3 ways to be Agile*

Building on last week's post, I think that not only the principles of agile development could apply to subsurface science, I think some of the tactics employed might also benefit us geoscientists. For example:

Ship and iterate: get maps, sections, velocity models, even geomodels, made early. Don’t wait until everything is perfect (it never will be). Making these things will help reveal the weaknesses in the data and the uncertainties interpretation, and you can be more strategic about what you spend time on. Do everything you can to make the iteration faster (use macros, write scripts, outsource).

Daily scrums: subsurface teams get together on a daily basis, for no more than 10 or 15 minutes. Everyone gives their two or three headlines, quick things are dealt with, other things are flagged for follow-up. And everyone can get on with their day... no more 1 hour meetings!

Pair interpretation: seismic interpreters sit together to interpret, with one picking the lines and looking at waveform character, the other taking a wide-angle view, looking for consistency, nearby well ties, or thinking about the geological setting. Slower, probably, but maybe better (in programming, this technique produces fewer bugs).

Signs and symbols

I made this sheet of signs and symbols when I was an explorationist at Statoil. I had always used Macs until then, and wrote my thesis in LaTeX; both make it very easy to write scientific signs and symbols. It seemed to be a struggle on the PCs we had at Statoil, so I made a cheatsheet of keyboard shortcuts for myself.

I sent it around to some people when I left ConocoPhillips and some said they liked it. So I thought I'd put it here for anyone to take. The idea is to print it out and put it on your wall. Next time you catch yourself writing 12 km2 or 25oC or not bothering with the pesky acute accent in resumé, just glance at the list. On Windows you would hold down the Alt key, then with NumLock on, type out the number indicated on the number pad (the numeric keys above the alphabet keys won't work).

Landed!

After a predictably exhausting trip across Kensington, then across Calgary, then across Canada, then across Nova Scotia, we have landed in our new town. Next week (we hope) we make the final move across the village to our house. Before then, we have some painting, planning, repairing and replacing to do. Fun stuff, but I am going to be trying to make myself useful to present and future clients while we do it. We'll see how that goes!

In the meantime, I got my new business cards just before we left Calgary. They are a bit home-made, but I like it that way. The geeky 2D barcode thing is a QRCode, and very easy to make online (just Google make qrcode). This one points at this website. You can encode more or less anything in them, but the more text you encode, the bigger they get. They max out at 255 characters.