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 of their capacity, then the usual factors of optimism will be unaccounted for, and the team will almost always over-estimate its capacity.
Knowledge of Domain and Tools
Not only must the team use a recorded measure of their capacity, but they also must be experienced with and knowledgeable of both the subject of the work and the tools they will do to perform the work in order to come up with a reasonable estimate of a project's size. If they need to learn about the project and how to execute it, then again, the team will almost always over-estimate its capacity.
Fantasy
If someone gives you an estimate for project duration, ask them the following questions:
1. Was this estimate made by the team which will actually be doing the work?
2. How long has this team worked together?
3. Has this team measured their own actual capacity and used that measurement for this estimate?
4. How well does the team know the domain and tools to be used?
If the answers to these questions are unsatisfactory, then the estimate is pure fantasy, it is a lie.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 09:06 AM | |
June 02, 2006
Cueing Agility - Creating a Supportive Environment for Agile Teams
In Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
In one experiement, researcher John Bargh designed a scenario to test how sensitive we are to written cues that are structured in a way that we are not consciously aware of being cued. Bargh created two lists, each composed of five words per list item. Of the five words, four were chosen to form a sentance, and the fifth word was selected so that it would not fit with the other four. Then the five words were jumbled.
For example:
rang phone peace the loudly
The people who came as subjects of the experiement were given one of the two lists and told to go through their list as quickly as possible and un-jumble the sentances.
Unbeknownst to the participants in the experiment, each group of five words also contained a word that was selected to suggest a feeling or attitude. In the first list, each group of five words contained one word that would suggest impatience, rudeness and aggressiveness. The second list contained words to suggest patience, politeness and calm.
All the subjects of the experiment were also given additional instructions to come to a particular office once they had completed their lists. At the office they were to receive final instructions. At the office, each participant encountered the experiment administrator deep in conversation with another person. Neither the administrator nor the other person acknowledged the just-arrived subject. Now the real purpose of the experiment was tested: how long would the subjects wait before interrupting the ongoing conversation?
The results were astonishing: those people who were cued with the list containing words suggesting impatience, rudeness and aggressiveness
eventually interrupted - on average after about five minutes. But of the people primed to be polite, the overwhelming majority - 82 percent - never interrupted at all. If the experiment hadn't ended after ten minutes, who knows how long they would have stood in the hallway, a polite and patient smile on their faces? (p 55)
Gladwell gives several more similar examples in his book. I strongly recommend reading this book to see just how powerful this cueing or priming effect can be.
For organizations, teams and even individuals, this effect can be harnessed. The most obvious ways include using posters, screen savers, banners etc. to constantly impress people with positive messages about teamwork, effectiveness, creativity and other values and qualities that might be deemed valuable. This should obviously go hand-in-hand with a conscientious removal of all negative messages.
For agile teams, there are some particular values that should be emphasized: truthfulness, courage, creativity, teamwork, trust, cooperation, hard work, learning, adaptability.
The message can also be communicated in more subtle ways - and this is actually likely to be more effective! Incentives, the power of exemplary behavior, and the physical environment itself all can contribute strongly. In Built to Last : Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
(p 122)
- Fervently held ideology...
- Indoctrination
- Tightness of fit [for employees]
- Elitism
Interestingly, agile methods do tend to require "buy-in". In order to fully feel comfortable in an agile environment, people need to understand and fully accept a small number of very important beliefs:
(These are the generic, non-software version of the Agile Software Manifesto.)
See also: Optimizing a Team Room
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:26 AM | |
May 31, 2006
The Human Touch
If you are given a problem to solve, how much does the presentation of that problem matter to your ability to solve it? Imagine that it's a simple problem... imagine that it is presented in two different ways, both of them simple. It turns out that presentation differences can still make a huge difference. In fact, there is a way to present problems that makes them substantially easiers to solve: make them people problems.
In The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Consider the following brain teaser. Suppose I give you four cards labeled with the letters A and D and the numberals 3 and 6. The rule of the game is that a card with a vowel on it always has an even number on the other side. Which of the cards would you have to turn over to prove this rule to be true?
Go ahead and take a few moments to figure that out before continuing on to the answer, and keep track of how long you work on it...
The answer is two: the A card and the three card. The overwhelming majority of people given this test, though, don't get it right. They tend to answer just the A card, or the A and the six. It's a hard question. But now let me pose another question. Suppose four people are drinking in a bar. One is drinking Coke. One is sixteen. One is drinking beer and one is twenty-five. Given the rule that no one under twenty -one is allowed to drink beer, which of those people's IDs do we have to check to make sure the law is being observed?
How long does it take you to figure that out?
Now the answer is easy. In fact, I'm sure that almost everyone will get it right: the beer drinker and the sixteen-year-old. But, as the psychologist Leda Cosmides (who dreamt up this example) points out, it is exactly the same puzzle as the A, D, 3, and 6 puzzle. The difference is that it is framed in a way that makes it about people, instead of about numbers, and as human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.
Now unless you had heard about this before, I suspect you were pretty suprised. I know I was! I always considered myself to be a very good abstract thinker/problem solver. In fact, I considered myself to be well above average in that regard for a number of reasons: I was always very good at math without every memorizing a single formula (I always made them up as I went along as long as I remembered the _idea_ of the formula), I was an excellent programmer in a number of different computer languages including assembler, Miranda, Java, Prolog, Pascal, and Objective-C, and finally, I'm always solving problems by moving the problem to a new level of abstraction - solving the meta-problem first.
So what does all this have to do with agile work methods? Quite a few things actually:
1. Obviously, if you can frame a problem as a people problem, it will be easier to solve... and most problems start out this way!
We tend to try to abstract problems, make them more generic or general purpose in the hopes that they can be communicated more precisely and can be solved in a way that will accomodate contingencies we haven't thought of yet. But all the effort we put into abstracting the statement of the problem ends up costing us doubly: in the initial abstraction and in the difficulty of solution that results. So if you have a team that is solving a people problem, make sure to keep it a people problem when you give it to the team!
2. If you have a problem that is given to you in an abstract form, try to convert it to a people problem before trying to solve it.
In all likelihood, the moment you do the conversion, you will quickly see the solution. It may even feel like the process of de-abstraction is a problem-solving process. You may have to make really odd connections to make the problem a people problem but it will likely be worthwhile.
3. Dealing with people rather than abstractions on a day-to-day basis will always result in a more effective interaction.
Sending printed documents, writing emails, manipulating symbols are all interesting ways to communicate, but fundamentally, you are communicating with other people. If you can make that communication as direct as possible - phone, video conference, in-person - then there will be far less effort involved in understanding the communication, and far more effort can be allocated to high-bandwidth communication. This obviously has special relevence for teams: get people in the same room as much of the time as possible.
In the software world, there is one technique that I give teams and that is the use of Personas to assist in solving a software problem. The place I first encountered Personas is in the excellent book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
The bare essense of the Persona is to create a fictional person who represents a user or actor or stakeholder or customer of whatever it is you are building. This fictional person should have a name and all conversation about the thing being built should be couched in the personal language of these Persona's names. A Persona should also have a short history, a photo and some description of their needs, goals or desires. All of this helps to frame everything about a software project as a people problem... and thus makes it much easier to discuss and solve.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:12 PM | |
April 24, 2006
Link: Eight Barriers to Effective Listening
On the Retrospectives Yahoo Group, Michael Webb posted a link to his article Eight Barriers to Effective Listening. This article provides practical advice on how to improve communication. Since one of the basic practices of Agile Work is to maximize communication, this article is essential reading!
Barriers to Effective Listening
Just in case you don't go follow the link from my introduction, here is a bit more info to help convince you:
As a process facilitator, one's responsibility is to remove obstacles. This is a list of obstacles to communication and includes for each barrier a strategy to overcome the barrier. Therefore, anyone who is a process facilitator (agile coach, scrummaster, etc.) should look this over and incorporate it into their skill set.
Here is the list of the eight barriers to effective listening:
- Knowing the Answer
- Trying to be Helpful
- Treating Discussion as Competition
- Trying to Influence or Impress
- Reacting to Red Flag Words
- Believing in Language
- Mixing up the Forest and the Trees
- Over-Splitting or Over-Lumping
Mr. Webb ends his article with a very nice self-referential comment:
We can make a difference in the world by learning to listen better and by telling others about better listening. But only if they listen.
Update 20070911:
Interestingly, I believe there are two more barriers to effective listening:
1. Distraction! I know that I have a hard time listening if I am tired, if I am worried about something, if I have sensory overload from another source, or (to my embarrassment) even if I just have my email open while talking on the phone.
2. Poor communication tools! It is much easier to listen effectively if I am face-to-face with the other person. Any type of technology that is used to communicate between two people becomes a barrier to effective listening: email, telephone, chat, etc.
Here is an interesting online quiz/presentation about the barriers to effective listening. In this presentation, there are seven barriers to effective listening listed:
- Content of the message
- Appeal of the speaker
- External distractions
- Emotions
- Clarity of language
- Selective perception
- Inappropriate feedback
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 10:50 AM | |
April 21, 2006
Agile Adoption Stages for Teams
We know that teams go through identifiable stages of development: forming, storming, norming and performing (1). What exactly does this look like for an Agile team?
Forming
Here the team is typically innundated with three sources of new information: the Agile process and practices, the nature of the project and the other people in the team. This can be overwhelming and people will react in diverse ways: calm wait-and-see, rebelliousness, passive-aggressive, excitement, etc. If the team has an effective coach or mentor shepherding them through this, then feelings will tend towards excitement. The reality of learning so much at the same time will make the first few weeks of the team's time together quite exhausting. People will be actively fighting old habits, and people around the team will be asking lots of questions. Retrospectives will usually show that the team is impressed with their own teamwork and communication and will also show some disappointment with specific agile work practices.
Storming
After only one or two iterations, the team will transition into the Storming stage of development. Because Agile methods "front-load" the learning and the crisis, this forming stage comes fast, but it is also relatively mild. (Front-loading the learning means that all the problems that an organization has that hold it back from delivering quality work quickly are made visible in the first couple of iterations.) People are not used to a project being in crisis right at the start. It is critical for a coach or mentor or manager to be aware of this effect and expecting it. Again, for emphasis: an Agile project is in crisis immediately!... and this is perfectly normal and healthy. If the organization and the team are able to find means of dealing with this early crisis, then the project will continue and build larger and larger successes. On the other hand, if the organization or the team try to ignore or hide the problems, then very quickly work will revert to the old way: bureaucracy or chaos.
Norming
After about four to eight iterations, the team will reach a fairly comfortable place: the basic agile processes and practices are understood, the organization and the team have removed some basic obstacles to getting work done (and consciously left some obstacles in place in all likelihood), and everyone on the team has a basic level of comfort with their role. The challenge at this stage is to avoid falling into the trap of complacency. Although comfortable, this level of performance is probably not all that much better than the old way. There will be real advantages: regular delivery of work, good communication between stakeholders and the team. But there will be many obstacles still to be removed, and the team has a long way to go in its development. If the team becomes complacent, then it is critical that a catalyst be introduced to incite the team to further development. Often, this can be as simple as a systematic and intensive program of capability building. As team members learn and practice new skills: process skills, technical skills, people skills, strategic skills, business skills... and as they become more and more aware of each other's capabilities, they will also become more and more aware of areas for improvement. Incentives need to be provided to help team members focus dilligently on self-improvement and team improvement. The iteration retrospectives become critical to help with this process... the tricky bit is that this is the stage when people start to think the retrospectives are no longer necessary!
Performing
The transition into the Performing stage for an agile team is gradual and happens over a fairly extended period of time. The definition of "getting to done" will gradually expand to allow the team to go from zero to full delivery of the end results every single iteration. There will be a temptation to split up the team and use these experienced team members to seed new agile teams - resist this temptation! Breaking up the team at this point destroys the value of time and effort invested in the team. It is much more effective to start a new team from scratch. The essence of a performing agile team is not the transferrable knowledge about agile processes and practices. Rather, the most important result of the team-building process combined with the agile process is the team itself.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:57 PM | |
April 12, 2006
Follow the Principles and Adjust the Practices
In "Built to Last : Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
Follow the Principles
What exactly are the principles? The foundation starts with Trust and Truthfulness. "Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues." Everything we do with agile should be about truthfulness (visibility, transparency) and building trust.
With this as a strong foundation, we can look at the Agile Axioms:
We are Creators
Reality is Perceived
Change is Natural
All of the other principles and practices associated with Agile Work flow from these basic assumptions about the world. We can't prove that the above three axioms are "true". But they either resonate with us or they don't. If they do, then it will be easy to use these axioms as a checkpoint for all the activities we engage in using Agile Work, wherever we apply it.
We are creators... therefore we derive our sense of value from our ability to create. If our creations are accepted by others, our team, our stakeholders or our community, all the better. But fundamentally, this is inherent to us as human beings. However, sometimes this natural drive is suppressed or repressed. In order to activate it, we need to work in empowered teams.
Have you ever experienced inspiration or "flow" or joy when working with someone else? Perhaps you were solving a problem. Perhaps you were playing a musical instrument - jamming - and got into a fertile groove. Perhaps you were teaching your children and created the light of understanding in them. Perhaps you built a beautiful set of bookshelves for your home. Or maybe you told a joke that created a brief moment of genuine levity in a group of friends. We are all constantly creating!
This basic principle then means that Agile Work methods and practices should not be imposed. Taught to us, perhaps... given to us as a template, perhaps... but once we understand the practices and are familiar with them, we should immediately be given the freedom to use the learning cycle to be creative with the process and practices of Agile Work itself. If we do not participate in creation, we become dis-empowered and that eventually leads to resentment or apathy.
Reality is perceived... therefore we need to work hard to build a common perception of reality if we are to work together effectively. We need to amplify our learning. We can't assume that our own understanding of a situation is going to be shared by others. At the very least we need to check: "do you see this?"
Let's recognize that in some way or another we are all blind:
Again, the learning cycle comes into play. The guidance, detachment, love, courage and search we go through all help us to build a common understanding of reality. This allows us to see new ways to apply the Agile Work principles and practices that make sense not only to our context, but also to everyone else participating in the work.
Change is natural... therefore instead of fighting change, we need to anticipate it, adjust to it, embrace it, and be gracious or even enthusiastic. Not only does change happen to us, but we also instigate change. If things get to boring, whatever the circumstance, we find ways to change things. We rebel at stasis and ennui.
Each practice and procedure done in the context of Agile Work must be explicity and implicitly accomodating of change. If a procedure can't tolerate change it will either lead to a dissonance or conflict... or if we are embracing change, then we will modify or discard the procedure. Our creative nature loves to create, but if we become too attached, too "in love" with our creations, we will support them past their point of relevance.
Our latest greatest idea will be good for a while. But eventually change will make it irrelevent.
So we see that all three Agile Axioms are also interrelated.
Our creations will be washed away through change and if we are lucky or wise we will perceive the change in reality - be truthful to ourselves and others - and allow a new creation to take the place of the old one.
When we perceive a certain truth, and try to share that with others, we will be asking those others to change their own perceptions. This change can be difficult and may even require the destruction of a mental model created with love and care over a lifetime. Sensitivity to this loss and encouragement to build a new creation will help build a shared perception... as long as we too are open to new perceptions!
Adjust the Practices
And of course, all this foundation of creation, perception and change must be connected to the practical day-to-day reality of our lives. Our family lives, our work lives, our social lives, our volunteer lives, our intellectual lives, our emotional lives, our spiritual lives... our whole lives.
The Agile Work practices are simple to state:
Manage Ourselves
Deliver Frequently
Adapt our Plans
Communicate Powerfully
Test Everything
Measure Value
Remove Obstacles
These practices provide a starting point. A basic set of activities that will assist you, your team or your organization to advance quickly towards whatever goal you have set for yourselves. The way these practices succeed is by making sure that the Agile Axioms are always remembered and their implications accepted. These practices will set up a virtuous circle by building trust and allowing truthfulness. More trust and truthfulness will allow a fuller and more nuanced expression of the practices...
But if these practices become canonized, if they become a rote process imposed and followed blindly, then it means that we have lost sight of the Axioms. We have forgotten to check our practices against the context of creation, perception and change.
The reason we follow these practices is because we believe that we are all creators, that we can learn from our diverse perception of reality and that change is a force of growth. We don't believe these Axioms because we blindly perform these practices.
This is all available as a nicely formatted pdf: Agile Axioms - a Brief Exposition.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 01:45 AM | |
March 31, 2006
How the Process Facilitator can Help the Team Handle Out-of-Scope Work Requests
Sometimes an agile team is innundated (or maybe just slightly distracted) by requests for individuals on the team to do work for people or groups outside the team's official stakeholders. This can happen, for example, in a corporate culture that promotes the exchange of favors. This past weekend at our Agile Coach's gathering, Deborah Hartmann shared her method of detecting, exposing and discouraging this unofficial work.
The mechanism is actually very simple: track the work in the team space using cards and a variation on the burndown chart.
The Cards:
During the team's status meeting, or any other time that a team member mentions doing some of this outside work, immediately request that that person write it down on a task card. The task card should be visibly distinct from normal task cards: either a different color or a different size or in a substantially different location. The task should also get an estimate in the same units you are using for the other tasks.
For each task identified, contact the person who requested the extra work. If the person who is doing the work has made a committment to the requestor then let the requestor know that the team has accepted the work but that there is a consequence: the team may not get all its other work done on time. As well, the requester should be informed that in the future, all extra work for individuals on the team must be prioritized by the team's product owner.
Encourage the team to reveal this work by mentioning it at the start of the status meeting, in any iteration planning or retrospective meetings, or in any one-on-one meetings you have with team members.
The Burndown Chart:
Now that all the extra work is reflected in cards with estimates, the burndown chart can track this work too. The key difference is that it is tracked as a separate part of the work. If there are 80 units of normal work remaining, and 20 units of this extra work remaining, then the burndown chart will have a mark at 20 and a mark at 100. The mark at 20 should be made in a different color (I recommend red) so that it is highly visible. One ends up with a burndown chart that looks something like this:
The Product Owner:
It doesn't take much more than a single iteration for the Product Owner to get the message loud and clear: this extra work is eating up the team's capacity! The Product Owner now sees the consequences of not being the go-to person for all work items.
Deb's experience with this was that by the next iteration there were no further requests of the team for unofficial work, and the team's capacity to do work for the Product Owner took a nice leap upwards.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:26 AM | |
March 20, 2006
Methods of Prioritization
In Jean Tabaka's new book, "Collaboration Explained : Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders
1) Round the Group prioritization:
group size 3-8
item list size < 15
Items are written on cards and placed in random order linearly either vertically or horizontally.
The members of the group each take turns placing the items in the order they think is the proper priority order. While doing so, each person moving the cards is welcome to explain their reasoning. However, the other group members refrain from commenting on the new prioritization.
This continues around the group as many times as it takes to find a stable order.
2) Ping Pong Balls:
group size 1-12
item list size > 15
(Thanks to Ken Schwaber for this method)
A fixed number of ping pong ball units are given to the group. The ping pong balls represent units of one dimension for prioritization such as value, risk or cost.
The group discusses how to allocate ping pong balls to each item in a dynamic fashion until everyone agrees that the allocation makes sense.
For very large lists, this is easiest to do in a spreadsheet with fewer people involved.
3) Variation: 2-stage multi-voting with voter freedom
group size 5-20
item list size < 50
This is identical to the public multi-voting system Jean describes with the following changes:
First, there is no restriction on how votes are allocated to items. A person can put multiple votes on a single item and can withhold some or all of her votes.
Second, after everyone has "finished" voting, the facilitator calls for everyone to step back and think about the results. Some discussion is allowed about the consequences of the results. Finally, everyone is given an opportunity to move their votes.
For large groups with large lists this can be somewhat awkward as people might forget where they voted. In this case, and if anonymity is not required, each person can use small post-it tabs with an identifying mark on them so that they can easily be moved around in the second stage.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 01:25 PM | |
March 14, 2006
Agile or Not Agile?
Every once in a while the del.icio.us tag for Agile turns up something really interesting. This evening, I found this article about the ongoing use of the term "Agile". The article is brief and a little weak, but it brings up a concern that is always niggling in the back of my mind. Interestingly enough, a good friend of mine, Christian Gruber, emailed me another web page of similar import...
In this registration page for Rules of Enterprise Agility, we read about something that really has nothing to do with the Agile Manifesto, nor the Agile Axioms.
Both of these examples are signs of two things:
1. The growing popularity of the term "Agile".
2. The growing dilution of the meaning of the term.
How can we fight this? Should we fight this?
I think it is very important to constantly call attention to the fact that Agile is about the minimum process and tools that can possibly work, and only in the context of valuing individuals, interactions and teams more than those tools and processes.
Trust is the Foundation of Agile Work
Technology, tools, process, even good ideas and good organizations do not create trust. People create trust by being trustworthy: honoring their commitments, striving for excellence, truthfulness, courage. One of the fundamental problems afflicting organizations is the lack of trust: between management and employees, between business and IT, between experts of various sorts, between coworkers.
This lack of trust is institutionalized in many ways including bureaucracy and legal frameworks.
The only way to change this state of affairs is to build trust. And the only way to build trust is to embody trustworthiness in yourself so that by example and by your words you can help others to become more trustworthy.
Agile methods put in place mechanisms that assist in building trust. But those mechanisms are merely a means to an end. Let us never forget that.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 12:27 AM | |
March 12, 2006
Work Item Backlogs as Queues - Agile vs. Lean
A recent discussion on the Scrum Development list (Start of Discussion) provides a good follow up to my parting words in The Art of Obstacle Removal about agile practices themselves becoming obstacles. I have excerpted a small amount of the discussion and added my own comments here.
In the agile community, most of us have bought into and adopted the Agile mental model. But that mental model has assumptions embedded into that may not be correct under all circumstances. Part of that mental model includes the efficacy of the work item backlog as a tool for tracking, prioritizing and communicating work to be done in the future.
I will be the first to say that Agile is far better than waterfall in almost every situation (the exception being the mythical project with stable requirements, business environment, technology and team).
That said, let's look at backlogs from another perspective: if a backlog was the only thing you delivered to the customer, would they pay for it? If you spent even just a few hours coaching a business representative to build a backlog, but there was no team to implment it, would that person really find value in the backlog itself? Would they be able to deliver ROI just from a backlog? I think the answer is a clear "no".
That set of questions may seem silly, but from a lean perspective, they are among the most important questions. Is an artifact/process value-added or non-value-added?
Since the backlog is clearly not a value added artifact/process (pause for effect)... it is waste!
When one is doing agile effectively, the backlog may in fact be one of the larger sources of waste! If the team has a stable velocity, there will come a point when the backlog becomes the constraint on the overall cycle time going from idea to ROI. If the backlog is large/long, and as Mary Poppendieck said if there is more than ...maybe two or three
sprints of work.... in there, then it may be time to find ways of constraining the size of the backlog. I have two suggestions:
Capacity of Team(s):
Find a way to increase the capacity of the team so that the backlog size reduces and then goes into a steady state. This may mean augmenting the staff.
Gate Backlog Items by ROI
(This is just theory to me at this point.) Make it a condition that all backlog items must have a positive ROI. In other words, the cost of building the backlog item needs to be less than the value delivered, taking into account time value of money. Don't let items onto the backlog unless this positive ROI can be demonstrated.
I believe the lack of this second discipline (assigning ROI to work items) is one of the main reasons that most agile methods such as Scrum allow an unlimited backlog size: there is no realistic way to gate the work that gets onto the backlog!
Until teams get to Agile nirvana (stable velocity, continuous delivery of business value, high-performance cohesive teams), having an unlimited backlog seems like a very reasonable thing: it's not the constraint or the primary source of waste. However, eventually the backlog will become a primary source of waste and it needs to be treated in a disciplined manner.
With a stable and well-functioning team, what other ways might there be to reduce the size of the backlog so that cycle time is substantially reduced?
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 03:31 PM | |
March 10, 2006
The Art of Obstacle Removal
One of the best ways to go faster is to remove the things that slow you down. This "obstacle removal" is an integral part of many agile methods including Scrum and Lean. Sometimes it is obvious where an obstacle is. There are a few small things that can be done easily to go faster. But to get going really fast, we need to have a deeper understanding of obstacles... and the Art of Obstacle Removal.
What are Obstacles?
An obstacle is any behavior, physical arrangement, procedure or checkpoint that makes getting work done slower without adding any actual contribution to the work. Activities that do add value to our work may be slowed down by obstacles, but are not obstacles in and of themselves.
Obstacles and Waste
Obstacles are the causes of waste in a process. There are many types of waste, and for every type of waste there are many possible sources (obstacles).
Types of Obstacles
Personal
Personal obstacles are related to us as individuals. There are several levels at which these obstacles can show up.
Outside factors in our lives such as illness or family obligations can become obstacles to our work at hand. These obstacles are hard to remove or avoid. Even if we would want to avoid an obstacle such as illness, it is hard to do anything about it in an immediate sense. However, as part of our committment to the group we are working with, we should consider doing things to generally improve our health. Good sleep, healthy and moderate eating, exercise and avoidance of illness-causing things and circumstances are all possible commitments we can make to the group. Likewise, we can make sure our personal affairs are in order so that unexpected events have the least impact possible. This topic is vast and there are many good sources of information.
Physical Environment
Obstacles in the physical environment can consist of barriers to movement or communication, or a lack of adequate physical resources. Sometimes these obstacles are easy to see because their effects are immediate. For example, if a team room lacks a whiteboard for diagrams, keeping notes, etc., then the team may not be able to communicate as effectively.
Other physical obstacles are not so obvious. The effects of physical environment can be subtle and not well-understood. Poor ergonomics take weeks, months or years for their effects to be felt... but it is inevitable. A too-small team room can lead to a feeling of being cooped up and desperation to get out... and eventually to resentment. Again this can take weeks or months.
Here are some guidelines on a good team room.
Knowledge
A lack of knowledge or the inability to access information are obstacles. A team composed of junior people who don't have diverse experience and who don't have a good knowledge of the work they are doing will have trouble working effectively. There may be barriers preventing the team from learning. Common barriers include over-work leading to a lack of time or mental energy for learning. With junior people in particular, there is a lot of pressure to be productive and that can often be at the expense of a solid foundation of learning.
Other times, knowledge-related barriers can be more immediate. If a critical piece of information is delayed or lost this can have a large impact on an Agile team that is working in short cycles. The team may be temporarily halted while they wait for information. Building effective information flow is critical to a team's performance.
Organizational
One of the best sources of information about this is the two books by Jim Collins: "Good to Great" (Review) and "Built to Last" (Review).
Cultural
In organizational culture, one thing I constantly see is a public espoused value of teamwork, but a conflicting behavior of individual performance reviews and ranking. This is cultural. It is also a barrier to the effective functioning of an Agile team. For corporate environments I highly recommend the Corporate Culture Survival Guide by Edgar Schein.
Dis-Unity
Dis-unity is one of the most subtle and common forms of obstacle. Competition, legal and cultural assumption of the goodness of "opposition" and habits of interaction including gossip and backbiting all combine to make united action and thought very difficult.
This is an extremely deep topic. There are many tools and techniques available to assist with team building. If you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend reading "The Prosperity of Humankind".
Removing Obstacles
The ability to identify obstacles and understand why they are causing problems is only the first step in removing obstacles. In Agile Work, the person primarily responsible for identifying and removing obstacles is the Process Facilitator. The Process Facilitator has several approaches available for the removal of obstacles. A process facilitator has similar responsibilities to a change agent.
Direct
Deal with the obstacle directly without involving other people. This can be as simple as getting up and moving an obstacle impairing vision, or as nuanced as running interviews and workshops throughout an organization to gradually change a cultural obstacle.
Command and Control
Identify the obstacle and give precise instructions for its removal to a person who will directly perform the removal. This can sometimes work if removing an obstacle takes a great deal of time, effort or specialized skills that you yourself do not posess. However, the overall approach of "command and control" is not recommended for Agile environments since it is disempowering.
Influence
Identify the obstacle and suggest means to deal with it to a person who has the authority or influence to get others to deal with it. This indirect method of obstacle removal can be slow and frustrating. However it usually has better long-term effects than command and control.
Support
Offer to assist and encourage the removal of obstacles that have been identified by other people. In many respects this is a very effective method. It can assist with team-building and learning by example. People are usually grateful for assistance.
Coaching
Train others on the art of obstacle removal including obstacle identification, types of obstacles and strategies for dealing with obstacles. Observe people's attempts to remove obstacles and give them feedback on their actions.
Creating a Culture of Obstacle Removal
Encourage and measure obstacle removal at all organizational levels until it becomes habitual. In many ways this is the essense of the lean organization.
Strategies for Dealing with Obstacles
Diagrams are a great way of communicating the essense of a concept. Feel free to share the following diagrams with anyone (but of course keep the copyright notice on them).
Remove
Remove the obstacle altogether. This method of dealing with an obstacle is usually the most immediately effective, but is also one of the most difficult methods.
The best way to actually remove an obstacle is to get at the root cause of the obstacle and change that. This type of change results in the longest-lasting and most stable elimination of an obstacle.
Move Aside
Take the obstacle and put it in a place or situation where it is no longer in the path of the team.
In a team's physical environment, this may be as simple as changing the tools that the team is using. For example, if the team is all in a room together, move computer monitors that are blocking team member's views of each other. If there is a useless checkpoint that work results have to go through, get management to eliminate it.
Shield
Build a shield or barrier to hide the obstacle so that it's effects no longer touch your team.
If a team is distracted by noisy neighbors, put up a sound barrier. If a team is unable to see their computers due to late afternoon sunlight, put up window shades. If a manager is bothering the team with meetings or tasks unrelated to the work of the team, then put yourself between the team and the manager (or get someone in upper management to do that).
Shielding is excellent for immediate relief, but remember that the obstacle is still there and may become a problem again if the shield cannot be maintained.
Transform
Change the structure or form of the obstacle so that it no longer affects effectiveness.
In general, this method requires a great deal of creativity and open-mindedness. This is one that works particularly well on people who are obstacles: convert them into friends of the team!
For example if the team needs approval of an expert who is not part of the team, this can cause extra work preparing documentation for this person and long delays while the expert revies the documents. If the expert becomes part of the team, then they are well-informed of the work being done and can give approval with very little overhead.
If done well, this can be a very long-lasting method of dealing with an obstacle. Make sure that the transformation is true and that it takes hold... and beware that the obstacle doesn't revert back to its old nature.
Counteract
Find an activity that negates the effects of the obstacle by boosting effectiveness in another area.
As a coach or Process Facilitator, this is what we spend our time in early in a team's adoption of Agile Work: we get them to work in the same room, use iterations and adaptive planning, we focus them on delivering work valued by the stakeholders as defined by the Product Owner. All these things are enhancing the team's ability to get work done without actually directly dealing with any obstacles.
Watch out for barriers avoided this way to come back and bite you later on.
Removing Obstacles and Learning
Organizational learning, as well as adult learning have a strong relationship to obstacle removal. Organizational learning can be either single-loop or double-loop learning. Adult learning can be either normal or transformative. We can approach obstacle removal from a surface level where we only deal with the immediate symptom, or we can work at a deeper level where we deal with the symptom and its chain of preceding causes. One effective method for examining the deeper causes is the 5-why's exercise.
Obstacles Inherent in Agile
Agile methods do not perfectly eliminate all obstacles. Some obstacles that are inherent in agile methods include overhead due to planning meetings at the start of iterations, the use of a dedicated process facilitator. As well, the use of iterations can become a barrier to certain types of work items: repeating items, investment in infrastructure, one-off tasks that are not directly related to the work at hand.
At some point, our teams will have matured to the point where agile methods are no longer necessary and we can pick and choose what parts of agile we use.
Go Forth and Demolish Obstacles!
As a Process Facilitator, coach, ScrumMaster, manager, change agent or stealth agile advocate, you have the ability and the knowledge to make a big difference in people's lives and in the success of the organizations they work within. Removing obstacles is one of the most important duties you have.
Do you have stories about obstacles you have removed or seen removed that have made a big difference? We would love the hear the anecdotal side of this as well!
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 01:10 PM | |
February 24, 2006
Privacy for Self-Organizing Teams
Why are observers to the team's daily status meeting not allowed to participate?
The daily Scrum is a private meeting for the team members to report status to everyone else on the team. In many respects this is very similar to the regular private status meetings an employee has with their boss. It is rude and inappropriate for people to come into this manager/employee meeting. It is even ruder if a third party came to this private meeting and started making all sorts of suggestions or demands of the manager or employee. The privacy of this meeting is required to build trust between the manager and the employee and for both parties to be able to speak freely without embarassment... The daily Scrum should be considered exactly the same way with the one exception that the Team has graciously allowed observers to also attend. This is why observers are not allowed to speak during the daily Scrum.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 12:22 AM | |
November 15, 2005
Salutogenesis and Agile
Twenty-five years ago American-Israeli Medical Sociologist, Aron Antonovsky developed the theory of salutogenesis. As opposed to the traditional pathogenic model of medicine focused on the study of disease, salutogenesis is the study of health. Since then, his work has been integrated into the field of public health and health education. This asset or strength based type of approach to individual or institutional development has been found in other fields such as organizational development and community development. In organizational development the field of Appreciative Inquiry and in community development the Asset Based Community Development model share the essential premises of salutogenesis. Quoting Garmezy, Antonovsky highlights the medical professions focus on deficits:
our mental health practitioners and researchers are predisposed by interest, investment and training in seeing deviance, psychopathology and weakness wherever they look.
This type of approach to work based on weakness and deficit can be found in most of our organizations. It seems to me that although Agile exposes inefficiencies and problems in organizations, it's focus never-the-less is to build on strengths and assets. It is in this light that I have been thinking about Antonovsky's work and what it can offer to Agile.
Antonovsky came to this theory of salutogenisis when he carried out a study on Israeli women going through menopause. He found that there were a number of women who, according to all indications of the pathogenic model, should be suffering severe symptoms (because they faced severe stressors which cause illness). But they were not suffering at all. To his surprise he discovered that these women happened to be survivors of concentration camps. He found certain qualities in these women that resulted in what he called a higher “Sense of Coherence” than the other women.
Sense of Coherence is made up of three factors; comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness.
Comprehensibility means that whatever happens to a person, she is able to make sense of it and understand it, that is, the challenge is in some way "structured, predictable, and explicable." Manageability means that either the resources are available to one to meet the demands posed by the stimuli,or one has a way to find them. Meaningfulness involves having a sense of meaning in the important areas of one's life or recognizing "these demands are challenges, worthy of investment and engagement."
Antonovsky found meaningfulness to be the motivational factor of the three, although he also found that all three mutually reinforce one another. For example if one has a high sense of comprehensibility but is low on the other two, one ends up not having the motivation to find resources and soon after this causes comprehensibility to be lost. If one is high on meaning and missing the other two, Antonovsky explains that there is a good chance to find the other two.
The theory of Salutogenisis may provide researched and proven reasons why Agile is so empowering for people. This research may also provide more insight into how to deepen Agile experiences to higher levels of empowerment. Agile methods help people to make sense of the market place by allowing for iterative delivery and adaptive planning, thus increasing their level of comprehensibility. Iterative delivery, adaptive planning and the concept of amplifying learning are all conducive to increased sense of manageability. Because people spend most of their time at work, it is quite important that they feel a sense of meaning in their work. The concept of empowering the team and the practice of self-organized teams and appropriate metrics can contribute to increased sense of meaning in one's work.
Salutogenic food for thought for the Agile practitioner:
Antonovsky associated comprehensibility with consistency which he defined as "the extent to which one’s work situation allows and fosters the clarity of seeing the entire work picture and ones place in it, provides confidence in job security, and supports communicability and feedback in social relations at the workplace".
How can the concept of consistency be promoted in Agile projects?
Manageability is related to under load/overload balance which is defined as "the availability of resources to the individual and to the collectivity within which there is interaction to get the job done well" and "...the extent to which the work situation has room for allowing potential to be utilized in substantively complex work." The opposite of the former results in overload and the opposite of the latter is a situation of under load.
How can Agile projects guard against overload? How can an Agile coach and Agile teams fully utilize the capacities of its members?
Meaningfulness is closely associated with participation in shaping outcomes. Antonovsky explains beautifully the relationship between these two concepts:
When others decide everything for us-when they set the task, formulate the rules, and manage the outcome-and we have no say in the matter, we are reduced to objects. A world thus experienced as being indifferent to what we do comes to be seen as a world devoid of meaning.
In light of the concept of meaningfulness how can the principle of self organized team and shared decision making be deepened in Agile work?
Reference:
Antonovsky, Aron (1988). Unraveling the Mystery of Health: How People Manage Stress and Stay Well (Jossey Bass Social and Behavioral Science Series)
Posted by Shabnam Tashakour at 07:50 AM | |
November 09, 2005
Agile Work Uses Lean Thinking - Empirical Process Control
This is Part 2 of a 3 part series.
Part 1
Part 3 - not posted yet :-)
Some work processes cannot be perfectly controlled nor perfectly defined. There may be non-linear interactions between steps in a process or there may be creative input from a human required. Processes with these qualities require empirical process control.
The basic attribute of empirical process control constitutes a continuous cycle of inspecting the process for correct operation and results and adapting the process as needed. A simple example of this is detecting impending failure of equipment by constantly monitoring the operation of that equipment. For Agile Work, the book Agile Software Development with Scrum provides an excellent chapter about this topic of Empirical Process Control.
In human processes like those to which Agile Work applies, the frequency of inspecting and adapting must match the needs of the process. Many projects occur in the context of constant change. This constant change makes long-term planning a wasteful effort. Rather, short-term planning with constant feedback provides a simple inspect and adapt cycle. This cycle can play out at different levels: daily for a team, monthly for a client of the team. The team inspects and adapts daily at the level of the tasks that it is performing. The client inspects and adapts monthly at the level of the team's actual delivered results.
Both lean and agile methods claim to increase both speed and quality. Many people believe that there are four constraints in a system that can be controlled: speed (or schedule, or time to market, or process cycle time), quality (number of defects), scope (how much functionality), and cost savings (how much to spend on the work). Frequently, management believes that one has to trade off between these four constraints; spend more money, get more scope; lower quality, go faster. But in fact, lean and agile strongly support the idea that as you increase quality, you also increase speed... you just have to do it right.
In Agile Work, increasing speed and quality is done in three ways. First, increase the frequency and quality of communication among team members so that errors are detected early or avoided altogether. Second, drive the work with the creation and execution of automated testing. No work is done without a test in place to check if it is done correctly. This constant testing means that work is always defect-free and therefore very little time/money is spent on fixing defects. Third, eliminate wasteful work steps or obstacles to performance of work. This last one is difficult to do an bears closer examination.
Wasteful work is done in every process, no matter how efficient. Lean tells us that there are several types of waste in a manufacturing process. Those types of waste have analogies in Agile Work. For example, documenting something you plan to do instead of just doing it is wasteful. Another example is waiting while someone completes work that you depend upon. Any step or task that does not add value to the final product of an effort is waste. This standard is very high and most organizations have about 80% of their efforts going into wasteful tasks. An organization that has done an initial cut of wasteful work might stand at about 50% waste. The leanest organizations, such as Toyota, stand at about 20% waste.
Agile work eliminates waste in the form of barriers or obstacles that come up when a team is trying to go fast. Sometimes this is in the form of waiting for another group to do something for the agile team... an outsourced request for service. Sometimes waste is in the form of corporate standards or policies around documentation of work. The Process Facilitator role in an agile team has responsibility for working with the team and others to help overcome these obstacles.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 02:08 PM | |
October 11, 2005
Is There a Single "Most Important" Agile Work Practice?
There are a few times that I have been involved with implementing agile pratices without management knowledge or direct support. In these cases it has usually been necessary to gradually introduce the practices. An unsupportive or apathetic environment cannot be changed instantly and big-bang introduction of agile tends to bring too much negative attention too quickly.
In reflecting on those experiences, as well as "normal" agile implementations, I have felt that there are some specific practices that can stand alone.
Self-Organizing Teams
The practice of a self-organizing team consists of frequent regular status meetings, face-to-face, reporting to the other team members accomplishments, work commitments and obstacles. Scrum has a very strict method of doing this on a daily basis but I have found it valuable to do more or less frequently depending on the team and its environment (generally any less than every second day is not enough). The team, or some assistant of some sort, tracks the barriers and works to resolve them quickly. Management, if it exists, must be contacted through trusted channels to assist with the removal of barriers. And stakeholders must be able to attend the status meetings or receive reports immediately after the meetings.
This single practice tends to have the ability to bootstrap the others. The identification and clearing of barriers provides a way for the team to practice all three Agile Work Disciplines (Empower the Team, Amplify Learning, Eliminate Waste). Reporting accomplishments to the other team members Amplifies Learning. Committing to work is empowering.
Some teams have done only this single agile practice and seen great improvements in productivity, morale, and stakeholder satisfaction. However, there are some pitfalls that must be acknowledged and dealt with.
Pitfall: Speculative Work
The team can tend towards speculative work if there is no strong representative of the stakeholders. This does not always happen since most people are sincere in their desire to "make a difference". However, if as a team you adopt only this practice and find yourselves doing lots of "what-if?" or "wouldn't it be neet if..." or "what exactly is our purpose?" discussions, then you need to find some external stakeholder support for your effort.
Pitfall: Failing to Deliver
In many organizations, failure to deliver is an endemic problem and a self-organizing team will break through and start delivering. However, failure to deliver can also become a cultural mindset for an organization or group. A self-organizing team must maintain a goal (not a plan) for itself, and that goal must include delivering something valuable. Again, finding an external stakeholder to support the team's efforts can help to avoid this pitfall.
Pitfall: No Barriers
Sometimes a team will get into a habit where no new barriers are being exposed. This can often happen when the progress in the work becomes steady and is recognizably better than it was before. The team falls into a "local optimum". In this case, the team needs a fresh way to view their work. This can happen in a number of ways: a crisis, an external observer, or a change in environment among others.
...
Do you have experience with successful but incomplete agile implementations? I would love to hear of other experiences and opinions about this.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 02:42 PM | |
October 10, 2005
Agile, the Adult Educator and Ethical Considerations
A review of Tara J. Fenwick's “Limits of the Learning Organization: A Critical Look” (article found in Learning for life: Canadian readings in adult education
This article is a critique of learning organization literature (as presented in the works of Peters, Senge, Watkins, Marsick, Argyris, Schon and others). I chose to do a review of it because learning organization literature can and does inform the work of Agile practitioners. The writer, Tara Fenwick, offers a critique of this literature as an academic and practitioner in the field of adult education. Even though the language and tone of the article is judgmental and at times affronting to the corporate trainer audience, it is never-the-less challenging and valuable because she raises interesting ethical questions that can serve as cautions against potential trends that can distort agile practice. I will summarize her argument in the some of the areas most relevant to Agile practice.
Fenwick's summary of the model of learning organization found in the literature, is an organization that: “creates continuous learning opportunities, promotes inquiry and dialog, encourages collaboration and team learning, establishes systems to capture and share learning, empowers people toward collective vision and connects the organization to its environment.”
The following is a summary list of some of Fenwick's critiques:
Who's Interests are Served
Although the learning organization literature holds great promise for a more humanitarian and egalitarian workplace, it has the potential to distort learning “into a tool for competitive advantage” and in turn, exploit people as resources in the pursuit of profit. To explore this idea she asks a valuable question: “Who's interests are being served by the concept of learning organization, and what relations of power does it help to secure?” She argues that learning organization literature tends to serve the interests of educators working as trainers in organizations and managers interested in their own self preservation.
How Learning is Defined
Learning, in learning organization literature seems to be defined as that which benefits the organization, all other learning falls into the dysfunctional category. This perspective negates other ways that people create meaning and learn and potentially causes a person to become “alienated from their own meaning and block flourishing of this learning into something to benefit the community.”
Assumptions about Learners
The learning organization literature subordinates employees by seeing them as “undifferentiated learners-in-deficit”. Educators and managers are the architects of the learning organization while employees are busy “learning more, learning better and faster” trying to correct their knowledge deficit. In the learning organization workers become responsible for the health of the organization without the authority to determine alternative ways to reach that health. The fear of being left behind in a quickly changing market environment is used to create anxiety and fear as motivations for learning. All of these factors serve to put serious limits on the potential of people to learn in the work environment.
Diversity and Privilege Overlooked
Perspectives of race, class and gender -which research has shown affects the way people learn and collaborate- are lacking in the literature. Fenwick challenges the notion of achieving a democratically ideal situation for open dialog -that the learning organization literature calls for- when all people in the work place do not “have equal opportunity to participate, reflect, and refute one another” (for example because of the status of ones job, character, gender, class, age etc.)
Fenwick sheds a clear light on where the good philosophies of the learning organization are found wanting. The Agile community can benefit from asking some of the same ethical questions she asks in relation to our work. Her critique is a good challenge for Agile practitioners. It challenges us to:
- Continue to strive for higher levels of ethical excellence in our work
- To consider issues of power in our work
- To become conscious of how we use our own power
- To give thought to what voices are included / excluded in the creation of the learning organization
- Pay attention to how we motivate learners
- How to foster collaborative environments that are conscious of the privileging of some over others
- Think about who decides what is valuable knowledge and learning and how that affects the knowledge creation process
Reflecting on these issues will go a long way to contributing to the development of agile practice.
The full text of an old version of Fenwick's article can be found here.
Posted by Shabnam Tashakour at 09:35 PM | |
October 07, 2005
Agile Coach/Mentor Job Description (Process Facilitator)
Given the Agile Axioms and Disciplines then an agile coach or mentor should have some really specific experience and capabilities. This list constitutes a first attempt at a job description.
Experience:
- working in strictly timeboxed iterations with adaptive planning using some sort of prioritized work list
- working in a "test-driven" manner (e.g. writing a document for a client where the client specifies acceptance criteria)
- participating in frequent status meetings where the team members report to each other, commit to work and identify barriers
- building and maintaining big visible charts to show progress and status (e.g. the standard thermometer chart to show progress towards a numerical goal)
- fashioning appropriate tracking and performance metrics that encourage team work rather than individual competition
- helping other people to adopt and adapt all these practices
Capabilities:
- promoting collaboration in challenging circumstances
- searching for truth/a solution relentlessly
- honesty and trustworthiness
- a learning attitude (proactive and learning from mistakes)
- humility and assertiveness
- guiding people without controlling them
- detachment (ability to step out of a situation)
- an attitude of service without expecting recompense
- understanding of transformative learning
- conflict resolution as learning (not negotiation)
- encouraging creativity
Not Required:- technical experience related to the work of the team - the Agile Coach (process facilitator) should not be a performer on the team
- domain experience related to the goal of the work - the Agile Coach should not be a direct stakeholder in the results of the work
However, technical experience and domain experience can sometimes help...
Suggestions and ideas are greatly appreciated!
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 12:33 PM | |
September 29, 2005
Transformative Learning and Agile
It seems to me that most people who have had any kind of success on serious projects, or in life, can probably point to a profound collaborative experience at the core of that experience. In my last posting, "tools vs. capabilities" I said that because Agile is fundamentally a process of collaboration and our culture is fundamentally is a culture of contest, we need to recognize that learning Agile requires a transformation at the level of character more than methodology. Despite the fact that we may have had profound experiences with collaboration, because we are also deeply influenced by our environment, there are limits to what we can understand about it. We need not look further than the agile disciplines to see how most of our working and social practices are not supportive of Agile perspectives. For example empowering the team and the concept of self-organizing team is a direct challenge to most of our social, economic, cultural, community and familial structures which are essentially hierarchical. The discipline of amplifying learning is a direct challenge to the practice of excessive specialization which manifests itself in the form of expert elitism. How can any one of us ever hope to have a culture of learning and innovation if we come from a culture of expertise and hierarchy based on that expertise?
This is where transformative learning comes in. Agile requires of us not just an ordinary, but transformative learning experience. When we learn, we take something new and fit it into an old category or assign an old meaning to it. Categories are ways in which we organize our learning, they can also be called frames of reference. If we encounter an experience for which we have no category it is hard to understand it. For example have you ever been in a conversation or taken part in a course where what you were learning was so foreign to you that you didn't even know what kinds of questions to ask to help you understand it?
Our frames of reference are shaped through the influence of our culture, language, and experiences, which all interact to set boundaries to future learning. This is because outside of these categories it is impossible for us even to register something new, let alone seek out its reality in an unprejudiced manner.
How often do you find yourself in a new learning situation where you feel overwhelmed, frustrated or even angry? It is possible that at those times you may be at the threshold of a transformative learning experience. You can have two reactions: one would be to dig deep and try to figure out why you are disturbed and see what insights you are led to and the other would be to just give up on the idea and find arguments against it.
Another way to recognize a potential opportunity for tranformative learning is to reflect on the following question: have you ever had an experience where you were faced with some new learning and because you have had a similar experience or because for some reason you see yourself as an expert in that field you have not been able to derive the proper learning from that experience? You may have realized this at a later time after numerous interactions with a similar experience where you slowly started to recognize gaps in your own understanding.
In order to derive the full benefit of a new experience that doesn't fit into the realm of our experience we must have a transformative learning experience. A transformative learning experience is an experience that requires of us to examine the values and limitations of our old categories and assign new meanings to them. This does not mean that all of our previous learning is invalid. A transformative learning experience allows us to expand our frames of reference to allow for more complexity and at times possibly to integrate two previously perceived dichotomous approaches.
For a detailed introduction to transformative learning theories, its thinkers and history check out this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_learning on Wikipedia.
Posted by Shabnam Tashakour at 10:50 PM | |
September 28, 2005
Agile Infrastructure Projects - Lessons Learned
I've worked as an agile coach on three infrastructure/maintenance projects in a row. One was a software/hardware upgrade, one was implementing agile for a defects/enhancements team, and my most recent was a data warehouse decommissioning project. In all cases, the interesting part for me was taking the basic principles of agile and applying them in a way that works when not doing new product development. Here are some lessons I've learned:
1. Figure out what is going to deliver value (usually cost savings). In the case of infrastructure projects, one is usually focused on cost savings. Find a way to tie your work items directly to cost savings. You need a good financial model to do this. Mary and Tom Poppendieck talk about this a little in their Lean Software Development book. In the decommissioning program, there was a very explicit dollar cost associated with disk space and cpu utilization. Every user/MB decommissioned saved a measurable amount of money. As well, it allowed us to easily prioritize our backlog.
2. Focus project/program organization more on Lean principles than agile. A good understanding of queuing theory will go a long way to helping with throughput. In a team doing defects/enhancements work, the small pieces lend themselves well to certain types of streaming through the team. Iterations are not necessary to chunck work. Instead, iterations become checkpoints solely for process reflection.
3. Technical infrastructure projects can benefit greatly from automation. Test automation including test generation can sometimes be possible. Automating parts of a regularly repeated process that is used for every work item can be extremely beneficial for increasing speed. In the case of the decommissioning effort where every database table needs to be considered separately and where they all go through the same process for decommisioning, there are many opportunities for automation. The project/program/team can invest in doing this automation to great benefit to NPV.
4. The basic axioms (We are Creators, Reality is Perceived, Change is Natural) and disciplines (Empower the Team, Amplify Learning, Eliminate Waste) still apply. Even though it is not "new" product development, the creativity of people is essential for problem solving, and finding ways to do the work faster. Stakeholders still need to have their perception of reality acknowledged, and the teams still has to do constant checking to make sure they are on track with that perception. And of course, things are always changing including priorities, our understanding of the work, resource availability etc. Having an empowered team makes short work of many obstacles, but that wouldn't happen without an explicit acknowledgement that we have to constantly be learning and eliminating waste. Teams get better and better at these disciplines over time.
I would be very interested to hear other peoples experiences with infractructural/operational projects.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 12:00 PM | |
September 27, 2005
Tools Versus Capabilities Approach To Agile Training
Which approach is most valuable in training that fosters collaborative work for the purpose of optimizing the performance of an organization: a tools / methodologies approach or an inner capabilities approach? The typical orientation that most organizations take is often external and rule-based. This consists of creating methodologies, rules, boundaries, systems and processes to enhance collaboration.
These external approaches ultimately fail to have a lasting effect on people and the culture of the organization because they don't address change at the level of habits of mind. People then work in the new structure with the same patterns of behaviour. Behind this kind of surface approach to change are assumptions about human nature. At worst this consists of a belief that people are base (greedy, selfish etc.) by nature. At best that people are fundamentally good but cannot improve except through external measures. It is true that we need external systems and structures to give expression to our inner capabilities, to test, foster and develop them in action. However all the investment that companies make in tools, systems, methodologies are obviously not enough. We need both external and internal approaches to training people in collaborative processes. Systems and tools provide only a framework that then need to be filled in with character. At the core of Agile there are disciplines (such as Empower the Team, Amplifly Learning) without which the methodologies would have no life. The practice of the disciplines fostered by the development of inner capabilities infuses life into the Agile methods and at the same time the methods act on and reinforce the inner practice of the disciplines.
As Agile champions (coaches, facilitators, practitioners) we must invest energy on fostering -through modelling and coaching- the development of inner capabilities. The Agile community will benefit from an identification of core capabilities required and a deep exploration of how to foster their development in individuals, teams and organizations.
Although it is our nature to organize in groups and we may have much experience with collaboration, we nevertheless live in a culture of contest and individualism. Out of this culture comes a set of belief systems which are so deeply rooted in our lives that we are not fully conscious of them and their affect on us. These belief systems cannot change easily through the introduction of external structures alone.
Posted by Shabnam Tashakour at 12:44 PM | |
September 15, 2005
Personal Philosophy of Adult Education
The following is my approach as an educator to my work in community and organizational development. I have come to this understanding mainly through experience, a great deal of mentoring and study.
Please note that when I use the term “teacher” in this document I also mean consultant, mentor, coach etc. The term “student” is also interchangeable with organization or community. The term education is interchangeable with organizational or community development consulting.
Validation: a starting point
Education should start from, affirm and validate the experience, insights and knowledge of the individual. This is a foundation for education that honours and respects the student. Recognizing the nobility of the student allows her an active role in her own learning. The role of the teacher is to facilitate learning by drawing on the experience of the student, to build on that experience through the acquisition of new insights, knowledge and skills.
Learning must be self-directed. The teacher may have a number of wonderful things to teach, but if the student does not believe that they are relevant to her, she will not be engaged. This is especially true for teachers who are working in communities that they are not a part of. The teacher must engage in careful investigation in order to understand the situation of the student, which includes attentive listening, as well as a genuine interest in the needs of the student, before proceeding along any line of instruction. Taking her cue from the students, the teacher must work with the individual / group to create a learning environment in which everyone takes responsibility for their own learning. In this kind of environment the teacher is not an expert and does not do the students’ learning for her. The teacher can use questions to assist the student to understand, instead of delivering answers. The teacher should also encourage an environment of learning that recognizes mistakes as part of the learning process. The learning environment should create in the student a hunger for the acquisition of knowledge, insights and skills beyond the direct experience with the teacher.
Encouragement: the key to self-directed learning
Once the experience of the student has been validated and her needs established, education should be challenging but not obtrusive and challenges must be presented with respect and encouragement. Encouragement versus excessive criticism leads to individual initiative instead of paralysis. The natural result of an encouraging and challenging learning environment is self-discipline and self-correction instead of external discipline (control) and constant external correction.
A transformative, holistic approach centred in humility and service
The learning environment should foster humility in both the student and teacher. Most contemporary approaches to education are materialistic; the student pays, studies, receives a degree, becomes an “expert”, etc. The whole educational experience, from the teachers to administrators, cultivates in the student a sense of self is that is based solely on the expertise and knowledge gained. The “Expert” attitude in the community development environment is often not useful because the work in the field is so complex. Many stakeholders have keys to the process, as a result, the “expert” attitude devalues the knowledge of others and tends to taint the path to solutions with conflict and ego. Another consequence of the expert mentality in the community is dependency; people are divorced from the solution to problems that they all contribute to and to which they all hold the keys. Instead of drawing on the knowledge of the stakeholders, the expert renders her own knowledge most valuable which in turn causes them to discard volition and succumb to a state of perpetual dependency on one expert after the other. Community members or institutions are robbed of the ability to play a central role in their own lives as a direct result of being robbed of opportunities to play central roles in the decision-making process of their community.
With humility at the centre of all learning, the purpose of education becomes transformation. We learn so that we, our communities and our institutions can improve and change for the better. Also as learning is applied to community efforts, individual capacity unfolds and is developed. Learning for its own sake is valuable, but learning for positive social change, makes the acquisition of knowledge, skills and insights relevant and engaging in the face of community development challenges. Learning then becomes intimately connected with action and is corrected and refined through action. This infuses a powerful sense of purpose and meaning in the learning process, especially as successes are realized.
Principle-based approach facilitates ownership
Education should cultivate a sense of personal ownership in the learning process and community life. Fostering a sense of personal ownership comes with educating students to have a mature perspective about their own learning as well as the changes they desire to implement in the community. It involves helping students learn the capability of ‘becoming’ the change that they want to see, as well as finding positive starting points in desperate situations and building on them. A mature outlook demands that students have a principle-based approach to problem solving versus a rule-based approach. Education then becomes not only a process of acquiring knowledge but centred on capacity building for individuals, institutions and groups. Fostering the development of capacities needed to overcome obstacles also requires a principle-based approach, embodying principles such as perseverance, human rights and dignity, building unity in diversity etc.
Integration and balance of methods essential
Education should be methodical and balanced. It should aim to acknowledge, validate and employ different learning paradigms: those of science, spirituality, culture and the arts. Systems of education that value science above the arts or spirituality are destructive to the individual and community as they create an imbalanced view of the world and rob people of a diversity of perspectives and tools that they need to face complex challenges. An educational program should strive to address the mental, emotional, spiritual and physical needs of students and not focus too much on merely one dimension of life. This is especially important in communities that have experienced extreme marginalization (colonization, oppression) where healing and wellness must play a significant role in the learning process.
Modelling Change
A key ingredient to success in transformational education is the example of the educator. As people, naturally we do what we know and what we have experienced. In order to change our patterns of behavior we need to begin having fundamentally different experiences than what we have known. The educator must be able to assist in the creation of such experiences. To do this she must be capable of modelling what is being taught and through constant critical self-reflection strive to exemplify in every action empowering ideals.
Summary
Learning and education are indispensable to all community efforts for positive change. The job of an adult educator is to assist individuals, the community and its institutions to adopt a posture of learning. This begins with working with the experience of the student, fostering self-directed learning and follows as the teacher interacts with the student to challenge and assist her to new levels of learning. With humility at the centre of all learning efforts, dependency on “experts” can be replaced with volition and independent decision-making. The potential of the individual further unfolds as she applies her learning to service to the community. Attention to capacity building and cultivating a sense of personal ownership -in the process of learning and community building- deepens the experience and truly engages the student in taking an active role in the development of her life. Utilizing all systems of learning in the education process ensures balance of methods and helps cultivate the infinite and diverse capabilities of human potential. Ultimately the success of an educator rests on the degree to which she is able to model the change she is fostering.
Posted by Shabnam Tashakour at 05:04 PM | |
September 06, 2005
Process Facilitator Role
I've been thinking a lot about the roles on Agile Work projects. Here is a possible "mission statement" or definition for the Process Facilitator:
The Process Facilitator is a person who is both experienced with Agile Work and trained as a facilitator. The Process Facilitator acts as a coach to the team to monitor the process, foster the understanding of the Agile Work Axioms, the development of the Agile Work Disciplines and adherence to the Agile Work practices. The goal of the Process Facilitator is to assist a team to become "performing" so that they are able to actively and independently persue continuous learning and improvement.
Also Known As: Scrum Master, Coach, and previously referred to as the "Process Owner"
Never Spread Your Facilitator Butter too Thin
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 12:27 AM | |
August 25, 2005
The Role of the Process Owner
The following is an edited version of a post to the Scrum Development Yahoo! group made by Dave Barrett (CSM) (used by permission):
The ScrumMaster (Process Owner) role itself doesn't automatically imply any degree of authority, although at times it does help when you need a little clout to clear some impediments or to negotiate with other departments. More than that, the ScrumMaster role does carry a responsibility to provide some leadership to the team. Even a self-organizing team needs leadership!So I would say that it helps if the ScrumMaster has a little bit of
seniority over the rest of the team, it also helps if the ScrumMaster
approaches the role as a coach and leader, rather than as a supervisor.On paper it looks like the ScrumMaster only has a few tasks:
1. Chair the Scrums, and make sure they happen each day. (The self-organizing team's regular status meetings.)
2. Chair the Sprint (Iteration) Review and Planning meetings.
3. Produce the burndown chart. (An information radiator used to indicate the amount of work left in the product work item list and in the iteration work item list.)
4. Do the team's "paperwork" - publish the Sprint Backlog (product work item list) once it has been set and so on.
5. Clear impediments brought up during the Scrums.In reality, the ScumMaster needs to do a lot of other things. There's all of the leadership stuff, keep the team happy, productive and motivated. There's the political aspect, keeping other groups and
departments happy and out of the team's hair. As the in-house "expert" on Scrum, you need to referee on points of procedure and theory. Often you need to champion Scrum within the organization.Really, I don't see a huge difference between the roles of Project Manager and Scrum Master. Semantics mostly. Project Manager almost seems to imply a "command and control" approach, Scrum thrives best
without that. I wouldn't make a junior programmer a project manager, nor would I make him a Scrum Master.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 09:32 AM | |
August 18, 2005
Harvard Business Review Article
I highly recommend this article on Collaboration Rules. Great stuff in there about developing teams, developing organizations and how important communication and trust are to doing so. The article draws examples from and compares the open-source development and maintenance of the Linux kernal and the operation of the Toyota Production System.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 10:48 PM | |
Using Agile Work Practices to Develop a Seminar
I've been working on developing a Agile Work Seminar to introduce teams to agile work. I'm using some Agile Work practices to develop it.
Iterative Delivery and Adaptive Planning
The seminar is going through drafts. Each draft will actually be delivered to a team. The first time through all the material was done at a small software consulting company five days ago. As a result of feedback from the people who participated, a revision will be made to the seminar... and then it will be delivered again (probably the next time will be in early September). This process allows me to refine the contents and presentation of the material.
Over time, I will be able to use Adaptive Planning to modify the contents and qualities of the seminar as circumstances change.
Test-Driven Work
I have set up criteria for the presentation in the form of an outline and learning objectives. The outline describes the major topics that must be directly covered such as the Agile Axioms or Corporate Culture. I have also set up "soft goals" such as that the seminar must include theory, history, practice and criticism of Agile Work. My first iteration met the outline tests, but did not meet the soft tests explicitly. The next version will.
Appropriate Metrics
This is an easy one: the success of this project will be its acceptance in the marketplace by having teams willing to pay the price for this seminar and then recommending it to others.
The Other Practices
Because this is essentially a one-man job, the other practices such as Self-Organizing Team and Maximize Communication are not as applicable.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 08:32 AM | |
August 15, 2005
Trust and Small Groups
A while ago I posted the story of a student film project using agile practices to create a documentary. One interesting observation made by the instructor is that trust among the group developed in an interesting fashion.
At first, the group self-organized by try to work in groups of three. However, when plans were made to get together (for example to film an interview), often, one of the three people would cancel. Probably, that person considered two people to be enough to do the work.
After noticing this pattern, the group decided to perform work in pairs. This made the commitment to working much stronger and eventually led to a more trusting work relationship.
I have also observed this pattern in other situations. Pair programming, pair writing, pair designing, pair problem-solving... all of these behaviors seem to arise naturally in a self-organizing team.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 10:59 PM | |
August 11, 2005
Agile Work Roles
There are three simple roles in Agile Work. All other roles, titles, duties or responsibilities are not part of Agile Work.
The Process Facilitator is responsible for the process used by the team. Normally, the Process Facilitator role is held by a single person who does not have any other duties.
- Keeps the team on-track by gently reminding the team of the process rules, e.g. having a completed chunk of work at the end of the iteration
- Facilitates process improvements, usually by doing a process reflection between iterations
- Coaches and instructs the team and individuals on the Agile Work axioms, disciplines, practices and how to apply them
- Works closely with the Product Owner to ensure that the quality Work Item List is maintained
- Focus on the "Clear the Path" practice of removing obstacles
Here is a short statement on the Process Facilitator Role. And here is a Process Facilitator Job Description.
The Product Owner is responsible for working with stakeholders to develop the Work Item List and understanding, maintaining and prioritizing it. Normally, the Product Owner role is held by a single person who does not have any other duties.
- Responsible for working with the team when the team has questions about items in the Work Item List
- Makes on-demand/immediate decisions about priority and meaning of items in the Work Item List
Here is a short set of links and another description of the Product Owner Role.
The Team Members are responsible for organizing and executing the work they have committed to doing.
- Extend themselves beyond their field of specialization
- Volunteer for tasks to complete the work (no one on the team or outside the team assigns tasks)
- Responsible as a team for determining how to complete work and then completing it
This new set of roles, along with other agile practices and principles, often results in a huge shift in responsibility. Decision-making and accountability is transferred from managers to the team. This change can be very difficult for managers who are accustomed to direction, delegation, control. Instead, managers must become facilitators and enablers.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 10:03 PM | |
August 10, 2005
Optimizing a Team Room
Some less-obvious hints for creating a team room that promotes collaboration and effective communication.
- don't underestimate the importance of plants and natural light for overall morale and health
- encourage the team both individually and as a group to personalize the team space: kid's art, photos, trinkets, food, special chairs/ergonomic stuff
- encouraging a playful atmosphere if your group is quiet and shy is easier in a bullpen and this in turn leads to better morale
- encourage the team to notice traffic patterns (both physical and communication) and optimize the space to account for these patterns
- play games in the team room during lunch breaks or after-hours and have the results of the games as part of the visual environment
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 03:13 PM | |
August 09, 2005
The Transparent Society
The Transparent Society, an essay by David Brin is an excellent statement about the possibilities and challenges that technology presents to us as a society. What is interesting about this paper is that it presents a possible society that is very similar to some of the goals in establishing an agile environment: open communication, accountability, free access to information and status, and close collaboration.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:58 PM | |
August 06, 2005
Generalizing Specialists
The term "generalizing specialists" has come to mean an individual who has a particular area of deep expertise but also has experience in a large number of other areas that may not be directly related to their core area. This type of person typically has strong talent in their specialty but also has a generally strong talent for learning new skills and ideas quickly. The origin of the term seems to be in the software industry referring to programmers who can do other software-development related tasks.
In self-organizing teams, a generalizing specialist is a more valuable team member than a pure specialist. The pure specialist often has an attitude that they should not need to do work outside their specialty. This can be destructive to the team's morale. On the other hand, the generalizing specialist is willing and able to learn new skills - to stretch as the needs of the team change. And since change is natural, this is an essential attitude for team members.
However, we are usually trained, and strongly encouraged to have a deep specialty. This approach to education and training is a natural consequence to the typical organizational model for work and society. Therefore, if a team is converting to agile work methods, people need to be coached to stretch themselves and learn new things. For some people, particularly those who already have multiple hobbies outside work, this is an easy transition to make. For others, it is a very difficult transition. In some extreme cases, this may call for the removal of someone from the team. (Note: I have never seen this myself and I only mention it with great reservation. I strongly feel that only those who could be called "ill" will be so incapable of changing their way of working. For other recalcitrants, it is usually a matter of motivation.)
Other terms that are similar to "generalizing specialist" include "craftsperson", "renaissance man", and "polymath".
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 08:05 PM | |
August 04, 2005
Just In Case You Haven't Seen It Yet
There is a fantastic article about software productivity: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html. I love Joel's writing style, and this article in particular has important lessons for us all, regardless of our profession: find what you can be the best at, and do that. Interestingly enough this is part of the message of the book Good to Great but applied to a whole corporation. It also applies in the context of self-organizing teams: each individual should be able to find/learn in what way they can best contribute and do that more than they do other stuff.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:41 AM | |
August 01, 2005
Broadcast Mode Communication
The book "The Mythical Man-Month"* discusses some of the reasons that larger teams are inefficient. The main concern is with the number of possible connections between team members. If you have two team members, there's only one channel of communication. However, if you have n team members, then you have n(n-1)/2 channels... which grows quickly (order n^2) as n becomes larger. If one is required to work with a large team, say more than 10 to 12 people, it becomes imperative to find ways to improve communication efficiency.
One of the best ways to do this is to use broadcast mode communications. Information radiators are a simple broadcast mode tool. In a subtler way, having the team co-located** also takes advantage of broadcast mode communication: if everyone can overhear all the conversations that are going on in a room, then people can tune in when they hear something of relevance.
It is important to note that there are several other forms of broadcast communication that are useful in certain circumstances: e-mail, blogs with RSS or Atom feeds, analog radio, television (if you can think of others, please let me know in the comments). These tend to be more useful for very large communities. Radio and television have severe limits: they are not easily used in a communal fashion.
Some forms of communication may seem to be broadcast, but in fact are not. A simple web site is not because it requires that people poll it to see if it has been updated. Conference calls are marginally broadcast in that while they are occuring, everyone participating hears everyone else. However, a conference call requires active synchronized attention on the part of all the participants.
The subject of media and communication is a vast one. Some of the best writers include Marshall McLuhan and Gregory Bateson. However, there are many many more.
*Highly recommended!
**A search on dictionary.com for collocation indicates that three spellings are all correct: collocate, colocate, and co-locate, this latter spelling being the most common on the web.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:18 AM | |
July 28, 2005
Applicability Matrix Tool for Colocated Team
Notes:
1. Individuals are automatically co-located with themselves.
2. Teams can greatly increase the effectiveness and efficiency of their communication by working in a shared space. For rote and adaptive work, sharing a space is highly recommended, but not always essential. Some teams have found mechanisms for working effectively in a distributed fashion. In these circumstances a great deal of effort is put into frequent use of rich communication channels. In purely creative and innovative work, it is very difficult to do the work without co-location. Risks of misunderstandings or waste due to handoffs increase a great deal if co-location is not used in these circumstances.
3. In community work, co-location is difficult in general due to the large numbers of people involved. A “command centre” open to all members of the community is usually as close as it is possible to come to co-location. With rote work, it is not necessary to even attempt co-location. Adaptive and creative work benefit greatly by increased communication so some efforts to co-locate may be worth the effort, but care should be taken in determining the return on investment.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:46 PM | |
July 25, 2005
Applicability Matrix Tool for Iterative Delivery
Notes:
1. Iterative Delivery is a specific way of managing queues of work. As such, rote work is generally better served by other applications of queuing theory.
2. There is one universal condition under which iterative delivery is awkward, if not inadvisable. If one's horizon of predictability is longer than the size of a work package by some substantial amount (e.g. 2:1 ratio), it can be more natural to use queuing theory and a pull system to flow work through the team. The actual ratio between the horizon of predictability and work package size that is used to switch over to a queue system must be determined empirically in your own circumstances. This empirical analysis can be done using a regular process reflection meeting.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 03:14 PM | |
July 23, 2005
Book Review - "The Tipping Point"
Overview
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference is a book that is about the way ideas, things and behaviors go from obscurity to ubiquity in a very short period. The basic model is that of an epidemic in which three types of factors contribute to quick dissemination: 1) the network of people involved including "connectors", "mavens" or respected experts, and "salesmen", 2) the ability of that which is spreading to stick around, the "stickiness factor", and 3) the importance of small physical, mental and social factors, in creating a conducive environment. The Author, Malcolm Gladwell, includes some excerpts on his web site.
- Introduction
- One: The Three Rules of Epidemics
- Two: The Law of the Few: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen
- Three: The Stickiness Factor: Sesame Street, Blue's Clues, and the Educational Virus
- Four: The Power of Context (Part One): Bernie Goetz and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime
- Five: The Power of Context (Part Two): The Magic Number One Hundred and Fifty
- Six: Case Study: Rumors, Sneakers, and the Power of Translation
- Seven: Case Study: Suicide, Smoking, and the Search for the Unsticky Cigarette
- Eight: Conclusion: Focus, Test, and Believe
- Afterword: Tipping Point Lessons from the Real World
- Endnotes
- Acknowledgements
- Index
Assessment
This is a fascinating book, well written. Some of the anecdotes and "case studies" are mind-blowing. However, there is a bit of weakness in parts. In particular, the Afterword and the sections on The Power of Context are weakly put together - ideas do not flow well, or are too stream-of-consciousness. As well, the weight of evidence, while strong, is not totally convincing. That said, there are a couple of really fabulous stories.
One story that stands out is the study related to the "Good Samaritan". In brief, researchers set up an experiment to test what factors influenced a person's behavior when presented with someone obviously in need of help. At a seminary, the researchers had students prepare and deliver a brief talk on some topic. One of the topics given randomly to some of the students was the story of the Good Samaritan. The students were to take a short amount of time to prepare their talk and then immediately go to another building to deliver it. Planted by the researchers along the path to the second building was an actor made up to appear in a great deal of physical distress. As each student was sent out the door, the researchers would breifly comment either that the student was running a little early, or that they were late and needed to hurry to deliver their talk. The results were astounding: of those students who were told that they were late 90% ignored the person in distress regardless of the topic of their presentation, while 63% those with a few minutes to spare stopped to help (pages 163-165).
Relevance
There are several ways in which this book is relevent to those of us practicing Agile Work and related methods. Most obviously, the ideas in The Tipping Point suggest some lines of action we can take to promote Agile: finding the connectors, mavens and salespeople, working to make Agile sticky, and making the environment hospitible to the spread of Agile. This applies both inside organizations and in the world at large.
In my own opinion, the drafters of the Agile Software Manifesto, either by design or otherwise, came up with an incredibly sticky term: Agile.
Finally, when coaching a team to adopt agile practices, it may be most important to focus on the Power of Context. Small suggestions, small physical changes, body language, all can have a large influence on the success or failure of an agile adoption. If a coach (Scrummaster/Team Lead/etc.) can find the connectors, mavens and salespeople in the sphere of influence of the team, and convince those people of the efficacy of Agile, then convincing the team will become that much easier.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 09:59 AM | |
July 22, 2005
Applicability Matrix Tool for Self-Steering Team
Notes:
1. Self-Steering may be difficult to implement in some cultural circumstances. An organization that is very comfortable with a command-and-control system can benefit from self-steering teams, but the effort to shift the culture should be realistically assessed. An excellent reference for corporate culture change is "The Corporate Culture Survival Guide" by Edgar H. Schein.
2. Self-Steering in a rote work environment boils down to teams empowered to learn how to do the rote work as effectively as possible. This learning process must include the power to change the process with the goal of doing the work faster or with fewer defects. For example, in a manufacturing environment, this means people being able to identify problems and make improvements to the manufacturing process. In a rote work environment, not all changes the team makes will be improvements, but they must be accepted. A mechanism for measuring the result of changes must be in place so that the team can assess the effect of their changes, and make corrections as appropriate.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 06:38 PM | |
July 21, 2005
Waste and Value: Basic Lean Concepts
In assessing a process, it is important to understand what activities in the process actually add value to the end result. All other activities are wasteful.
CVA (Customer Value Added - or just VA for Value Added): adding form fit or function to a product or service, an activity that the customer would be willing to pay for in isolation if they knew it was being done – e.g. Creating code, implementing functionality.
BVA (Business Value Added - non-negotiable waste): an activity that is required to operate the business but the customer is unwilling to pay for – e.g. Budget tracking, code documentation.
NVA (Non-Value Added): an activity that is not required by the business nor is the customer willing to pay for – e.g. Waiting for resource allocation, requirements documents.
In the book Lean Six Sigma : Combining Six Sigma Quality with Lean Production Speed
(p 52-53)
- Customer Value-Added (CVA) Questions:
- Does the task add a form or feature to the product or service?
- Does the task enable a competitive advantage (reduce price, faster delivery, fewer defects)?
- Would the customer be willing to pay extra or prefer us over the competition if he or she know we were doing this task?
- Business Value-Added (BVA) Questions:
In addition to customer value-added activities, the business may require you to perform some functions that add no value from the customer's perspective.Recognize that these activities are really non-value-added but you are currently forced to perform them. You need to try to eliminate or at least reduce their cost.
- Is this task required by law or regulation?
- Does this task reduce the financial risk of the owner(s)?
- Does this task support financial reporting requirements?
- Would the process break down if this task were removed?
- Non-Value-Added (NVA) Questions:
- Does the task include any of the following activities: counting, handling, inspecting, transporting, moving, delaying, storing, all rework loops, expediting, multiple signatures?
- ...
Links:
Its About Time - an article about the importance of time in lean and value.
Reducing NVA Office Work - applying lean in an office environment.
Lean Six Sigma on the Electronic Business - some lean six sigma success stories.
Inventory is Ignorance - reasons that lean is so hard to do.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 04:22 PM | |
July 19, 2005
Applicability Matrix Tool for Adaptive Planning
Notes:
1. For rote work, it is rare to need an Adaptive Planning style prioritized backlog. Rather, simple queues tend to be sufficient. The adaptive backlog is designed to allow for reprioritization of work as more is learned about the work itself. With rote work most of the learning is involved with improving the process of creating the work and reducing defects rather than changing the work product itself.
2. Individuals can benefit from using a backlog to organize their work, keep a history, and track progress. However, it may be sufficient to keep a simpler to-do list. The adaptive planning practice allows an individual to gain the benefit of explicit collaboration points with stakeholders.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 10:39 PM | |
July 18, 2005
Sociometry and Team Building
I was recently introduced to the term "sociometry". As it turns out, my introduction to it was a little mis-defined. If you follow the link, you will find that sociometry is basically a measurement of relationships between people. What I was introduced to has some aspects of sociometry in it. I tried it out on a team that I am coaching. Here is what we did:
Team Building
1. If the members of the team have not worked closely together previously, start with introductions, name and role/experience.
2. Go around the group again, this time each person describes something about themselves that the others likely do not know. It could be something personal, like a hobby, or it could be something professional, like a previous career. The idea here is for everyone to learn something new about everyone. This usually can end up with exclamations of suprise, laughs, and general fun for the group.
3. Simple self-organizing starts with a group exercise of sociometry. The people in the team organize themselves into a line based on length of time they have been involved with the current organization/workplace/community/association. This is a fairly easy exercise since it is an easily quantifiable measure. Sometimes interesting things come up like that everyone has "been there" for a long long time, or that everyone is really new.
4. The team then does another sociometric self-organizing exercise. Here, each individual asks themselves what proportion of the creative or innovative capacity is actually put into use in their current role. How much opportunity is there to be creative? Again, the group organizes itself into a line from least creativity to most creativity. Note: this is not a self-assessment of how creative one is, just how much of one's creativity is in use! After the group gets lined up, it is important for the facilitator to get people to describe why they placed themselves in their location and to encourage discussion around creativity in their work.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:09 AM | |
July 17, 2005
A Nice Little Intervention
Esther Derby wrote about a great, incredibly obvious, but sometimes missed never-the-less, intervention for helping teams make a decision: write the options down (20050724: corrected link).
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 02:42 PM | |
July 16, 2005
Applicability Matrix Tool for Information Radiators
Notes:
For individuals, the use of Information Radiators is usually not applicable in rote work since the individual can keep track of status of such work easily. However, for adaptive and creative work, an information radiator can be quite useful as a constant reminder of what is happening or for organizing work to be done. A cork board for the status of tasks or for categorizing ideas can be a simple information radiator used by an individual. A whiteboard can be used for free-form notes.
For teams, information radiators are ideal for easily maintaining broadcast communication with team members. A team is usually small enough that an information radiator can be maintained by individuals making updates as appropriate. Project status of tasks, issues parking lots, and group calendars are examples of information radiators used by teams.
For a community, the difficulty of using an information radiator comes in the logistics. With a large number of people performing work, possibly never all coming together at the same time, the broadcast nature of information radiators can be severly curtailed. It is difficult to efficiently represent information that is relevent to the whole communit in a way that can be easily accessed and easily understood at a glance. As well, it is difficult to have community members directly and (relatively) equally participate. That said, there are some exceptions. The most obvious one is the various wikis that are maintained by communities... and the largest of these is Wikipedia.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 06:45 PM | |
May 15, 2005
Truck Factor
Truck Factor (definition): "The number of people on your team who have to be hit with a truck before the project is in serious trouble"
Clearly "hit by a truck" is an extreme thought however you could easily substitute "take vacation at the same time" to get the same idea. If any part of your project has a truck factor of one then you are in a particularly fragile situation. If that one person leaves or is unable to work on the project, you will suffer the consequences.
Over time, anyone can be replaced. Truck factor is an indication of how expensive it will be to replace specific people.
In an ideal situation, everyone on the team will know all parts of the system so that the loss of any one person would have minimal impact. In reality, many projects rely on one or more "heros" who are the only one who understand certain critical parts of the system. When these heros leave (and you should assume they will), you must be prepared to recover.
If you have a hero on your team, the best thing you can do is reassign that person to a different part of the system. This will allow the replacement to ramp up while the hero is still available for support. If you wait until the hero has left then the ramp-up will be significantly more expensive.
An added benefit to reassigning the hero is that this person will now have the opportunity to work on something different. Since the hero's tend to be the most technically competent members of the team, this will usually mean that the new area will improve once the hero has worked on it for a while.
Truck factor is a quick metric that will highlight potential problems in your project. Having hero's on your team can be very beneficial but only if you don't become dependant on them. Truck factor is one metric that will highlight your dependencies.
Cross posted from Mike Bowler's Weblog
Posted by Michael Bowler at 06:42 PM | |
May 11, 2005
Appropriate Metrics
At the Advanced ScrumMaster Training, Ken Schwaber presented a substantial amount of thinking about metrics used with Scrum. The main driver for thinking about metrics has come from implementing Scrum in enterprise situations. Management expects metrics to be used in order to provide visibility into the progress of the Scrum implementation.
While this driver has some legitimacy, there are three main concerns to prescribing metrics for use with Scrum.
1. Planned/Engineering Approach - metrics such as "ideal person days" smell like the bad old way of treating people as resources that can be swapped in and out of a project.
2. Normative vs. Empirical - metrics are often used to set a standard for reasons such as prediction, and expectation. Scrum is about discovery and improvement not prediction and planning.
3. Is Something in Scrum not Working? Is adoption being hindered? Are too many Scrum implementations failing? Are metrics a critical success factor?
Keep these concerns in mind while considerig the uses of metrics.
What are Metrics for?
1. Self-Evaluation over Time - use a metric to track the progress of a group. A measurement is taken at a certain point in time, and then taken repeatedly over intervals. Example: the velocity at which a team completes work can be used to identify problems and opportunities for a team.
2. Control - use a metric to legislate the qualities of some process or attribute of work. A goal or standard is set for a measurement. The size of a queue of projects waiting to be worked upon by a team can be controlled in order to limit the size of work in progress and therefore project inventory.
3. Prediction - use a metric with values collected over time in order to predict future values of that metric. By implication, the metric is used to predict the performance of a system. The number of additional tasks discovered inside an iteration can be tracked and used to determine future expectations on extra tasks discovered.
4. Performance Measurement - use a metric in order to determine rewards and/or punishments and/or adjustments to behavior. An individual on a team may be evaluated based on their productivity as measured by lines of code completed and rewarded or penalized on that basis (not recommended!).
5. Behavior Motivation - use a metric to guide behavior by setting a context for thinking, action and reflection. Focus on an important measure in order to draw attention to improving the attribute with which the metric is associated. Measuring the time elapsed from conception of a project idea to the time it actually delivers valuable results can draw attention to improving speed.
The Lesson from Good to Great
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins discusses the attributes and behavior that are common and unique to companies that have gone from a long history of mediocre results to a long run of great results. One identified aspect is referred to as the "Hedgehog Principle". In this principle, three questions are answered: "what can we be the best in the world at?", "what can we be passionate about?", "what is my one economic driver?"
The economic driver is a metric. For example, at Walgreens, their driver is profit per customer visit. Other large institutions have other metrics. But all good to great companies have a single economic driver metric that guides all their decision making.
See also: A Metric Leading to Success.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 05:21 PM | |
May 10, 2005
Steps in Making a Decision
In her workshop "Advanced Scrum: Collaboration Skills for Scrum Teams", Esther Derby includes a brief discussion on the five parts of a decision.
1. Define the Problem
2. Establish Focus and Boundaries
3. Identify Options
4. Choose Among Options
5. Implement
At each step, it is instructive to examine who is "responsible" or involved. In an agile team where team empowerment and self-organization are considered critical success factors, the answer to "who?" fore each step should usually be "the team".
There are however, some situations where decisions are outside the realm of a team's empowerment. As well, some decisions are so trivial that it is wasteful to have the whole team involved. In these trivial decisions, usually another person can take responsibility for all the steps of a decision as a service to the team.
Over time, a team and the organization in which a team operates can evolve a set of standards that describe who acts in each step of a decision under what circumstances.
Many thinking tools described by Edward de Bono in his various books (such as Six Thinking Hats, Lateral Thinking : Creativity Step by Step (Perennial Library), Textbook of Wisdom etc.) can be used at various steps in the decision making process.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:48 PM | |
Empower the Team
Empowerment is the ability of a team to make decisions about how to do their work and execute on those decisions without outside interference. If a team is empowered, then it will be more capable of responding to change, and it will be able to focus on manifesting the members' creative potential. Empowerment comes from a combination of several factors:
1. members of the team have a deep sense of self-worth that includes nobility, and contribution to the progress of humanity
2. tacit or explicit authority and responsibility for results as a team and as individuals
3. a team environment which is honest, trusting and allows for mistakes
4. the absence of personal attacks against individuals on the team and in particular a total lack of gossip and backbiting
There are several ways that team members will demonstrate their empowerment. People will derive joy from their work. Team members will be dedicated to the work and the team. Individuals on the team will frequently take individual initiative to accomplish tasks, share insights, and develop improvements. Spontaneous leadership will become common. Individuals will step out of comfort zones or areas of specialization in order to assist the team.
Empowering a team is a process that can sometimes take a great deal of time and effort. In order to start on this process, the team members should carefully listen to each other and ask many questions. More mature individuals should lead and teach by example. And all the team members can start to question and challenge the rules and procedures of an environment that are preventing effective work. If the team is in an organizational environment where team members have management to report to, then management must be aware of this opportunity for empowerment and support it.
An empowered team can gradually understand and internalize the agile work principles (People are Creators, Change is Constant, Perception mediates Reality). By internalizing these principles, a team can move beyond specific agile work practices and become a high performing team setting their own work practices.
Jeff Sutherland has a very brief blurb about the progress of teams as they evolve in their use of Scrum.
Future entries here will discuss the methods of creating empowered teams.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:04 PM | |
May 04, 2005
Can dying plan-based projects be recussitated?
We've all seen this. A one-year project in its 13th month, and the Project Manager has been reporting 80% of the tasks at 90% and has been doing so for the last 120 days. There's no end in sight, and the customer is leaking cash every day the product fails to go into production. What can be done? Agile project management principles can help this all-too-frequent scenario.
First, let's look at how this situation comes about. In a typical task-oriented project plan, one is required to decompose the tasks down to a fairly reasonable degree of specificity. The tasks are organized around a dependency graph, estimated, resources are assigned, and the schedule is calculated and/or nudged. (Well, usually the initial estimates don't match the customer's expectation and deadlines, so there's a revision step here where estimates are shortened) But how does change get reflected? If a PM is doing an excellent (if frustrating) job, they are constantly updating the schedule, the plan, and re-conceiving the tasks as new information comes to him.
More often than not, however, this gets so messy and unwieldly that the PM holds fast, and starts to estimate completion based not on a proper decomposition and a completion of each of these tasks, but based on his guess, or his workers' guesses. Complexity of the tasks is hidden, and becomes often quite invisible. Tasks at 80% which suddenly need to be re-decomposed and re-conceived do not, in the main, get moved back down to 40% after certain roadblocks are discovered.
The result? The customer is increasingly afraid, trust between delivery staff and client (and management) are eroded, pressure is increased, mistakes under pressure become more frequent, less sleep is had by all, and 90% complete becomes an asymtote, rather than a milestone.
Now what is to be done with such a project? How can Agile project management approaches help this situation? We can examine this by playing out such a scenario...
We can start by identifying a few key practices of Agile project management, and examine their benefits to the business client.
Timeboxing and Iteration
The first thing we can talk about to the fearful client is timeboxing. Timeboxing caps his investment into small chunks. We look at it and say, OK, you're in deep trouble, but you don't know how deep your trouble is. By timeboxing into a very short timeframe, and making a large project into many little short projects, we can get more visibility into the process - we can see things as they are, rather than how they're reported on a project plan. Speaking of visibility...
Daily Meetings and Iteration Review
Part of the value of iteration and timeboxing is increased visibility, so we really need to have a mechanism for visibility. Already distrustful of project plans, we can tell the client, "Don't believe the paperwork, let's look at what's actually built. At the end of each iteration, we'll review the current situation, and demonstrate existing functionality." His eyes perk up. "Wah?" he asks incredulously? What do you mean? So we say, "we don't want you to guess at how ready this thing is. We'll show you. That way, you can decide if it's ready enough. ...Or your product marketing people, if you prefer. It's up to you, but you get to see it, touch it, and sense for yourself how ready it is, and you won't have development managers and developers waving their hands pretending it's further than it is."
"Oh wierd," says he. "So what are these daily meetings?"
We tell him that the daily meetings have several purposes. Only project members get to speak, and they report on what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, and what, if anything, is blocking their path. No one else gets to speak, but others who are not on the team itself can listen in. This way, the whole project team is clearly aware of how they're working, what's left to do, and what each other are doing.
"Why do they need this? They have the plan." "True," we reply, "but how often do you have two people who need something, and both do it because they don't know that someone else already did it. With your current project delays, do you want any duplication of effort? Just by way of example?"
Feature Lists, not Task Lists
We also talk to him about working from feature lists, not task lists. The team will be implementing features, and fulfilling requirements. How they do it is up to them. "Why should I care," he'll ask. "You don't," we reply, except to assure him that if people are working against features, then they can choose to re-order their tasks in such a way as to most quickly get to the goal. No wasted effort, we tell him. Sounds good to him.
Customer-Prioritized Features
What's more, we assure him, we will be first working on the highest-priority features. What "needs" to get to market. Everything else slides down the list. Even if the wonderful plan we all love had it earlier. High-value features (as prioritized by the client) and their necessary dependencies. That's it.
"So no features that I didn't ask for?" He looks hopeful.
"That's right," we reassure him, "and you can change your mind."
He faints.
Smelling salts are brought.
"What do you mean, 'I can change my mind?'" he asks.
"If, when we get to the iteration review, and you test drive the thing, Acme corporation has come up with the killer feature that you absolutely must have or the whole thing is useless, you put it at the top priority on the list we use to drive the next iteration."
"And no one will complain that it's out of scope?" he marvels?
"If you put it at the top of the list, it is the scope for the next iteration. We are at your service," we comfort him.
"So when will this be finished?" he asks us desperately.
"When you say it's ready," we reply. He boggles. What does that mean, he thinks.
"What does that mean," he asks.
"It means that we will tie it off, when you think it has enough juice to go to market. If, after you re-prioritize what's left, you find that it's 'ready enough', then we'll roll with it, take a couple of weeks to steady it and ship it, and then we can pick up your next-highest priority things, or anything new you want in it." He looks near fainting again. "And we stop when you feel that spending money on it is no longer bringing you enough value, ideally because we've done all the high-value stuff already, and we're working on less valueable stuff."
"So I have discretion to pull the plug whenever I want to?"
"Yep."
"Please help me..."
Conclusion
This little scenario is fictitous, but in the end, it's consistent with the experiences of many Agile practitioners (particularly Scrum) that I have spoken with. We've only covered a small sampling of Agile practices that may help a project in crisis. Others may help quality, may improve developer productivity - but the above can help a key client or stakeholder begin to see a light at the end of the tunnel. While many people cannot get their heads around it, they may be willing to try new things when they're in enough pain with the existing process.
And it can turn a project failure into an ever-increasing success, because success is defined monthly, re-defined at the desires of the business client, and executed in bite-sized chunks that are digestible and estimable.
Just don't forget that people have the strangest reactions to things that break their expectations... so make sure to bring the smelling salts...
Posted by Christian Gruber at 09:08 PM | | | TrackBack
April 30, 2005
Pair Programming in Software Development
Pair programming appears to be the most controversial of all the Extreme Programming (XP) practices. It invokes such a violent emotional response in some people that they quickly dismiss all of XP just because of this one practice.
Let me start by saying that I've done pair programming on software development teams and it has worked really well for me. I freely admit that it doesn't work for everyone or in every situation however when it does work, it is the most effective form of peer review that I've ever used.
Laurie Williams of North Carolina State University has done extensive research into pair programming and has published her findings at PairProgramming.com. She has also written the book Pair Programming Illuminated with Robert Kessler. If you are interested in seeing actual research into this practice then I'd strongly recommend reading Laurie's work.
Lets look at why this practice is so controversial.
The benefits of pair programming are significant. Overall development time is reduced and quality is higher. Additionally, teams doing pair programming tend to have more fun than teams working individually. People who have done pair programming when it worked well are strong advocates for the practice as they've seen first hand what is possible.
The biggest downside to pair programming is that it can push people well outside their comfort zones. I have often heard comments like "if they make me pair, I'll quit". This is an understandable fear reaction to something that is outside our comfort zone. Pair programming cannot be effectively mandated for exactly this reason. If the team is reacting out of fear then you won't get any of the benefits of the pairing.
Another downside to pair programming that doesn't get discussed as often is that it is tiring work. After a day of pairing, the team is usually exhausted.
I've also seen problems where there is a personality clash between programmers. I coached one team where I had two otherwise excellent programmers who couldn't be paired with each other because of a personality clash. Either one could pair with anyone else on the team but they couldn't be put together.
One common myth about pair programming is that it will take twice as long to complete a certain amount of functionality. In my experience (and the research backs this up), a pair will take longer to write the initial code but will spend less time debugging as the code will have significantly fewer defects. When the total developer time is measured, it actually turns out that pairs are more effective than individuals.
To be perfectly honest, I didn't believe this claim myself until I actually tried it. Now I've seen the results first hand.
One nice side effect of pairing is that you are continually cross training the team. Over time, everyone will learn all parts of the application and therefore the team will be less susceptible to staffing changes.
If your team is open to the idea of pair programming then you can get some significant benefits from this practice. Be aware however, that mandating the use of pair programming can be disastrous if the team is not receptive.