Archive for the ‘Agile & Lean’ Category

A Culture of Heroism

Agile & Lean, Coping and Communicating, Musings | Posted by Doc
Feb 11 2010

A while back, I wrote about A Culture of Blame. As I’ve traveled around the US and to other countries, I’ve seen more and more evidence of this, which keeps me thinking. I’m always looking for patterns of behavior, and simple ways to describe them.

When talking about Agile teams as compared to Waterfall teams, one of the things that has become apparent is that Waterfall is also a Culture of Heroism. In fact, in many ways, much of Western culture is about heroism. We laud the star athlete, the exceptional business person, the standout author, and so on. In many cases, it seems to be recognition and acclaim for the individual over the group, or at least the individual separate from the group.

Agile teams foster a culture of collaboration and cooperation. That’s not to say that there’s not room for individual excellence, effort, and achievement. I would say that high performant teams tend to focus on the success of the team over the individual. Is Agile more socialist, while Waterfall is more capitalist? I’m not sure, but it seems that way.

Regardless, there are a number of side effects of a Culture of Heroism:

  • Ego-driven achievement
  • Unhealthy competition (although sometimes it’s quite healthy)
  • Rewards that – in recognizing the individual – discourage the others on the team
  • A focus on the individual rather than the group goals

This is an interesting thing for me, because I’m highly competitive, and am happy to have individual recognition. On the other hand, I believe strongly in subordinating my ego to the purposes and goals of the team, and that the success of the team is what’s important*. Since my ego still wins out at times, I recognize that this is not just a struggle for me, but for others as well.

We’re raised in a culture of individualism and heroism, then we are invited into the Agile fold, and asked to shift our focus and our energy from ourselves to our teams.

I’ll continue to explore this as I get the opportunity to work with more teams. I will say that I’ve seen the culture of heroism everywhere I’ve gone, in one form or another, and believe firmly that the change to a culture of collaboration must come from the leadership as well as the team.

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Training is amazing

Agile & Lean | Posted by Doc
Feb 09 2010

I’m at the end of day one of training, doing a custom two-day workshop for a client. The requests were long, so we negotiated it down to what we thought would reasonably fit within two days.

At 11am, I was on slide 4 in the PowerPoint deck. The reason it was moving so slowly is that these people are STARVING for information and guidance. They know they’re doing “quagile” (quasi-agile), they want to move closer to “real” Agile, and they are interested and eager and articulate.

It fascinated me all day, as they took what I was presenting and ran with it. Some heated discussions, some passionate, some involving the whole group of 15, some a subset. It went on all day.

It’s frustrating to me that they’re so eager, and facing such challenges in achieving Agile adoption. And yet it’s the same pattern…

The development team wants it, the QAs want it, the BAs and PMs want it – the “business” and the “customer” want the same old thing.

Sigh.

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Subtleties (again)

Agile & Lean, Coping and Communicating, Musings | Posted by Doc
Jan 07 2010

While working out this morning, I got to watching other folks at the gym. It’s a fascinating exercise (watching, that is), as there are all sorts of variations on form and the exercises people do.

Here’s the thing…

Let’s consider biceps curls. It’s a simple enough exercise that lots of people do. Whether with a barbell or dumbbells, the form should be pretty much the same. And yet…

Watching one woman, she pulls her elbows back just before she lifts the barbell to her chest. Watching another fellow, he hunches up his shoulders just before lifting. Another person leans back a bit.

The thing about these subtle movements is that they change the exercise. Changing the exercise changes the value that you get from the exercise.

Obviously, most of these people are either unaware of what they’re doing – those subtle movements – or are unaware of how those movements change the exercise.

So let’s consider someone who, as they are saying something to me, tilts their head to the side. I don’t know about you, but that body language usually means “questioning” to me.

How about someone who doesn’t look me in the eye? Or someone who says things like “really” or “I mean it” or “honestly” a lot. Like Simon Cowell on American Idol who frequently says “If I’m being honest…” What? You’re not being honest the rest of the time?

There is so much communicated in those subtleties.

As I said this summer, each of us is responsible for considering what we say and what we do and how it affects or is interpreted by others. Each of us must be conscious of how we change the value of what we say or do by the little things, like pulling back our elbows before the lift.

I was having a conversation with my friend Sunni Brown the other day, and the topic of subtleties came up. I made the contention that mastery of any skill is made through the subtleties.

As I reflect on that, I’m reminded of something my former karate instructor, Jim Mather, used to say… “I can teach a chimpanzee to do kata [forms], but I can’t teach one to do them well!” Having taught many karate students myself, I became aware fairly early on that mastery of the large movements was easy, but mastery of the subtleties was not.

When I was taking a Chinese calligraphy class, I realized that I needed to watch the teacher’s fingers, where they held the brush, at least as much as I needed to watch the brush itself and the strokes she was making. At one point, I realized that she was unaware of many subtle movements she made as she wrote, and that those subtle movements made all the difference between average and masterful. And she did them largely unconsciously. As a result, she wasn’t actively teaching us those things – it was up to us, as her students, to be perceptive enough to learn those things.

The thing is, you can’t expect people in conversation, meetings, training, or life in general to be adept or perceptive enough to discover what you want them to discover – it’s up to you to make it clear to them. You can’t think or say “they should have known what I meant!” because that abrogates your responsibility to communicate effectively, and pushes that responsibility to the other person.

Be subtle by intent. Be clear and obvious the rest of the time.

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The Anchor

Agile & Lean | Posted by Doc
Nov 14 2009

In Agile software development, we talk about learning from the past in order to improve the future. As I spend time with clients, whether doing coaching or training, I find them burdened by the past.

The Anchor.

“That’s the way we’ve always done things.”

Resistance to change for the sake of resistance.

Those of us who have had opportunity to work on and with Agile teams have seen what a difference that shift in principles, practices, and thought makes.  It makes a difference in the pleasure and pride that team members find in what they do. It makes a difference in the quality of the product they create.  It makes a difference in the overall competence of the team, both as individuals and as an entity.

Waterfall, on the other hand, has led to unhappy team members and failed projects.  Demonstrably.  In one report, the Standish Group found that only 34% of software projects were unqualified successes. While it says that the percentage was up to 34%, I still find that to be a discouraging statistic.  What’s encouraging is this:

Asked for the chief reasons project success rates have improved, Standish Chairman Jim Johnson says, “The primary reason is the projects have gotten a lot smaller. Doing projects with iterative processing as opposed to the waterfall method, which called for all project requirements to be defined up front, is a major step forward.”

So here we have an approach, along with a set of practices, that has been shown not to work for years, even decades, and yet managers or organizations hang onto it like it’s a life preserver, when in fact, it’s an anchor.

Drop your anchors. What is so frightening about not buying into the fallacy that you can know everything up front, plan everything up front, budget everything up front…?  Well, it goes on and on.

Of course you need to be able to plan and budget. But I don’t buy into the idea that anyone believes that those numbers are real or accurate. Rather, it’s “the way we do things” and they are resistant to change and the unknown.

Cast off your anchors! Learn from the mistakes we’ve been making for 50 years and find better ways to do things.  Let’s deliver better software with fewer defects that meets the needs of the customers/users, delivers more value, and does so when it says it will.

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With Blame Goes Guilt

Agile & Lean, Coping and Communicating | Posted by Doc
Nov 07 2009

I was talking to a colleague last night about my thoughts around A Culture of Blame. He was sharing with me one of the tactics used by management, and it occurred to me that it’s hard to live in a culture of blame without also having blame’s counterpart, guilt.

“We’ve made a commitment to our customer, and we must fulfill that commitment.” This frequently means “I made a commitment to our customer, and YOU must fulfill that commitment (or YOU will suffer).”

Poor managers frequently combine blame and guilt as their two weapons of destruction. Rather than think of positive ways to motivate people, they undermine and discourage, somehow believing that this will produce better results.

Research and anecdotal evidence reveal that reward and positive motivation work far, far better than punishment and negative motivation. And yet, there we are.

One of the many things I love about Agile teams is that we move away from blame and guilt to collaboration, support, respect, and motivation.

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A Culture of Blame

Agile & Lean, Facilitation | Posted by Doc
Oct 30 2009

In developing and delivering training on Agile Software Development, I frequently talk about the group ownership and individual commitment. I also talk quite a bit about the formation of the team, the group responsibility, and the mutual respect.

This is very cool stuff.

When I get to the Agile Manifesto, I dig into what the four main concepts mean to us as we embrace Agile.

Right now, what’s on my mind is the third value: customer collaboration over contract negotiation.

Here are some of the key points that I find in this statement:

  1. Contracts are only put in place so that we can enforce them when we believe that the other party has not met their obligations under the contract.
  2. Contracts imply a lack of trust.
  3. If you’re actually talking to your customer on an ongoing basis, then contracts generally become superfluous.
  4. Requirements specs and design specs are software contracts.
  5. See point #3.

As I’ve been doing coaching and training, I’ve had the opportunity to see a variety of different organizations and situations. What has become clear to me is this:

Some organizations that embrace Agile have a culture of openness, safety, respect, and friendliness, where the people who work there are happy to go to work each day. Those employees have a feeling of pleasure and pride in what they do and the people they get to do it with.

Then there are organizations that are built upon a Culture of Blame.  Contracts are about blame.  Specifications are – at least to an extent – about blame. Project plans, which on the surface are about predictability and budgeting and resource allocation, are also about blame. What I’ve seen happen in these organizations, more than once, is that Agile adoptions fail in the worst case, and struggle in the best case.

The problem is that their “leadership” (quotes intentional) are mired in Waterfall practices. The irony of this is that – while management is operating under the fallacious assumption that these practices work – these practices have been demonstrated repeatedly and measurably to fail.

“The first formal description of the waterfall model is often cited to be an article published in 1970 by Winston W. Royce (1929–1995), although Royce did not use the term “waterfall” in this article. Royce was presenting this model as an example of a flawed, non-working model (Royce 1970).” (from Wikipedia)

What seems to go hand in glove with this Waterfall mindset is the contract. These managers need to have specs and project plans so that they can figure out who is at fault when the project is late, over budget, or of low quality. Sadly, those of us who have embraced Agile – and many who still live in the Waterfall world – would tell you that at least one of those three – lateness, over budget, or low quality – is pretty well guaranteed.

Someone asked me recently whether it was possible to succeed in adopting Agile without there being a cultural change.

My answer is a resounding “no!” Without the move to a culture of trust and respect, without the true support – not just lip service or permission – of representatives of “leadership” at all levels*, Agile adoption is very unlikely to succeed.

A Culture of Blame is not always obvious – although frequently it is obvious. But there will generally be smells that a reasonably discerning individual can detect that make it clear that the Culture of Blame is present.

* I refer to this as Vertical Commitment or Vertical Buy-In. As a coach and facilitator, I believe that without ensuring that management shares the same language about Agile principles and practices, and without ensuring that they are committed to the success of Agile adoption, the culture clash is unendurable.

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Is Agile a mystery?

Agile & Lean, Musings | Posted by Doc
Sep 02 2009

Over the past few weeks, in between preparing for Agile2009, I was preparing to deliver some Agile training to a company’s product owners and project managers. I was told that they’d been doing various Agile practices for as much as a year.  This made me curious as to why we’d be delivering a course on Agile Fundamentals.

After all, if they’ve been doing stuff for a year, I thought, shouldn’t they have some of the fundamentals firmly in mind?

Nonetheless, skepticism firmly in hand, I prepared myself to deliver to what might be a knowledegable and, perhaps, challenging group.

Much to my surprise – although it shouldn’t surprise me – these folks have piecemeal knowledge of certain practices, and seem to mostly lack a solid grasp of the underlying principles of Agile. While I don’t think that the Agile Manifesto is a bible, I do think that it’s both required reading and deserves some thought. The implications are profound, once you start thinking about them and trying to understand what they mean for an organization.

How can it be that people have been doing standups and iterations and estimating and story cards for 6 – 12 months, and don’t have a firm grasp of the why of what they’re doing?

Maybe it’s just me.  Maybe most people don’t have any need to understand the philosophy or principles or subtleties of what they’re doing, and are happy to just learn the what and the how.

I’m still a bit baffled. The subtleties of what makes Agile be what it is are what excite me. Yes, I do get excited about pairing and standups and iterations and IPMs and retrospectives and all the other stuff we do. And I also get excited by the understanding and the “cultural shift” (as one attendee put it) that goes along with Agile adoption.

After all, Agile is clearly not just about the practices and methodologies. It’s about the discipline and the attitude changes and the mental shifts in things like code ownership and transparency. How can you go from the dark ages of Waterfall, individual code ownership, controlled communication, and defensiveness to Agility without being affected by all of those changes in profound ways? How can you make the shift from maybe-doing-unit-testing-a-little-bit-after-the-fact to TDD/Test-First and not see that there’s more going on than just the practices?

Sigh.

I guess the opportunity to share that excitement that comes with the transformation is part of what drives me to do coaching and training and facilitation.  If I can see just one person get it, then it’s all worth it.

It seems that you can take the man out of motivational speaking, but you can’t take the motivational speaking out of the man. ;)

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Agile2009 Drawing to a Close

Agile & Lean, Events | Posted by Doc
Aug 27 2009

I have to admit that barring the cold I got and the exhaustion, this has been an outstanding experience.

You may be thinking “Doc must have attended some GREAT sessions!”

First of all, I was privileged to be a Stage Producer. This means that I got to go through 120 submissions to choose around 20 presenters/sessions. Along the way, I recruited some outstanding people to be on my committee, including Ola Ellnestam as my Assistant Stage Producer. Ola is a star in his own right.

During the conference, I tried to get to say hello to all of “my” presenters, and spend a minute or two in their sessions. I didn’t quite make it.

There were also over 20 ThoughtWorkers presenting, and I tried to spend a minute or two in each of their sessions.  This was particularly hard today, when there were as many as four of them presenting concurrently, along with one or two of “my” presenters.

Then there were the amazing people I got to hang out with, meet, and connect with, like Alistair Cockburn (poetry readings and shamanism this year), Jean Tabaka (I love Jean Tabaka!), my dear friends Julie Chickering and Christine Delprete, Chris Matts and Olav Maassen, Diana Larsen, Esther Derby, Johanna Rothman, Martin Fowler and all the other fabulous ThoughtWorkers, Twitter-friends whom I finally got to meet, Corey Haines, Phil Brock (without whom the Agile Alliance would fall apart), Jim Newkirk, and on and on. I spent a significant chunk of my time in the Open Jam area, which I have dubbed “The Shmooze Pool”, since that’s what I did there.

I also became a member of the APLN board, and spent more time with Julie Chickering in that endeavor, along with Pollyanna Pixton, Todd Little, Jim Highsmith, David Chilcott, Linda Cook, Rose Anton, Sanjiv Augustine, Robbie Mac Iver, Cesar Idrovo, and Susan Fojtasek. As a combined effort between the APLN and ThoughtWorks Studios, I am starting to plan a series of Agile Leadership Open Space events. We’ll probably initially focus on cities where there is both a ThoughtWorks office and an APLN chapter. And then? We’ll see. ;)

I met so many interesting, smart, challenging, engaging people this week. Just amazing. If I didn’t name you above, I apologize – you helped to make this an exceptionally rich experience for me.

And then there was my session on Facilitation Patterns & Antipatterns.  The feedback was excellent, including some critical comments that will enable me to improve the offering and generate more value.

Expected more focus on how to be a facilitator and practicing facilitation.

Could benefit from connecting the patterns to when to use them, how some of them help.

Very well presented and very thoroughly prepared and thought out. Would love to hear more project/real life examples as anecdotes.

Loved the presentation and the interactive activities with the deck of cards. Learned lots of great stuff.

The cards were a big hit.  Someone at each table got to take the deck from their table home with them, and a bunch of folks asked me to send them one (I have to have more printed!).

Tomorrow we have the Agile2009 retrospective for the organizers, and stage producers, and so on.  It should be very valuable, and should start Jim Newkirk off on a great path toward Agile2010 in Nashville.

So while I really, REALLY wish I hadn’t gotten a cold, I’m still a happy boy! :)

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First full presentation of Facilitation Patterns and Antipatterns today #agile2009

Agile & Lean, Facilitation | Posted by Doc
Aug 25 2009

Yes, this is just a brag post. :)

At 2pm Central time today, I’ll be doing the first full delivery of the Facilitation Patterns & Antipatterns workshop at the Agile2009 conference.

Yes, I’m excited.

I’ve gotten great response from the folks I’ve told about it.  Hopefully some of them will turn up. :)

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More new graphics, and Agile2009

Agile & Lean, Events, Facilitation | Posted by Doc
Aug 07 2009

Yes, I’ve added more new graphics, courtesy of Mike Ferrin.

I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned that these characters will make their “live” debut when I present my session on Facilitation Patterns and Antipatterns at Agile2009. I’ve developed a workshop around these ideas, and I think it will be a lot of fun.

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