able to step back and let teams do their thing when things are moving in the right direction. They should also be active participants in Agile ceremonies such as retrospectives so they are aware of what their teams need. One other thing that upper management has to have is patience and faith in their people. Bootstrapping Agile approaches and ingraining them in the culture takes time. Management can't just pull the rug out from under the team and revert to non-Agile methods just because their are emergencies or hiccups along the way. Neither can they let their teams lose discipline and focus.
I don't know there is much difference between the high-level responsibilities of top management in Agile and non-Agile companies. But I do think that Agile provides the tools that will help management be more attuned to the real-time health of the projects in their portfolios.
This topic may actually warrant an entire article on its own as Chris suggested in his comment.
The ANALYSIS process
Celso Martins
I prefer "the analysis process became a bottleneck in the system" instead of "...the analysts became a bottleneck in the system". If you put the problem on the shoulders of people may favor the emotional resistance raising.
Scrum vs. Kanban
Dennis Kornbluh
ATDD also helps our project
Leung Michael
I can't agree more on your statement "The single most important decision we made to start getting control over quality was to require acceptance tests to be developed for work items before a developer could write code…It also forced the tester and developer to get on the same page before coding started".
It seems that ATDD is very effective regardless of whether you are doing Kanban, Scrum or only Water-Scrum-Fall (what we are practicing). Especially with language like Gherkin that business users can understand, users, developers and testers are on the same page. In the past, users tend to throw out casual and not well thought through requirements. They now become very caution if they can provide valid acceptance tests cases. This saved us a lot of rework.
Serving as both specifications and automated regression tests, it is worthwhile to maintain these acceptance tests as our living document throughout the system's life span. We even plan to run full regression tests after applying patches and upgrading OS and components in servers.
I hope that there are more real life experiences sharing in using ATDD.
Fine for a crisis, but you're designing for no design
Huw Lloyd
I would think about a double-dispatch between pending and designed job, the priorities still apply but it encourages developers to bring their brain to work (which is why they signed up, right?). Likewise refactoring tasks etc can thereby stay off the pending queue and yet remain visible.
Nice and simple. KISS is what you need in a crisis. Good job and thanks for reporting on it.
Re: Scrum vs. Kanban
Steve Andrews
While Kanban controls WIP based on the state of work items (In Development, Pending Acceptance, etc), Scrum controls WIP at the iteration level. For example, in Scrum the WIP is to a large degree a function of the scope the team commits to based on their historical velocity. Because of this, Scrum teams tend to be more disciplined in terms of being able to work together to make sure they are ensuring the right balance between focusing on a specific story versus multi-tasking across stories to be able to ensure that the sprint commitments get met by the end of the sprint. By contrast, Kanban takes the guesswork out of this - the stories are flowing across the board unimpeded or there they are getting backed up in some work item state because of some bottleneck and the team needs to organize to unblock the bottleneck.
Kanban does a good job of quickly radiating the information about work items being blocked because some WIP constraint is violated. That said, adept Scrum teams can be equally adept at staying unblocked through constant communication and collaboration, which is why I think it works better for physically co-located teams. For example, if I'm a tester and I need a developer to start working on a story I just developed tests for, it's a lot easier and more effective for me to swivel my chair and tell the developers in the room with me than it is to send an email and wait for a response.
Scrum sprints provide nice time boxes that can be used to plan incremental chunks of functionality that roll up to a release. Sprint boundaries also provide a great place for the team to retrospect about how they are working and make continual improvements. The cadences of regular Release, Sprint, and Standup ceremonies provide great sync-points for the team to come together in a way that has low coordination costs. In Kanban, you can still achieve this, but its just not baked into the methodology - you keep working until you think you have enough and then do a release.
One other thing to consider is that Kanban is a good transitional approach because it is very accommodating to existing ways of working, but it just decreases the batch size and enforces WIP constraints to govern the throughput. Switching to a Scrum approach, however, can be more disruptive because it requires the team to adopt a new set of ceremonies.
To directly answer your question, I'd be inclined to recommend Kanban for projects that are failing to meet delivery dates and running over budget. Scrum is a fine choice for more disciplined co-located teams working on new development efforts. Scrum also has the concept of architecture spikes to work out novel technical approaches that the team has not yet used to deliver some new functionality. Kanban can be an equally good choice for new development efforts, but is more suited to development efforts where the solution space technology is well known by the team. Both methods require product owner engagement to ensure that the work items are at the right granularity and that the backlog is always prioritized. I'd also recommend ATDD as a facet of both approaches. For the best of both worlds I'd recommend a Scrumban hybrid approach.
Re: Fine for a crisis, but you're designing for no design
Steve Andrews
So how do we deal with innovation? In Scrum, new technical approaches get worked out in architectural spikes if they are broad enough to cut across and enable the development of several stories, otherwise the new technical details just get worked out as part of the developing the story itself.
In many ways, I think that Agile methods tend to gloss over the importance of good architectural design. My own feeling is that there is a need to spend time thinking about and designing the technical underpinnings of a system; you can't just haul off and start coding with no technical direction. In most cases, the team will pick existing frameworks to enable the architectural mechanisms of the system. It's less common that entire frameworks will need to be developed from scratch unless there is something particularly novel about the problem space that demands it. Either way, you still have to take the time to work that out before you start pulling new functionality onto the assembly line.
In traditional methods, we tried to get all of the architecture details worked out up front before building anything. That caused us to eat up a lot of budget before having anything to show for it and resulted in solutions that were harder to adapt as we learned more during development. Either that or the design was just ignored in many cases. In Agile methods, I'd say that it makes sense to do enough architectural thinking about the top stories in the backlog that have some technical commonality. The stories that depend on getting those common technical bits worked out just wouldn't make their way onto the board until the dependency is resolved. While a subset of the team is focusing on throughput for getting that batch of stories developed, a smaller subset of the team can be working on identifying the next batch of stories that can benefit from some common components. This may result in some refactoring work. By the way, this was kind of the goal with the Elaboration phase of the Unified Process. The difference here is that you're working out architectural issues continuously on smaller batches of stories and only when you need to instead of trying to get it all worked out up front.
Whether this technical work gets accounted for on the same board as the stories (functionality) or on a separate board all depends. Your idea of having an architectural assembly line that churns out technical components that stories on the functionality assembly line depend on is an interesting one.
Re: Fine for a crisis, but you're designing for no design
Huw Lloyd
Yes, I agree about the glossing over of design. However, I think this is equally glossed over by binary distinctions of architecture and coding. Both lead to devaluation. I think it would be a different matter to take the pull metaphor seriously and track how a system's form ('architecture') responds to the "pulls" (assimilates and accommodates the content), which, as I understand it, would be closer to the original kanban spirit.
Is this a real world case?
Fu Qingdong
The subsequences were,
1) the backlog kept changing, even during one sprint which caused our team member even more confused;
2) since project manager would not assign any task to the team, team members had to pick them from backlog but they had got used to the task assignment style for a long time, they didn't know which task to be selected, that is, during the sprint planning meeting, no one standed up and picked any task from backlog, so our practice was, we had to ask the team members one by one, based on their skills and capacities, selected tasks for them. I did not see any new spirit emerged;
3) definition of done was also not clear, so even we hoped to use ATDD, the acceptance tests may not cover all scenarios and normally people cannot brainstorm all scenario before implementing;
4) the worst thing was, the stakeholder kept asking for the plan, they wanted to know when the project could release. However, since transitting to Kanban, we normally did not (actually no capacity) work on a complete plan; that is, what we can provide was just a short-term plan which could be done in the coming couple of sprints but this was not accepted by the stakeholder. If we put more effort to do estimation on lower-priority stories, we may not even release anything in every sprint. So the long-term plan kept being unclear which made our stakeholder even more unhappy.
I have to stop here. I can keep raise more issues we found during our practices. Let's think about this later. Thanks.
Re: Is this a real world case?
Steve Andrews
To address your project's specific issues:
1. Of course the backlog keeps changing. That's the reality of software projects, and that's how we keep ensuring we're giving users what is next most important to them. But once a work item is in progress the team has to be allowed to drive it to completion.
2. Project managers are not supposed to assign work to team members. Individual team members need to have the maturity and be proactive enough to pull work as their skills and capacity allows. If team members need to be told what to do they are either not being properly empowered. If they are being empowered but still not able to proactively pull work they need to be coached or replaced as appropriate. High performance teams cannot tolerate weak links, be they skill or attitudinally challenged.
3. If it's really hard to understand what "done" means for a story then the story is probably poorly written or sized too large to being with. All backlog-based development approaches require effective articulation of work items. This only happens through lots of practice, but there are a few guidelines that all storywriters should follow such as the INVEST principles that will help to increase the understanding of what "done" means.
4. It's not unreasonable for stakeholders to expect a plan. Just because you're following an Agile method doesn't mean you can't do longer-term planning. It does mean you will need to set your client's expectation that they don't get to tell you what they want and when they want it by. They can tell you one of those. If you're doing Kanban, you will quickly be able to establish your team's throughput, which is analogous to velocity in Scrum. You can use that to forecast how many work items can be done in a timeframe. Clients may not be happy if you're not telling them exactly what they want to hear, but in my experience, most clients are reasonable in terms of recalibrating expectations for the longer-term as long as the team predictably delivers on its short-term commitments.
Interesting article
Frederik Vannieuwenhuyse
1/ cross-functional team to break the silos and encourage people to work together and to communicate better
2/ apply good engineering practices, i.e. acceptance test driven development
3/ get a WIP limited pull system in place
4/ prioritize the input queue
5/ estimation by the team
I've found these articles very useful on the topic of Scrum and Kanban and comparing those:
Scrumban - Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development
Re: Is this a real world case?
Frederik Vannieuwenhuyse
That said, it obviously is very meaningful for a business to have a strategy and mid to long term view. This view should not written in stone with a detailed release roadmap, but rather a view on how the product/service can to evolve; for example driven by a number of high-level concepts and how they would like to package features for release (related to point 4)
Point 2: Project managers schooled in the "industrial" paradigm can have a hard time to switch context and stop pushing activities on people. As such I think it comes from both directions: managers need to get a new perspective on how to redirect their focus (from micromanagement to leadership, a "go and see" lean problem solving attitude) and team members on how to become more self-organising within given boundaries. It's all about team coordination: start talking to your team members and start thinking about the different feedback loops (and yes, for people who have traditionally worked driven by assigned to-dos: they can use some guidance in this self-development)
Point 3: acceptance criteria are crucial for each item, in fact you should have a stage which specifies if the acceptance criteria / acceptance test is specified and validated. Regarding TDD: read some concerns here: beust.com/weblog/2014/05/11/the-pitfalls-of-tes...
Point 4: this reminds me of the different levels of agile planning (cf. agileatlas.org/articles/item/five-levels-of-agi...)


text:
Rowan University is scheduled to break ground today on an engineering building that will help the university more than double enrollment in its engineering program, to 2,000 students, officials said.
That increased capacity is critical for Rowan, which has been inundated with applicants eager to take part in its engineering program, said the university's president, Ali Houshmand.
"If you look at the demand for our engineering program, this past year, for every undergraduate position in engineering, we had 10 qualified applicants — New Jersey residents — that we could not take," Houshmand said.
And engineering graduates are in high demand in the state, said Anthony Lowman, dean of Rowan's College of Engineering. This past year, 95 percent of Rowan's engineering graduates got jobs after leaving the university.
And with all the pharmaceutical giants and defense and aviation companies in southern New Jersey, the area is clamoring for more, he said.
"I receive calls every day from companies looking to get our engineers," Lowman said. "And we're just simply not producing enough engineering students."
That will change with the new building, a 90,500-square-foot structure that will more than triple the college's available space when it is completed during the 2016-17 academic year. That building, along with another new structure that will house Rowan's Rohrer College of Business, is being funded by $117 million from the state's Building Our Future Bond Act.
That legislation also is being used to build two new structures at Montclair State University — a project that broke ground last month.
The university will enroll its first class of biomedical engineers next fall; that same semester, the school is planning to launch a Ph.D. program in engineering.
The new building "couldn't come at a better time. I think it fits our vision of growth," Lowman said. "In two years, we will be primed and ready to make a bigger difference than we already make."


text:
conebeckham wrote: "Means and practices" are very much part of "traditions." For example, we can speak of the Vajrayana Tradition(s), in their totality, having different "means and practices" than the "Theravada Tradition(s)." A teacher in a Theravada tradition will likely not be able to guide someone on the Vajrayana Path, and vice versa. This is not a judgement as to which is better or worse, just a statement that strikes me as fairly obvious, and demonstrates that means, practices, and teachers are all "of" a tradition, or a path.
Well, I completely agree. That is what I said.
Son wrote:When Lord Gautama revealed Dharma to the world, he did not set people in differing traditions. He pointed the way to the top of the mountain, and he encouraged every single step toward the top, regardless of what trail those steps may fall upon. Now, if one tradition leads you mostly up the east side of the mountain, and another leads you mostly up the west, you will not be able to follow both traditions. However, following your own way and your own trails up the mountain, it can be very useful to listen to several traditions. This has always been my experience. This is the Ekayana.
That's exactly what I have said.Ignoring historical development, and the quasi-mythological creation stories of Vajrayana, or even Mahayana (Nagarjuna and the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras, for example), I am sure that Gautama gave a variety of instructions to a variety of disciples. In a very general sense, I think he is known to have given various responses and instructions to householders, and to monks, and to kings/rulers/officials, etc. These are not "differing traditions," as much as expedient means to suit a variety of circumstances and beings.
Yes, I can see that in a way. The word tradition has wide and historical connotations to its meaning.I see the various traditions in much the same way, but in a wider, and more historical, sense.
As you've noted, if one tradition leads up the East side, and one up the West side, you won't be able to follow both. This would apply to paths, and to guides as well, wouldn't it?
Perhaps I've been misleading. I do not think that someone who has excluded themselves--or chosen, if one prefers--a specific tradition, can be persuaded out of it. I've certainly never tried to accomplish that persuasion to anyone. I've already conceptualized Ekayana and I never meant to imply that traditionalists should follow Ekayana. I simply wanted to express my view of the topic, by saying that, "one should not." Not to say it's wrong.Trails are by their very nature made by others, by those that have come before you. If you are going to create your own trail, you are by definition creating one that wasn't there before. You are "blazing a new trail," as they say, eh? "Listening to" several traditions, is fine--in my allegory, I referred to looking at the map of the whole mountain while one was already half way up a trail. Appreciating the myriad of ways is wonderful and nourishing, I think. But actually climbing the mountain, well.... if one were blazing their own trail, one would make a decision, based on reviewing the map, that a different trail may in fact be better at a certain point. At that point, you would need to get from Point A/Path A/Tradition A to Point B/Path B/Tradition B. If you've ever blazed a trail up a mountain, I think you can understand that it takes more effort, and likely more time, than following the trails that already exist. Sometimes the effort is worth it, don't get me wrong...sometimes one needs to reconnect, and each person is different. But as you have noted, one can't be in two places at once.
You seem to be responding as though I'm against tradition. No, I simply don't agree with following limited tradition. If others agree with it, I am not against them following it. Perhaps this clarifies my standpoint and concludes my two cents.


text:
A fat old woman that resides in Palmetto, Florida. She is a racist bitch who despises Obama. Not only is she racist towards African Americans, she also hates Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and every other race that is not white. She enjoys eating sweets and smothering all of her food with butter.
Taylor and Caitlin's grandmother's nick name is Ca-chunk-Ca-chunk.
by McCain's bitch. June 29, 2011


text:
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams could take home the biggest jackpot once the company goes public.
Williams, who was Twitter's CEO for two years until Dick Costolo took over in 2010, owns a 12 percent stake in the company. If Twitter turns out to be worth at least $17.60 per share, the initial public offering will make Williams a billionaire at 41 years old.
San Francisco-based Twitter Inc. unsealed its IPO documents on Thursday and said it intends to raise up to $1 billion in the offering. The figure could change as the bankers managing the deal gauge interest from investors.
Although Williams is no longer chief executive, he remains on Twitter's board of directors. Another board member, Peter Fenton, and his venture capital firm, Benchmark Capital, own a 6.7 percent stake in the company.
Next in line with a 4.9 percent stake is Jack Dorsey, who came up for the idea for Twitter with Noah Glass and Biz Stone. The stakes of Glass and Stone aren't listed in the IPO documents, meaning they don't own enough stock to trigger legal disclosures.
Glass came up with the original name "Twttr" in a reference to chirping birds. Despite his early involvement in Twitter, Glass was never promoted as one of the company's founders along with Dorsey, Stone and Williams.
Other investors who own at least a 5 percent stake in Twitter include private investment firm Rizvi Traverse, which backed Hugh Hefner's successful bid to take Playboy private two years ago, as well as Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital Partners and Union Square Ventures.
DST Global, a London-based investment firm founded by Russian investor Yuri Milner, is another stakeholder. DST, which focuses its investments on Internet companies, was pre-IPO investor in Facebook.
Many of Twitter's 2,000 employees could become rich, too. They won't be allowed to sell their stock until Feb. 15, at the earliest.


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224 Superior Street
Victoria, BC, V8V 1T3
The Manor
Some of the history of our remarkable house is obscure, but we do know a little bit. Henry Young and his wife Matilda Benyon had two sons, Harry and William. Young Harry was sent back to England to go to university. He fell in love with Tennyson (from whence the poem and our name, 'Albion Manor') and with a young woman named Stella. In order to lure the lovers back to Victoria from the lights and glitter of London, Henry and Matilda built this house as a wedding present. It was built in 1892 and cost a staggering $3,500.00. The family lived in the house until the 1920's and then little is known.
In the photo, standing on the verandah are Harry, Stella and William's wife Madge. William took the photo in the late 1890's. The details on the house are seen exactly as they appear today. Even the down spout from the eaves trough is the same. The old climbing rose has been removed, but the rest of the details are as you would have seem them in 1892
Interior Design
We are both artists - Don has an extensive history with theatrical design and Fernando has a degree from Artes Aplicadas in Seville and studied for a Fine Arts degree at Simon Fraser University. Together we have created a warm and welcoming home for guests - a home decorated with an eclectic collection of antiques and original artwork from around the world and surrounded with a lush garden that is our passion.
On entering the house, guests are greeted by the indomitable 'Maria de Medici', one of Fernando's spectacular creations. The walls of the living room, dining room and the halls are a veritable canvas of paintings, sketches, etchings and sculptures. There are treasures from the jungles of Papua New Guinea, carvings brought out of Northern Thailand on the back of an elephant, and antiques from the back streets of Kyoto, Japan.
The Garden
Albion Manor is surrounded by a lush English country garden that provides guest with an oasis in which to relax and unwind at the end of a working day or a busy day of sightseeing. Enjoy a drink on the large verandah or take a walk around the grounds and explore the Obelisk Garden, the setting for several unique sculptures including: the Playwrights' Font, Anicha, and Fernando's 'Hamburger Obelisque'.
You're only young once,
Your Hosts: Fernando Garcia and Don Halton
I grew up in a little hamlet in one of the driest part of Andalucia, Spain. My early memories are of strong beautiful daylight contrasted with cool and serene shadows and of old ladies in black sitting statically like ancient goddess overseeing my destiny in the calm of the middle of the day. And I remember the smell of jasmines and the cries of swallows flying over our patio.
My family moved to Seville. There the muse brought me to the beauty and inspiration of visual art. I studied and practiced ceramics for almost twenty years. When I moved to Vancouver the muse showed me that I still can play with the grandest of ideas and concepts using the smallest and most humble of things. In Victoria, my muse has remained with me, helping me make the atmosphere, our rooms and our garden at Albion House reflect all that I believe in about art and life. And don't forget, some of the brightest, most interesting colours on our palette come from you and our other guests. You bring life to our masterpiece.
I grew up in the mountains of Alberta. We fished in mountain streams, rode horses and hiked in the woods. In my youth, I worked as a miner, as a farm hand and as an organizer in the storage warehouses of a major museum. I have worked as a designer in television, film and on the stage. I have built my own house. I have traveled to England, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Morocco, Thailand, Burma, the US, Australia and Japan.
In 1992, I was in Seville working at a Creative Director at Expo '92. One night at a party in Seville, I met a young man. He was Fernando and for the last 15 years, we have lived in Korea, England and Italy before coming back to British Columbia — first for 6 years in Vancouver. We have ended up here in Victoria at this unbelievable house. We are living a dream running Albion Manor, our heritage bed and breakfast and sharing our international art treasures with an extraordinary range of wonderful guests. Our life is incredibly stimulating and we look forward to welcoming you when you visit Victoria — whether you stay overnight on your way to another destination, a week while you explore the many wonders of Victoria and the Island, or if you come as a snow-bird to escape the winter.
Did I mention that the daffodils start blooming in January?
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Albion Manor Bed and Breakfast
224 Superior Street
Victoria, BC, V8V 1T3 Canada
Toll-free: (877) 389-0012
Local phone: (250) 389-0012
Web site: www.albionmanor.com
Email: [email protected]


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Dream big. Do you want to pay for your daughter's university education? Do you want to throw a celebration for your son's wedding? Do you want to make significant improvements to your house? Even if you are poor, these dreams can be possible through financial planning.
Noel, of the Client Services department, welcomes Dungganon members to the workshop
This week, I had the opportunity to take part in a two-day workshop for Project Dungganon* members on wealth management and savings generation – where clients were encouraged to think of future goals and how they could be a reality. The course focused on two lessons 1) understanding the income and expenses of your household, and your capacity to save, and 2) understanding how small amounts of savings today can add up to large lump sums in the future. Members were energized by the content of the workshops, which involved each borrower having to analyze the finances of her family on a weekly basis. And important questions were asked of the entrepreneurs – Can you save? or save more? Can you improve your income or eliminate expenses? What do you want to save toward? How would you prioritize these future dreams? The workshop was a success – equipping borrowers with a new way to look at their financial situation and plans, and in some cases a renewed motivation to save.
Participating in this session, I was inspired. The degree to which borrowers participated showed that they enjoyed learning, and may apply these lessons to their lives. Moreover, I was inspired by Project Dungganon's work. Micro-savings products are important for the poor – allowing them to safely save small amounts of money for the future – but these products are only as good as the education that comes with them. I am truly impressed by the commitment that NWTF's Client Services staff showed as they delivered an engaging workshop – providing Dungganon clients with education they can use in further improving their lives.
Clients discuss their own goals for the workshop on Day 1
* Project Dungganon is the main microfinance arm of the Negros Women for Tomorrow Foundation (NWTF)
Joanne Gan is finishing up her last month as a Kiva Fellow at the Negros Women for Tomorrow Foundation in Bacolod City, Philippines. She continues to admire the work of the Client Services team at NWTF that is dedicated to providing non-financial services to the poor including business and financial training, trade fairs, and medical missions. To join the NWTF lending team, click here. To fund an entrepreneur in the Philippines, click here.


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KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (Sept. 14, 2013) – After averaging 11.86 assists and 1.36 digs in four matches this weekend at the Comcast Lady Vol Classic, ETSU junior setter Jamie Rutledge (Kingsport, Tenn.) received All-Tournament Team accolades, which was announced late Saturday night at the conclusion of the tournament.
For the weekend, Rutledge registered 166 assists, 19 digs, seven blocks, and six kills in 14 total sets played in Knoxville.
Rutledge was outstanding in ETSU's four-set win over Tennessee on Saturday as she recorded a season-high 62 assists and posted eight digs, marking the Bucs' first win over the Lady Vols in 34 years. On Friday, the Kingsport, Tenn. native tallied 59 assists, eight digs, four blocks and three kills in the 3-1 victory over Austin Peay.
Rutledge and the Bucs return to action Friday when ETSU opens Atlantic Sun Conference play at Mercer. Game time is set for 7 p.m.
ETSU fans wanting to receive Buccaneer news, score updates, in-game promotions and much more sent to their mobile device can do so by signing up for "Buc Updates." Click here to sign up today!
For more information on Buccaneer athletics, visit ETSUBucs.com.