Archive for the ‘Agile & Lean’ Category

Announcing my new position at Neudesic

Agile & Lean, Career, Musings | Posted by Doc
Sep 26 2011

I’m thrilled to share this with all of you. As of the 12th of this month, I joined Neudesic, which is based in Irvine, California and has offices in a number of cities around the United States and in India.

is a Microsoft National Systems Integrator and Gold ISV Partner with a proven track record of providing reliable, effective solutions based on Microsoft’s technology platform. Our technical and industry expertise empower enterprises to enhance their technological capacity and respond to business opportunities with greater efficiency.

I get to with my good friends Ted Neward and Simon Guest, both of whose judgement I respect.

My title is “National Evangelist”. That means I’ll be focusing on how we can be more effective at developing and delivering our services through the use of , /Kanban, and whatever methodologies suit. I’ll also be focusing on how we assist our clients in adopting these practices and principles to the betterment of their organizations.

The process going from day one (“your position is no longer being funded” at TW) to making the decision to join Neudesic was thoroughly enjoyable for me. I got to spend time with people I knew and liked, people I didn’t yet know and discovered I liked, and also to learn about what’s going on in the space in the United States.

For each of you that contributed to the journey, please accept my gratitude.

I hope I can do the same for others.

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The joy of conferencing – Agile2011

Agile & Lean, Events | Posted by Doc
Aug 05 2011

It’s coming up – the biggest in the community each year: Agile2011.

This year, I’m the producer of the Open Jam, with my assistant producer being Rachel Davies. I’ll get back to this in a minute.

There are several reasons to attend a conference like this:

  2. Networking (shmoozing)
  3. Selling and marketing
  4. Teaching and sharing
  5. Volunteering or otherwise working at the conference

The first question I ask myself before I go is “What is my purpose here? Do I have multiple purposes? Is there one thing, or some small set of things, that I’d like to accomplish? When I get back home, what will make me feel that the time was well spent or wasted?”

If you know me, you know I spend a bunch of time in #2 (shmoozing) and, if given the opportunity, a bunch of time in #4 (teaching and sharing). It’s not unlikely that I will be doing #5 (volunteering) and #1 (learning). Up until Tuesday of this week, I was expecting to do a bit of #3 (selling/marketing) on behalf of ThoughtWorks. Clearly, I’ll have that time free. ;)

Are you going? If so, what’s your purpose? If your employer/ is sending you, how will you justify their investment? Will you be better at your ? Be sure that you have some way to identify the benefits you receive, and that your employer/organization therefore receives, based on the events you attend and connections you make.

Now, that said, on to the Open Jam…

In order to make the whole richer, the organizers of Agile2011 have, for the past few years held an “Open Jam”. It partakes of concepts like birds-of-a-feather (BOF), Open Space Technology/Unconferences, and lounge. Depending on where it has been, who has been responsible, and what’s going on in the conference, it has presented a different face each year. This year, with Rachel and myself producing it, we’ve decided to introduce a couple of extras as part of the Open Jam.

  1. PechaKucha (pronounced, if you care, as p’cha-k’cha, not peh-cha-koo-cha): each day, after the programmed sessions have ended, the stage is yours. Come present 20 slides at 20 seconds each for a total of six minutes and forty seconds (6:40). Talk about anything you like: hobbies, technology, passions, sports, design, whatever you like. It should be fun and exciting!
  2. Coaches Corner: thanks to the leadership of Mark Levison, there will be an area with experienced Agile coaches who will maintain “office hours” so others can come talk with them. Got challenges? Problems? Curiosity? Just learning? Come and talk to them during their office hours. Various organizations and independents will be represented. You can’t lose!
  3. The Fringe: there were many excellent proposals submitted to the conference earlier this year. Having been one of the reviewers, I can tell you that it is never easy to eliminate some. It’s like American Idol or So You Think You Can Dance – it doesn’t matter how good you are, not everyone can win. So we (okay, Rachel) thought it might be nice to have a non-stage on which some of these folks can deliver the goods. We went through the non-accepted proposals (they weren’t rejected, y’know), and have picked an interesting sample (including yours truly, btw) for you.
  4. Park Bench: this will be a place where, among other things, the original authors of A Manifesto for Agile Software Development (“the Agile manifesto”) will be dropping by from time to time.
I won’t tell you what it is, but there’s one more cool surprise in store for folks in the Open Jam.  Seriously.  It’ll be awesome.

I’ll be there from Sunday afternoon through Friday evening.  Not necessarily in the Open Jam the whole time, but the odds are good that you’ll see me there a time or two if you look for me.

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Where is the greatest friction?

Agile & Lean, Musings | Posted by Doc
Aug 03 2011

Between coaching and , I’ve dealt with a number of organizations that are trying – in one way or another – to adopt principles, practices, and methodologies.

I’m frequently asked “What is the hardest part? Is it the engineering practices? The predictability (or lack thereof)? Staffing?”

None of the above (you probably guessed that).

Boundary friction. Yup, that’s it. Boundary friction.

Train TracksImagine two trains. They’re running on tracks that sometimes run parallel, and sometimes diverge and come back together. When they get close enough, they actually touch.

Got it? Got the image of two trains racing or plodding along, coming closer and moving farther away, and sometimes coming into contact? Can you hear the train whistles and the sound of the wind and the wheels?  Feel the vibration?

If they’re both moving at the same speed, what happens when they come together?

Nothing. Smooth, easy, no friction.

What if they’re moving at different speeds? Faster versus slower is not better or worse, just different. So what happens?

Friction. Things heat up, maybe metal gets bent or crunched or marred. It is not smooth and easy, is it?

When organizations are implementing agile (or any systemic , really), without considering the whole , friction is inevitable. Let’s say that Business Operations is used to doing things one way, and isn’t ready to change (yet). Along comes this project team that’s doing Agile. Again, I’m not arguing that “agile is faster/better”, I’m just saying that it’s like they’re moving at different speeds. Where they come together, there will be more or less friction depending on how close to parallel and how close to the same speed they are.

In this case, it means that if both organizations are not embracing the change in similar ways, there will be more friction.

You can’t impose a change on part of the organization without affecting the rest of the organization. That’s ostrich .

The trick, the secret (it’s actually neither a trick nor a secret, though) is to figure out how to get them to truly come together.

That doesn’t mean telling Business Operations (or Sales or Product Management or…) “For this to , you have to adopt Agile principles and practices and methodologies. Now. Today.”

No, it means figuring out how to evolve together, taking smaller or larger steps when they’re appropriate. Like embracing the Last Responsible Moment principle. Like the Simple Design principle.

Implement as much change as you can readily absorb, in order to get you a bit further along. Then inspect and adapt. Don’t rush.

Organizations are organisms, and the organs and skeletal structure are all part of the same organism.

Or trains. Yeah, they’re trains. ;)

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Dilbert and Testing

Agile & Lean | Posted by Doc
May 15 2011

Dilbert.com

This is such a good object lesson about , it’s almost not funny.

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Change is hard, still

Agile & Lean | Posted by Doc
Apr 17 2011

I had a chat with a new friend yesterday. We walked down the road from the hotel into Wolvercote, and chatted about life and .

This fellow manages a development team. He’s concerned that they’re not as effective as he thinks they could be, that they have a low “bus factor” (my term), and that in particular is not what it could be. They have legacy code, and it sounded like they have quite a bit of specialization, in spite of having only four developers.

I latched onto that last point first. “Have you tried pairing?” I asked.

“No, I hadn’t really thought of it yet.”

Lots of intermediate discussion…

“What do you do when you have an odd number of people?”

I knew he was listening carefully, and yet I was getting a feeling of resistance. I tried to offer ways in which he could get buy in from the team, make some changes that would encourage them to think and examine the way they’ve been working, and make it a team thing, not something imposed from above.

“Well, I’m really concerned about the testers.”

I suggested co-location, or some version of it. He explained that they have separate two-person offices, and he can’t that.

All of this got me to wondering whether he really wants to facilitate change, or he just wants to talk about it. He said some of the right things, but when it got down to actually doing it, he repeatedly explained to me how hard it would be, and what the obstacles are.

Change is hard. Embrace change only if you really believe that it has the potential to deliver benefit. And then embrace it wholeheartedly.

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The Hidden Project Plan

Agile & Lean | Posted by Doc
Apr 13 2011

As I’ve been doing on Fundamentals over the past 18 months, I’ve found myself talking about this consistently: The Hidden Project Plan.

Here’s how the story goes: you build a project plan, and do your best to manage to the project plan. Things drop out, like and documentation and training, as you run short on time and/or money, or your resources are committed elsewhere. Ultimately, with a system with multiple components/subsystems/systems, you get to the point of integration. Your project plan allows for some time to do the integration, including fixing the bugs uncovered during integration.

The problem I’ve seen over and over is that there are more bugs than anticipated, the team has been split up to on other projects, there’s neither time nor money left for this project, and the developers and testers are multitasking from their new assignments to get these things fixed. Oh, and they’ve forgotten everything they knew about the code and tests that they wrote a year ago.

The time and effort and cost that are not part of the original project plan? That’s what I call “the hidden project plan”.

The short answer? Continuous integration / deployment / delivery, combined with effective TDD and automated functional testing. These things, along with a number of other agile practices, can reduce or eliminate the hidden project plan such that when a team says “it’s done” it’s really done.

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A (compelling?) vision

Agile & Lean, Education | Posted by Doc
Mar 08 2011

wonderingI was talking to my friends Maura and Shawn (Shawn and I both love photography) this weekend, telling them about the ideas I’ve been developing as I read Jane McGonigal’s “Reality is Broken”. Between McGonigal’s , Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” and his talk about 10,000 hours to achieve mastery, and all the recent references to 10,000 hours (like in Seth Godin’s blog post), I got to wondering about how to combine it all.

Here’s the result of my developing and wondering and pondering and talking:

I want to start on open source project to create something – , system, website, whatever – that incorporates elements of alternate reality games (as described by McGonigal) including the four defining traits of games*, somehow tracking and recording practice toward 10,000 hours, and that focuses on intrinsic with a tickle of extrinsic .

My first focus would be on facilitating the adoption of principles and practices in organizations, although it’s far from limited to that.

I’m not defining it any further than this for now, because I want to engage folks “out there” to work with me on this project. It feels LARGE. It’s certainly larger than I can envision and implement myself. Does it intrigue you? Would you like to join me in creating something that could make a significant mark on the world?

If you’re reading this, then you know how to reach me. That’s your first quest. ;)

* “When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.” ~Jane McGonigal, “Reality is Broken”

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Quests and powerups

Agile & Lean, Education, Musings | Posted by Doc
Mar 07 2011

on a questThe first challenge I’ve set myself is to explore how to incorporate the concepts of quests and powerups/levelups into the professional educational setting1.

In many situations, there is certainly a sense of accomplishment. In fact, at our internal at ThoughtWorks, we’ve2 moved away from lecture and classroom intensive training, and toward project-focused, experiential . This allows the participants to gain feelings of and accomplishment, to learn about collaboration, and to find a sense of discovery. Much of the instruction has moved to a Socratic Method, which both leads and allows the participants to use their intrinsic .

The question I’m exploring is “can we apply these same methods and techniques in a public, less-controlled setting?” I believe the answer is yes.

What would the changes have to be?

  • Far less lecture. Just enough to give them a basic understanding, but not enough to fill their heads.
  • Challenges that allow them to discover, rather than be spoon-fed.
  • Questions rather than assertions, to allow them to incorporate changes in their thinking.
  • Achievements that allow them to feel good about themselves while they are learning.
  • Some extrinsic motivation, as long as it’s not the main focus.
  • The idea of a constant progression toward mastery (which takes me back to Shu Ha Ri and my post Is easy the same as hard?).

We’ll be working on this in our educational content. Expect to see the first results publicly available in the next few months.

Just because, look at this TED Talk by Sugata Mitra. It’s fantastic. (it should be embedded right here)

1 Just in case it hasn’t become painfully clear yet, I am avoiding the word “training”.

2 While I say “we”, in fact I had nothing to do with it. Take a look at Sumeet Moghe’s blog. Sumeet is the driving force behind all of our internal at ThoughtWorks.

P.S. We’re hiring at ThoughtWorks again (still).

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Learning and games, games and learning

Agile & Lean, Education, Musings | Posted by Doc
Mar 04 2011

I’m reading “Reality is Broken: How Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World” by Jane McGonigal. It’s fascinating stuff, talking about Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and using gaming to teach, learn, collaborate, and learn to enjoy what we do.

Of course, it’s got me thinking.

Alternate Reality

Does this mean some kind of weird science fiction stuff? No. It means games that can be played in the real world or in virtual worlds that may apply different sets of rules or contexts. McGonigal mentions the virtual worlds of Halo and World of Warcraft in the book. These are two very different contexts and scenarios. Halo is warfare set in something like the real world we know. Okay, there are aliens. But other than that…

I’ve never been a big, enthusiastic gamer, but I do like shooting things and blowing them up. And yet, somehow Halo has never called to me.

And then there’s World of Warcraft, which is a fantasy world in which you complete quests, fight, and band with others. If you’d asked me last week, I’d have said that I had no particular interest. But thanks to Jane McGonigal, I decided to sign up for a free trial of the . It was more what she said about Intrinsic (see Dan Pink’s “Drive”) and how the quests relate, and the overall idea of collaboration but not (necessarily) competition.

The quests are compelling. Nothing really happens. I don’t get any prizes or recognition or anything but leveling up in the game. Somehow, in spite of that, I want to keep doing quest after quest. There’s a feeling of satisfaction about it. Finish one, start another. Level up periodically. Fight monsters, deliver messages, get lost and wander around, go up trees and down into the earth… On one level, it seems entirely pointless. On another, I FREAKIN’ GET IT!

?

How does this apply? Is there a way to use this kind of approach in delivering what we oh-so-annoyingly* call “training”?

I’m thinking about the idea of intrinsic motivation, quests, achievements that allow each of us to feel a sense of accomplishment, and extending it beyond the specific educational situation. That last includes some form of “social medium” and also thinking about how to extend it into the workplace.

teams are pretty good at this. Each time a person or pair completes a story, they get to move it on. There’s a sense of in that. Of course, they don’t get a nifty “+1″ floating over their heads. They don’t level up to the next level of developer or tester. Maybe there’s a way?

For now, my immediate focus is on how to apply this in the educational/ situation. Is there a way to design and create environments that take advantage of the of Jane McGonigal, game designers, and others?

* I say “oh-so-annoyingly” because we should NOT be doing “training”. We train pets to certain specific behaviors. When I’m working with a project team or a bunch of folks from an that wants to adopt Agile, I’m not training them. I’m leading them to think differently and adopt different behaviors. So “training” just seems the wrong word to me.

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Based on what we know today…

Agile & Lean, Musings | Posted by Doc
Mar 03 2011

One of the things I like about is .

In traditional/waterfall, it’s all too likely that we are being dishonest, either through commission or omission: about being on time; about how much is left to do; about when we’ll be done; about the quality of our . The whole system seems to encourage, or at least support, this kind of dishonesty.

Let me be clear: I am not condemning waterfall wholesale, nor those who practice waterfall. I am examining the cultural biases generated by this approach, and the effects they have on the people.

A phrase I use frequently in Agile:

Based on what we know today, if nothing changes,…

Think about a burn-up chart or burn-down chart. It is immediate. It is based on what we know today, and the forecast/projection only holds true if nothing changes. All the information is clear, it’s right out there for anyone to see, and it’s honest.

When will the project be done? Based on what we know today, if nothing changes…

Because we allow for changes in scope and capacity (velocity), all we know for sure is based on what we’ve accomplished to date, and the current status.

How much is left to do? Based on what we know today, if nothing changes…

As above, the scope might . If the scope doesn’t , then we can look at a burn-up chart and tell, with some accuracy, how much is left to do between now and when the progress line touches the scope line.

It goes on and on. The charts are on the wall (including the card wall itself) or in some readily accessible and visible virtual location (like in Mingle).

When I do , I always make sure that people learn this: “Based on what we know today, if nothing changes…”

It’s honest, based on history, experience, and evidence, and it’s all there for anyone to see.

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