September 06, 2007
Four Methods of Perfecting Agile
Most organizations start doing agile (or Scrum or lean or ...) imperfectly. Someone introduces a few practices or a manager gets a team some training, or a person starts using agile terminology. And things might improve, particularly with the use of iterations. One of the core ideas of agile methods is to have frequent delivery of valuable results. In fact, this core idea can be used to drive the improvement of an agile process. How? Here are four methods of perfecting agile by expanding the definition of done.
Perfecting Agile
Let's suppose you already understand the benefits of agile. With these benefits in mind, you would like to improve the organization's ability to deliver working, valuable results at the end of every iteration so that you can get better at realizing those benefits. The primary way to do this is by expanding the definition of done. You can imagine this like so:
On a regular basis, the team/organization find ways to bring work done in either the preparation stage or the close stage into every iteration of the agile portion of the project. By moving the work from these "bookend" stages into the iterations, you reduce the amount of time spent in those stages and simultaneously create a more complete delivery every iteration. The "definition of done" is now expanded to contain the results or value delivered by the work that was taken out of the startup and shutdown stages of the project. By expanding the definition of done, each iteration delivers a more "complete" increment of value, and there is less work done before or after iterations in order to plan or deliver. This gradual process allows the team to get better at doing agile.
There are four methods for transferring work from the start and end of a project into the iterations of a project.
Expand the Agile Team's Skill Set
In some ways, this is the simplest and most common approach to expanding the definition of done in the agile portion of a project. By training, coaching, mentoring, re-assigning or hiring, a team's capacity to do work is expanded and used to expand the definition of done. As a simple example, a software developer might learn to use an automated unit testing framework and therefore expand the definition of done to include some amount of unit test coverage of delivered code. In general, training, coaching and mentoring existing team members should be preferred over adding people to the team since the addition disrupts the team's development and can increase communication overhead among team members.
Expand the Agile Team's Authority
Sometimes, a team is not able to do part of the preparation work or close up work because they are not authorized to do so. This may be a policy, a unspoken assumption or a bureaucratic procedure. By giving the team (or some person on the team) the authority to do this work, the team can find ways to do it every iteration instead of having to work through another non-team individual. Again, a simple example here is a situation where a technical person is given permission to talk directly to an end user in order to reduce the need for up-front requirements gathering and analysis and reduce the need for end-of-project user acceptance testing. The obvious challenge to do this is the question of trust (or lack thereof).
Automate an Existing Manual Process
Automation is often given far less than its due consideration. This is primarily be cause automating a process is an investment of work in and of itself. Fortunately, it is often easy to measure the ROI or savings involved with automation. In many agile environments, heavy automation is critical and a huge enabler for very short iterations. Automated testing, automated translation, automated build processes, are all common areas of improvement. Agile teams should always be looking for opportunities to automate their own work. In this way, the automation work itself is transformed from a separate project to a responsibility of the team.
Remove Wasteful Processes
There are some parts of the project preparation work and the project close up work that are pure waste! There is no independent value to these activities, nor is there indirect value to them. An excellent example of this sort of thing is an approval process that _always_ grants approval ("rubber stamping"). One insurance organization I worked with as they were converting to an agile approach discovered that their "second stage" approvals always allowed proposed projects to proceed. Since they often incurred a 4-6 week delay for this approval process, it became obvious that they should "get rid of it". Now, what they actually did is made it so that it became a parallel review process rather than a gated approval process; this was so that the true purpose of the activity could still be met: to help stakeholders understand the projects that were being worked upon. Here, there is no need to take this approval process and somehow work it into every iteration. An agile approach tends to increase the visibility of the work anyway, so it may be discovered later on that the review process can also be done away with.
Agile is often implemented in a limited fashion when it is first adopted by most teams and organizations. The four methods of expanding the definition of done can help a team or organization get better at doing agile and therefore reap more of the benefits of agile. These methods are simple: expand the agile team's capacity, their authority, have them automate manual processes and remove wasteful activities from the process.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 03:32 AM | |
January 16, 2007
The Wisdom of Teams - Generalizing Specialists
I've almost finished reading The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization
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.
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 | |
January 02, 2007
Top Ten Most Popular Entries from 2006
If you are new to Agile Advice, these are not just some of the most popular articles, they are also some of the best! Take a look around; you will find ideas to inspire you, challenge your thinking and maybe that one little thing that will make the difference in applying agile methods in your situation.
1. How Two Hours Can Waste Two Weeks - 25,617 unique views
This little hypothetical story by Dmitri Zimine was very popular on Reddit, and Joel on Software ranted a bit about it.
2. The Case for Context Switching - 2,936 unique views
My rebuttal to Joel's rant. Goes well with Dmitri's article. Emphasizes the idea of building trust in an organization.
3. The Qualities of an Ideal Test - 1,579 unique views
Six qualities that will help make your tests as valuable as can be. Similar to the ACID properties of databases or the INVEST properties of user stories.
4. The Pros and Cons of Short Iterations - 1,555 unique views
A few words that will help you decide how long to make your iteration length. This is an important decision, and most teams and organizations don't know the factors involved.
5. Five Signs of Trouble in an Iteration - 1,489 unique views
A good howto on using burndown charts to discover problems in an iteration.
6. Seventeen Tips for Iteration Planning - 1,427 unique views
A good list of hints and tips that can make the difference between struggling with iteration planning and having it go smoothly and effectively. This is a key part of the Agile Work process, so getting good at it is a high priority for any team new to Agile Work.
7. Change is Natural - "Embrace Change" - 1,397 unique views
A short riff on the universality of change. Also introduces the idea of the "horizon of predictability".
8. The Art of Obstacle Removal - 1,287 unique views
This is a good reference article on types of obstacles and methods for removing them... a critical practice for Process Facilitators.
9. The Seven Core Practices of Agile Work - 1,285 unique views
Agile Work is really quite simple. This is a concise list of the practices that make up this effective methodology.
10. Interview with Alistair Cockburn - Agile and House Renovations - 902 unique views
Applying agile methods to home and garden renovations! Learn a bit about how this luminary of the agile world has taken agile practices out of the software world and into the hardware world.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 06:32 PM | |
June 02, 2006
Cueing Agility - Creating a Supportive Environment for Agile Teams
In Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
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.
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
(p 122)
- Fervently held ideology...
- Indoctrination
- Tightness of fit [for employees]
- Elitism
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:
(These are the generic, non-software version of the Agile Software Manifesto.)
See also: Optimizing a Team Room
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:26 AM | |
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 15, 2005
Truck Factor
Truck Factor (definition): "The number of people on your team who have to be hit with a truck before the project is in serious trouble"
Clearly "hit by a truck" is an extreme thought however you could easily substitute "take vacation at the same time" to get the same idea. If any part of your project has a truck factor of one then you are in a particularly fragile situation. If that one person leaves or is unable to work on the project, you will suffer the consequences.
Over time, anyone can be replaced. Truck factor is an indication of how expensive it will be to replace specific people.
In an ideal situation, everyone on the team will know all parts of the system so that the loss of any one person would have minimal impact. In reality, many projects rely on one or more "heros" who are the only one who understand certain critical parts of the system. When these heros leave (and you should assume they will), you must be prepared to recover.
If you have a hero on your team, the best thing you can do is reassign that person to a different part of the system. This will allow the replacement to ramp up while the hero is still available for support. If you wait until the hero has left then the ramp-up will be significantly more expensive.
An added benefit to reassigning the hero is that this person will now have the opportunity to work on something different. Since the hero's tend to be the most technically competent members of the team, this will usually mean that the new area will improve once the hero has worked on it for a while.
Truck factor is a quick metric that will highlight potential problems in your project. Having hero's on your team can be very beneficial but only if you don't become dependant on them. Truck factor is one metric that will highlight your dependencies.
Cross posted from Mike Bowler's Weblog
Posted by Michael Bowler at 06:42 PM | |
May 11, 2005
Appropriate Metrics
At the Advanced ScrumMaster Training, Ken Schwaber presented a substantial amount of thinking about metrics used with Scrum. The main driver for thinking about metrics has come from implementing Scrum in enterprise situations. Management expects metrics to be used in order to provide visibility into the progress of the Scrum implementation.
While this driver has some legitimacy, there are three main concerns to prescribing metrics for use with Scrum.
1. Planned/Engineering Approach - metrics such as "ideal person days" smell like the bad old way of treating people as resources that can be swapped in and out of a project.
2. Normative vs. Empirical - metrics are often used to set a standard for reasons such as prediction, and expectation. Scrum is about discovery and improvement not prediction and planning.
3. Is Something in Scrum not Working? Is adoption being hindered? Are too many Scrum implementations failing? Are metrics a critical success factor?
Keep these concerns in mind while considerig the uses of metrics.
What are Metrics for?
1. Self-Evaluation over Time - use a metric to track the progress of a group. A measurement is taken at a certain point in time, and then taken repeatedly over intervals. Example: the velocity at which a team completes work can be used to identify problems and opportunities for a team.
2. Control - use a metric to legislate the qualities of some process or attribute of work. A goal or standard is set for a measurement. The size of a queue of projects waiting to be worked upon by a team can be controlled in order to limit the size of work in progress and therefore project inventory.
3. Prediction - use a metric with values collected over time in order to predict future values of that metric. By implication, the metric is used to predict the performance of a system. The number of additional tasks discovered inside an iteration can be tracked and used to determine future expectations on extra tasks discovered.
4. Performance Measurement - use a metric in order to determine rewards and/or punishments and/or adjustments to behavior. An individual on a team may be evaluated based on their productivity as measured by lines of code completed and rewarded or penalized on that basis (not recommended!).
5. Behavior Motivation - use a metric to guide behavior by setting a context for thinking, action and reflection. Focus on an important measure in order to draw attention to improving the attribute with which the metric is associated. Measuring the time elapsed from conception of a project idea to the time it actually delivers valuable results can draw attention to improving speed.
The Lesson from Good to Great
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins discusses the attributes and behavior that are common and unique to companies that have gone from a long history of mediocre results to a long run of great results. One identified aspect is referred to as the "Hedgehog Principle". In this principle, three questions are answered: "what can we be the best in the world at?", "what can we be passionate about?", "what is my one economic driver?"
The economic driver is a metric. For example, at Walgreens, their driver is profit per customer visit. Other large institutions have other metrics. But all good to great companies have a single economic driver metric that guides all their decision making.
See also: A Metric Leading to Success.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 05:21 PM | |
April 24, 2005
Agile HR - Sort Of
An article called Are You Ready for the Agile Future presents a brief discussion about the role of HR in an agile organization. There are several very good ideas. The basic idea is that the HR function must adapt to the nature of agility. This in turn means, for example, hiring people that are agile, nimble, adaptable etc.
There are however some mis-steps in the article.
One is an ommission: the HR organization must itself become agile. In one organization that I worked, it took at a minimum 4 weeks and typically 12 weeks to get a contractor onto a project. Three months lead time!!! Now admittedly, it is not easy to bring an individual on-board quickly. However, it is possible. Some organizations I have worked at have lead times for getting new people into the organization that are on the order of 2 weeks including search, selection, administration and orientation. In these organizations, the HR organization maintains an attitude to their own work as service to the larger organzation... and the faster the service (without sacrificing quality), the better.
The article also misses the mark on employee performance. Employees should be measured on their sphere of influence, not their sphere of responsibility. In other words, if a person is a member of a team, their own performance should be judged by the performance of the team as a whole. This mitigates people's competitive habits and positively reinforces collaboration. People should not be measured against their role discription.
One of the recommendations in the article is to "Create selection, testing and hiring criteria that identify diverse, resilient, nimble people." Unfortunately, there is no guidance on how to do this. Here are some ideas: look for people who have moved between projects, roles, employers and even locations frequently, look for people whose resumes contain lots of work that doesn't fit their job titles, look for people who have hobbies and interests that are outside their field of specialization, look for people who have diverse volunteer experience, look for people who ask lots of questions.
(Thanks to Deb Hartmann for the link.)
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 09:48 PM | |
Agile HR - Sort Of
An article called Are You Ready for the Agile Future presents a brief discussion about the role of HR in an agile organization. There are several very good ideas. The basic idea is that the HR function must adapt to the nature of agility. This in turn means, for example, hiring people that are agile, nimble, adaptable etc.
There are however some mis-steps in the article.
One is an ommission: the HR organization must itself become agile. In one organization that I worked, it took at a minimum 4 weeks and typically 12 weeks to get a contractor onto a project. Three months lead time!!! Now admittedly, it is not easy to bring an individual on-board quickly. However, it is possible. Some organizations I have worked at have lead times for getting new people into the organization that are on the order of 2 weeks including search, selection, administration and orientation. In these organizations, the HR organization maintains an attitude to their own work as service to the larger organzation... and the faster the service (without sacrificing quality), the better.
The article also misses the mark on employee performance. Employees should be measured on their sphere of influence, not their sphere of responsibility. In other words, if a person is a member of a team, their own performance should be judged by the performance of the team as a whole. This mitigates people's competitive habits and positively reinforces collaboration. People should not be measured against their role discription.
One of the recommendations in the article is to "Create selection, testing and hiring criteria that identify diverse, resilient, nimble people." Unfortunately, there is no guidance on how to do this. Here are some ideas: look for people who have moved between projects, roles, employers and even locations frequently, look for people whose resumes contain lots of work that doesn't fit their job titles, look for people who have hobbies and interests that are outside their field of specialization, look for people who have diverse volunteer experience, look for people who ask lots of questions.
(Thanks to Deb Hartmann for the link.)
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 09:48 PM | |