Agile Advice - Working With Agile Methods (Scrum, XP, Lean)

All credit for this is due to Mary Poppendieck as this is entirely cribbed from her Agile2007 talk on agile leadership.

A man walks into a quarry and sees three people with pickaxes. He walks up to the first one and asks, “What are you doing?” The first quarry worker irritably replies, “I’m cutting stone, what does it look like? I cut stone today, I cut stone yesterday, and I will cut stone tomorrow!” The man asks the same of the second person who replies, “I’m making a living for my family.” The man turns to the third person and asks him, “so what are you doing here?” The third worker looks up for a moment, looks back at the man with a proud expression and says, “I’m building a Cathedral!”

The moral of the parable is likely clear, but it bears applying to organizational dynamics. Basically, consider that everyone gets annoyed with aspects of their jobs. The question is one of response. Basically, if a person is annoyed with his job, does he:

• Complain? He is probably a stonecutter.
• Ignore it? He is probably a paycheque earner.
• Fix it? He is a cathedral builder.

Cathedral builders are absolutely critical to a healthy organization. They push the organization towards a vision, often propagating the high-level vision throughout all levels of the organization. Unfortunately, these are also people who annoy the stonecutters and paycheque earners, because they won’t participate in the complaints, and they agitate for changes which make it hard to ignore things and just “do the job.” But your success will rely on them… find them, shelter them, and grow them. And whatever you do, don’t “promote” them into positions where they aren’t effective. Empower them, and if you need to add salary and title that’s fine, but let them find their own area of maximal contribution. Guaranteed you, Mr. business owner, aren’t smart enough to see what that is.

Organizations that fail to see this remain mediocre or failing organizations. Organizations that find ways of harnessing their workforce and coaxing people into the next level of engagement, succeed.

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This might be impossible, but I was thinking that it would be cool to have a single reference of all the possible agile practices.  Obviously, since “agile” is not a single defined method, we must take the word “comprehensive” with a bit of humor (or a grain of salt).  I’ve attached a spreadsheet that represents my first draft (it’s in OpenOffice.org format so that you don’t have to worry about me spreading viruses - if you want it in MS Office format, email me at mishkin@berteigconsulting.com).  I’ve split the practices up into several sections including: “Agile Skeleton”, “Common Practices”, “Basic Scrum Practices”, “Optional Scrum Practices”, “Extreme Programming Practices” and “Lean Practices”.  I’ve stopped there because I’m not an expert on other agile methods such as Crystal, Agile Unified Process or Feature Driven Development.  I imagine that this list will be useful for teams to do self-assessment and to think about ways they might improve.  Perhaps it could be used in a retrospective setting.  Berteig Consulting coaches use something similar to this to assess the effectiveness of their engagement with clients.  If you think of practices I’ve missed or other potential uses for a list like this, let me know in the comments.  My intention is to convert this to a wiki and make it available under a Creative Commons license once it is a little more refined.

Agile Practices List (OpenOffice format - 68KB)

There was an interesting discussion on the LeanAgileScrum Yahoo Group early in December regarding the difference between flow (lean) and iterations (agile) that caught my eye. I only just now have had the time to write about it.

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There’s a great discussion on the Extreme Programming Yahoo! group where a whole bunch of folks list their blogs out. If you aren’t part of the group, you should probably join it (it focuses on technical practices, and there’s lots of other good agile stuff there too). The discussion starts with a message from James Carr where he asks who else here blogs?

It’s probably still cool to jump in with your own blog link if you have an agile-focused blog (I’m sure Scrum, Lean and other agile methods would be welcome even though it’s an extreme programming list!)

Mike Cohn has written an excellent article that covers a number of different options that can be taken when someone in an organization desires to implement an agile method.  These Patterns of Agile Adoptions are described as three sets of contrasting options:

1. Start Small vs. Go All In
2. Technical Practices First vs. Iterations First
3. Stealth Mode vs. Public Display