The fact that agile methods increase return on investment, accelerate learning, increase stakeholder satisfaction, and enable better control of work are all an interesting result of this final benefit: responding to change.
We wouldn’t do agile if we didn’t think it was better in some way. More and more, I am seeing the adoption of agile methods being driven by business management (rather then engineering). There is a clear reason for this: agile methods offer the possibility of early return on investment compared to other methods of working. This benefit is only one of five essential benefits of agile, but it is one of the most practical and easiest to measure. Therefore it is important to clearly understand how agile methods can deliver this benefit… and how they can fail to do so!
Okay, this is only marginally related to agile, but I thought it was interesting nevertheless: How to Write a Detailed Strategic Plan. The main connection to Agile Work, is that you need to have a clear performance goal in mind towards which you are working. This may be a great way to clarify your thoughts about such a goal.
My first iteration using Agile Work for my business development has come to a close. Here is what I did for a “demo” and retrospective.
Wednesday is nearly done and I’m looking at my list of tasks and cringing! I’ve only done a few out of the forty for this week. What’s going on?!
Last night I was thinking more about the analogy of technical debt. In this analogy, design and quality flaws in a team’s work become a “debt” that must eventually be paid back. This analogy is fantastic because it can be taken just a little bit further to understand just how bad defects are…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
I have written previously about the tendency we have to limit future learning based on previous learning. This tendency has aptly been termed by Mezirow as the central learning problem of adulthood: “that we fail to notice that failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.” In Transformative Learning literature a central method advocated for overcoming this learning problem is critical reflection. Critical reflection is the act of becoming conscious of our beliefs and assumptions (Where do they come from? Are they valid? What are their limitations? etc.) and either expanding, validating or discarding them.
Stephen Brookfield has written extensively about critical reflection and the following is a brief summary of a part of a chapter he wrote in a text on adult and continuing education entitled “The Concept of Critically Reflective Practice.”
Brookfield outlines Four Traditions of Criticality found in different fields:
Ideology critique
It is based on a premise that uncritically accepted and unjust dominant ideologies are embedded in everyday situation and practices. The purpose of ideology critique is to examine these assumptions in order to effect change at the social and institutional level. An example of this kind of approach to learning is found in the work of American popular educator Myles Horton. As the founder of Highlander Folk School, during the civil rights movement he started literacy program for African Americans. Study groups would learn to read while engaging in ideology critique in their own lives and communities using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a the text.
Psychoanalytic and psycho therapeutically inclined critique
These are traditions that work on identifying and reappraising limitations created through childhood traumas. This tradition advocates individual and group therapy for personal learning and development for the purpose of integration of all aspects of self.
Analytic philosophy and logic
This is the tradition that for most is closely associated to critical reflection. Here critical reflection means to recognize logical fallacies and see the difference between bias and fact and opinion and evidence, and become effective at using different forms of reasoning.
Pragmatic Constructivism
This tradition is based on the premise that reality is perceived, that is, we construct our own meaning out of experiences. The focus here is how people interpret their experience v.s. universal and recognizable truths. There is also a strong emphasis on creating new realities together.
Brookfield proposes that to engage in reflection is not the same as engaging in critical reflection. His understanding of critical reflection is centered on ideology critique rooted in the pragmatic constructivist approach. Renowned Brazilian educator Paulo Friere speaks of a similar process by which adults “achieve a deepening awareness of both the sociocultural reality which shapes their lives and… their capacity to transform that reality through action.” Ideology critique is rarely used in the work place. For the most part a culture of conformity and obedience is promoted by organizations.
Brookfield presents a picture of what the process may look like: “The adult educator’s task is that of helping people articulate their experience in dialogic circles and then encouraging them to review this through the multiple lenses provided by colleagues in the circle. On the basis of these collaborative critical reflections on experience adults reenter the work to take critically informed actions that are then brought back to the circle for further critical analysis.”
To engage in collaborative critical reflection based on a rhythm of action and reflection is not only a process of building collective knowledge and consensus, but also strong foundations for both trans formative learning in the work place and thriving self-organized teams. It is also a way to discover appropriate forms of metrics because it helps people apply multiple lenses of analysis to their work.
Critical reflection should be taught to teams through modeling. For example the coach disclosing his/her won process of critical reflection. Critical reflection should no be associated with self berating and putting others down or the culture of “telling it like it is” without regard for others.
Try the list of questions in the extended text to get a sense of how your work as an Agile practitioner (or whatever work you do) can be enhanced by critical reflection.
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.