December 11, 2007
New Agile Training Course and 2008 Schedule
Berteig Consulting Inc. is introducing a two day course for team members. The first run of this course is occurring in Toronto on Jan. 21 and 22. This course is a slimmed down version of the four-day intensive training that we often deliver in-house to teams. It is an inexpensive option for teams that want to bring a new team member up to speed, who need to get a few people to understand how Scrum works and then share it with the rest of the team, or for any team member who would like to learn how Scrum works in the hopes of intelligently convincing other team members to try it out. Since there is a strong experiential component to the course, it is also ideal for managers and other stakeholders who would like to try out an agile process.
We are also offering our three day Agile Project Management / ScrumMaster Certification course in several locations: Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary and Beijing. Right now, there are special prices for the first team member training course as well as the course being delivered in Beijing.
For more information, please check out the Berteig Consulting listing of agile and Scrum training.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 03:43 PM | |
November 01, 2007
Learning Collaboration
How do we teach people to work in a collaborative manner? How do we help individuals, in our incredibly individualist and competitive society, to learn the skills needed for agile teamwork?
Start with the Kids
Our school system, here in the West, is strongly oriented to individual grading, work, and even competition. We throw our kids into age-limited classrooms where they are inevitably compared to one another and learn to make the comparisons themselves. There are private schools which don't do this: no grading, mixed-age classrooms, but they are the exception by far.
It seems reasonable to me that if we could help our kids learn collaborative skills, they would at least have a foundation to build upon and minds that were more open to the possibilities.
In my mind, the best way to do this consists of two aspects: collective efforts and human capacity development.
Collective Efforts
Kids are amazing at learning. If they have experiences, they naturally learn to cope with those experiences. It follows then, that even if children start out with little or no skill in collective, collaborative work, then simply by putting them into situations where that type of work is required, they will learn at least some of the necessary skills.
I had two experiences in my childhood that helped me learn those skills. In my faith community, as a Baha'i, we had children's classes (kinda like Sunday school) where we played many collaborative games and learned about the Baha'i concept of consultation. I didn't particularly like the games, but nevertheless, they made an impression on my young mind. I even remember at one point when I was a little older learning to help out with these games. The things I learned about group decision making through consultation made a big impact on me and have become more and more important as I progressed through school and professional life.
The second experience was in my public school where I was streamed into a program for academically talented children. I think the idea was that if you had an IQ of 120 or over you were eligible for the program. I remember doing an IQ test in grade four. Anyway, the program was excellent in many ways. In grades seven and eight we started to learn Edward deBono's CoRT thinking skills program. I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but many of the exercises were small group exercises where two or three or four of us had to work together. Again, I learned a great deal about the value of working with people with different skills and ideas, and how to do this in a systematic way. Many of the exercises and techniques that I use as a coach and trainer are based on or inspired by these exercises I did as a child.
Human Capacity Development
I recently wrote here about truthfulness. Aside from the obvious implications for agile methods that I have written about, there is another level to this concept.
Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues - Baha'u'llah.
There is no doubt in my mind that some of the basic virtues or moral ideas that we are supposed to learn in childhood are critical to effective collaboration. For example, the "Golden Rule": "And if thine eyes be turned towards justice, choose thou for thy neighbour that which thou choosest for thyself." Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, p30.
The trouble is, you can't do the Golden Rule effectively without being truthful. How so? Well, if you can't be truthful about what you really want for yourself, deep, deep down, then chances are you aren't going to do to others what they truly want. Knowing your own self at the deepest level is a pre-condition to following the Golden Rule effectively. And knowing your own self deeply requires a level of truthfulness that most of us are not accustomed to.
The same could be said about almost any other virtue or capacity required for collaboration: courage, humility, assertiveness, compassion, etc.
Of course, developing these capacities is something that doesn't happen overnight. The starting point is to look at what we can be truthful about, and building on that. As we practice these capacities in our relationships with other people, they will strengthen and we will set out on a path of improvement. It is helpful to have other people working with us; to support us, encourage us, and to help us honestly face up to our failures and learn from them. It also helps to have guidance that can be trusted. Searching for these sources of guidance is an important part of developing professionally as well as personally, whether it is a mentor, an author or some other figure.
These capacities are essential to our ability to work well together. The root cause of most of our failures to work together can be traced back to a lack of or failure to exercise these human capacities. For example, a lack of courage can lead to a failure to experiment. A lack of humility can lead to a failure to ask for help.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 07:26 AM | |
September 24, 2007
Agile Benefits: Five Essential Reasons to Try Agile
Although there many other benefits of agile, and although those provide us with other reasons to try agile, the five essential benefits of agile are:
Rapid Learning - disciplined application of the scientific method to explore the best ways to deliver valuable results.
Early Return on Investment - opportunity to use the results of work starting with the work delivered at the end of the first iteration.
Satisfied Stakeholders - engagement in the process in a way that allows meaningful contributions from all stakeholders.
Increased Control - mechanisms to track/measure and therefore steer the direction that work is going so that it meets goals.
Responsiveness to Change - processes, tools, roles and principles that allow a team and an organization to embrace change rather than reject, control or suffer from change.
These reasons are sufficient and apply to operations work, project work and open-ended research work, whenever humans are involved. The above links take you to more detailed descriptions of each of these benefits.
What are some of the other benefits of agile?
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 10:47 PM | |
September 17, 2007
Agile Benefits: Satisfied Stakeholders
So far, we've discussed learning and value as benefits of agile. Now we turn to a more human side: satisfied stakeholders. Agile methods provide multiple roads to satisfaction for customers, users, business people, bureaucrats (okay, maybe not _all_ bureaucrats), team members, managers, shareholders, and interested passer-by. There are three primary mechanisms by which this occurs: engagement, trust-building and feedback-control. [UPDATED: added link to explanation of Commitment Velocity]
Satisfied Stakeholders
There are so many different stakeholders for any given project or work effort, it is impossible to make generalizations that apply to them all. This is one reason why methods such as Scrum do not define any roles for the stakeholders. Nevertheless, as a concept, stakeholders are important people to consider when thinking about an agile approach to working. How is this method going to improve the satisfaction of our stakeholders?
Engagement
Some stakeholders are satisfied simply to be involved, to know what's going on, to be part of something that is progressing. They have no need for specific results or specific contributions. Rather, these stakeholders might be looking to learn, trying to increase their influence, or simply curious about the work being done.
Agile methods provide improved engagement for these stakeholders using two simple mechanisms: visibility and frequency of delivery. Visibility comes in that anyone is welcome to come to the demos, to walk through the team room, to examine the burndown charts or task boards, or simply to ask questions of the team members. Frequency of delivery through short iterations gives a stakeholder the opportunity to see progress (or change) on a regular basis. This visible change satisfies engagement simply because of the potential it represents: hope for the future, opportunity to influence.
Trust-Building
Another set of stakeholders are more concerned about results. And not just any results, but reliable, predictable results. Results that you can depend upon. Agile methods are ideally suited to help these stakeholders. The visibility, capacity measurement and commitment aspects of agile methods all help these stakeholders come to understand, rely-upon and ultimately trust the work of the team and the organization.
Here there is a substantial pitfall. There are a few agile practices that _must_ be put in place and followed rigorously in order to develop this trust. First, the team must keep a consistent time box for both duration and effort of work. Every iteration or Sprint must be the same amount of work time. Secondly, the team must use estimation and tracking of tasks that is compatible with "commitment velocity". Thirdly, the team must use iterations short enough that these stakeholders don't get frustrated waiting for the commitment velocity to stabilize. Fourth, the team must get it's work up to a level of quality where defects are rare rather than expected. Finally, the team must be protected from interruptions. Don't forget: two hours can waste two weeks!
All this is not easy, and doesn't happen quickly. Trust is a deep and important quality for both people and organizations so it is worth the investment.
Feedback-Control
Then there are the contributors. The people who, for various reasons, some legitimate, need to make their mark on the work. This group should include the team members themselves! These stakeholders are interested in providing input into the process, seeing the results of that input, and then being able to have another chance based on those results. Business people want to see the results of their work in the marketplace and use those results to get better. Users of software, consumers of media want to have a say in what the next version looks like. This is the level of active engagement.
Agile methods provide opportunities for active engagement, for feedback and control, through the backlog or queue of work, through the demos, through participation in the team's discussion about the work, and through the visibility of seeing their contributions take effect in "real time".
Now control is obtained through the specific rules of engagement in one's particular agile method. In Scrum, this is through the role of the Product Owner and the Product Backlog, the daily Scrum, etc. Each agile method has a defined set of practices and guidelines about how ideas, suggestions and criticisms are handled. Fortunately, those mechanisms are oriented around visibility, adaptability and speed so that frustrating delays in seeing results are rare.
Other Satisfactions
In some methods, team members are ignored or downplayed as stakeholders. In many agile methods, the importance of the team's well-being is given high priority. Agile methods reduce micro-management, reduce command-and-control management, reduce shoddy workmanship. Agile methods increase the need for creativity and problem-solving, the level of responsibility, support an honest working environment, increase the chances of delivering something that will actually be useful (and used), increase the challenge without causing "death marches". All that said, agile methods are not for everyone!
Agile Benefits: Rapid Learning
Agile Benefits: Early Return on Investment
Agile Benefits: Satisfied Stakeholders
Agile Benefits: Increased Control
Agile Benefits: Responsiveness to Change
Agile Benefits: Summary Article
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:12 PM | |
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 | |
April 15, 2007
Four Methods for Dealing with Interruptions
Recently I've talked with a number of people who have a simple question: what do we do with teams that are constantly interrupted by urgent support requests for their time?
I have seen a few different structures work well for this kind of problem.
1) The part-time allocation to the iteration's work is most common. There are a couple things that need to be done to make this work well in the long term. The main thing is to make the allocation of time inflexible: if you allocate 50% to the iteration and 50% to support, then you should never be flexible about that allocation. This is necessary in order for the team to make a commitment at the start of each iteration.
2) Another common method is the "fluorescent note card" method which requires stakeholder negotiation around the impact of interruptions. With this method, any time a stakeholder comes to the team with a request, the Process Facilitator writes the request on a bright colored note card. The team then does a task breakdown on the card and using their normal process (whatever that is) estimates the work. The requesting stakeholder then has to negotiate with any other stakeholders about what work to remove from the iteration in order to make room for the new work. The trick here is that the team has to be involved because they have already started on some of the work and it might be difficult to dis-entangle things enough. This process works well primarily because it makes the tradeoffs visible. It does not work so well with letting the team make their commitments.
3) A third common method is to form two separate teams: one doing new work, one doing support work. This is simple, effective, and annoying for the people on the team doing the support work! Please don't consider a rotation system since this destroys the process of team development and makes it nearly impossible for the team doing new work to learn their capacity for the purposes of commitment.
4) A less common, but fourth method is to have extremely short iterations. In this method, choose your iteration length to be so short that you can always start work on urgent interruptions before anyone gets impatient! This can be exhausting, but it is one of the best ways to get the team and the organization to understand the large toll that these interruptions take.
Are there other methods that you have seen work?
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:48 PM | |
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 09, 2007
Continuity of Teams on Agile Projects
Dave Nicolette posted a really interesting and insightful comment about the recent discussions on team commitment, flexibility and rigidity in agile methods. The focus of Dave's article is on the idea of having an established and continuously available team that grows in its abilities. The more you interrupt the team with individual or one-off tasks, the longer it takes to move through the stages of team development. Thanks Dave for the good post.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 06:14 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 | |
December 13, 2006
8 Team Room Tips
Here are eight tips for making a great team room.
Light, Air, Nature
An appropriate amount of natural light, air circulation and live plants are excellent ways to make a space suitable for human occupation. The lack of these things can subtly but surely slow down and demoralize a team.
Layout
People need to be able to face each other and work beside each other. They also need a semi-private space to have discussions or make phone calls. The walls of the space need to have large areas that can be used for whiteboards.
Ergonomics
It's just not worth it to have a high-performance team hampered by a poor workstation setup. Good chairs, tables at an appropriate height, and the flexibility to allow individual ergonomic needs to be accommodated all help.
Privacy
Every member of the team needs to be able to get away for short amounts of time. Some organizations provide separate mini conference rooms or “hoteling” spaces. Others allow staff to keep a private cubicle away from the team room.
Personalization
The area of space that a person occupies needs to be flexible and personalized. People need pictures, toys, plants, and other incidentals to help them make a space their own.
Visibility to Outsiders
Other people in the organization need to be able to walk by to see and hear what is going on with the Agile Work team. Open doors, windows or a “bullpen” formation of cubicles all allow this.
Convenience
The space must be located so that washrooms, coffee, printers and other common services are easily accessible. It should not be set off and isolated far away from everything else.
Noise
The team will be noisy. Make sure that other people outside the team room are far enough away or isolated in some way from the noise. It can be hard to balance this with convenience and visibility.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 07:37 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
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.
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
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 24, 2006
How to Avoid Context Switching
Given the huge interest in the article by Dmitri Zimine about context switching, and despite a couple of good articles about how to determine iteration length, there has been no empirical method described, only reasoning processes. This article describes a simple method to quickly determine iteration length by experimental means.
Step One
Start with an iteration length that feels right. Use the two articles below to try decide a reasonable length. In software development, this should be no longer that four weeks. In larger volunteer communities it might be as long as three months. In a work environment where you have to deliver daily, your iteration length might be two hours.
Step Two
Build your Work Queue, and plan your first iteration. Mark the tasks that come out of your iteration planning meeting so that you know that they are tasks that were planned. As you go through this first iteration, track all the interruptions you get by writing up a task for each interruption. Each interruption task should be marked so that you know it was an interruption. If you are using note cards on a visible task board, I like to have "normal" tasks on white cards and interruption tasks on fluorescent orange cards to help them stand out!
Step Three
At the end of your iteration, determine which interruption tasks could have been deferred. In other words, determine which were truly urgent and needed to be handled in the already short time of your iteration, and which could have been put on the Work Queue, prioritized, and therefore deferred to a later iteration. This will require collaborating with your Queue Master and possibly other stakeholders.
Step Four
Count how many non-deferrable interruption tasks your team had in the iteration. For this experimental method, you can assume that this is going to be your normal number of interruptions. Divide the length of your iteration by the number of non-deferrable interruptions. For example, if you had a ten day iteration, and two non-deferrable interruptions, you would have a result of five days. Also consider what was the maximum reasonable response time for these non-deferrable interruptions. The lower of these two values becomes your experimentally determined iteration length. But you are not quite done!
Step Five
Do it all again to verify your iteration length. Note that because of your shortened iteration length, you hopefully will have far fewer non-deferrable interruptions. After your second (shortened) iteration, you can adjust the iteration length shorter if necessary... but don't adjust longer (for now).
I've worked with enough teams to know that for a substantial portion of them, this method would result in very very short iterations. In the software world, a team is often asked to work on a project and support their previous project. This support work tends to mean dealing with various bugs in deployed software. This is one reason why I have become such a strong advocate that quality is not negotiable.
I worked with one team that did something similar to this method (although not as rigorously) and we decided that we needed to try an iteration length of two days. This was painful for the team, but they badly wanted to build trust with their stakeholders. Their interruptions were causing them to constantly fail on their commitments. By switching to these two day iterations, they were able to defer the bulk of their interruptions and meet the commitment they made as a team in the iteration planning meeting.
Articles about iteration length:
Mike Cohn's article: "Selecting the Right Iteration Length for Your Software Development Process"
Mishkin Berteig's article: "The Pros and Cons of Short Iterations"
Now that you have gotten to the end of the article, I can admit something to you: this article is badly named. It should be named "How to determine how often to context switch so that you can meet your commitments and build trust with your stakeholders."
What this article doesn't help with is the pain of context switching. The teams that I have see that use short iteration lengths all find ways of making context switching less painful. Automation, good tool choices, workspace arrangements, etc. all play a part in this. But there is no secret ingredient to make context switching painless. Sorry!
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 07:55 AM | |
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..."
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:
- Stay the Course
- 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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). - 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.
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.
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.
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!
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:
- Maintain a single Work Queue that prioritizes the work and from which all the teams select items.
- 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
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.
I have seen all three aspects of coordination implemented in large multi-team projects. Some of the common challenges include:
- 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. - 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 18, 2006
Offshore/Distributed Agile: Challenges, Productivity and Tools
On the agile-usability Yahoo! group, someone asked about tools to mitigate the consequences of having an off-shore team doing some of the work. I have strong feelings about this.
I've seen lots of tools/techniques tried for this.
But it basically comes down to this: as a team, if you are not all colocated in an effective team room, you are going to take a hit in productivity. That hit averages out to about half the productivity level. Everything you do to mitigate this by alleviating the communication difficulties will only get you up to that half-way point. Any desire to get close to the productivity levels of a colocated team is bound to be frustrated.
On the other hand, if you don't have colocated teams now and if in fact your "teams" aren't really teams, then putting in some good communication tools can help increase your productivity. Whatever your current state, you can make improvements. Focus your improvement efforts on two things: reducing the cycle time for communication, and improving the richness of the communication channels.
For offshore teams, high-speed access to the same work environment as the "onshore" team is critical (for software, this means code base, development environment, test environment, db environment, tools, etc.). If you have them on separate system (for example due to paranoia about data going outside your company), then getting them on the same system as your onshore guys is going to result in a big improvement. This is a way to improve communcation that for some reason is often overlooked.
If your offshore team is on the opposite side of the earth, then you are going to have to stick mostly with "batch" communication. Every day, a batch of questions, requests, comments, feedback, etc. is going to be batched up by one group or the other and there will be a 24 hour lag time in responses. If you are doing two-week iterations, this is 10% of your time (!!!) just to do what might be a very simple communication. Compare that to people sitting beside each other who might be able to have the same exchange in 15 seconds. If it's a tough problem, the batching will make this lag even more pronounced. (BTW, some off-shore companies offer people who will work the night shift in order to be available to your team. I ask a simple question: would your on-shore team be willing to work the night shift? Hopefully you can guess my feelings about this practice from that question.)
So, if you are early on in adopting agile methods, I strongly recommend that you don't use your offshore resources. If the organization insists on paying for them, then let them sit idle. Yes, that's right: IDLE. Your on-shore team will probably be more productive without them.
If you have lots of experience with agile, then do the experiment: find out if it makes sense. But make sure you have a good way of measuring productivity so that you can tell if the cost savings are worth the hit in productivity.
If the bulk of your team is offshore, and you simply don't have the expertise on-shore, then send a couple of your customer/business/ requirements experts over to stay full-time with the off-shore team. This is often worth it.
And of course, if you just can't do it any other way than the "standard" split on and off shore teams, then make the best of it by constantly trying new ways to communicate. The guidance that Martin Fowler gives is sound, and everything else is left up to you to discover based on corporate culture, resources available, etc.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 02:04 PM | |
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)
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).
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 | |
September 04, 2006
Pair Problem Solving - Sudoku!
In a training course I recently delivered, I tried a new simulation exercise. Using the game Sudoku, I divided the class into two groups: a group that would solve the game in pairs, and a group that would solve the game solo. My hope was that I would be able to demonstrate some interesting aspects of working in an agile team, particularly around communication and problem solving.
The setup for the simulation exercise was fairly simple: print out the same Sudoku puzzle multiple times, give the group basic instructions about how to do the puzzle, divide the room (1/3 are solo, the other 2/3 pair up), hand them out flipped upside down, make sure people had pencils, and then let people work on the puzzles for ten minutes.
After ten minutes, everyone put down their pencils and we listed out how many spaces had been filled in for each solo/pair. Since some people did not know how to do the puzzle, there was a large variation in the actual times.
The interesting part came with the discussion.
One important observation was that a person who was experienced at solving Sudoku puzzles felt hindered by having to work with someone who wasn't experienced. It was difficult for the experienced person to take the time and explain every time why he was putting a number in a particular spot.
Someone else mentioned that she felt time-pressure and did not enjoy that.
These two observations together led to a good discussion about how agile methods timebox everything and therefore there is always time pressure. However, scope pressure is meant to be relieved somewhat so there should be time to help bring junior / new team members up to speed. The frustration we feel when trying to work with someone who doesn't know how to do the work is often because we feel time pressure - we are impatient. Agile methods use timeboxing as a counter-intuitive way of relieving the time pressure.
There was also some discussion about how problem-solving for Sudoku may be easier in pairs because it is easier to search the overall solution space. Some of the pairs tried putting numbers in randomly and then seeing if the placements resulted in inconsistancies. Although no one solved the puzzle in the ten minutes given, there was a feeling by the pairs that their approach may have been able to solve the puzzle fairly quickly. This is something to explore further!
One person working solo said that she had felt frustrated because she did not understand the puzzle. That immediately led to a pair piping up and saying that even though both of them had never done Sudoku before, they felt mutual support and therefore it was fun rather than frustrating.
The next time I try this, I would like to try solo, pair and trio work. I would also like to give better instructions: that the puzzle should be solved purely using logic, no guessing, that the puzzle has exactly one correct solution (and making sure I have it available for comparison). I would also like to give the class fifteen minutes instead of ten minutes to work on it. I will start collecting times to see if there are any statistically significant relationships between group size and number of cells correctly filled in.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 03:15 PM | |
August 29, 2006
Seventeen Tips for Iteration Planning
Agile Work requires a team to take work items from a prioritized list, break those items into small tasks and then execute those tasks inside of the timebox of an iteration. When first trying agile, many teams have trouble with the task breakdown done in the iteration planning meeting. Here are some hints and tips for making this critical part of the agile process more effective.
1. Work items are, among their other qualities, valuable to the customer or stakeholders. Think of these work items as being built out of many smaller pieces. You can imagine a toy model made out of Lego bricks. Each brick, by itself, is of no value. It is only when they are put together that they become useful. The tasks you create for each work item are often small enough that they do not have any value on their own.
2. The word "task" implies activity... but the tasks you create for your work items do not need to be activity based. Tasks can be effective if they are written as components or pieces of the work item you are building. Here is an article about creating good tasks.
3. Sometimes if the work item is not well understood, you might find that a "research" or "experiment" task is a good starting place. Try to be as specific as possible. When writing the task description, spell out what exactly is the goal of your research, and possibly list what options you are going to research.
4. When first starting out with Agile Work, many teams find it difficult to do a good job of iteration planning in the fixed amount of time allocated to it. Consider shortening your iteration length so you can practice this skill more frequently. (Remember to make the planning meeting shorter too!)
5. Make sure that everyone has index cards and a pen to write with! Team members shouldn't have to wait for a "scribe" to write down a task. In many ways this is a brainstorming session. The Process Facilitator can collect all the cards after the meeting is finished if they need to be recorded more formally.
6. Do a first pass by creating "big" tasks... then break them up into smaller tasks if you have time. Since this meeting is timeboxed, it is better to get all the work broken down into big chunks than to break down only a small part of the work into very fine chunks.
7. If the same task keeps showing up for all your work items, it probably shouldn't be a task... instead it should probably be a process step or constraint or condition of satisfaction for the work you are doing. For example, if you always have to write a document that follows a template to record what you have done for each work item, then writing that document can be shown as part of your task board.
8. It's okay for tasks to be _very_ small.
9. Share your tasks! If you write a task down without telling the rest of your team, they can't use your idea to generate more tasks, nor can they improve on your idea.
10. Generating tasks in the iteration planning meeting is a problem solving and creative process. This is where you do a lot of your analysis and design work. This is where you struggle through options and choose _how_ to build/do your work.
11. Consider creativity technique such as light-weight brainstorming for generating lots of ideas quickly. Any technique you use should be streamlined for quick results.
12. Don't worry about administrative stuff while you are generating tasks. For example, if you normally put task cards up on a wall, wait until after the meeting is over to do this. Likewise, if you normally enter them into an electronic tools, wait until the meeting is over to do this.
13. Make sure you have scrap paper or a good whiteboard convenient for notes and drawings so that you can quickly model your solution for the work item. (Check out Agile Modelling for a discussion of this in the software realm.)
14. Remember that it's okay if you end the meeting with an imperfect list of tasks. You will make corrections throughout the iteration. It is more important to maintain the discipline of the timeboxed meeting length, than to get the tasks right up front.
15. The whole team must participate: everyone's experience, skill, expertise and insight are needed to do the best job of generating tasks. Just because it won't be a perfect list doesn't mean you can do a shoddy job of it!
16. You need quick access to information about the work items you are planning. You also need quick access to other relevent information. A computer with a web browser open to Google is a great tool to have at hand.
17. If you don't have anyone on your team who has lots of diverse experience and expertise, then consider inviting someone like this as a guest to help you out. It is much more difficult to do the necessary problem solving if you new to the medium in which you are doing the solving. Such a guest would need some time before the meeting to be prepared.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 10:44 PM | |
July 05, 2006
Groups do Better than Individuals at Problem Solving
It's official. Someone has done a fully-controlled experiment to prove that groups are better at solving problems than even the best individuals working separately. For example, a group of three people, was better than the three best people working independently.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 10:17 PM | |
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 14, 2006
Agile Work Artifacts - Tasks
I recently described the Work Item List. The second type of artifact used in an Agile Work environment is the Task. At its most basic, a Task is a simple description of how to do some bit of work towards completing an item in the Work Item List. However, there are some important things to remember when using Tasks.
What is a Task
Normally, an item from the Work Item List is broken down into multiple Tasks. These Tasks are all the things that need to be done or built to get the item into a deliverable state.
In general, the process of creating a bundle of Tasks for a given Work Item is a design or analysis process. It is a problem-solving process. The Tasks themselves represent the solution: the building blocks of the structure of the Work Item. Tasks do not normally represent the problem solving or analysis process.
Here are two contrasting (somewhat contrived) examples of Tasks generated for a "Home Office Addition" to make this clear:
Example 1 Bad:
- determine requirements for home office
- design home office layout
- check home office layout with client
- choose furniture and decor
- build home office
- install furniture and decor
- unpack books and files into home office
Example 2 Good:
- 300 sq. ft. maple hardwood
- 4' x 7' custom desk
- Aeron chair
- red leather sofa
- 16' custom bookshelves
- 22" double French doors
- 8' 4-panel vinyl triple glaze bay window
- 36 2x4x10' metal studs
- ... drywall
- ... other building materials and furniture and decor
Generating Tasks
The whole team works together to come up with the Tasks for every Work Item being worked upon during the iteration. The majority of the Tasks are determined during the timeboxed iteration planning meeting. Sometimes, the iteration planning meeting is not long enough to get all the Tasks defined. Sometimes new Tasks are discovered during the course of the iteration. Either way, it is fine to make changes to the bundle of Tasks as the work proceeds.
Special Tasks
Due to the timeboxed nature of the iteration planning meeting, a Team will sometimes find itself knowing that there is more analysis or problem-solving needed for a given Work Item. In this case, a special Task can be created to indicate that this analysis work needs to be completed. For example, the task might be labled "Finish analysis for Work Item 62", or it might say "Team meeting to finish Task generation for Work Item 62". Other ways of writing these Tasks include "Research...", "Solve..." or "Discuss...". Everyone needs to recognize that these tasks represent risk and uncertainty about how to get the work of the iteration complete.
Sometimes work needs to be done that is outside of the control of the Team. The Team should always try to find creative solutions to avoid this situation, but it is almost inevitable that Tasks will come up for which the Team does not have the expertise or the authority. These Tasks need to be treated very carefully since they can seriously hinder a Team's forward progress. The Process Facilitator should usually consider these Tasks as obstacles to be removed.
Working on Tasks
Typically, a single person takes responsibility for a single Task at a time. A person may end up working on other tasks for two reasons. First, if the Task he/she is responsible for has an unavoidable wait, then that person may go find someone else to assist until the Task is ready to be worked on again. Secondly, another person may have an urgent need for assistance and call other people away from their current Tasks.
Tracking the Work
In their most basic form, Tasks are assumed to all be roughly the same size or effort and small enough that they are only done or not-done. Therefore, tracking the work on the Tasks throughout the course of the iteration is kept very simple: how many tasks are remaining to complete in the remaining time of the iteration? There is no ambiguity: Team members report on completion of tasks to the Process Facilitator who updates a burndown chart to show the quantity of remaining work.
Gotcha's
Tasks must be written to avoid including wait time. For example, a Task that says "Get the parts delivered" actually includes three steps: make the request for the parts, wait for the parts to be delivered, receive the parts. Since it is often hard to predict how long a "wait" will be, it is important to break this down into two separate tasks: "order the parts" and "receive the parts" and then treat the wait time as an obstacle to be removed/minimized.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 09:34 AM | |
June 13, 2006
Fantasy Estimation
In software development (and in many other types of projects), there is a typical non-agile approach to estimation of project size. This method starts with a high-level understanding of the work to be done, the requirements, and uses that to make an initial estimate of the project size. This estimate is often stated in units such as man-months. There is a very important piece missing here that makes this estimate completely useless... that makes it pure fantasy.
The Team
Any estimate made by anyone other than the team doing the work is useless. For any sort of project, software or otherwise, estimates made by a project manager or leader on behalf of an existing, or, even worse, a non-existant team, must be subject to the highest degree of scepticism.
Team Maturity
Not only does the team need to make the estimates for its own work, but the team must be mature! If the team is newly-formed, the team members will have no sense of the team's capacity other than their own individual capacity.
Work History
Not only must the team be mature to make reasonable estimates, it must have a recorded history of their own work capacity in order to be able to estimate their capacity to do work in the future. If there is no record o