Saturday, April 04, 2015

I am nominated for the 2015 Brickell Key Award!

It was a huge surprise when I received the email saying I am nominated for the 2015 Brickell Key Award. The email reads "…nominated due to your exhaustive work in advancing the quality of data-driven planning and spending your time spreading that knowledge worldwide. You deserve it."

First what is the Brickell Key Award? As we can read here  "The Brickell Key Award highlights excellence in our community, honoring two people who have shown outstanding achievement, leadership and contribution to our community. The award is especially oriented toward highlighting people who are lesser known and worthy of greater exposure." I am “lesser known” indeed…but am I worthy of great exposure? Let’s check…

First what about “contribution to our community”? Indeed I have some contributions…for instance I am an Accredited Kanban trainer (AKT)...but I don't give many public classes...mostly private classes and of course I use Kanban Method in my own work...also three years ago I published David Anderson’s Kanban book in Bulgarian language…and I even spent eight months translating the first eight chapters myself… before I hired a professional translator who finished the rest of the book in 3 months…but on the other hand I failed to make the Bulgarian translation of the Kanban book a commercial success…which didn’t stop me to publish in Bulgarian for the first time ever two books by W. Edwards Deming and four books by Eli Goldratt…I know the Kanban community honors the two great management gurus and besides “The Goal” is quite successful commercially…unfortunately not as much as it should be…but it takes time an idea to stick with the public…which reminds me of the fact that last year I presented #NoEstimates Project Planning Using Monte Carlo Simulation at five community conferences…and at the Istanbul event I even managed to make the audience laugh…thanks God not at the math I presented…the math lots of people seems to like…but I am not sure if it is a success…well it helps me in my daily work…but on the other hand nobody ever came to tell me something like – your idea is sound but while using it on a daily basis I found a small gap in it and here is how it can be improved or better explained…I mean somebody to build on my work…like I did on the method for probabilistically planning a project - the one David Anderson presented at LKCE2011... indeed first I published Project Planning using Little’s Law... that article allowed me to become the first ever Bulgarian to present at a global Theory Of Constraints conference - TOCICO2014!!!... and I continued using and building on David’s probabilistic project planning method…like in my latest article Probabilistic project sizing using Randomized Branch Sampling (RBS) … which hopefully will have an impact…it has already earned me a presentation spot at LKNA15 in Miami…and…and that’s all I could recall about my contribution to the Kanban community…

So if the nomination is not about contribution then what about the “outstanding achievement”? Here comes the difficult part…because now I have to share what David Anderson wrote to me in 2013…actually all
kanbandev subscribers saw it back then…here it is - "I think the issue you are having, and this is incredible common, is that you are struggling to think and work probabilistically and continue to think deterministically. This is why paradigms are also called "mindsets." Quite literally your brain is wired to think and calculate deterministically. Changing is painful. It literally requires a rewiring of your brain."…you see…quite friendly indeed…but the best part is at the end…where he gave me some encouragement saying - "Struggle through the pain and embrace a new way of thinking. It will be worth it."

Indeed it was worth it.

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