Agile Advice

July 19, 2007

Agile is Not Communism

Last week I taught an introductory course on Agile Work. Normally this is pretty easy stuff. However, I was teaching this course in Bucharest, Romania (cool), and I have come across a substantial, strong and vigorous objection to agile (also cool, but challenging too). Several people in my class are asserting that agile is just like communism and since communism failed, agile is not likely to succeed either. I'm looking for help on this!

I have Googled "agile communism" and come up with some interesting reading:

Does Scrum/XP Violate the Agile Manifesto?
The Agile Method and Other Fairy Tales: QED

I have also done some quick research on communism to check that I understand the comparison and objection. Here is a wiktionary definition of communism:

1. A term used to refer to a number of political philosophies or ideologies which share the belief in the virtue of holding the production resources collectively. 2. A society organized in line with the communist theories, the ultimate aim of which is the abolition of the state and the creation of a classless, stateless society whose members produce according to their abilities and take what they need.

So let's start with that definition.

Holding Production Resources Collectively
Also called: common ownership of the means of production

I suppose there are a few ways to look at this. In an agile environment which encourages (for example) collective code ownership, it might seem like holding the production resources collectively. However, the code is actually the result of production, rather than the Means of Production. This distinction is not trivial. The means of production for a team in an agile environment still include both the tools and the raw materials upon which those tools exercise. In software development (and in most creative work nowadays), the tools are computers and software and other electronic gadgets such as video cameras, telecomm systems, etc. The raw materials are typically intellectual constructs such as images, sounds, ideas, processes (and of course their legal counterparts such as trademarks, copyrights, and patents). Agile methods do not require the team of workers to own these means, nor do agile methods forbid workers from owning these means. In fact, There is one important way in which agile methods are decidedly not communist: every individual owns their own creativity, experience, and knowledge and is only asked to share willingly (and usually in exchange for pay such as salary, stock options or outright corporate ownership). I believe this passage clarifies things nicely:

Marxists define economic systems in terms of how the means of production are used, and which social class controls them. Thus, in capitalism, the means of production are controlled by the bourgeoisie, (the "capitalists" - the owners of capital), while in socialism they are controlled by the people's elected representatives and in communism they are controlled collectively by the people themselves. [Means of Production]

Agile methods, if anything, tend towards capitalism in this regard. (Although a whole other question could be asked about just how much control the owners of a corporation really have given delegated authority through the board of directors to the chief executive staff _and_ the abrogated authority through mutual funds, pension funds, holding companies, and trusts _and_ the limitations on that control through the blunt instrument of voting shares _and_ the influences on that control through the control of information by financial analysts and the media...)

Ultimate Aim of The Creation of a Classless, Stateless Society

Well, this certainly isn't the aim of agile methods that I am aware of. The aims of agile methods as I understand them includes:

• Building stuff that stakeholders like
• Creating an environment for team members to exercise their creativity
• Doing all this in a way that responds well to pervasive frequent change

Again, I can understand why there might be some confusion here. Agile methods promote these three aims by doing something that looks just a little like a classless organizational structure. Typically, agile (and lean) environments start to have a higher manager to staff ratio (fewer managers), encourage self-organizing, cross-functional teams, and emphasize team goal setting, commitment and accountability. This might seem classless (and stateless/managementless) until one examines what is not said: Agile does not claim that every team member is exactly equal, it does not require that every team member do exactly the same thing, it does not require that every team member give up _all_ their individual preferences (although certainly it would be hard for someone who didn't like talking to other people to be part of an agile team... so I guess some individual preferences won't work in an agile team), it does not encourage every team member to do exactly the same amount of work regardless of if you are measuring effort or output.

Now admittedly, when I am presenting examples of self-organizing teams, I do sometimes use examples that come close to classless stateless teams... but that's just to show that this is a possibility and allowable in an agile environment, not that it is the only way.

Those practices in agile methods that do seem like classlessness and statelessness are not aims... they are means. A self-organizing, self-managing team, is means to an end. It is not an aim in itself. Why does this matter? For the simple reason that it is always bad to confuse means and ends. The end cannot justify the means (classlessness and statelessness imposed by revolution)... and nor can the means justify the ends (classlessness and statelessness that results in apathy, boredom and low productivity). So the fact that self-organization is a means is a way for us to decide if it is worthwhile. The evidence for self-organizing teams in a business context is strong (lots of links and articles and books on this blog as well as others). Most team members enjoy being self-directed in a way that is collaborative with other professionals. So both the ends are good - productivity - and the means are good - happy people.

Members Produce According to Their Abilities and Take What They Need

To me, "produce according to their abilities" sounds a lot like a tautology. Certainly, team members can produce no more than their abilities! From an agile perspective, this isn't even what we are interested in... we are interested in the multiplicative effect of teams of people working together effectively so that the result of the work is greater than the sum of the individual abilities. There is now substantial evidence that this is not just possible, but a likely outcome of group work (see Research on Group Effectiveness vs Individuals among many others). My favorite phrase for this is "Unity in Diversity" which describes a group of people who have united around a common goal, but with each individual having talents, experiences, knowledge, patterns of behavior, and insights that are all different from each other.

The second part of the phrase "take what they need" is another piece of this pie that has absolutely no relationship to agile methods. Again, there is evidence that this is specifically not supported. Lean methods encourage compensation that is based on a number of things including: contribution to results in one's sphere of influence (rather than the more limited sphere of responsibility) and the number of skills you have mastered and use to contribute to the work.

Disconnecting reward from results is an obvious problem. While people do have altruistic feelings, we also are clearly motivated by praise

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Some Similarities

One of the attendees of the course, a woman by the name of Christina, provided me with some notes based on her understanding of Agile and Communism and she listed these similarities:

• They both rely on participation, rather than executing orders.
• One aim is less frustration.
• They use some similar phrases such as multidisciplinary / cross-functional.
• They both ask people to evaluate each other.

And What about Reality?

Well, I haven't lived in a communist environment so I admit that my ability to talk intelligently about this is not what I would like it to be. I am interested in people out there who might be able to help me with this.

Here are some questions for people who have actually experienced communism:

• What are the actual, in-practice similarities between agile and communism?
• What are the in-practice differences between agile and communism?
• Why did communism fail and how might this affect the success of agile methods?
• How can we safeguard agile from falling into the same problems?

Can anyone out there help please?

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 06:13 PM | |

June 04, 2007

The Culture of Time

Thanks to Deborah Hartmann who pointed out these links:
Perception of Time
Timeless Time

Personally, I'm strongly on the side of "polychronic"... and I'm being strongly encouraged to move to a more "monochronic" approach to time management. All my life I have struggled with calendars, PDAs etc. We'll see how it goes!

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 10:00 PM | |

January 17, 2007

The Inner Ring

Here's a slightly off-topic, but nevertheless excellent read: "The Inner Ring" by C S Lewis. This is a talk given by C S Lewis to what seems to be a group of university students. In it, he describes the notion of the inner ring and the desire to be "in". It is amazing how much our culture in North America and our corporate culture is driven by this desire. I'll leave it to you to decide if this is good or bad.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 04:23 PM | |

January 16, 2007

The Wisdom of Teams - Generalizing Specialists

I've almost finished reading The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization. I wanted to share a couple of paragraphs that give a great example of the idea of Generalizing Specialists that is such a key part of Agile Work. Here's the passage:

The [Connectors Team] made several decisions that solidified its common team approach and sense of mutual accountability. First, it set some rules. Everyone on the team had to identify two others who could serve as backups during vacation and sick days. To eradicate the attitude of "it's not my job" from the team, it was agreed that whenever anyone needed help, the person asked had to respond even if the activity was not in his or her area of expertise. And the team also agreed on a peer appraisal system that gave everyone the opportunity to evaluate everyone else and, through [their team leader], feed it back to the person being evaluated. Clear-cut rules of behavior like these are an important element of all successful teams.

Second, the team eliminated the two managerial positions that had retarded empowerment. This effectively modified the membership of the team because only one of the two managers whose jobs were eliminated chose to stay. The other believed he could not take a perceived demotion and left. By January 1991, however, the Connectors Team was a dramatically more effective group of people than it had been at its formation a year earlier.

Energy and enthusiasm reached higher levels as the team started pushing itself harder and in more innovative ways. One of the engineers, for example, decided to become completely qualified as a purchaser as well. Instead of being threatened, the purchasers on the team worked hard to teach her the basics of the job. The peer review approach worked so well that the team agreed on the additional - and, for many teams, difficult - step of directly providing each other feedback instead of relyinng on the team leader for this task.

There are several great points in the above story:

Backups: many agile methods do not explicity talk about this, but there is a need to make sure that the Truck Factor increases. A low truck factor can be a real problem and I strongly recommend that the Queue Master (Product Owner, Customer) in particular needs to have backup. As well, this hints at the idea that eventually the roles of Process Facilitator and Queue Master should eventually go away to be taken on by the team as a whole.

Skills: the example of the engineer learning to be a purchaser is a great example of a brave soul really taking to heart the idea of working for the good of the team by becoming a generalizing specialist. In my own coaching work, I have seen purely business-oriented Queue Masters become technical contributors to the team through a process of both deliberate and "accidental" learning. Every human being has an incredible capacity for learning. In a high-performance team, everyone takes that ability very seriously - to the point of it becoming a responsibility.

Rules: one of the simplest, yet most profound, ways that a group of people can start on the process to becoming a high-performance team is by working together to agree on some ground rules about team behavior. One team I worked with, among other rules, decided that no "stinky food" was allowed in the team room. The passage above notes the non-trivial rules. Both "trivial" and non-trivial rules are important to the team for two reasons:

1. Develop a set of expectations that individuals can hold each other to in order to avoid or deal with conflict.

2. Become aware of the team's power to set their own working conditions, independently of management or other "leadership".

Management: regrettably for most managers, in a high-performance team the value of formal, traditional management is much reduced. However, there is now an opportunity for two different types of work: the generalizing specialist work on the team, and the servant leader work of supporting the team. The servant leader is someone who is exceptionally good at problem solving, organizational change, and working through influence rather than authority.

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This book is incredible. Every time I read a few pages I think "Oh! I've got to write about that on Agile Advice!" Unfortunately if I did that, I'd be in serious copyright violation. So all I can do is encourage you to read the book.

If you have already read the book, I would love to hear your impressions, particularly if there were things about it that you really didn't like. What didn't you like and why? What are the holes in it's argument?

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 04:05 PM | |

December 18, 2006

Lean, Agile and Capitalism - Just a Thought

It occurred to me to ask: If the "invisible hand" in the free markets of capitalism is making for efficient markets, efficient work... then why is there some much room for improvement when we start using non-competitive, collaborative techniques such as lean and agile?

And if these collaborative techniques work on a small scale to improve efficiency, does this mean that we could do this across organizations as a "replacement" for capitalism somehow?

In agile methods, we "assume positive intent" on the part of individuals. What if we could do this across organizations? I'm not living in a dream world yet, but I think I have an inkling of what it might look like: Toyota and its collaborative, leaned-out supply chain.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 06:39 PM | |

December 07, 2006

Peformance Goals - The Wisdom of Teams

As I continue my enthralled read through "The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization" I am moved to share another core concept that deserves to be considered essential for Agile Work:

The Performance Goal

This concept and practice is an essential condition for a team to become a high performance team. The Performance Goal is a specific, measurable, challenging goal that is given to and/or adopted by the team. It is a statement or description of a goal that answers "why?" and "what?" questions, but specifically avoids answering "how?". It is not a description of activities, it is a statement of desired results. The team is left with the full authority to answer "how?" and implement it.

This concept is essential for setting the initial boundaries of self-organization. By defining "what" and "why", the team is left free to be creative about the solution. The Performance Goal is also essential to building team accountability (as opposed to individual or externalized accountability). Every action, plan, mistake and success are oriented around the Performance Goal.

From the book:

The hunger for performance is far more important to team success than team-building exercises, special incentives, or team leaders with ideal profiles. In fact, teams often form around such challenges without any help or support from management. Conversely, potential teams without such challenges usually fail to become teams.

I would also like to point out a great blog entry I found that shows some of the other side of dealing with teams and present some cautionary words about the potential pitfalls of working in teams.

Teams as a Double-Edged Sword

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In an Agile Work environment, the starting point for a performance goal is simply the delivery of valuable work at the end of their very first iteration. This is often a substantial challenge to a team and an organization. For some teams that have worked for a long time in a "waterfall" or phase-based project environment, it can be almost unthinkable that valuable results could be delivered in one tenth or one twentieth of the "normal" amount of time.

However, simply delivering value at the end of each iteration is probably not going to sustain the development of a high performance team for very long. Rather, the overall objective or goal of the project has to be important and compelling. Much work these days is _not_ important and compelling. In fact, many people become cynical about work because they are stuck doing a high proportion of work that is bureaucratic or due to chaotic circumstances.

As a reminder, the books "Good to Great" and "Built to Last" both discuss the importance of challenging, important goals. The wording is different, but the concepts all map to the idea of a Performance Goal. In "Good to Great" it is the "Hedgehog Concept". In "Built to Last" it is the "Big Hairy Audacious Goals" (no kidding!). I imagine this concept comes up in many other good books about team and organizational effectiveness. I would love suggestions on other good books to read about this! Please write them in the comments.

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I frequently work with organizations where a team has been formed up, told to use agile methods, and then also told how to do their work. Really great examples of this are things like: "we want you to self-organize, but you have to build this huge system using J2EE." The the problem with this is simply that it may in fact be ten times less expensive to build the system with Ruby. However, someone has decided (possibly for defensible reasons) that J2EE is the technology platform that must be used. In this circumstance, someone external to the team has stepped over the boundary of "why" and "what" and also included some "how" in the team's goals. The team is not even allowed to consider the possibility that something might work just as well and be much less expensive. Not only that, but the stakeholders haven't even really stated "why" the system is being built and so the team can't evaluate technology choices. There is no standard around which to self-organize. I admit that I am using a simplistic example here, but the pattern is something that I have seen over and over again.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:44 PM | |

November 15, 2006

The Case for Context Switching

Recently, Dimitri Zimine wrote an excellent little story about context switching. Joel Spolsky writes in "From the 'You Call this Agile' Department":

Dmitri is only looking at one side of the cost/benefit equation. He's laid out a very convincing argument why Sarah should not interrupt her carefully planned two week iteration, but he hasn't even mentioned arguments for the other side: the important sale that will be lost.

Okay... I'll bite.

Let's look at that argument from the perspective of the sales person first since that is where Joel's concern starts:

The Sales Guy Perspective

"I need the 'ezhibal' feature now! Big bucks coming soon if we can get it now."

Let's suppose that this urgent email has come in somewhere near the start of our two week iteration. The normal response to this in Scrum is to push back a little. The ScrumMaster says something to the effect of: "Look if you wait 7 days we can put this on the top of the list for our next iteration."

First reaction, and it's a normal one, is for Sales Guy to freak out. I've actually heard people saying things like "You're going to lose your job over this! I'm getting the VP involved and he's not going to like it" and then they stalk off to find the big dog to come and bark at us. Anyway, let's pretend that the Sales Guy is willing to be reasonable and not instantly escalate the "problem". So what he actually says is: "Look, this is super important, it'll probably only take a few minutes for us to talk about it and then we can figure out how long it will take to fix. Let's just do a quick phone call and yadda, yadda, yadda, blah dee blah..."

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Enough of the Sales Guy perspective.

Nowadays, if I'm in this situation, I do a value assessement. I tell the team to keep working on their plan, nothing's changed yet, and I sit down with Sales Guy and the person who's sponsoring the current work and we start a discussion about the options of which there are really only two that work in Scrum:

1. Stay the Course
2. Cancel the Iteration

First, let's talk about how we decide which option to take. Then we'll talk about why.

Deciding on the option is easy. You look at the value of the work currently being done and compare it to the value of the work that Sales Guy needs. You take into account probabilities. If Sales Guy doesn't have a signed contract, then it's hard to day if there's going to be any real revenue from the 'ezhibal' feature. Still, you might be able to do an assessment of the probabilities based on your level of trust and history with the client, etc. You also need to take into account the time value of money. Does delaying the current work have consequences for another client or stakeholder? What is the cost of those consequences.

This is a relatively simple cost/benefit analysis and comparison. If you're not comfortable with money and numbers and spreadsheets, you better get comfortable!

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Okay, so we have a way of comparing the two bits of work. Now let's look at the two "allowed" responses and a third "bad" response.

Stay the Course

Turns out that the potential benefit of the stuff Sales Guy wants is not quite as high as the potential benefit of the stuff that Suzie Stakeholder prioritized for the current iteration. Well, that's easy. Put the request from Sales Guy in our prioritized list of work and get to it when there is an appropriate level of benefit relative to the other work.

Cancel the Iteration

The stuff Sales Guy wants is super-valuable. So let's get the whole team to stop what they are doing and everyone supports this very valuble work. Stopping the whole team is appropriate because obvioulsy, the stuff they're working on isn't as valuable. Oh, and because we treat a team as a unit in Scrum. And because the team needs to commit to work, not individuals. This isn't so obvious... more later.

Peel Sarah off to do the 'ezhibal' Feature

This is what normally happens, and in a "normal" non-agile environment, it's probably okay. In a non-agile environment, Sarah hasn't made any commitments (she's been forced to agree to dates and scope, etc., but she hasn't made a commitment that she is empowered to live up to). So if she goes off and does this one little thing, it probably will be just business as usual. In an agile environment, the team has made a commitment and doing this work this way invalidates the team's commitment.

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Why do we do it this way? The main reason is around trust and commitment. Yup, it's that soft icky stuff that we're so incredibly bad at that customers think that bugs are normal, that management shoves the kitchen sink into projects in the frustrated hope that they'll get something out of the IT team at the end of the project. Sound familiar to anyone?

Anyway. An iteration is a commitment. It is a firm and solid commitment. The team as a group of smart and honorable people is making a definite commitment to the rest of the organization to get a certain amount of work done in a fixed amount of time. In return, management is agreeing to give the team every support in reaching this commitment. When a team is new at this, they might get it wrong. But having done this with dozens of teams now, I know that after a few tries, the team gets the hang of it and commits to appropriate amounts of work, and management provides appropriate levels of support.

This commitment is essential for developing trust. And anything that comes in the way of the team meeting its commitment is considered "BAD". An obstacle to do away with.

This is interesting, because Joel's second example is about defects. And I strongly agree that defects are "BAD" and need to be dealt with at a very high level of priority. The reason is simple: they prevent a team from meeting its commitment.

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One team I was coaching was constantly bombarded by these types of it'll-just-take-a-few-minutes-need-it-asap requests. They had many stakeholders and very very limited resources to service these requests. They had several small projects that were taking literally years to do because they couldn't get enough concentrated time on any one thing. This was considered normal and good in their environment.

The trouble is, no one had really looked at the overall consequences. Everyone was doing local optimization. For us geeks, we all know that local optimization is something to be avoided if possible. We climb a peak only to discover that we have to climb back down a ways to get up to the higher peak we now see is next to this one. We climb up that one only to discover yet another higher peak even further along thus requiring us to climb down and up again... When really what we should have done is stepped back a ways, looked at the lay of the land and said, "hey, that peak over there is the highest of them all, let's go climb that one."

Scrum helps us avoid local optimization by forcing all feature requests for a team to be prioritized in a list of work, and by allowing the team to complete small pieces of work so it actually gets _something_ done that you can learn from.

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Joel said:

Agile is not supposed to be about swapping out one set of bureaucratic, rigid procedures for another equally rigid set of procedures that still doesn't take customer's needs into account.

True enough! But it also demonstrates a serious lack of understanding about what is being done in Dmitri's example! First of all, without being agile at all, it is possible to switch from 18 month projects to two week projects. Both can be bureaucratic as you please (well, actually, there's only so much bureaucracy you can cram into two weeks and still get something done). The shorter projects will allow you to be much more responsive to customer needs... by definition!

So what happens when you add in all the other things that agile really is about? Transparency. Truthfulness. Creativity. Learning. Meta-Learning. Prioritization. Self-Organizating Teams. Eliminating Waste.

Well, first of what you get is something that's damn hard to do right. It goes against almost everything we've been taught to do: the extreme of heroics of the extreme of careful planning and process.

Secondly, what you get is something that needs safety zones and meta-rules. Like mutual, freely-given, team-to-stakeholders commitment. Like assuming positive intent.

And thirdly, what you get is an environment where not only is the business getting what it needs more than it used to, but also, the team likes working with the business, and the business likes working with the team.

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I admit that the point Joel is making isn't too different. Yes: look at the costs and the benefits. But agile isn't quite about instantaneous responsiveness. That's a red herring and I'm suprised that Joel threw it's stinky carcass into the discussion. Agile is also about balancing that responsiveness with the overall view of value for the team and the organization. The tool for doing that is the prioritized list of work, not the email message from Sales Guy to Sarah.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 04:13 AM | |

November 14, 2006

Process Facilitator "Smells"

I have now trained over one hundred people in my Agile Project Managmenet / ScrumMaster Certification course. I'm starting to see and hear some of the results of this training. There are a couple specific "smells" that I have become aware of.

Fortunately, I've been able to provide coaching to some of the organizations that have sent people to my course. There are quite a number of good things that happen, but there are a couple of things that seem to be "natural" misunderstandings.

1. Spectating
   I put a lot of emphasis on the idea of a self-organizing team in my course. There are a number of exercises, an hour-long section, and many other points during the course when it comes up. With all of this emphasis, it seems that a few people have come away from the course with an extremely hands-off approach to the Process Facilitator role (ScrumMaster/Agile Project Manager). I think this is a natural and probably good reaction to the heavy-handed command & control approach that these people come from. However, there are a few things that should be considered minimum levels of engagement (listed below).
2. Problem Solving
   There is also a great deal of emphasis put in the course on removing obstacles. I have seen several cases where it becomes the habit of the Process Facilitator to start solving every problem. This can happen in day-to-day work, and also in the retrospectives. Again, this seems to be a natural consequence of the desire to get in there and be of value. However, if the Process Facilitator writes down all the "things that need impovement" from the retrospective and then says "Okay! I'll take care of these things." then you know that the Process Facilitator has gone too far.

Appropriate Process Facilitator Engagement

Here are a few ideas on an appropriate level of engagement. Finding the right balance of enagement is not easy and there is no exact formula to follow. Partly it depends on your personality and skills as a Process Facilitator, partly it depends on the capabilities of the team, and partly it depends on the constraints of your work environment. Nevertheless, there are some types of engagement that you can persue with confidence. Here are a few concrete guidelines:

• Team Membership
  If you aren't saying "we" when referring to the team, you aren't engaged enough. The Process Facilitator is a member of the team.
• Colocation
  Most of your time should be spent sitting with the team. If the team isn't colocated, then you should be spending most of your time physically visiting each team member.
• Obligations
  The Process Facilitator is a catalyst. You must track all the obstacles and "needs improvement" things that the team raises, and then make sure that they get fixed... without going in and fixing everything yourself. Ultimately, your job is to work yourself out of a job.
• Assertiveness
  The organization that the team is working in will be creating some of the obstacles that the team is facing. Being assertive is critical to helping the organization face and then overcome some of these obstacles.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 01:49 PM | |

November 12, 2006

More on Scaling Agile

One problem with having multiple teams working on the same project will be the tendency to compare the teams' performance. Why is this a problem?

Why Not Compare Team Performance?

One of the main reasons is that the teams need to be collaborating not competing. There can be a small amount of friendly competition that might come naturally, but as soon as management starts paying attention to differences in team performance, the competition starts to get serious.

In the case of multiple teams working on the same project, the goal should be to maximize overall performance, not individual team performance. Too much competition can lead to unintentional or deliberate sabotage: failed communication, incomplete communication and downright dishonesty.

Motivating Teams without Comparing Them!

As Mary Poppendieck has written, measure up [pdf]. In a single-team situation this means that individuals are measured and rewarded based on team performance (their sphere of influence). In a multi-team environment, that means that the group of teams should be measured as a group and compensated as a group. This will encourage all teams to work towards the success of the overall project. I personally believe there is some room for individual-based compensation, but the way it is handled needs to be done so that it does not encourage sub-optimal behavior.

As well, each team can keep track of their velocity. Some coaches recommend using "ideal hours" or some other units to determine velocity (velocity = estimated work remaining completed / iteration). The trouble with doing this with multiple teams is that there will be a very real tendency to want to compare each team's velocity. Since velocity is a useful measure for team capacity, it is important to still have a way to measure it. One simple way to do this to prevent comparison is to use different units for each team. Team One might be measuring velocity in Estimated Ping Pong Balls Completed / Iteration... Team Two in Estimated Bananas Completed / Iteration... Team Three in Estimated Bogo-MIPS Completed / Iteration... etc. etc.

Motivating Collaboration

First off, management must make visible commitments to eliminating barriers to collaboration. For example, it is a great sign of commitment to re-organize office spaces so that all the teams are sitting near to each other. Every time the Process Facilitator identifies an obstacle that relates to collaboration (tools, process, physical environment, etc.) management should get right on it and fix it.

An ongoing investment in team-building training, workshops and exercises is also helpful. This type of investment helps people gain the skills necessary to work effectively with other people. Again, individuals need to see and believe that management cares about and values teams.

Finally, one of my pet peeves: when a project is over, keep the team together! Do not break them up and redistribute your "resources" to other efforts. The value of those people working together is substantial. The value of those people working together as a high-performance team is incredible! In a multi-team situation, it is reasonable to take teams from the overall group and re-distribute their efforts... but just don't break up the individual teams.

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Miscellaneous Notes on Scaling Agile:

Twelve is still the maximum recommended size for a single agile team. Seven is really the sweet spot. A team larger than twelve people just takes too long to get into the Performing stage of team development. If you feel like your project needs more than twelve people actively involved, then you probably want to split into two or more teams... and then you have "scaled" agile.

If you have three teams of five people (or some similar configuration of people just over the 12 person limit), then they will work as a very close-knit group and a lot of the time will act as if they were a single team. They will probably plan iterations and do demos and retrospectives together.

Twelve teams working on the same project at once is about the maximum number before communication overhead is slowing everyone down too much. This is largely a factor of trust: with 150 or fewer people involved in an effort, it is possible for everyone to know everyone. More than that many people and it is no longer possible. Trust is just not an option anymore and bureaucratic controls take over.

If for some reason you need to do something in a small amount of time and you think it's going to take more than twelve teams of twelve people...? Break the effort into smaller chunks. Divide and conquer. Division can be across functional areas, structural areas or time.

Although I have heard of agile methods being used with groups larger than this, I haven't heard any success stories :-)

Check out my earlier introductory article on Scaling Agile in a large project situation.

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Dean Leffingwell has an article about practices needed for scaled-up efforts at the Agile Journal. I glanced through it, but I admit that after I disagreed with his very first point (Intentional Architecture), I started to pay less attention.

He claims that refactoring of large systems is not possible (or at least infeasible). The odd thing is, most large projects that I have been involved with are being done exactly because an old system is not refactorable. A large telecom system, a large insurance system, a large data warehouse and a large GIS system are all being done with scaled up agile methods exactly because the old systems that are currently in place have become ossified to the point where they must be replaced.

These old systems were originally built with phase-based development approaches. At some point, people stopped refactoring because they were not given the space to do so. This drop in code quality turned into technical debt. The technical debt accumulated to the point where it was unbearable (maintenance costs, cost of change, etc.).

The problem with intentional architecture is that it goes back to the old assumption that you can do a good design for a system without the constant feedback from review, deployment and use done on a very short cycle time. Over and over, we are faced with the painful consequences of this attitude, and that is one of the key reasons we started to work with agile methods in the first place.

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Martin Fowler makes a good case that scaling agile is the last thing you should do. I don't disagree! Scale your agile teams at your own risk!

It's nice for me to be able to say that I've worked on some agile projects over $10,000,000 in size, but the fact is that the cost could have been reduced substantially if the team size was lowered and the deadline extended. It is (relatively) simple to do a cost/benefit analysis of cross-team-coordination-overhead vs. the time value of early delivery of more functionality... although I've never seen anyone do it! If you know of an example of an organization doing this in a realistic way, I'd love to hear about it!

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Are there other ways of supporting cross-team collaboration that you have seen?

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 09:13 AM | |

November 07, 2006

Scaling Agile Projects

More and more, organizations are applying agile methods to large projects or efforts that require more than a single team. There are three dimensions or concerns of coordination. It is critical that all three be addressed, but there are many ways of addressing them. Here I will simply list these three types of coordination and make some simple suggestions of how to implement them.

I have now had the opportunity to work with several clients where they are applying agile methods to projects with budgets that are greater than $10,000,000. All of them are using multiple teams to work on the same overall project/program. Out of this experience (along with some good reading along the way), I have come to understand that the following three types of coordination are the essential ones:

Value

In order to maintain the "early and frequent" delivery of value that agile methods propose, it is important that the work of the effort be coordinated to maximize early delivery of value. From this perspective, there are often many cooks in the kitchen. I have seen a "Product Owner Team", a "Customer Team", and a number of variations of this type. In order to do the coordination work effectively, it is still necessary to make sure of two things:

1. Maintain a single Work Queue that prioritizes the work and from which all the teams select items.
2. Have a single person in the "buck stops here" role who can make final binding decisions about work priority and content.

These two items have some implications for the organization.

First, the teams must be organized to be generalist: each team should be able to handle any item on the Work Queue. Not every team is going to be equal in abilities and this can be accomodated in a number of ways. My favorite so far comes from an excellent agile coach Dave West who suggested that teams bid on the items in the Work Queue at the start of each iteration. This should be done in a collaborative fashion so that it isn't just a simple low-bid-gets-the-work, but rather the teams learn from each other and have an opportunity to adjust their bids.

The second implication is that the customer or product team (Queue Master) must have the availability to support multiple teams in a timely fashion. Ideally, there are individuals on each team who can make judgement calls about features, functionality, constraints etc. on the work and provide quick answers to questions. This is not always easy since the people doing this often have a special area of expertise and it is difficult for them to work outside this area. Just as team members are asked to become generalizing specialists, so must the people who are responsible for determining value in a project.

Process

An agile process endeavors to provide a minimally structured way to do three things: deliver value early, then learn about what is high in value and deliver that more, and finally, learn how to deliver value more effectively.

That third activity, learning how to deliver value more effectively, is facilitated by the Process Facilitator. The Process Facilitator keeps a visible list of obstacles and works collaboratively with the Team and the Stakeholders to resolve obstacles on the list.

In a multi-team environment, there may be a single Process Facilitator working with each team. Like with the Work Queue, it is often necessary to have a single Record of Obstacles for the entire project.

Technique

People develop skill and knowledge in the use of their tools. Most types of work have a special vocabularly that only makes sense to other people also doing that work. For example, the field of computer programming has programming languages, integrated development environments, build tools, testing tools, algorithms, and a host of other techniques. The field of film-making has cameras, film, directorial techniques, lighting, story structure, it's own esoteric vocabulary, and other techniques. Likewise for construction, law, medicine, drama, education, etc. etc. etc.

In a large Agile Work project, teams need a way to coordinate their technique to produce integrated, consistent and compatible results. As well, individuals on the teams may discover or create new ways of doing things that would be valuable for the other teams to know about and use.

The most effective way of coordinating technique across teams is for strong members of each team to gather regularly to review the way work is being done. This "technical support group" can look at tools, reuse, automation, patterns, vocabularly and any other "how to" aspects of the work. It is critical that these people are actively involved in work being done on a delivery team so that efforts of the technical support group do not become academic or "ivory tower".

In certain environments, it may be useful to have this techincal support group become a team with a clear allocation of time apart from the regular delivery teams. In this case, this technical support team would have its own Work Queue that consisted of requests, ideas, concerns, and opportunities presented by the regular delivery teams.

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I have seen all three aspects of coordination implemented in large multi-team projects. Some of the common challenges include:

1. Generalist Teams.
   It is difficult enough to create cross-functional teams where people are willing to become generalizing specialists. While it is important to create generalist teams, most organizations should expect to set up non-ideal specialist teams (sometimes by line-of-business) and support their development into generalist teams.
2. Technical Coordination.
   Often organizations have a design or technical review group composed of the "experts". These people are often isolated from the actual work being performed by the teams. It is difficult, yet critical, that these people actually be involved in day-to-day work on the teams.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 09:15 AM | |

September 11, 2006

Agile Team Launch - a Howto Guide for Managers

Starting off on the right foot is just as important as it ever was. However, with Agile Work, this takes on a significantly different meaning than it does in other methods as the emphasis of what is "right" is also significantly different. This is a short guide on how to successfully launch a team using Agile Work.

0. Do what you need to in your organization to get a project and its budget approved. This usually involves some sort of business case, project charter and approval process. This may sound obvious, but the organizational support that this provides is essential.

1. Management must have a basic understanding of the method and in particular the roles: Queue Master, Process Facilitator and Team. This can be accomplished in a number of ways: reading, attending a workshop, or bringing a coach in to do a brief presentation. By "management" is meant at least the person sponsoring the launch of an agile team.

2. Individual people must be identified to fill the Queue Master and Process Facilitator roles. At first, these people should be assigned to these roles full-time and relieved of their previous duties. Ideally, the people filling these roles are volunteers from a pre-selected group of appropriate candidates.

3. The Queue Master and Process Facilitator must both get some initial training. For this, the following books are recommended for both roles: Agile Estimating and Planning (Robert C. Martin Series), User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development (Addison-Wesley Signature Series), and Agile Project Management with Scrum (Microsoft Professional). Unfortunately, all of these books are software-specific and if you need to apply Agile Work in a non-software environment, there will be some effort in translating the concepts and practices. You may need more specific training depending on the criticality of your pilot project.

4. Form up the team. Getting this right is not easy: the team needs to remain relatively small (5 people is about right), but at the same time include people with all the skills necessary to deliver the whole project. You need people who are good at the various technical skills needed, the people skills needed, the problem-solving and analysis skills needed, and the administrative skills. All these people need to be part of the team right from the start. Again, for emphasis: do not start the project before all these people and their skills are dedicated to the team and they have been relieved of their previous duties. Forming the team includes logistical concerns such as where the team will sit, making sure they have the right equipment for their work, etc.

5. If you are trying agile for the first time, don't consider using a distributed team or off-shore resources. Nor telecommuters. This type of stuff is better left for once your organization has more experience with agile methods.

6. Provide initial training to your team. Include the Queue Master and Process Facilitator in this training (they are considered part of the team). Also include any significant stakeholders in the results of the project. Give them, at a minimum, a one-day introduction to agile.

7. The Queue Master creates an initial Work Queue. The rest of the team should participate in this process. The creation of this Work Queue must be timeboxed. I advise that it should only be given 1 or 2 percent of the overall project time. Decide before you start on how long will be given to this. The end result of this is a Work Queue that has some number of work items defined, understood by the team, valued, costed, and prioritized. The Work Queue does not have to be "finished". It is more important to hold to the timebox than to get the Work Queue "right". Remember that the Work Queue will continue to be refined as the team progresses in its work. Do not under any circumstances create the initial Work Queue in the absence of the team!

8. Run a brief project workshop. In this workshop, the team answers basic questions about the nature of the project run with agile methods such as:
- what is the length of our iterations?
- what are the team's core hours (when do all the team members commit to working together as opposed to working on administrivia)?
- what other teams/groups do we need to work with?
- are we missing any critical skills (now that we have seen the initial Work Queue)?
- what are the priorities of the project (quality, scope, time, budget, experimentation, etc.)?

9. OPTIONAL ITEMS:
- Consider doing a workshop on corporate culture and agile methods to help the team understand some of the challenges it will face and where it can find support
- Consider doing some initial team building exercises. Particularly if people on the team haven't worked together previously, this can help the team to get over some initial hurdles.
- Consider getting junior members of the team some additional training on the techniques, technologies or tools used in the team's work. This can be arranged so that it is done simultaneously with some of the team's early iterations.
- Consider engaging a coach or mentor for your Process Facilitator. This coach can be someone inside the organization who has extensive experience with agile methods or an external consultant who comes for a limited time to help your Process Facilitator.
None of these optional items should unduly delay the start of the first iteration.

10. Start your first iteration. There should be little or no delay or waiting between the creation of the team and the start of the first iteration. At this point the Process Facilitator is responsible for the process, the Queue Master is responsible for the value delivered, and the Team is responsible for delivering results.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:36 AM | |

September 05, 2006

The Seven Core Practices of Agile Work

Agile Work consists of seven core practices. These practices form a solid starting point for any person, team or community that wishes to follow the Middle Way to Excellence.

Self-Organizing Team

Any group of people that wish to be an Agile Team need to take the initiative to determine for themselves how they are going to work (process) and how they are going to do the work (product). The term "team" really applies quite broadly to any size group of people that are working together towards a common goal.

Teams go through stages of development as they perform their work. The most important result of team development is the team itself, and not the specific skills and abilities that the individuals learn.

If the team is part of a broader organization, that organization must give the team the authority, space and safety to learn to be self-organizing. The organization's leadership is responsible for determining the "why?", some constraints on "how?", and then letting the team respond to the need as best as it can.

Also Known As: Whole Team (Extreme Programming), Cross-Functional Team (business management).

Deliver Frequently

Agile Work uses short fixed periods of time to frame the process of delivering something of value. Each of these iterations or timeboxes is structured so that the team or group actually finishes a piece of work and delivers it to stakeholders. Then, the team builds on what has previously been delivered to do it again in the same short amount of time.

The sooner that valuable results can be delivered, the more value can be obtained from those results. This extra value is derived from opportunities such as earlier sales, competitive advantage, early feedback, and risk reduction.

There is an explicit tradeoff: the shorter the time to delivery, the smaller the piece of value will be. But, like investing in one's retirement account, the earlier you start, even with small amounts of money, the better off you are in the long run.

Also Known As: Sprint (Scrum), Iteration (Extreme Programming), Timeboxing (generic), Time Value of Money (accounting).

Plan to Learn

Every type of work is governed by a Horizon of Predictability. Any plan that extends beyond this horizon of predictability is bound to fail. Agile work uses an explicit learning cycle tied in with the planning of work to accomodate this inevitable change.

First, a goal is required. This goal can be long-term. Teams using Agile Work then create a queue of work items to be done in order to reach this goal. Each iteration, some of these items are selected, finished and then the queue is adjusted. The changes in the work queue are based on external factors, and learning that the team does as it goes.

One of the most effective methods for the team to learn about how it is doing its work is the retrospective. After each delivery of results, the team holds a retrospective to examine how it can improve.

Also Known As: Inspect and Adapt (Scrum), Kaizen (Lean), Adaptive Planning (generic).

Communicate Powerfully

A team needs to have effective means of communicating, both amongst team members and also to stakeholders. To Communicate Powerfully, a team needs to prefer in-person communication over distributed communication. Synchronous over asynchronous communication. High-bandwidth over low-bandwidth communication. Multi-mode communication over single-mode communication.

The results of failing to communicate powerfully include wasted time for waiting, misunderstandings leading to defects or re-work, slower development of trust, slower team-building, and ultimately a failure to align perceptions of reality.

The single most effective means to communicate powerfully, is to put all the team in a room together where they can do their work, every day for the majority of the work time.

Some types of work do not lend themselves to this approach (e.g. creating a documentary video), but every effort should be made to improve communication.

Also Known As: Visibility (Scrum), Whole Team and Team Room (Extreme Programming), War Room (business management).

Test Everything

Defects are one of the most critical types of waste to eliminate from a work process. By testing everything, by driving all the work of a team by creating test cases to check the work, a team can reach extremely high quality levels. This ability to prevent defects is so important that only an executive level decision should be considered sufficient to allow defects into a work process. Quality is not negotiable.

In Agile Work, removing a defect is the only type of work that takes priority over any new features/functionality/production. If the end result desired is to maximize value, then removing defects is an important means to that end.

A team has an ethical duty to discover new ways to effectively test their work. This can be through the use of tools, various feedback mechanisms, automation, and good old problem-solving abilities.

Also Known As: Canary in the Coal Mine (Scrum), Test-Driven Development (Extreme Programming), Defects per Opportunities (Six-Sigma).

Measure Value

Since Reality is Perceived, it is important for an agile team and organization to have a clear method of describing and perceiving what is important for the organization. Measuring value is a critical method for describing and perceiving what is important.

A single metric can be used to drive all the measurement and goal-setting and rewards in an organization. All other measurements are secondary and must be treated as such: limited in use and temporary.

There are many things which are easier to measure than value. It is often easy to measure cost, or hours worked, or defects found, or estimate vs. actual... etc. However, all of these other measurements either implicitly or explicitly drive sub-optimal behavior.

Also Known As: Measuring Results (Scrum), ROI (business management), Economic Driver (Good to Great), Running Tested Features (Extreme Programming).

Clear the Path

Everyone in an organization using Agile Work takes responsibility for clearing the path, removing the obstacles that prevent work from being done effectively. Clearing the Path doesn't just mean expedient, quick fixes to problems, but rather taking the time to look at an obstacle and do the best possible to remove it permanently so that it never blocks the path again.

In the Agile Work method, the Process Facilitator is the person who is responsible for tracking obstacles and ensuring that the path is cleared. To do this, the Process Facilitator maintains a Record of Obstacles.

Clearing the Path is sometimes painful work that exposes things we would rather not deal with. As a result, it is critical that people build their capacity for truthfulness and work to develop trust amongst each other. Building a capacity for truthfulness is not something that can be done by using an explicit process.

Also Known As: Removing Obstacles (Scrum), Stopping the Line (Lean).

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Remember also, that these practices must always be viewed and implemented in the context of the Agile Axioms. These axioms provide a check to ensure that the practices are not being applied blindly, but rather applied appropriately to the given situation.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 09:09 AM | |

June 23, 2006

Managing "Leaderful" Groups

In agile development circles self-organizing teams are all the rage nowadays. And I often hear people bemoaning the "evil managers". And no doubt in many circumstances and organizations there is real work to do here and real dysfunction to resolve. But I'm less concerned with the analysis of what's wrong and more concerned with what can we do differently and better. IE: How can we develop the skills necessary to practice effective self-organization.

So what does it mean to be a participant in a "leaderful" group?

The implication of "leaderful" is that many or most of the people in the group are exercising leadership. It seems that leadership is necessary, humans can't engage in group activity successfully without leadership. Successful group action always requires leadership and leaders. Someone, at least one person, must think about the effort as a whole and not only about her or his individual role in it in order for the group effort to succeed. A group can have more than one leader, but must have at least one to function successfully. Leadership is thinking about the well-being of the group as a whole as well as that of the individual group members. The essential commitment of a leader is to see to it that everything goes well.

I assume that leadership is an inherent capacity of every person and that leadership is not a "special" role or activity only for "special" people. The skills of successful leadership can be taught, learned, mastered, and practiced.

Further, I assume that people are fundamentally peers and that we are all doing the very best that we can at the moment. So the question becomes how do we reconcile assuming leadership with our peers? And how do we support each other in developing our leadership skills together?

More on this later...

Posted by David Chilcott at 04:58 PM | |

June 22, 2006

The Trouble with Consensus

A friend of mine, Bettina Grassmann, has written a very insightful short piece on consensus called "Consensus Killed the Cat". I have a few additional comments to make to connect what she has written with Agile Work.

In my work I am frequently working with self-organizing teams. This problem with consensus comes up frequently. One of the best solutions to the problem is to have a very clear long-term goal or vision that everyone agrees to. In corporate environments, this is usually imposed. In a coop or other volunteer situation, it can be difficult to articulate this goal, but the effort in getting there is worth it. Once the goal is in place, it is (relatively) easy to get consensus on decisions if they are relevent to the goal. If the group is trying to decide on something irrelevent to the goal, then again consensus is very difficult, mostly because the decision "doesn't matter".

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 02:26 PM | |

June 02, 2006

Cueing Agility - Creating a Supportive Environment for Agile Teams

In Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, there is a chapter that describes a number of fascinating experiments. These experiments show how we can be influenced by very subtle cues in our environment. This is a very important lesson for us to apply in our work environments and in particular in our agile work.

In one experiement, researcher John Bargh designed a scenario to test how sensitive we are to written cues that are structured in a way that we are not consciously aware of being cued. Bargh created two lists, each composed of five words per list item. Of the five words, four were chosen to form a sentance, and the fifth word was selected so that it would not fit with the other four. Then the five words were jumbled.

For example:

rang phone peace the loudly

The people who came as subjects of the experiement were given one of the two lists and told to go through their list as quickly as possible and un-jumble the sentances.

Unbeknownst to the participants in the experiment, each group of five words also contained a word that was selected to suggest a feeling or attitude. In the first list, each group of five words contained one word that would suggest impatience, rudeness and aggressiveness. The second list contained words to suggest patience, politeness and calm.

All the subjects of the experiment were also given additional instructions to come to a particular office once they had completed their lists. At the office they were to receive final instructions. At the office, each participant encountered the experiment administrator deep in conversation with another person. Neither the administrator nor the other person acknowledged the just-arrived subject. Now the real purpose of the experiment was tested: how long would the subjects wait before interrupting the ongoing conversation?

The results were astonishing: those people who were cued with the list containing words suggesting impatience, rudeness and aggressiveness

eventually interrupted - on average after about five minutes. But of the people primed to be polite, the overwhelming majority - 82 percent - never interrupted at all. If the experiment hadn't ended after ten minutes, who knows how long they would have stood in the hallway, a polite and patient smile on their faces? (p 55)

Gladwell gives several more similar examples in his book. I strongly recommend reading this book to see just how powerful this cueing or priming effect can be.

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For organizations, teams and even individuals, this effect can be harnessed. The most obvious ways include using posters, screen savers, banners etc. to constantly impress people with positive messages about teamwork, effectiveness, creativity and other values and qualities that might be deemed valuable. This should obviously go hand-in-hand with a conscientious removal of all negative messages.

For agile teams, there are some particular values that should be emphasized: truthfulness, courage, creativity, teamwork, trust, cooperation, hard work, learning, adaptability.

The message can also be communicated in more subtle ways - and this is actually likely to be more effective! Incentives, the power of exemplary behavior, and the physical environment itself all can contribute strongly. In Built to Last : Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Collins and Porras, there is a whole chapter dedicated to the idea of "Cult-Like Cultures" where everything in an organization is focused around that organization's core values. The authors found the following four characteristics of successful, visionary companies:

• Fervently held ideology...
• Indoctrination
• Tightness of fit [for employees]
• Elitism

(p 122)

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Interestingly, agile methods do tend to require "buy-in". In order to fully feel comfortable in an agile environment, people need to understand and fully accept a small number of very important beliefs:

The Agile Axioms

(These are the generic, non-software version of the Agile Software Manifesto.)

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See also: Optimizing a Team Room

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:26 AM | |

May 31, 2006

The Human Touch

If you are given a problem to solve, how much does the presentation of that problem matter to your ability to solve it? Imagine that it's a simple problem... imagine that it is presented in two different ways, both of them simple. It turns out that presentation differences can still make a huge difference. In fact, there is a way to present problems that makes them substantially easiers to solve: make them people problems.

In The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell, we are given a very concrete and suprising example of this. Here it is quoted in its entirety:

Consider the following brain teaser. Suppose I give you four cards labeled with the letters A and D and the numberals 3 and 6. The rule of the game is that a card with a vowel on it always has an even number on the other side. Which of the cards would you have to turn over to prove this rule to be true?

Go ahead and take a few moments to figure that out before continuing on to the answer, and keep track of how long you work on it...

The answer is two: the A card and the three card. The overwhelming majority of people given this test, though, don't get it right. They tend to answer just the A card, or the A and the six. It's a hard question. But now let me pose another question. Suppose four people are drinking in a bar. One is drinking Coke. One is sixteen. One is drinking beer and one is twenty-five. Given the rule that no one under twenty -one is allowed to drink beer, which of those people's IDs do we have to check to make sure the law is being observed?

How long does it take you to figure that out?

Now the answer is easy. In fact, I'm sure that almost everyone will get it right: the beer drinker and the sixteen-year-old. But, as the psychologist Leda Cosmides (who dreamt up this example) points out, it is exactly the same puzzle as the A, D, 3, and 6 puzzle. The difference is that it is framed in a way that makes it about people, instead of about numbers, and as human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.

Now unless you had heard about this before, I suspect you were pretty suprised. I know I was! I always considered myself to be a very good abstract thinker/problem solver. In fact, I considered myself to be well above average in that regard for a number of reasons: I was always very good at math without every memorizing a single formula (I always made them up as I went along as long as I remembered the _idea_ of the formula), I was an excellent programmer in a number of different computer languages including assembler, Miranda, Java, Prolog, Pascal, and Objective-C, and finally, I'm always solving problems by moving the problem to a new level of abstraction - solving the meta-problem first.

So what does all this have to do with agile work methods? Quite a few things actually:

1. Obviously, if you can frame a problem as a people problem, it will be easier to solve... and most problems start out this way!

We tend to try to abstract problems, make them more generic or general purpose in the hopes that they can be communicated more precisely and can be solved in a way that will accomodate contingencies we haven't thought of yet. But all the effort we put into abstracting the statement of the problem ends up costing us doubly: in the initial abstraction and in the difficulty of solution that results. So if you have a team that is solving a people problem, make sure to keep it a people problem when you give it to the team!

2. If you have a problem that is given to you in an abstract form, try to convert it to a people problem before trying to solve it.

In all likelihood, the moment you do the conversion, you will quickly see the solution. It may even feel like the process of de-abstraction is a problem-solving process. You may have to make really odd connections to make the problem a people problem but it will likely be worthwhile.

3. Dealing with people rather than abstractions on a day-to-day basis will always result in a more effective interaction.

Sending printed documents, writing emails, manipulating symbols are all interesting ways to communicate, but fundamentally, you are communicating with other people. If you can make that communication as direct as possible - phone, video conference, in-person - then there will be far less effort involved in understanding the communication, and far more effort can be allocated to high-bandwidth communication. This obviously has special relevence for teams: get people in the same room as much of the time as possible.

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In the software world, there is one technique that I give teams and that is the use of Personas to assist in solving a software problem. The place I first encountered Personas is in the excellent book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper. This book presents some of the basics of the Interaction Design discipline.

The bare essense of the Persona is to create a fictional person who represents a user or actor or stakeholder or customer of whatever it is you are building. This fictional person should have a name and all conversation about the thing being built should be couched in the personal language of these Persona's names. A Persona should also have a short history, a photo and some description of their needs, goals or desires. All of this helps to frame everything about a software project as a people problem... and thus makes it much easier to discuss and solve.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:12 PM | |

April 21, 2006

Agile Adoption Stages for Teams

We know that teams go through identifiable stages of development: forming, storming, norming and performing (1). What exactly does this look like for an Agile team?

Forming

Here the team is typically innundated with three sources of new information: the Agile process and practices, the nature of the project and the other people in the team. This can be overwhelming and people will react in diverse ways: calm wait-and-see, rebelliousness, passive-aggressive, excitement, etc. If the team has an effective coach or mentor shepherding them through this, then feelings will tend towards excitement. The reality of learning so much at the same time will make the first few weeks of the team's time together quite exhausting. People will be actively fighting old habits, and people around the team will be asking lots of questions. Retrospectives will usually show that the team is impressed with their own teamwork and communication and will also show some disappointment with specific agile work practices.

Storming

After only one or two iterations, the team will transition into the Storming stage of development. Because Agile methods "front-load" the learning and the crisis, this forming stage comes fast, but it is also relatively mild. (Front-loading the learning means that all the problems that an organization has that hold it back from delivering quality work quickly are made visible in the first couple of iterations.) People are not used to a project being in crisis right at the start. It is critical for a coach or mentor or manager to be aware of this effect and expecting it. Again, for emphasis: an Agile project is in crisis immediately!... and this is perfectly normal and healthy. If the organization and the team are able to find means of dealing with this early crisis, then the project will continue and build larger and larger successes. On the other hand, if the organization or the team try to ignore or hide the problems, then very quickly work will revert to the old way: bureaucracy or chaos.

Norming

After about four to eight iterations, the team will reach a fairly comfortable place: the basic agile processes and practices are understood, the organization and the team have removed some basic obstacles to getting work done (and consciously left some obstacles in place in all likelihood), and everyone on the team has a basic level of comfort with their role. The challenge at this stage is to avoid falling into the trap of complacency. Although comfortable, this level of performance is probably not all that much better than the old way. There will be real advantages: regular delivery of work, good communication between stakeholders and the team. But there will be many obstacles still to be removed, and the team has a long way to go in its development. If the team becomes complacent, then it is critical that a catalyst be introduced to incite the team to further development. Often, this can be as simple as a systematic and intensive program of capability building. As team members learn and practice new skills: process skills, technical skills, people skills, strategic skills, business skills... and as they become more and more aware of each other's capabilities, they will also become more and more aware of areas for improvement. Incentives need to be provided to help team members focus dilligently on self-improvement and team improvement. The iteration retrospectives become critical to help with this process... the tricky bit is that this is the stage when people start to think the retrospectives are no longer necessary!

Performing

The transition into the Performing stage for an agile team is gradual and happens over a fairly extended period of time. The definition of "getting to done" will gradually expand to allow the team to go from zero to full delivery of the end results every single iteration. There will be a temptation to split up the team and use these experienced team members to seed new agile teams - resist this temptation! Breaking up the team at this point destroys the value of time and effort invested in the team. It is much more effective to start a new team from scratch. The essence of a performing agile team is not the transferrable knowledge about agile processes and practices. Rather, the most important result of the team-building process combined with the agile process is the team itself.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:57 PM | |

April 20, 2006

An Introduction to General Systems Thinking

I recently completed reading An Introduction to General Systems Thinking by Gerald M. Weinberg. Since it was mind-blowingly fantastic, I thought I should probably write a brief review of it so you-all can check it out!

The Subject

This book is about science, philosophy, behavior, organizations, organisms, problems, solutions, faith, reason, and everything in between. Specifically, it is about a general approach to dealing with systems given the limitations of our human abilities.

The Ideas

One of the strongest ideas in the whole book is that there is a class of systems for which we have only very poor tools to understand them. These systems, which he calls "organized complexity" are contrasted to "organized simplicity (machines)" and "unorganized complexity (aggregates)". Machines can be dealt with purely analytically and in a deterministic manner. Aggregates can be dealt with statistically. Systems that are in the organized complexity category are too complex for a purely analytical approach but too simple for a reasonable statistical analysis. The book is focused on methods for dealing with this class of systems.

The Writing

Mr. Weinberg's writing is, first and foremost, engaging. He writes in an informal voice that is a wonderful complement to the subject matter. Even with the informal tone, he is nevertheless able to communicate some tricky ideas with a great deal of precision and clarity. His use of examples, diagrams, stories and quotes throughout the book is excellent. Although I did not do the exercises he includes, upon reading them, I was satisfied to see that they are all interesting. Since I intend to re-read the book in six months or so, I will also publicly commit to doing a good chunck of the exercises too. Maybe you'll see some of my efforts here since many of them are apropos to Agile Work.

How Does This Apply to Agile Work?

Much of the emphasis in agile methods is on the intractability of building a perfect plan for a set of work (particularly in software projects). The group of human beings that are building something is in itself a system of "organized complexity". As a result, it is impossible to treat that group of people as a system that can be made to work in a deterministic manner. We simply can't account for all the variables. At the same time, we would like to have a lot more certainty about the behavior of the group than we could just using statistical methods. (Check out Systematic HR for some related articles.) Agile methods help us find this middle way that gives us a very good shot at reaching our goals, but acknowledges our inability to determine precisely how we'll get there. A good understanding of Systems Thinking helps us comprehend the necessity and applicability of agile methods.

The Table of Contents

The chapter and section titles of this book tell a great deal about the scope of the work. I have reproduced the table of contents here for your reference.

Chapter 1 The Problem
- The complexity of the World
- Mechanism and Mechanics
- The Square Law of Computation
- The Simplificiation of Science and the Science of Simplification
- Statistical Mechanics and the Law of Large Numbers
- The Law of Medium Numbers

Chapter 2 The Approach
- Organism, Analogy, and Vitalism
- The Scientist and His Categories
- The Main Article of General Systems Faith
- The Nature of General Systems Laws
- Varieties of Systems Thinking

Chapter 3 System and Illusion
- A System Is a Way of Looking at the World
- Absolute and Relative Thinking
- A System is a Set
- Observers and Observations
- The Principle of Indifference

Chapter 4 Interpreting Observations
- States
- The Eye-Brain Law
- The Generalized Thermodynamic Law
- Functional Notation and Reductionist Thought
- Incompleteness and Overcompleteness
- The Generalized Law of Complementarity

Chapter 5 Breaking Down Observations
- The Metaphors of Science
- Boundaries and Things
- Qualities and the Principle of Invariance
- Partitions
- The Strong Connection Law

Chapter 6 Describing Behavior
- Simulation - The White Box
- State Spaces
- Time as a Standard of Behavior
- Behavior in Open Systems
- The Principle of Indeterminability

Chapter 7 Some Systems Questions
- The Systems Triumvirate
- Stability
- Survival
- Identity
- Regulation and Adaptation
- The Used Car Law

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Also, check it out, Mr. Weinberg has started a blog on writing fiction. He also helps run the AYE Conference (amplifying your effectiveness).

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 05:18 PM | |

April 12, 2006

Follow the Principles and Adjust the Practices

In "Built to Last : Successful Habits of Visionary Companies" Jim Collins repeatedly emphasizes that long-lasting successful companies have a very single-minded focus. But that focus is not stupid or blind. Rather, Collins uses the phrase "Preserve the core / stimulate progress". This is also the essense of agility.

Follow the Principles

What exactly are the principles? The foundation starts with Trust and Truthfulness. "Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues." Everything we do with agile should be about truthfulness (visibility, transparency) and building trust.

With this as a strong foundation, we can look at the Agile Axioms:

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We are Creators
Reality is Perceived
Change is Natural

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All of the other principles and practices associated with Agile Work flow from these basic assumptions about the world. We can't prove that the above three axioms are "true". But they either resonate with us or they don't. If they do, then it will be easy to use these axioms as a checkpoint for all the activities we engage in using Agile Work, wherever we apply it.

We are creators... therefore we derive our sense of value from our ability to create. If our creations are accepted by others, our team, our stakeholders or our community, all the better. But fundamentally, this is inherent to us as human beings. However, sometimes this natural drive is suppressed or repressed. In order to activate it, we need to work in empowered teams.

Have you ever experienced inspiration or "flow" or joy when working with someone else? Perhaps you were solving a problem. Perhaps you were playing a musical instrument - jamming - and got into a fertile groove. Perhaps you were teaching your children and created the light of understanding in them. Perhaps you built a beautiful set of bookshelves for your home. Or maybe you told a joke that created a brief moment of genuine levity in a group of friends. We are all constantly creating!

This basic principle then means that Agile Work methods and practices should not be imposed. Taught to us, perhaps... given to us as a template, perhaps... but once we understand the practices and are familiar with them, we should immediately be given the freedom to use the learning cycle to be creative with the process and practices of Agile Work itself. If we do not participate in creation, we become dis-empowered and that eventually leads to resentment or apathy.

Reality is perceived... therefore we need to work hard to build a common perception of reality if we are to work together effectively. We need to amplify our learning. We can't assume that our own understanding of a situation is going to be shared by others. At the very least we need to check: "do you see this?"

Let's recognize that in some way or another we are all blind:

Again, the learning cycle comes into play. The guidance, detachment, love, courage and search we go through all help us to build a common understanding of reality. This allows us to see new ways to apply the Agile Work principles and practices that make sense not only to our context, but also to everyone else participating in the work.

Change is natural... therefore instead of fighting change, we need to anticipate it, adjust to it, embrace it, and be gracious or even enthusiastic. Not only does change happen to us, but we also instigate change. If things get to boring, whatever the circumstance, we find ways to change things. We rebel at stasis and ennui.

Each practice and procedure done in the context of Agile Work must be explicity and implicitly accomodating of change. If a procedure can't tolerate change it will either lead to a dissonance or conflict... or if we are embracing change, then we will modify or discard the procedure. Our creative nature loves to create, but if we become too attached, too "in love" with our creations, we will support them past their point of relevance.

Our latest greatest idea will be good for a while. But eventually change will make it irrelevent.

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So we see that all three Agile Axioms are also interrelated.

Our creations will be washed away through change and if we are lucky or wise we will perceive the change in reality - be truthful to ourselves and others - and allow a new creation to take the place of the old one.

When we perceive a certain truth, and try to share that with others, we will be asking those others to change their own perceptions. This change can be difficult and may even require the destruction of a mental model created with love and care over a lifetime. Sensitivity to this loss and encouragement to build a new creation will help build a shared perception... as long as we too are open to new perceptions!

Adjust the Practices

And of course, all this foundation of creation, perception and change must be connected to the practical day-to-day reality of our lives. Our family lives, our work lives, our social lives, our volunteer lives, our intellectual lives, our emotional lives, our spiritual lives... our whole lives.

The Agile Work practices are simple to state:

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Manage Ourselves
Deliver Frequently
Adapt our Plans
Communicate Powerfully
Test Everything
Measure Value
Remove Obstacles

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These practices provide a starting point. A basic set of activities that will assist you, your team or your organization to advance quickly towards whatever goal you have set for yourselves. The way these practices succeed is by making sure that the Agile Axioms are always remembered and their implications accepted. These practices will set up a virtuous circle by building trust and allowing truthfulness. More trust and truthfulness will allow a fuller and more nuanced expression of the practices...

But if these practices become canonized, if they become a rote process imposed and followed blindly, then it means that we have lost sight of the Axioms. We have forgotten to check our practices against the context of creation, perception and change.

The reason we follow these practices is because we believe that we are all creators, that we can learn from our diverse perception of reality and that change is a force of growth. We don't believe these Axioms because we blindly perform these practices.

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This is all available as a nicely formatted pdf: Agile Axioms - a Brief Exposition.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 01:45 AM | |

March 31, 2006

How the Process Facilitator can Help the Team Handle Out-of-Scope Work Requests

Sometimes an agile team is innundated (or maybe just slightly distracted) by requests for individuals on the team to do work for people or groups outside the team's official stakeholders. This can happen, for example, in a corporate culture that promotes the exchange of favors. This past weekend at our Agile Coach's gathering, Deborah Hartmann shared her method of detecting, exposing and discouraging this unofficial work.

The mechanism is actually very simple: track the work in the team space using cards and a variation on the burndown chart.

The Cards:

During the team's status meeting, or any other time that a team member mentions doing some of this outside work, immediately request that that person write it down on a task card. The task card should be visibly distinct from normal task cards: either a different color or a different size or in a substantially different location. The task should also get an estimate in the same units you are using for the other tasks.

For each task identified, contact the person who requested the extra work. If the person who is doing the work has made a committment to the requestor then let the requestor know that the team has accepted the work but that there is a consequence: the team may not get all its other work done on time. As well, the requester should be informed that in the future, all extra work for individuals on the team must be prioritized by the team's product owner.

Encourage the team to reveal this work by mentioning it at the start of the status meeting, in any iteration planning or retrospective meetings, or in any one-on-one meetings you have with team members.

The Burndown Chart:

Now that all the extra work is reflected in cards with estimates, the burndown chart can track this work too. The key difference is that it is tracked as a separate part of the work. If there are 80 units of normal work remaining, and 20 units of this extra work remaining, then the burndown chart will have a mark at 20 and a mark at 100. The mark at 20 should be made in a different color (I recommend red) so that it is highly visible. One ends up with a burndown chart that looks something like this:

The Product Owner:

It doesn't take much more than a single iteration for the Product Owner to get the message loud and clear: this extra work is eating up the team's capacity! The Product Owner now sees the consequences of not being the go-to person for all work items.

Deb's experience with this was that by the next iteration there were no further requests of the team for unofficial work, and the team's capacity to do work for the Product Owner took a nice leap upwards.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:26 AM | |

March 30, 2006

Bombs and Agile

The coach's gathering last weekend also got me thinking about the ethics of Agile Work and coaching. Is it okay to use agile methods for destructive purposes?

Let's first look at the Agile Software Manifesto for guidance. We see four statements of values and a number of principles. None of them provide an ethical framework that helps us determine where to use agile methods. In fact, there are many types of work that we could ask an equivalent set of questions about:

Is it okay to use agile methods to assist research in bio-weapons?

Is it okay to use agile methods to build software systems for nuclear missiles?

Is it okay to use agile methods to run a hate campaign?

Is it okay to use agile methods to ... ?

The agile community lacks a statement of ethics equivalent to the Hippocratic Oath. Do we even need one? As coaches, should our Middle Way to Excellence be grounded in a strong moral sense or is the middle way adrift?

I feel like we need a moral grounding. I think that the basis of it should be the recognition of the Unity of Humanity. I believe that both justice and mercy are important. Trust and Truthfulness are part of the foundation as well.

Is there any way to state a professional creed for Agile coaches that we can all agree upon? Has anyone tried?

For what it's worth, the ICF has a code of ethics that might be a starting point.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 01:04 PM | |

March 20, 2006

Methods of Prioritization

In Jean Tabaka's new book, "Collaboration Explained : Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders", she describes several methods of collaboratively prioritizing a list of items (for example a project's work item list). The methods she suggests are excellent, and I would strongly recommend the book. However, there are a couple variations and additional methods that I have used successfully that I would like to share.

1) Round the Group prioritization:
group size 3-8
item list size < 15

Items are written on cards and placed in random order linearly either vertically or horizontally.

The members of the group each take turns placing the items in the order they think is the proper priority order. While doing so, each person moving the cards is welcome to explain their reasoning. However, the other group members refrain from commenting on the new prioritization.

This continues around the group as many times as it takes to find a stable order.

2) Ping Pong Balls:
group size 1-12
item list size > 15

(Thanks to Ken Schwaber for this method)

A fixed number of ping pong ball units are given to the group. The ping pong balls represent units of one dimension for prioritization such as value, risk or cost.

The group discusses how to allocate ping pong balls to each item in a dynamic fashion until everyone agrees that the allocation makes sense.

For very large lists, this is easiest to do in a spreadsheet with fewer people involved.

3) Variation: 2-stage multi-voting with voter freedom
group size 5-20
item list size < 50

This is identical to the public multi-voting system Jean describes with the following changes:

First, there is no restriction on how votes are allocated to items. A person can put multiple votes on a single item and can withhold some or all of her votes.

Second, after everyone has "finished" voting, the facilitator calls for everyone to step back and think about the results. Some discussion is allowed about the consequences of the results. Finally, everyone is given an opportunity to move their votes.

For large groups with large lists this can be somewhat awkward as people might forget where they voted. In this case, and if anonymity is not required, each person can use small post-it tabs with an identifying mark on them so that they can easily be moved around in the second stage.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 01:25 PM | |

March 14, 2006

Agile or Not Agile?

Every once in a while the del.icio.us tag for Agile turns up something really interesting. This evening, I found this article about the ongoing use of the term "Agile". The article is brief and a little weak, but it brings up a concern that is always niggling in the back of my mind. Interestingly enough, a good friend of mine, Christian Gruber, emailed me another web page of similar import...

In this registration page for Rules of Enterprise Agility, we read about something that really has nothing to do with the Agile Manifesto, nor the Agile Axioms.

Both of these examples are signs of two things:

1. The growing popularity of the term "Agile".
2. The growing dilution of the meaning of the term.

How can we fight this? Should we fight this?

I think it is very important to constantly call attention to the fact that Agile is about the minimum process and tools that can possibly work, and only in the context of valuing individuals, interactions and teams more than those tools and processes.

Trust is the Foundation of Agile Work

Technology, tools, process, even good ideas and good organizations do not create trust. People create trust by being trustworthy: honoring their commitments, striving for excellence, truthfulness, courage. One of the fundamental problems afflicting organizations is the lack of trust: between management and employees, between business and IT, between experts of various sorts, between coworkers.

This lack of trust is institutionalized in many ways including bureaucracy and legal frameworks.

The only way to change this state of affairs is to build trust. And the only way to build trust is to embody trustworthiness in yourself so that by example and by your words you can help others to become more trustworthy.

Agile methods put in place mechanisms that assist in building trust. But those mechanisms are merely a means to an end. Let us never forget that.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 12:27 AM | |

March 10, 2006

The Art of Obstacle Removal

One of the best ways to go faster is to remove the things that slow you down. This "obstacle removal" is an integral part of many agile methods including Scrum and Lean. Sometimes it is obvious where an obstacle is. There are a few small things that can be done easily to go faster. But to get going really fast, we need to have a deeper understanding of obstacles... and the Art of Obstacle Removal.

What are Obstacles?

An obstacle is any behavior, physical arrangement, procedure or checkpoint that makes getting work done slower without adding any actual contribution to the work. Activities that do add value to our work may be slowed down by obstacles, but are not obstacles in and of themselves.

Obstacles and Waste

Obstacles are the causes of waste in a process. There are many types of waste, and for every type of waste there are many possible sources (obstacles).

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Types of Obstacles

Personal

Personal obstacles are related to us as individuals. There are several levels at which these obstacles can show up.

Outside factors in our lives such as illness or family obligations can become obstacles to our work at hand. These obstacles are hard to remove or avoid. Even if we would want to avoid an obstacle such as illness, it is hard to do anything about it in an immediate sense. However, as part of our committment to the group we are working with, we should consider doing things to generally improve our health. Good sleep, healthy and moderate eating, exercise and avoidance of illness-causing things and circumstances are all possible commitments we can make to the group. Likewise, we can make sure our personal affairs are in order so that unexpected events have the least impact possible. This topic is vast and there are many good sources of information.

Physical Environment

Obstacles in the physical environment can consist of barriers to movement or communication, or a lack of adequate physical resources. Sometimes these obstacles are easy to see because their effects are immediate. For example, if a team room lacks a whiteboard for diagrams, keeping notes, etc., then the team may not be able to communicate as effectively.

Other physical obstacles are not so obvious. The effects of physical environment can be subtle and not well-understood. Poor ergonomics take weeks, months or years for their effects to be felt... but it is inevitable. A too-small team room can lead to a feeling of being cooped up and desperation to get out... and eventually to resentment. Again this can take weeks or months.

Here are some guidelines on a good team room.

Knowledge

A lack of knowledge or the inability to access information are obstacles. A team composed of junior people who don't have diverse experience and who don't have a good knowledge of the work they are doing will have trouble working effectively. There may be barriers preventing the team from learning. Common barriers include over-work leading to a lack of time or mental energy for learning. With junior people in particular, there is a lot of pressure to be productive and that can often be at the expense of a solid foundation of learning.

Other times, knowledge-related barriers can be more immediate. If a critical piece of information is delayed or lost this can have a large impact on an Agile team that is working in short cycles. The team may be temporarily halted while they wait for information. Building effective information flow is critical to a team's performance.

Organizational

Bureaucratic procedures, organizational mis-alignment, conflicting goals, and inefficient organizational structures can all be significant obstacles.

One of the best sources of information about this is the two books by Jim Collins: "Good to Great" (Review) and "Built to Last" (Review).

Cultural

Sometimes the beliefs we have about how to work can become obstacles to working more effectively. These beliefs are often in place because they have been part of what we think makes us successful. Cultural assumptions can come from our families, our communities, our religious affiliation and our national identity.

In organizational culture, one thing I constantly see is a public espoused value of teamwork, but a conflicting behavior of individual performance reviews and ranking. This is cultural. It is also a barrier to the effective functioning of an Agile team. For corporate environments I highly recommend the Corporate Culture Survival Guide by Edgar Schein.

Dis-Unity

Dis-unity is one of the most subtle and common forms of obstacle. Competition, legal and cultural assumption of the goodness of "opposition" and habits of interaction including gossip and backbiting all combine to make united action and thought very difficult.

This is an extremely deep topic. There are many tools and techniques available to assist with team building. If you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend reading "The Prosperity of Humankind".

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Removing Obstacles

The ability to identify obstacles and understand why they are causing problems is only the first step in removing obstacles. In Agile Work, the person primarily responsible for identifying and removing obstacles is the Process Facilitator. The Process Facilitator has several approaches available for the removal of obstacles. A process facilitator has similar responsibilities to a change agent.

Direct

Deal with the obstacle directly without involving other people. This can be as simple as getting up and moving an obstacle impairing vision, or as nuanced as running interviews and workshops throughout an organization to gradually change a cultural obstacle.

Command and Control

Identify the obstacle and give precise instructions for its removal to a person who will directly perform the removal. This can sometimes work if removing an obstacle takes a great deal of time, effort or specialized skills that you yourself do not posess. However, the overall approach of "command and control" is not recommended for Agile environments since it is disempowering.

Influence

Identify the obstacle and suggest means to deal with it to a person who has the authority or influence to get others to deal with it. This indirect method of obstacle removal can be slow and frustrating. However it usually has better long-term effects than command and control.

Support

Offer to assist and encourage the removal of obstacles that have been identified by other people. In many respects this is a very effective method. It can assist with team-building and learning by example. People are usually grateful for assistance.

Coaching

Train others on the art of obstacle removal including obstacle identification, types of obstacles and strategies for dealing with obstacles. Observe people's attempts to remove obstacles and give them feedback on their actions.

Creating a Culture of Obstacle Removal

Encourage and measure obstacle removal at all organizational levels until it becomes habitual. In many ways this is the essense of the lean organization.

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Strategies for Dealing with Obstacles

Diagrams are a great way of communicating the essense of a concept. Feel free to share the following diagrams with anyone (but of course keep the copyright notice on them).

Remove

Remove the obstacle altogether. This method of dealing with an obstacle is usually the most immediately effective, but is also one of the most difficult methods.

The best way to actually remove an obstacle is to get at the root cause of the obstacle and change that. This type of change results in the longest-lasting and most stable elimination of an obstacle.

Move Aside

Take the obstacle and put it in a place or situation where it is no longer in the path of the team.

In a team's physical environment, this may be as simple as changing the tools that the team is using. For example, if the team is all in a room together, move computer monitors that are blocking team member's views of each other. If there is a useless checkpoint that work results have to go through, get management to eliminate it.

Shield

Build a shield or barrier to hide the obstacle so that it's effects no longer touch your team.

If a team is distracted by noisy neighbors, put up a sound barrier. If a team is unable to see their computers due to late afternoon sunlight, put up window shades. If a manager is bothering the team with meetings or tasks unrelated to the work of the team, then put yourself between the team and the manager (or get someone in upper management to do that).

Shielding is excellent for immediate relief, but remember that the obstacle is still there and may become a problem again if the shield cannot be maintained.

Transform

Change the structure or form of the obstacle so that it no longer affects effectiveness.

In general, this method requires a great deal of creativity and open-mindedness. This is one that works particularly well on people who are obstacles: convert them into friends of the team!

For example if the team needs approval of an expert who is not part of the team, this can cause extra work preparing documentation for this person and long delays while the expert revies the documents. If the expert becomes part of the team, then they are well-informed of the work being done and can give approval with very little overhead.

If done well, this can be a very long-lasting method of dealing with an obstacle. Make sure that the transformation is true and that it takes hold... and beware that the obstacle doesn't revert back to its old nature.

Counteract

Find an activity that negates the effects of the obstacle by boosting effectiveness in another area.

As a coach or Process Facilitator, this is what we spend our time in early in a team's adoption of Agile Work: we get them to work in the same room, use iterations and adaptive planning, we focus them on delivering work valued by the stakeholders as defined by the Product Owner. All these things are enhancing the team's ability to get work done without actually directly dealing with any obstacles.

Watch out for barriers avoided this way to come back and bite you later on.

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Removing Obstacles and Learning

Organizational learning, as well as adult learning have a strong relationship to obstacle removal. Organizational learning can be either single-loop or double-loop learning. Adult learning can be either normal or transformative. We can approach obstacle removal from a surface level where we only deal with the immediate symptom, or we can work at a deeper level where we deal with the symptom and its chain of preceding causes. One effective method for examining the deeper causes is the 5-why's exercise.

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Obstacles Inherent in Agile

Agile methods do not perfectly eliminate all obstacles. Some obstacles that are inherent in agile methods include overhead due to planning meetings at the start of iterations, the use of a dedicated process facilitator. As well, the use of iterations can become a barrier to certain types of work items: repeating items, investment in infrastructure, one-off tasks that are not directly related to the work at hand.

At some point, our teams will have matured to the point where agile methods are no longer necessary and we can pick and choose what parts of agile we use.

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Go Forth and Demolish Obstacles!

As a Process Facilitator, coach, ScrumMaster, manager, change agent or stealth agile advocate, you have the ability and the knowledge to make a big difference in people's lives and in the success of the organizations they work within. Removing obstacles is one of the most important duties you have.

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Do you have stories about obstacles you have removed or seen removed that have made a big difference? We would love the hear the anecdotal side of this as well!

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 01:10 PM | |

December 30, 2005

On Passion and Sustainable Pace

You love your work. You love your family. It's a difficult balancing act: which is winning at your house, these days?

Perhaps, right now, the fulcrum on this precarious teeter-totter is set for more teetering than tottering. How to move the fulcrum? Readjusting work-life balance, while desirable, may seem impossible given the projects we are embroiled in right now. How do we get into this situation? How do we get out?

I work in the world of software development, and in the traditional way of working here, so many things were out of my control. In my days as a developer, I had no influence on our delivery dates or scope, and these externally imposed controls threatened either the completion or the integrity of my work. Here's where my personal life came in: this job paid my mortgage. The people were nice, it was close to my house. I wanted that job.

The company's success, we were told, was dependent on our own success in meeting delivery deadlines. Given the choice, many of us chose to borrow time from our personal lives to allow creation of quality work products within the given timeframes.

Hmmm: "borrow time from our personal lives"? Eventually this strategy reveals its true face: co-workers now expect this level of committment from us and we realise that we will never get that time back. The desire for sustainability now provokes a different dilemma: disappoint our co-workers or our friends and family? When we are passionate about both our teams and our home life this dichotomy adds further pressure to the long days we are heroically accomplishing. Over time, morale can erode, and despite our passion the quality of our collective work can suffer. Analogous situations emerge in other work roles: architect, manager, [your job role here]. The details may differ but the end result looks similar: stress, discouragement, sub-optimal performance.

Agile Work is an approach that offers hope to rectify this imbalance by realigning the accountabilities and responsabilities of project participants. But we tend to carry our old ways of thinking into these new ways of working. Agile practices alone are not the answer - the realignment must reach deep into our own beliefs about work. Achieving this is is one aim of the Agile practice of periodic Reflection, or Retrospective. Some of you have a head start on this: a few Agile coaches discussed this important topic in the context of their own roles recently, at the Boulder Scrum Gathering.

I'll write more about this topic in January. In the meantime, I invite you to reflect on your work-life teeter-totter... how's it doing? What do you really want, I mean really? Many of us are away from our offices this week: a good opportunity to remember who we are and what makes us happy. Leaving behind "ought" and "must": can you imagine a life in which work and home do not compete, but complement each other? Imagining it can help you discover the next change you want to make - and it may not be the biggest or most obvious!

Hold on to your passion - it's part of who you are. And savour your time with family and friends - it will help you channel that passion in healthy ways, to adjust your balance. Sustainability can rekindle your creativity and bring back a joy you thought was lost.

I wish, for you and those you love, a restful and healing time as you prepare for an exciting new year, in which you can "work smarter, not longer."

Peace,
deb

Further reading:

Book Review: Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency, book by Tom DeMarco

Book: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd Ed., by Tom DeMarco

Book: The Responsibility Virus: How Control Freaks, Shrinking Violets-And the Rest of Us-Can Harness the Power of True Partnership, by Roger L. Martin

Discussion notes: Sustainable pace for coaches, mentors and change agents

Posted by Deborah Hartmann at 11:09 PM | |

December 21, 2005

Social Dynamics for Agile Organizations

Article: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy by Clay Shirky.

Clay is writing about social environments enabled by technology and what we have learned about groups from these environments. He points to several failed online communities as well as research pre-dating the Internet and points out "Three Things to Accept" and "Four Things to Design For". Both lists are critical for us to map into Agile organizations. I have some thoughts on how to make the mapping to those Three Things to Accept.

Three Things to Accept... in an Agile Organization

1. We cannot completely separate social and technical issues.

In Agile, this is a recognition that having an open team room (and no offices), influences team success... and that team dynamics will influence the use and effectiveness of that team room's space.

For an Agile organization, your organizational communication mechanisms such as email, telephones, video conferencing all play a role in how effective the Agile community becomes... and that the Agile community in your organization will change the way that technology is used to communicate.

One company I have coached has struggled with developing a strong community of internal Agile practitioners because there is no easy way for them to communicate in a collaborative manner. The corporate policies about networks, hardware, etc. make it very difficult to set something up in an ad hoc manner. Now, however, the needs of the internal Agile community have become strong enough that there is an effort to set up a wiki... but the organization has no idea what kinds of challenges that can open up. What will be the rules for using the wiki? Can people put stuff up that is "off-topic"? What constitutes acceptable material? Will it need moderation?

This relationship between the social aspect and the technological (or media) aspect must be accepted.

2. Members are different than users.

There may be lots of people involved in Agile projects, Agile training, Agile coaching, Agile management etc. in an organization... but not all of those people will be members of your internal agile community. Some of them will do it as their day job. And some will get excited and become leaders of the community. These self-selecting leaders must be nutured and supported.

You can identify these people because they will have ideas, attend lots of meetings, and generally want to be with other people doing agile in the organization. This should not be considered wasteful, but rather a natural extension of people's desire for community. These people have an important role to play. Therefore a great deal of attention should be paid to giving them access to lots of training, exploratory implementations of Agile, etc.

3. The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some circumstances.

The self-selecting core group has to be protected. This does not mean protecting individual members of the core group. In other words, a member of the core group who for some reason starts to undermine the group or the Agile community should not be protected. Rather, the community needs to be protected, possibly by ejecting a member who is causing problems.

In societies where individual rights are considered the highest priority, this can be difficult. Unfortunately, if you want the community to survive, then you have to have some community rights that are stronger than individual rights. If on the other hand, as an organization, you truly believe that individual rights are most important, then you might not want to bother trying to create an Agile community... since it will fail (read the linked article for details).

---

Someday I might also write about the "Four Things to Design For" :-)

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 05:27 PM | |

October 11, 2005

Is There a Single "Most Important" Agile Work Practice?

There are a few times that I have been involved with implementing agile pratices without management knowledge or direct support. In these cases it has usually been necessary to gradually introduce the practices. An unsupportive or apathetic environment cannot be changed instantly and big-bang introduction of agile tends to bring too much negative attention too quickly.

In reflecting on those experiences, as well as "normal" agile implementations, I have felt that there are some specific practices that can stand alone.

Self-Organizing Teams

The practice of a self-organizing team consists of frequent regular status meetings, face-to-face, reporting to the other team members accomplishments, work commitments and obstacles. Scrum has a very strict method of doing this on a daily basis but I have found it valuable to do more or less frequently depending on the team and its environment (generally any less than every second day is not enough). The team, or some assistant of some sort, tracks the barriers and works to resolve them quickly. Management, if it exists, must be contacted through trusted channels to assist with the removal of barriers. And stakeholders must be able to attend the status meetings or receive reports immediately after the meetings.

This single practice tends to have the ability to bootstrap the others. The identification and clearing of barriers provides a way for the team to practice all three Agile Work Disciplines (Empower the Team, Amplify Learning, Eliminate Waste). Reporting accomplishments to the other team members Amplifies Learning. Committing to work is empowering.

Some teams have done only this single agile practice and seen great improvements in productivity, morale, and stakeholder satisfaction. However, there are some pitfalls that must be acknowledged and dealt with.

Pitfall: Speculative Work

The team can tend towards speculative work if there is no strong representative of the stakeholders. This does not always happen since most people are sincere in their desire to "make a difference". However, if as a team you adopt only this practice and find yourselves doing lots of "what-if?" or "wouldn't it be neet if..." or "what exactly is our purpose?" discussions, then you need to find some external stakeholder support for your effort.

Pitfall: Failing to Deliver

In many organizations, failure to deliver is an endemic problem and a self-organizing team will break through and start delivering. However, failure to deliver can also become a cultural mindset for an organization or group. A self-organizing team must maintain a goal (not a plan) for itself, and that goal must include delivering something valuable. Again, finding an external stakeholder to support the team's efforts can help to avoid this pitfall.

Pitfall: No Barriers

Sometimes a team will get into a habit where no new barriers are being exposed. This can often happen when the progress in the work becomes steady and is recognizably better than it was before. The team falls into a "local optimum". In this case, the team needs a fresh way to view their work. This can happen in a number of ways: a crisis, an external observer, or a change in environment among others.

...

Do you have experience with successful but incomplete agile implementations? I would love to hear of other experiences and opinions about this.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 02:42 PM | |

October 10, 2005

Agile, the Adult Educator and Ethical Considerations

A review of Tara J. Fenwick's “Limits of the Learning Organization: A Critical Look” (article found in Learning for life: Canadian readings in adult education).

This article is a critique of learning organization literature (as presented in the works of Peters, Senge, Watkins, Marsick, Argyris, Schon and others). I chose to do a review of it because learning organization literature can and does inform the work of Agile practitioners. The writer, Tara Fenwick, offers a critique of this literature as an academic and practitioner in the field of adult education. Even though the language and tone of the article is judgmental and at times affronting to the corporate trainer audience, it is never-the-less challenging and valuable because she raises interesting ethical questions that can serve as cautions against potential trends that can distort agile practice. I will summarize her argument in the some of the areas most relevant to Agile practice.

Fenwick's summary of the model of learning organization found in the literature, is an organization that: “creates continuous learning opportunities, promotes inquiry and dialog, encourages collaboration and team learning, establishes systems to capture and share learning, empowers people toward collective vision and connects the organization to its environment.”

The following is a summary list of some of Fenwick's critiques:

Who's Interests are Served
Although the learning organization literature holds great promise for a more humanitarian and egalitarian workplace, it has the potential to distort learning “into a tool for competitive advantage” and in turn, exploit people as resources in the pursuit of profit. To explore this idea she asks a valuable question: “Who's interests are being served by the concept of learning organization, and what relations of power does it help to secure?” She argues that learning organization literature tends to serve the interests of educators working as trainers in organizations and managers interested in their own self preservation.

How Learning is Defined
Learning, in learning organization literature seems to be defined as that which benefits the organization, all other learning falls into the dysfunctional category. This perspective negates other ways that people create meaning and learn and potentially causes a person to become “alienated from their own meaning and block flourishing of this learning into something to benefit the community.”

Assumptions about Learners
The learning organization literature subordinates employees by seeing them as “undifferentiated learners-in-deficit”. Educators and managers are the architects of the learning organization while employees are busy “learning more, learning better and faster” trying to correct their knowledge deficit. In the learning organization workers become responsible for the health of the organization without the authority to determine alternative ways to reach that health. The fear of being left behind in a quickly changing market environment is used to create anxiety and fear as motivations for learning. All of these factors serve to put serious limits on the potential of people to learn in the work environment.

Diversity and Privilege Overlooked
Perspectives of race, class and gender -which research has shown affects the way people learn and collaborate- are lacking in the literature. Fenwick challenges the notion of achieving a democratically ideal situation for open dialog -that the learning organization literature calls for- when all people in the work place do not “have equal opportunity to participate, reflect, and refute one another” (for example because of the status of ones job, character, gender, class, age etc.)

Fenwick sheds a clear light on where the good philosophies of the learning organization are found wanting. The Agile community can benefit from asking some of the same ethical questions she asks in relation to our work. Her critique is a good challenge for Agile practitioners. It challenges us to:

• Continue to strive for higher levels of ethical excellence in our work
• To consider issues of power in our work
• To become conscious of how we use our own power
• To give thought to what voices are included / excluded in the creation of the learning organization
• Pay attention to how we motivate learners
• How to foster collaborative environments that are conscious of the privileging of some over others
• Think about who decides what is valuable knowledge and learning and how that affects the knowledge creation process

Reflecting on these issues will go a long way to contributing to the development of agile practice.

The full text of an old version of Fenwick's article can be found here.

Posted by Shabnam Tashakour at 09:35 PM | |

October 07, 2005

Agile Coach/Mentor Job Description (Process Facilitator)

Given the Agile Axioms and Disciplines then an agile coach or mentor should have some really specific experience and capabilities. This list constitutes a first attempt at a job description.

Experience:
- working in strictly timeboxed iterations with adaptive planning using some sort of prioritized work list
- working in a "test-driven" manner (e.g. writing a document for a client where the client specifies acceptance criteria)
- participating in frequent status meetings where the team members report to each other, commit to work and identify barriers
- building and maintaining big visible charts to show progress and status (e.g. the standard thermometer chart to show progress towards a numerical goal)
- fashioning appropriate tracking and performance metrics that encourage team work rather than individual competition
- helping other people to adopt and adapt all these practices

Capabilities:
- promoting collaboration in challenging circumstances
- searching for truth/a solution relentlessly
- honesty and trustworthiness
- a learning attitude (proactive and learning from mistakes)
- humility and assertiveness
- guiding people without controlling them
- detachment (ability to step out of a situation)
- an attitude of service without expecting recompense
- understanding of transformative learning
- conflict resolution as learning (not negotiation)
- encouraging creativity

Not Required:- technical experience related to the work of the team - the Agile Coach (process facilitator) should not be a performer on the team
- domain experience related to the goal of the work - the Agile Coach should not be a direct stakeholder in the results of the work

However, technical experience and domain experience can sometimes help...

Suggestions and ideas are greatly appreciated!

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 12:33 PM | |

September 29, 2005

Transformative Learning and Agile

It seems to me that most people who have had any kind of success on serious projects, or in life, can probably point to a profound collaborative experience at the core of that experience. In my last posting, "tools vs. capabilities" I said that because Agile is fundamentally a process of collaboration and our culture is fundamentally is a culture of contest, we need to recognize that learning Agile requires a transformation at the level of character more than methodology. Despite the fact that we may have had profound experiences with collaboration, because we are also deeply influenced by our environment, there are limits to what we can understand about it. We need not look further than the agile disciplines to see how most of our working and social practices are not supportive of Agile perspectives. For example empowering the team and the concept of self-organizing team is a direct challenge to most of our social, economic, cultural, community and familial structures which are essentially hierarchical. The discipline of amplifying learning is a direct challenge to the practice of excessive specialization which manifests itself in the form of expert elitism. How can any one of us ever hope to have a culture of learning and innovation if we come from a culture of expertise and hierarchy based on that expertise?

This is where transformative learning comes in. Agile requires of us not just an ordinary, but transformative learning experience. When we learn, we take something new and fit it into an old category or assign an old meaning to it. Categories are ways in which we organize our learning, they can also be called frames of reference. If we encounter an experience for which we have no category it is hard to understand it. For example have you ever been in a conversation or taken part in a course where what you were learning was so foreign to you that you didn't even know what kinds of questions to ask to help you understand it?

Our frames of reference are shaped through the influence of our culture, language, and experiences, which all interact to set boundaries to future learning. This is because outside of these categories it is impossible for us even to register something new, let alone seek out its reality in an unprejudiced manner.

How often do you find yourself in a new learning situation where you feel overwhelmed, frustrated or even angry? It is possible that at those times you may be at the threshold of a transformative learning experience. You can have two reactions: one would be to dig deep and try to figure out why you are disturbed and see what insights you are led to and the other would be to just give up on the idea and find arguments against it.

Another way to recognize a potential opportunity for tranformative learning is to reflect on the following question: have you ever had an experience where you were faced with some new learning and because you have had a similar experience or because for some reason you see yourself as an expert in that field you have not been able to derive the proper learning from that experience? You may have realized this at a later time after numerous interactions with a similar experience where you slowly started to recognize gaps in your own understanding.

In order to derive the full benefit of a new experience that doesn't fit into the realm of our experience we must have a transformative learning experience. A transformative learning experience is an experience that requires of us to examine the values and limitations of our old categories and assign new meanings to them. This does not mean that all of our previous learning is invalid. A transformative learning experience allows us to expand our frames of reference to allow for more complexity and at times possibly to integrate two previously perceived dichotomous approaches.

For a detailed introduction to transformative learning theories, its thinkers and history check out this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_learning on Wikipedia.

Posted by Shabnam Tashakour at 10:50 PM | |

September 27, 2005

Tools Versus Capabilities Approach To Agile Training

Which approach is most valuable in training that fosters collaborative work for the purpose of optimizing the performance of an organization: a tools / methodologies approach or an inner capabilities approach? The typical orientation that most organizations take is often external and rule-based. This consists of creating methodologies, rules, boundaries, systems and processes to enhance collaboration.

These external approaches ultimately fail to have a lasting effect on people and the culture of the organization because they don't address change at the level of habits of mind. People then work in the new structure with the same patterns of behaviour. Behind this kind of surface approach to change are assumptions about human nature. At worst this consists of a belief that people are base (greedy, selfish etc.) by nature. At best that people are fundamentally good but cannot improve except through external measures. It is true that we need external systems and structures to give expression to our inner capabilities, to test, foster and develop them in action. However all the investment that companies make in tools, systems, methodologies are obviously not enough. We need both external and internal approaches to training people in collaborative processes. Systems and tools provide only a framework that then need to be filled in with character. At the core of Agile there are disciplines (such as Empower the Team, Amplifly Learning) without which the methodologies would have no life. The practice of the disciplines fostered by the development of inner capabilities infuses life into the Agile methods and at the same time the methods act on and reinforce the inner practice of the disciplines.

As Agile champions (coaches, facilitators, practitioners) we must invest energy on fostering -through modelling and coaching- the development of inner capabilities. The Agile community will benefit from an identification of core capabilities required and a deep exploration of how to foster their development in individuals, teams and organizations.

Although it is our nature to organize in groups and we may have much experience with collaboration, we nevertheless live in a culture of contest and individualism. Out of this culture comes a set of belief systems which are so deeply rooted in our lives that we are not fully conscious of them and their affect on us. These belief systems cannot change easily through the introduction of external structures alone.

Posted by Shabnam Tashakour at 12:44 PM | |

September 15, 2005

Personal Philosophy of Adult Education

The following is my approach as an educator to my work in community and organizational development. I have come to this understanding mainly through experience, a great deal of mentoring and study.

Please note that when I use the term “teacher” in this document I also mean consultant, mentor, coach etc. The term “student” is also interchangeable with organization or community. The term education is interchangeable with organizational or community development consulting.

Validation: a starting point

Education should start from, affirm and validate the experience, insights and knowledge of the individual. This is a foundation for education that honours and respects the student. Recognizing the nobility of the student allows her an active role in her own learning. The role of the teacher is to facilitate learning by drawing on the experience of the student, to build on that experience through the acquisition of new insights, knowledge and skills.

Learning must be self-directed. The teacher may have a number of wonderful things to teach, but if the student does not believe that they are relevant to her, she will not be engaged. This is especially true for teachers who are working in communities that they are not a part of. The teacher must engage in careful investigation in order to understand the situation of the student, which includes attentive listening, as well as a genuine interest in the needs of the student, before proceeding along any line of instruction. Taking her cue from the students, the teacher must work with the individual / group to create a learning environment in which everyone takes responsibility for their own learning. In this kind of environment the teacher is not an expert and does not do the students’ learning for her. The teacher can use questions to assist the student to understand, instead of delivering answers. The teacher should also encourage an environment of learning that recognizes mistakes as part of the learning process. The learning environment should create in the student a hunger for the acquisition of knowledge, insights and skills beyond the direct experience with the teacher.

Encouragement: the key to self-directed learning

Once the experience of the student has been validated and her needs established, education should be challenging but not obtrusive and challenges must be presented with respect and encouragement. Encouragement versus excessive criticism leads to individual initiative instead of paralysis. The natural result of an encouraging and challenging learning environment is self-discipline and self-correction instead of external discipline (control) and constant external correction.

A transformative, holistic approach centred in humility and service

The learning environment should foster humility in both the student and teacher. Most contemporary approaches to education are materialistic; the student pays, studies, receives a degree, becomes an “expert”, etc. The whole educational experience, from the teachers to administrators, cultivates in the student a sense of self is that is based solely on the expertise and knowledge gained. The “Expert” attitude in the community development environment is often not useful because the work in the field is so complex. Many stakeholders have keys to the process, as a result, the “expert” attitude devalues the knowledge of others and tends to taint the path to solutions with conflict and ego. Another consequence of the expert mentality in the community is dependency; people are divorced from the solution to problems that they all contribute to and to which they all hold the keys. Instead of drawing on the knowledge of the stakeholders, the expert renders her own knowledge most valuable which in turn causes them to discard volition and succumb to a state of perpetual dependency on one expert after the other. Community members or institutions are robbed of the ability to play a central role in their own lives as a direct result of being robbed of opportunities to play central roles in the decision-making process of their community.

With humility at the centre of all learning, the purpose of education becomes transformation. We learn so that we, our communities and our institutions can improve and change for the better. Also as learning is applied to community efforts, individual capacity unfolds and is developed. Learning for its own sake is valuable, but learning for positive social change, makes the acquisition of knowledge, skills and insights relevant and engaging in the face of community development challenges. Learning then becomes intimately connected with action and is corrected and refined through action. This infuses a powerful sense of purpose and meaning in the learning process, especially as successes are realized.

Principle-based approach facilitates ownership

Education should cultivate a sense of personal ownership in the learning process and community life. Fostering a sense of personal ownership comes with educating students to have a mature perspective about their own learning as well as the changes they desire to implement in the community. It involves helping students learn the capability of ‘becoming’ the change that they want to see, as well as finding positive starting points in desperate situations and building on them. A mature outlook demands that students have a principle-based approach to problem solving versus a rule-based approach. Education then becomes not only a process of acquiring knowledge but centred on capacity building for individuals, institutions and groups. Fostering the development of capacities needed to overcome obstacles also requires a principle-based approach, embodying principles such as perseverance, human rights and dignity, building unity in diversity etc.

Integration and balance of methods essential

Education should be methodical and balanced. It should aim to acknowledge, validate and employ different learning paradigms: those of science, spirituality, culture and the arts. Systems of education that value science above the arts or spirituality are destructive to the individual and community as they create an imbalanced view of the world and rob people of a diversity of perspectives and tools that they need to face complex challenges. An educational program should strive to address the mental, emotional, spiritual and physical needs of students and not focus too much on merely one dimension of life. This is especially important in communities that have experienced extreme marginalization (colonization, oppression) where healing and wellness must play a significant role in the learning process.

Modelling Change

A key ingredient to success in transformational education is the example of the educator. As people, naturally we do what we know and what we have experienced. In order to change our patterns of behavior we need to begin having fundamentally different experiences than what we have known. The educator must be able to assist in the creation of such experiences. To do this she must be capable of modelling what is being taught and through constant critical self-reflection strive to exemplify in every action empowering ideals.

Summary

Learning and education are indispensable to all community efforts for positive change. The job of an adult educator is to assist individuals, the community and its institutions to adopt a posture of learning. This begins with working with the experience of the student, fostering self-directed learning and follows as the teacher interacts with the student to challenge and assist her to new levels of learning. With humility at the centre of all learning efforts, dependency on “experts” can be replaced with volition and independent decision-making. The potential of the individual further unfolds as she applies her learning to service to the community. Attention to capacity building and cultivating a sense of personal ownership -in the process of learning and community building- deepens the experience and truly engages the student in taking an active role in the development of her life. Utilizing all systems of learning in the education process ensures balance of methods and helps cultivate the infinite and diverse capabilities of human potential. Ultimately the success of an educator rests on the degree to which she is able to model the change she is fostering.

Posted by Shabnam Tashakour at 05:04 PM | |

August 18, 2005

Harvard Business Review Article

I highly recommend this article on Collaboration Rules. Great stuff in there about developing teams, developing organizations and how important communication and trust are to doing so. The article draws examples from and compares the open-source development and maintenance of the Linux kernal and the operation of the Toyota Production System.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 10:48 PM | |

Using Agile Work Practices to Develop a Seminar

I've been working on developing a Agile Work Seminar to introduce teams to agile work. I'm using some Agile Work practices to develop it.

Iterative Delivery and Adaptive Planning

The seminar is going through drafts. Each draft will actually be delivered to a team. The first time through all the material was done at a small software consulting company five days ago. As a result of feedback from the people who participated, a revision will be made to the seminar... and then it will be delivered again (probably the next time will be in early September). This process allows me to refine the contents and presentation of the material.

Over time, I will be able to use Adaptive Planning to modify the contents and qualities of the seminar as circumstances change.

Test-Driven Work

I have set up criteria for the presentation in the form of an outline and learning objectives. The outline describes the major topics that must be directly covered such as the Agile Axioms or Corporate Culture. I have also set up "soft goals" such as that the seminar must include theory, history, practice and criticism of Agile Work. My first iteration met the outline tests, but did not meet the soft tests explicitly. The next version will.

Appropriate Metrics

This is an easy one: the success of this project will be its acceptance in the marketplace by having teams willing to pay the price for this seminar and then recommending it to others.

The Other Practices

Because this is essentially a one-man job, the other practices such as Self-Organizing Team and Maximize Communication are not as applicable.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 08:32 AM | |

August 17, 2005

The Viable Systems Model

Agile Work is a system that can be created inside many types of organizations and work environments. I recently came across an interesting article about the viability of systems. The article describes an interesting recursive breakdown of systems into sub-systems of specific types. Over the course of the next few weeks, I will use this model to try to analyze Agile Work to see if it is viable.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 08:36 AM | |

August 15, 2005

Trust and Small Groups

A while ago I posted the story of a student film project using agile practices to create a documentary. One interesting observation made by the instructor is that trust among the group developed in an interesting fashion.

At first, the group self-organized by try to work in groups of three. However, when plans were made to get together (for example to film an interview), often, one of the three people would cancel. Probably, that person considered two people to be enough to do the work.

After noticing this pattern, the group decided to perform work in pairs. This made the commitment to working much stronger and eventually led to a more trusting work relationship.

I have also observed this pattern in other situations. Pair programming, pair writing, pair designing, pair problem-solving... all of these behaviors seem to arise naturally in a self-organizing team.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 10:59 PM | |

August 11, 2005

Agile Work Roles

There are three simple roles in Agile Work. All other roles, titles, duties or responsibilities are not part of Agile Work.

The Process Facilitator is responsible for the process used by the team. Normally, the Process Facilitator role is held by a single person who does not have any other duties.
- Keeps the team on-track by gently reminding the team of the process rules, e.g. having a completed chunk of work at the end of the iteration
- Facilitates process improvements, usually by doing a process reflection between iterations
- Coaches and instructs the team and individuals on the Agile Work axioms, disciplines, practices and how to apply them
- Works closely with the Product Owner to ensure that the quality Work Item List is maintained
- Focus on the "Clear the Path" practice of removing obstacles

Here is a short statement on the Process Facilitator Role. And here is a Process Facilitator Job Description.

The Product Owner is responsible for working with stakeholders to develop the Work Item List and understanding, maintaining and prioritizing it. Normally, the Product Owner role is held by a single person who does not have any other duties.
- Responsible for working with the team when the team has questions about items in the Work Item List
- Makes on-demand/immediate decisions about priority and meaning of items in the Work Item List

Here is a short set of links and another description of the Product Owner Role.

The Team Members are responsible for organizing and executing the work they have committed to doing.
- Extend themselves beyond their field of specialization
- Volunteer for tasks to complete the work (no one on the team or outside the team assigns tasks)
- Responsible as a team for determining how to complete work and then completing it

This new set of roles, along with other agile practices and principles, often results in a huge shift in responsibility. Decision-making and accountability is transferred from managers to the team. This change can be very difficult for managers who are accustomed to direction, delegation, control. Instead, managers must become facilitators and enablers.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 10:03 PM | |

August 10, 2005

Optimizing a Team Room

Some less-obvious hints for creating a team room that promotes collaboration and effective communication.

- don't underestimate the importance of plants and natural light for overall morale and health
- encourage the team both individually and as a group to personalize the team space: kid's art, photos, trinkets, food, special chairs/ergonomic stuff
- encouraging a playful atmosphere if your group is quiet and shy is easier in a bullpen and this in turn leads to better morale
- encourage the team to notice traffic patterns (both physical and communication) and optimize the space to account for these patterns
- play games in the team room during lunch breaks or after-hours and have the results of the games as part of the visual environment

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 03:13 PM | |

August 09, 2005

The Transparent Society

The Transparent Society, an essay by David Brin is an excellent statement about the possibilities and challenges that technology presents to us as a society. What is interesting about this paper is that it presents a possible society that is very similar to some of the goals in establishing an agile environment: open communication, accountability, free access to information and status, and close collaboration.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:58 PM | |

August 06, 2005

Generalizing Specialists

The term "generalizing specialists" has come to mean an individual who has a particular area of deep expertise but also has experience in a large number of other areas that may not be directly related to their core area. This type of person typically has strong talent in their specialty but also has a generally strong talent for learning new skills and ideas quickly. The origin of the term seems to be in the software industry referring to programmers who can do other software-development related tasks.

In self-organizing teams, a generalizing specialist is a more valuable team member than a pure specialist. The pure specialist often has an attitude that they should not need to do work outside their specialty. This can be destructive to the team's morale. On the other hand, the generalizing specialist is willing and able to learn new skills - to stretch as the needs of the team change. And since change is natural, this is an essential attitude for team members.

However, we are usually trained, and strongly encouraged to have a deep specialty. This approach to education and training is a natural consequence to the typical organizational model for work and society. Therefore, if a team is converting to agile work methods, people need to be coached to stretch themselves and learn new things. For some people, particularly those who already have multiple hobbies outside work, this is an easy transition to make. For others, it is a very difficult transition. In some extreme cases, this may call for the removal of someone from the team. (Note: I have never seen this myself and I only mention it with great reservation. I strongly feel that only those who could be called "ill" will be so incapable of changing their way of working. For other recalcitrants, it is usually a matter of motivation.)

Other terms that are similar to "generalizing specialist" include "craftsperson", "renaissance man", and "polymath".

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 08:05 PM | |

August 02, 2005

Memory and Mystery

My father, Garry Berteig, recently took a trip to China to visit my brother in Beijing. Garry is an artist and an educator of great skill and insight. While there, he had the following insight:

Memory (traditional forms) is undone by Mystery (abstract forms). The next step is to combine the two into new forms in a postmodern sense... unity through diversity.

I believe this can be related to the idea of levels of mastery which I first encountered in Alistair Cockburns excellent book "Agile Software Development". Since I don't have the book in front of me, I have to go from memory. First there is rote learning, memorization of predefined forms. Then comes understanding of why the forms are the way they are. Finally comes the wisdom and experience to innovate on the forms.

If anyone else has any ideas about this, I would love to discuss them!

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 12:00 PM | |

August 01, 2005

Broadcast Mode Communication

The book "The Mythical Man-Month"* discusses some of the reasons that larger teams are inefficient. The main concern is with the number of possible connections between team members. If you have two team members, there's only one channel of communication. However, if you have n team members, then you have n(n-1)/2 channels... which grows quickly (order n^2) as n becomes larger. If one is required to work with a large team, say more than 10 to 12 people, it becomes imperative to find ways to improve communication efficiency.

One of the best ways to do this is to use broadcast mode communications. Information radiators are a simple broadcast mode tool. In a subtler way, having the team co-located** also takes advantage of broadcast mode communication: if everyone can overhear all the conversations that are going on in a room, then people can tune in when they hear something of relevance.

It is important to note that there are several other forms of broadcast communication that are useful in certain circumstances: e-mail, blogs with RSS or Atom feeds, analog radio, television (if you can think of others, please let me know in the comments). These tend to be more useful for very large communities. Radio and television have severe limits: they are not easily used in a communal fashion.

Some forms of communication may seem to be broadcast, but in fact are not. A simple web site is not because it requires that people poll it to see if it has been updated. Conference calls are marginally broadcast in that while they are occuring, everyone participating hears everyone else. However, a conference call requires active synchronized attention on the part of all the participants.

The subject of media and communication is a vast one. Some of the best writers include Marshall McLuhan and Gregory Bateson. However, there are many many more.

*Highly recommended!

**A search on dictionary.com for collocation indicates that three spellings are all correct: collocate, colocate, and co-locate, this latter spelling being the most common on the web.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:18 AM | |

July 30, 2005

A Simple Rule of Thumb

Make your product/service development lifecycle shorter than your horizon of predictability. For example, if you can't predict your competitive environment or your own capabilities outside of 4 months, then any new product/service should be initially launched at most 4 months from the time it is conceived. Once initial launch has occured, it is possible to examine the environment and make adjustments for an additional launch. One might call this experimental marketing. Ideas that just can't be accomplished inside of one's horizon of predictability should be considered very risky. In order to reduce this risk, these larger projects can either be broken up into smaller pieces, or efforts can be made to extend the horizon of predictability out further (this second task is extremely difficult).

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:09 PM | |

July 28, 2005

Applicability Matrix Tool for Colocated Team

Notes:

1. Individuals are automatically co-located with themselves.

2. Teams can greatly increase the effectiveness and efficiency of their communication by working in a shared space. For rote and adaptive work, sharing a space is highly recommended, but not always essential. Some teams have found mechanisms for working effectively in a distributed fashion. In these circumstances a great deal of effort is put into frequent use of rich communication channels. In purely creative and innovative work, it is very difficult to do the work without co-location. Risks of misunderstandings or waste due to handoffs increase a great deal if co-location is not used in these circumstances.

3. In community work, co-location is difficult in general due to the large numbers of people involved. A “command centre” open to all members of the community is usually as close as it is possible to come to co-location. With rote work, it is not necessary to even attempt co-location. Adaptive and creative work benefit greatly by increased communication so some efforts to co-locate may be worth the effort, but care should be taken in determining the return on investment.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:46 PM | |

July 25, 2005

Applicability Matrix Tool for Iterative Delivery

Notes:

1. Iterative Delivery is a specific way of managing queues of work. As such, rote work is generally better served by other applications of queuing theory.

2. There is one universal condition under which iterative delivery is awkward, if not inadvisable. If one's horizon of predictability is longer than the size of a work package by some substantial amount (e.g. 2:1 ratio), it can be more natural to use queuing theory and a pull system to flow work through the team. The actual ratio between the horizon of predictability and work package size that is used to switch over to a queue system must be determined empirically in your own circumstances. This empirical analysis can be done using a regular process reflection meeting.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 03:14 PM | |

July 23, 2005

Book Review - "The Tipping Point"

Overview

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference is a book that is about the way ideas, things and behaviors go from obscurity to ubiquity in a very short period. The basic model is that of an epidemic in which three types of factors contribute to quick dissemination: 1) the network of people involved including "connectors", "mavens" or respected experts, and "salesmen", 2) the ability of that which is spreading to stick around, the "stickiness factor", and 3) the importance of small physical, mental and social factors, in creating a conducive environment. The Author, Malcolm Gladwell, includes some excerpts on his web site.

• Introduction
• One: The Three Rules of Epidemics
• Two: The Law of the Few: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen
• Three: The Stickiness Factor: Sesame Street, Blue's Clues, and the Educational Virus
• Four: The Power of Context (Part One): Bernie Goetz and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime
• Five: The Power of Context (Part Two): The Magic Number One Hundred and Fifty
• Six: Case Study: Rumors, Sneakers, and the Power of Translation
• Seven: Case Study: Suicide, Smoking, and the Search for the Unsticky Cigarette
• Eight: Conclusion: Focus, Test, and Believe
• Afterword: Tipping Point Lessons from the Real World
• Endnotes
• Acknowledgements
• Index

Assessment

This is a fascinating book, well written. Some of the anecdotes and "case studies" are mind-blowing. However, there is a bit of weakness in parts. In particular, the Afterword and the sections on The Power of Context are weakly put together - ideas do not flow well, or are too stream-of-consciousness. As well, the weight of evidence, while strong, is not totally convincing. That said, there are a couple of really fabulous stories.

One story that stands out is the study related to the "Good Samaritan". In brief, researchers set up an experiment to test what factors influenced a person's behavior when presented with someone obviously in need of help. At a seminary, the researchers had students prepare and deliver a brief talk on some topic. One of the topics given randomly to some of the students was the story of the Good Samaritan. The students were to take a short amount of time to prepare their talk and then immediately go to another building to deliver it. Planted by the researchers along the path to the second building was an actor made up to appear in a great deal of physical distress. As each student was sent out the door, the researchers would breifly comment either that the student was running a little early, or that they were late and needed to hurry to deliver their talk. The results were astounding: of those students who were told that they were late 90% ignored the person in distress regardless of the topic of their presentation, while 63% those with a few minutes to spare stopped to help (pages 163-165).

Relevance

There are several ways in which this book is relevent to those of us practicing Agile Work and related methods. Most obviously, the ideas in The Tipping Point suggest some lines of action we can take to promote Agile: finding the connectors, mavens and salespeople, working to make Agile sticky, and making the environment hospitible to the spread of Agile. This applies both inside organizations and in the world at large.

In my own opinion, the drafters of the Agile Software Manifesto, either by design or otherwise, came up with an incredibly sticky term: Agile.

Finally, when coaching a team to adopt agile practices, it may be most important to focus on the Power of Context. Small suggestions, small physical changes, body language, all can have a large influence on the success or failure of an agile adoption. If a coach (Scrummaster/Team Lead/etc.) can find the connectors, mavens and salespeople in the sphere of influence of the team, and convince those people of the efficacy of Agile, then convincing the team will become that much easier.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 09:59 AM | |

July 22, 2005

Applicability Matrix Tool for Self-Steering Team

Notes:

1. Self-Steering may be difficult to implement in some cultural circumstances. An organization that is very comfortable with a command-and-control system can benefit from self-steering teams, but the effort to shift the culture should be realistically assessed. An excellent reference for corporate culture change is "The Corporate Culture Survival Guide" by Edgar H. Schein.

2. Self-Steering in a rote work environment boils down to teams empowered to learn how to do the rote work as effectively as possible. This learning process must include the power to change the process with the goal of doing the work faster or with fewer defects. For example, in a manufacturing environment, this means people being able to identify problems and make improvements to the manufacturing process. In a rote work environment, not all changes the team makes will be improvements, but they must be accepted. A mechanism for measuring the result of changes must be in place so that the team can assess the effect of their changes, and make corrections as appropriate.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 06:38 PM | |

July 19, 2005

Applicability Matrix Tool for Adaptive Planning

Notes:

1. For rote work, it is rare to need an Adaptive Planning style prioritized backlog. Rather, simple queues tend to be sufficient. The adaptive backlog is designed to allow for reprioritization of work as more is learned about the work itself. With rote work most of the learning is involved with improving the process of creating the work and reducing defects rather than changing the work product itself.

2. Individuals can benefit from using a backlog to organize their work, keep a history, and track progress. However, it may be sufficient to keep a simpler to-do list. The adaptive planning practice allows an individual to gain the benefit of explicit collaboration points with stakeholders.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 10:39 PM | |

July 17, 2005

A Nice Little Intervention

Esther Derby wrote about a great, incredibly obvious, but sometimes missed never-the-less, intervention for helping teams make a decision: write the options down (20050724: corrected link).

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 02:42 PM | |

July 16, 2005

Applicability Matrix Tool for Information Radiators

Notes:

For individuals, the use of Information Radiators is usually not applicable in rote work since the individual can keep track of status of such work easily. However, for adaptive and creative work, an information radiator can be quite useful as a constant reminder of what is happening or for organizing work to be done. A cork board for the status of tasks or for categorizing ideas can be a simple information radiator used by an individual. A whiteboard can be used for free-form notes.

For teams, information radiators are ideal for easily maintaining broadcast communication with team members. A team is usually small enough that an information radiator can be maintained by individuals making updates as appropriate. Project status of tasks, issues parking lots, and group calendars are examples of information radiators used by teams.

For a community, the difficulty of using an information radiator comes in the logistics. With a large number of people performing work, possibly never all coming together at the same time, the broadcast nature of information radiators can be severly curtailed. It is difficult to efficiently represent information that is relevent to the whole communit in a way that can be easily accessed and easily understood at a glance. As well, it is difficult to have community members directly and (relatively) equally participate. That said, there are some exceptions. The most obvious one is the various wikis that are maintained by communities... and the largest of these is Wikipedia.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 06:45 PM | |

July 11, 2005

People are Creators - The Artist's Way

I have just started reading The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. I found it interesting how affirming it is of the first of the Agile Axioms. The following are all quotations taken from the first couple of chapters of the book:

Through my own experience - and that of countless others that I have shared - I have come to believe that creativity is our true nature...

---

What you are doing is creating pathways in your consciousness through which the creative forces can operate. Once you agree to clearing these pathways, your creativity emerges. In a sense, your creativity is like your blood. Just as blood is a fact of your physical body and nothing you invented, creativity is a fact of your spiritual body and nothing that you must invent.

---

And few ideas are worse than the ones we have about art.

---

Why should we all use our crative power . . . ? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money. (Brenda Ueland)

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:17 PM | |

May 18, 2005

Making Friends Sure Beats Making Enemies

I heard a story about a situation where someone was refused career advancement because she had made an enemy a long time ago.

It made me think. Why do we make enemies? Is it because we don't really know how to make friends? In Agile Work, where communication, collaboration, teamwork and truthfulness are so important, making enemies is the worst thing a person can do. (It might not be such a big problem in mechanistic environments.)

The golden rule is a good starting place for learning how to make friends. Esther derby has a great course on teamwork that could help. An of course there's the old classic: How to Win Friends & Influence People which really is very good (if a little dated). If anyone knows some other good books or resources about learning to make friends, please reply in the comments!

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 03:26 PM | |

May 10, 2005

Empower the Team

Empowerment is the ability of a team to make decisions about how to do their work and execute on those decisions without outside interference. If a team is empowered, then it will be more capable of responding to change, and it will be able to focus on manifesting the members' creative potential. Empowerment comes from a combination of several factors:

1. members of the team have a deep sense of self-worth that includes nobility, and contribution to the progress of humanity

2. tacit or explicit authority and responsibility for results as a team and as individuals

3. a team environment which is honest, trusting and allows for mistakes

4. the absence of personal attacks against individuals on the team and in particular a total lack of gossip and backbiting

There are several ways that team members will demonstrate their empowerment. People will derive joy from their work. Team members will be dedicated to the work and the team. Individuals on the team will frequently take individual initiative to accomplish tasks, share insights, and develop improvements. Spontaneous leadership will become common. Individuals will step out of comfort zones or areas of specialization in order to assist the team.

Empowering a team is a process that can sometimes take a great deal of time and effort. In order to start on this process, the team members should carefully listen to each other and ask many questions. More mature individuals should lead and teach by example. And all the team members can start to question and challenge the rules and procedures of an environment that are preventing effective work. If the team is in an organizational environment where team members have management to report to, then management must be aware of this opportunity for empowerment and support it.

An empowered team can gradually understand and internalize the agile work principles (People are Creators, Change is Constant, Perception mediates Reality). By internalizing these principles, a team can move beyond specific agile work practices and become a high performing team setting their own work practices.

Jeff Sutherland has a very brief blurb about the progress of teams as they evolve in their use of Scrum.

Future entries here will discuss the methods of creating empowered teams.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:04 PM | |

April 19, 2005

Considering the Agile Manifesto and the Axioms of Agile Work

The Agile Manifesto, aimed squarely at software development, is inaccurate when considered against the more general target of Agile Work. The Agile Software Manifesto reads in part:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Having studied Scrum, and attempted to apply agile practices on non-software projects in non-corporate, non-new-product-development efforts, I am painfully aware that the Agile Software Manifesto needs some re-jigging to become the Agile Work Manifesto. My first cut at doing this was to remove the software implications from the above four statements of value. This resulted in the following three statements of value:

Individuals and Interactions are preferred over Processes and Tools
Moving Towards a Valued Goal is preferred over Producing Ephemera
Responding to Change is preferred over Following a Plan

I removed the part about customer collaboration because I felt that it was strongly implied by "Individuals and Interactions" and "Moving Towards a Valued Goal" and because not all efforts have identifiable customers in the sense that a business effort usually does.

Once I got to this point, I started to feel like the statements of value were not really getting to the fundamental assumptions or principles or axioms of Agile Work. I thought quite a bit about each value and what it was really saying at a very basic level. For example, "Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools" is partly about the value and power of human beings. What is that power? "Moving Towards a Valued Goal over Producing Ephemera" begs the questions of what is a valued goal? and can ephemera be valued? and for that matter, what exactly constitutes ephemera and its opposite? Finally, "Responding to Change over Following a Plan" is really saying that plans don't tend to work. And why is that? So in order to answer those questsions, I have come up with the following three Agile Work Axioms:

People are Creators
Perception Mediates Reality
Change is Constant

People are creators and that's why its so important for us to improve ourselves and our interactions with others. Perception mediates reality and that's why we must produce results that are perceived as valuable to those who care about our results. Change is constant and that's why following a plan never works... unless you "embrace change" (Beck). But there is still something missing. There is a foundation necessary to make these principles work together in real human environments.

Truthfulness is the Foundation of Agile Work

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 10:32 PM | |

April 18, 2005

Book Review: "Good to Great" by Jim Collins

Summary: In this well-written, engaging book, author Jim Collins describes six critical factors that he and his research team found common in companies that transformed themselves from a long period of mediocre or bad results to a long period of great financial results. Although focused on publicly-traded companies in the United States, the results of this research can easily be extended to apply to other types of organizations.

Good to Great describes the following six concepts:

1. Level 5 Leadership: personal humilty and professional discipline in an organization's leader are the starting point for the transformation.
2. First Who... Then What: don't worry about what to do until the right people are in the right positions in an organization.
3. Confront the Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith): careful and honest examination of an organization's current situation is the foundation for finding a path forward.
4. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): discover a simple business concept that people can be passionate about, that works with a single key economic driver and that the organization can be the best in the world.
5. A Culture of Discipline: disciplined people removes the need for heirarchy, disciplined thought removes the need for bureaucracy and disciplined action removes the need for excessive controls.
6. Technology Accelerators: pioneer the application of carefully selected technologies without relying on technology for transformation.

Some of these concepts are very close to the underlying prinicples of agile work. For example, in the Scrum methodology, the first five principles are all represented. The Scrum Master embodies some of the attributes of level 5 leadership. A self-organizing team gets the right people in the right position. The daily scrum and the sprint planning meetings are designed to help the team confront the brutal facts. The sprint goal embodies at a local level the simplicity of the hedgehog concept. And the practices in general are a manifestation of a culture of discipline.

Who Should Read this Book? Anyone interested in creating a lasting positive transformation in an organization should read this book. In particular, individuals who are coaching teams or organizations should read this book since the concepts also appear to apply at a sub-organizational level.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 07:29 PM | |

April 14, 2005

Stealth Methodology Adoption

This link was seen on a scrum-toronto list, referring to an e-book called Stealth Methodology Adoption. The title is brilliant, and reflects, in my view, a significant means of adoption of Agile technologies at this point in the maturity of this market.

More projects than not, a small straw poll of friends and family in the business indicated, where Agile was used, used it under the radar screen. Often artifacts were translated into the artifacts of more traditional PMOs, and not a word was said. However, this is a dangerous approach, however necessary at times. The partial implementation of an Agile method, without buy-in in certain quarters can lead to a failure to realize the benefits of the method. If the practices that were used can be blamed, they will. People love to find scapegoats, and there are costs to agile that can be pinned. For example, if the project fails, but TDD was used in isolation, or used badly, it can be held to account as having taken more time than just writing code. If Pair Programming is used in an otherwise traditional project that fails, it can be identified as a halving of productivity. If daily scrums and backlog are used (again, by themselves, or without experience), they can be seen as a failure to gather sufficient requirements and manage to those requirements.

It take subtlety and wisdom to know how much agile to put into an organization, how much visibility, and which particular practices will garner the most benefit in a particular area. Most agile methods have a combination of practices that encourage emergent behaviour. But in many cases, the practices themselves are emergent. The interaction of daily scrums with a scrum master that's working the group to a sprint backlog, and working with a product owner to refine the product backlog for the next sprint - without interrupting the sprint - these have powerful effects on productivity when put together. But, for example, all you have to do is interrupt the sprint and start messing with sprint backlog, or have a product owner / scrum master that doesn't do the work of refining a good product backlog and you end up with developers who don't know which way to turn at a given moment.

Similarly, TDD - if you are writing tests first, but you're not actually defining "done" properly, (ie. sufficiently covering the desired behaviour and edge and negative cases) then you can end up having someone write a lot of tests that are practically meaningless to the code in question. This means that you don't get the benefits of the testing, plus you incur the costs not only of the tests, but also of the wasted time sifting through test code that was not written against the requirements of the interface.

In a lot of these situations, it is judgement that comes from experience that is the real solution. There are few formulae that can practically resolve these questions. The benefits of NOT implementing Agile in stealth-mode, therefore, include the ability to bring in experienced mentors who can provide this kind of judgement to an organization new to agile approaches. Most "stealth agile" projects don't have budget for such. But books like the afore-linked can help communicate some of this wisdom and judgement.

Posted by Christian Gruber at 07:08 AM | |

April 09, 2005

Article on CIO Insight

The online CIO Insight has a great article/interview about a forthcoming book: "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century". Choice quote:

What I am trying to do is say that something important really is happening. The value-creation model is moving away from a vertical silo model to an increasingly collaborative horizontal model, from command and control to collaborate and connect, and that's going to change everything.

This comment alone is a fairly close hit at the essense of Agile Work. The rest of the article is very interesting and touches on many topics of interest relating to globalization, business, information technology, outsourcing and politics.

There is an interesting article at The Economist also about this book. It is very critical.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:49 PM | |