Author: John Yorke

I am the Operations Manager for World Wide Technology's Virtual Office - supporting teams of software consultants collaborating to deliver amazing products and solutions. I am also an Agile Coach, coaching teams in developing an Agile, Lean and Theory of Constraints mindset. I am a regular speaker at conferences on related topics and am the designer of a Kanban based board game - "Motor City" I have 25 years experience in software development, working on projects in both the UK and the USA

Isn’t it obvious?

I occasionally get asked why and how I became an Agile Coach and whether it is a fulfilling role. When I began my career I certainly had no intention or expectation to be here, I was a software developer, I loved writing code and like most developers I wanted to create something that made a difference.

What followed was 15 years of… I want to say frustration but that is unfair because I generally loved my work and got to create some great software, but I always had this belief that there was a better way, a more effective way to get the job done, I dabbled in project management and team management believing I could do better than those I had worked for in the past. My problem and I suspect it is a very common problem is that I spent a lot of effort trying to do my job better, to be more efficient, more effective, to deliver more etc. etc. It turns out that was wrong and I was wasting a lot of effort and not getting the results I expected.

And then quite by accident (and for all the wrong reasons) I stumbled on to Scrum. I was running a software department and we were forever fire-fighting and I saw Scrum as a tool I could use to control the workflow and manage the demands on the team. It worked, and in the breathing room it created I was inspired to look deeper, beyond Scrum to Agile, and then Lean and Systems thinking and the Theory of Constraints and then I saw it. I felt like I had discovered the meaning of the universe, and once you see it you can’t un-see it, you see it everywhere, it feels like it is staring you in the face.

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
― Arthur Conan Doyle

Of course I hadn’t discovered anything, I had just opened my eyes and it was right there in front of me and it was so unbelievably obvious that it almost feels stupid writing this.

And it is this simple:

All we have to do is work on the thing that adds the most value and stop working on things that don’t add value.

Work on the thing that adds the most value and stop working on things that don’t add value.

So I said it was simple but it took me 15 years to start to understand it and nearly 10 years later I am still figuring it out, because whilst it is so simple that it should have been obvious all along, it is also remarkably difficult to do.

What is Value?

The primary problem is to understand what value is. figuring out your value stream in a system is key, and to be fair most businesses do this to some extent, but most individuals do not understand how they fit into the system they are in, nor do they understand how their local system fits into the big picture.

We cannot see the value we contribute to the system and when we don’t see what is most valuable, we do what we see as most valuable in our line of sight. Crazy as that sounds it is nearly always the wrong thing, optimizing for us nearly always optimizes against the larger system. The bigger the organisation the more this happens and the more inefficient it gets.

opportunity cost

the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.

Another aspect is that so much value is obfuscated, it gets lost in opportunity cost which is invisible on balance sheets and yet is likely the biggest cost you pay when developing software. Or cash flow, leverage and return on investment, these are fundamental aspects of successful business but they are generally encapsulated and decoupled from the parts of the business that can impact them most – especially IT and software product development. Many projects get given budgets and time lines, which is a horrible way to run a business and it cripples cash flow, it also significantly limits investment opportunities and increases risk significantly. But worst of all it delays delivering value.

Two Problems

So that is actually two problems, first is that we need to figure out what is valuable and then we have to communicate that to those doing the work.

In that sentence is the heart of being an Agile Coach, my role has become one of helping organisations understand their value stream, especially how software impacts and interacts with it, helping visualise that value and prioritise it and then to help communicate that to those that will create the software and deliver that value as quickly as possible.

Discover what our goal is – how do we deliver value? What outcome are we trying to achieve?

Communicate that to everyone so we each know how we help to get towards the goal and how we avoid getting in the way.

Unfortunately the majority of the time is spent dealing with people that are just like I was, they are doing their very best to be as efficient and possible in their domain, simply because they cannot trace what they are doing to the value delivered. So I spend much of my time doing my best to help them see that often what they are doing is at best not achieving anything useful and more often is actually damaging to the bigger picture.

Example

Let me give an example that a friend of mine shared recently: My friend was baking some cakes for an event and needed to bake 10 cakes, but only had one oven. Her husband offered to help out and so she asked him to measure out the ingredients for the cakes in advance so that it would be quicker to get the next cake in the oven.

When she came to get the ingredients for the cake, they were not ready, her husband had optimised for himself and not for the goal. He concluded it would be much more efficient for him to measure out 10 batches of flour then 10 of… etc. after all he knew they would be needed later and it was quicker and far more efficient for him to do that than to do small batches and keep switching.

The result was that whilst he was being efficient for himself, the system grinds to a halt and must wait, his efficiency came at the cost of massive losses to value delivery (cakes baked).

Perhaps if he had understood the full picture, and how his contribution impacted the value stream he would have planned his work differently? He would have prepared one cake at a time even though it was less efficient for him. Together they would have reached the true goal more quickly.

But the funniest part of this story for me was that she was so frustrated, she thought it was obvious, and he thought he was being efficient. Those opposing view points are so common in this line of work.

When you see it, it is obvious but until you do it remains an enigma.

Why be a coach?

Now imagine that confusion on an industrial scale, a whole organisation of people conscientiously working hard in the belief they are being efficient but still struggling to deliver software, delivering software that is not what is wanted, features that are not needed, struggling with integration and so on. Then this loony guy comes in and says that you might actually contribute more by being less efficient. – I’m the loony guy and I love it.

Agile is a mindset for getting better at delivering software and coaching is about helping you. But my goal is not to help you improve just a part of the system, the goal is to help you improve the system, and that starts by helping you and the whole organisation see the system. and learn how to communicate where we can add value.

Obviously there is a lot more to Agile than communication and value, but in my experience if you figure those out the rest falls in to place.

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There are a handful of books that I repeatedly recommend, all of which display true Agility and yet to be contrary not one is about ‘Agile’

The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni

This talks about being clear in your goal and how to communicate it to your organisation, it is not quite as specific as I am hinting at in the article as we must delve deeper but it is an amazing book and the emphasis is on over-communication.

The Goal by Eli Goldratt

This book uses a production plant as a metaphor for delivering value to your customers. The emphasis is on the manufacturing equivalent of delivering working software, doing it regularly, and that delivery is not about development, OR production OR deployment it is about everything – essentially encouraging Dev Ops. It also has a lot to say about the non-sense of Dev-Done and how the only Done that matters is to have it in your customers’ hands.

Read it! This is hands down the best book on Agility I have ever read. There are many others by this author all of which are great but this is my favourite.

The 5-Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

I wholeheartedly subscribe to the Lencioni school of thought on many things (hence two books by him in this short list). On team building this is one of the best books out there, it describes the stages of team development, and you see this time and time again. Team dynamics are such a crucial part of agility and fundamental to success, this helps teams see those stages and is a great tool for helping teams bond.

What does agility mean to you?

It seems like there is a very personal level to what Agile Software Development means, as far as I can tell there is no consistent common understanding of what agility means. Some see it as a framework, others as a mindset.

For me it means two things.

We have agility in our planning. We expect and encourage our plan to change as we better understand what we are delivering.

And

We have agility in our operations. We expect and encourage our tools processes and methods to change as we discover better ways of doing things.

Planning

Agility in planning means making a plan: ‘failure to plan’ as they say is ‘planning to fail’, and that failure is probably more certain than than it was when we had an inflexible plan. There is a great deal of value in planning, we learn a lot and by setting a sense of direction we create focus.

The trick is that if we understand what we are planning and why we are planning, we can do it in the most efficient and effective way. We don’t need a lot of planning or a lot of detail, planning doesn’t need to be a massive overhead.

If we limit the granularity of our plan in relation to how far ahead we are planning then we allow for that plan to adapt as we get more information. We can get all the benefit of having a plan without the overhead and without being restricted if and when the plan needs to change.

Process

I believe process is vital to success in business, whether we are building software or hiring or in a factory, even sales has a process. But a process must be flexible, we must be able to adapt when things change and we must be able to react to exceptions.

We mustn’t ever get to a point where we declare this is the ‘best’ way of doing something or ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ As soon as we stop looking we prove ourselves right, if we only know one way to do something it is definitely the best that we know of. Our ignorance ensures that we are right. But if getting better is more important than being blissfully ignorant then we must look for ways to improve, we need to observe and we need to experiment. We should never let entropy set in, we should always be seeking to improve.

The very best processes build in opportunities for reflection and improvement, ensuring a mindset that there is always a better way, is far healthier than one of complacency.

One of my favourite ‘processes’ comes from the Theory of Constraints, it starts with the assumption that something can be improved and the first step is to identify the one area that would most benefit from improvement, it ends with a refusal to accept inertia.

Summary

For many Agile is about the framework, or the tools, for others it is the people and their ability to self-organise. I don’t want to devalue those aspects but I see those as a means to achieve the agility in planning and process.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, what does Agile mean to you?

The 3 Elusive Qualities of a Product Owner

It may sound overly simplistic but in my experience products generally succeed or fail in correlation to the effectiveness of Product Ownership on the team. Mainly because we under-appreciate the importance and the difficulty of the Product Ownership aspects in the product creation process. In my opinion the choice of this role is far more important than the coach or other team members. The role is full spectrum, they go all the way from discovery to delivery and more.

Ironically, we tend to think of software applications as being primarily technical objectives, our focus is too often on the quality and ability of the engineers, the architecture and design. We will spend time on process and optimization and efficiency. All the while forgetting that the most common and most consistent failure of all software products is that no matter how good the quality, how optimized or efficient it is, or how good the engineers are that built it – if you build the wrong thing it is a failure. A perfectly designed but unused product is worthless.

History if full of great products that missed the mark, how many apps have you downloaded to your phone that are no longer used or were never used after the first 30 seconds. There are many many more products that fail to ever get in the hands of customers at all. Internal IT products are often culprits of this, the assumption seems to be that because the users are forced to use the product we don’t have to actually ask them what they want or how they will use it, we build great products that don’t fulfill the actual user need.

I think probably my favorite and most over used quote is:

There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

Peter Drucker

I use the quote far too frequently but in 25 years developing software this remains the most frequent sight I see, more products fail for not meeting the most basic customer needs than for any other reason. And yet when I say this, it generally gets scoffed at, until you start asking how many people have worked on products that have been abandoned or shelved mid development. Teams rarely believe their product is at risk of being cancelled, or are too far removed from the customer to appreciate that the user liking and using the product is infinitely more important than whether they are efficiently re-using a section of code. We have created a mindset that ‘done’ is delivering code. A product/feature/story is only really done when the customer is using it.

Product Ownership does not need to be a single person in that role, but it should be a mindset within the team. Ideally I’d love for this to be a shared responsibility. Unfortunately in my experience a true appreciation of Product Ownership is as scarce as Hen’s Teeth, and generally unappreciated and vastly underpaid, those that do it well make it look easy and doing it badly or being indecisive can really destroy a product so it can be a risk to spread the responsibility beyond one person. I have heard people talk of teams where the teams do it well and they don’t need a PO, but I have yet to see this for myself. Because of this experience I think of the Product Owner as the most important ‘hire’ for the team, getting the right person in this role can be crucial to the success of the product.

A good PO these days is hard to find…

So why is a good Product Owner so hard to find and what makes the role so difficult?

1: Differentiating what is needed from what is wanted

A significant part of the role is identifying what is needed to solve your users problems or to fulfill their needs, to enable them to be better at their job, or to maximize their fun or relaxation. The role is about understanding the problem and creating a vision of how that could be solved – not the technical solution but discerning the true need or true problem.

Henry Ford With 1921 Model T — Henry Ford stood next to his ‘Faster Horse’

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

Henry Ford

The reason this skill is so tough is that users rarely know what they need, typically a user’s vision is constrained by what they currently do. As a result many products become re-works of a paper system or re-engineering an old system. A poor product owner gives a customer what they want or what they ask for, a good product owner listens and watches and blends wants and needs to solve the customer’s problem and give them what they need.

I often seen backlogs that are full of stories that are unfiltered customer requests, it is lazy and it is easier to do what is asked. But to find what is needed typically requires experimentation, feedback, conversations and observation. It is far harder to build what is needed than it is to build what is asked for. Similarly this can manifest itself when department managers decide what their team needs or wants without involving them in the discussion, a good Product Owner will spend time with the users of the product and ideally see how they use it.

A Product Owner with the creativity, the initiative and the Vision to create a great Product is worth their weight in gold,

2: Understanding what is required to create a successful application

A second aspect of the role is the one I see most frequently overlooked. Perhaps because of the emphasis on 1, the need to understand the business, I see people choosing someone from the business to become the Product Owner, their knowledge of the business is seen as their primary qualification and in many cases their only qualification for the role. And worse they are often asked to do the role in addition to their normal job.

However, a great Product Owner understands not only what to build but is familiar with the development process, they understand the ebbs and flows, they understand the implications of technical debt, automation and testing. The understand how crucial it is to have working software in the hands of users as soon as possible. I am sorry to say that business POs often lack this knowledge and experience, they will mistakenly perceive a desire for a fully working product rather than appreciate the value of early feedback. Many are plagued with the last bus syndrome, trying to include every imaginable feature rather than working towards a minimum feature set to get feedback and derive value early.

Personally I’d invariably trade an experienced Product Owner with zero business knowledge for an expert in the business with zero software delivery experience. Business knowledge can be gleaned from effective conversation, observation and feedback. The understanding of a good Agile Software Development lifecycle is far harder to learn and there is no substitute for experience.

Typically the best products result from experiments, reviews and feedback, a willingness to be flexible and respond. The other disagreeable quality of a Product Owner taken from the business is that their knowledge is about how the work is done now, and they are often blinkered to the possibilities.

Remember that the Product Owner sets priorities and interprets the Vision, they have more influence on the product creation than anyone. Their choice of priorities can profoundly impact the value, and the quality of the product. If they lack the understanding of the importance of testing, feedback and good software principles it can lead to conflict and disharmony in a team.

3: Communicating effectively with both technical and business stakeholders

Finally there is a need for effective communication. We always talk about effective communication to the point that it becomes background noise. But the importance cannot be overstated.

A great Product Owner, listens, they observe, they probe and they reflect. The ask for feedback and they read between the lines, they watch body language, they see and hear what isn’t said as much as what is said. When it comes to understanding the user they have great attention to detail and they look intently for pain points and points of pleasure, they are looking for a way to serve their users in the best way they can. Most of us think of communication as speaking, but for a Product Owner watching and listening are so very important. Empathy with the user, the customer and the ability to communicate using their terms and understanding their domain and conversing with them in a meaningful way is crucial, and if you don’t understand the terms develop an attitude of attentive student ask questions and show you are interested and are learning.

A great Product Owner learns to say ‘No’ powerfully respectfully and does so in a way that conveys they understanding to the person asking, a great Product Owner should not be seen as an obstacle or a hurdle but a steward of good decisions. The word ‘No’ should be delivered in a way that leaves me feeling confident that the Product Owner will deliver the best product within the parameters and leaving me confident that this decision is right even if it is not what I initially wanted. The Product Owner should be able to convey the implications of saying ‘Yes’ so that I understand why I am being told No. A great Product Owner has any number of tools that can help people see this and yet we regularly see backlogs full of feature requests that will never see the light of day because the PO doesn’t feel capable or sufficiently empowered to say NO!

But the PO must also communicate with the development team, they must understand technical development terms, to have a grasp of the technical implementation, even if they do not have authority over the ‘How’ I’d expect them to have a vested interest in understanding it. They also need to be able to communicate the business needs and the business terms in a meaningful way to the development team, This requires a versatility in speech and communication that is unusual to say the least. Being respected and understood by both the business and the technical team is a major feat, and as we all know any cloistered group speaks in three letter acronyms that only they understand and the audible sign when they have to explain to an unlearned outsider can demoralize the best of us. Do not underestimate this ability.

But there is more, they need the creativity to communicate design ideas or if the ideas come from others the scope to understand that creativity, to imagine what could be and express that to the business and to the technical team. And then we get into the really tricky realm of the stakeholders as opposed to the users, this generally is the group that funds the product, they want to see progress, they want to see good stewardship of their investment, they may ask for forecasts and may even press for commitments.

We have now loaded our Product Owner with the need to communicate with senior people that make financial decisions, to express Risk and Forecasts in a manner that it concise but meaningful, we want to be transparent and informative, but confident. If we are using forecasts especially mathematical forecasts we had better understand them and be able to back them up with explanation and confidence. A Product Owner my stand their ground in the face of authority and speak truth to power. A Product Owner that makes unrealistic commitments or promises, will lose the confidence of her team and her stakeholders in a flash.

If a Product is to be sold it is likely that you will need to be involved in Sales and Marketing, which brings a whole host of other skills and communication issues to bear, understanding the implication to the market, and how you measure that and how you engage with that is a new realm of understanding and confusion.

A great Product Owner is a master communicator, they have an insatiable desire for knowledge, to understand and be understood.

Summary

As you can see the skill set of a great Product Owner is monumental, and yet the good ones make it look easy. If you have a mindset suited to Product Ownership it is likely you already have good communication skills and enjoy learning more domains.

It is likely you are the sort of person that thrives on the delivery of a product and revels in the feedback, enjoying the flexibility and change, is unmoved at the thought of redoing something twice or even more to get it right.

Solving problem is a thrill and being able to see beyond the obvious and draw out information from users and then present something back is a joy.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t incredibly difficult, overwhelming at times and sadly unappreciated, and very often underpaid.

At some point the industry dismissed all these skills as unimportant and we see a flurry of Product Owners that write stories exactly as dictated by users, that input data into forecasting tools without the vaguest notion of what the forecasts mean or how they are calculated.

As I said at the start a great Product Owner is the lynchpin of a great Product, we should be seeking them out and rewarding them appropriately, you will be amazed at what can be achieved with the right person in that role.

A tale of two engineers.

There are two ships traveling a busy shipping route, each ship has a complex engine and the engineering team has a chief engineer. Both ships are a similar age and size.

The first ship has a very busy chief engineer running this way and that, fixing any and every problem that comes up, he knows every inch of the engine and many parts of it are custom made by him. He is dirty and oily and hard working, whenever there is a problem – and there are many problems – he is on hand to fix it. He is dedicated and hard working, he works long hours and is always ready and willing to get his hands dirty. Without him the ship couldn’t function.

The second chief engineer has spent his time not fixing things, if a part is unreliable he has replaced it, if a component is troublesome it is gone. If there is a problem he ensures one of his team fixes it (with guidance initially) and will encourage them to spread the knowledge so that after a while he rarely if ever gets his hands dirty. He is rarely dirty or oily and it is a very rare situation to see him fixing anything. On many voyages he can seemingly sit there with his feet up doing very little in maintaining the ship and can use his time on other productive activities. Frankly if he missed a voyage the ship would probably run just fine without him.

Now which in your opinion is the better chief engineer? I know which one I would rather have on my team.

It is often said that the goal of a good Scrum Master is to make themselves redundant, I take exception to this a little I think as in the tale above it is possible to create a situation where you are not necessarily needed all the time. But I wonder how long a team would last as a top-performing team if the Scrum Master was taken away, perhaps in the short term no one would notice, but growing and shaping and coaching a team takes time and effort, but slipping back into bad habits can happen quickly. Creating a situation where the Scrum Master has time to do other things is a good thing and a reflection of success not a sign he is not needed. A Scrum Master that is essential to a team is one that has failed, in fact if ever you feel you have an employee you are overly dependent on you have a serious issue.

How many top athletes would say “I’ve reached me peak I no longer need my coach”? My guess is that if they feel they have reached their peak they will seek out a new coach that can push those limits further.

A good coach or Scrum Master guides the team to independence, and then pushes their limits further. They may be more useful elsewhere but that is very different from becoming redundant.

Never talk about politics!

I grew up in the UK but I have lived in the USA for a little over 6 years in total, which equates to around a quarter of my working life, so whilst I still feel very British there is an element of the mid-Atlantic creeping in. That is to say I feel like I have grown a level of understanding for some of the quirks of American culture and am a little more sympathetic to the perception of the UK culture from the American side of the pond.

However being so overtly British I get to hear the same questions repeatedly and some of the misinformation is a little troubling at times. Especially when it can be fact checked so easily. Since this is my soapbox I’ll indulge a little before I get on to the topic at hand.

First the USA did not win the war of 1812 please take 5 minutes to read wikipedia. Second, the UK NHS: I have been in the USA for 6 years and in that time I have worked for two employers both of whom tell me that the health insurance they provide is the best there is. My colleagues tell me it is better than anywhere else they have ever worked. I have no reason to doubt that this is great Health Insurance, and apparently it costs around $27,000 per year – mostly paid by my employer and that is in addition to the social security deductions which are approximately 8% of my paycheque.

In my experience the quality of service offered by the ‘best‘ Health Insurance is approximately identical in quality of healthcare to that received from the NHS. Yep you heard me, I find no discernible difference in quality of care. There are certainly differences, I have to pay a co-pay to see my Doctor here in the US which is free in the UK. Doctors in the USA want to push you to take every test under the sun so they can bill the insurance, where in the UK they assess if there is a need first. In the USA if there is a referral it is on you, whereas in the UK your doctor would follow-up. The Doctors’ surgeries here seem to be a bit more lavish and they need an army of staff to administer the insurance bureaucracy but as far as wait times, quality of medical treatment and accessibility of treatment I see no difference.

So I do get a little upset when I say people describing the UK medical system as having poor treatment and long wait times and something to generally be afraid of. Think of it as having the best medical insurance you can buy, and then imagine that it is free to you, I can see why that is so incomprehensible when you are used to spending nearly $30,000 per year on that service. I am sorry to say it so bluntly, but the USA spends on average 4 times as much for what is very much an inferior system for most people.

Okay I’m off-my NHS soap box now.

But the third and most troubling perception that I am regularly confronted with is the notion that the UK is a ‘Socialist‘ country and the USA is a ‘Capitalist‘ country. This notion troubled me a lot and got me thinking, but first let’s clarify the definitions:

Socialism: political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

Capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.

Essentially the extent to which you are a capitalist or socialist country is determined by the extent to which the government interferes with the free market, either through spending or through legislation.

Measuring Capitalism

Spending is pretty easy to assess as we can see what proportion of GDP comes from government spending and how much from ‘the free market’ However, legislation is much harder to measure and by definition any intervention in the market is ‘socialist’. E.g. Defence, immigration, policing, taxation, tariffs, subsidies, etc.

I think most people realize that pure socialism is fatally flawed and equally flawed is pure capitalism, so it is really a question of how little or how much government is needed and how much can the market provide on it’s own. We all have a reasonable expectation that infrastructure, defense, police, jails etc cannot be provided by the market and that the whole country benefits from education and healthcare for the poor as the benefits are far reaching to the economy but how much of the rest is open to debate.

Let’s take the USA, the US spends a staggering 35% of it’s GDP on socialist activities, that is more than a third, and is incredibly socialist in it’s government policies and legislation, just recently there have been some very high profile trade tariffs, a trade tariff is direct manipulation of the free market by the government – it is the very definition of socialism. Lobby groups regularly persuade the government to invest in particular parts of the country or legislate for the benefit of certain industries. Both the UK and the USA bailed out banks and the USA bailed out the car industry and corn farmers.

By contrast the UK spends 41% of it’s GDP on socialist activities, and also heavily regulates the free-market with employment laws, they provide tax-breaks for entrepreneurs and subsidies for ‘green’ businesses to name a few, but notably didn’t bail out the car industry or steel industry or mining industry.

In my anecdotal experience and to be clear this is opinion based on only very limited education in Economics and Politics, neither the UK nor the USA has any claim on being capitalist countries, both may claim to be slightly right of center but are both squarely ‘Mixed economies’ and have found a balance that is slightly further from Socialism than Capitalism but not by much. And whilst the UK spends more, my observance is that the USA regulates more and is far more interventionist in investing, bailing-out, propping up and otherwise supporting USA based industries.

TL:DR Summary:

The UK and USA are broadly similar in terms of the degree to which they are Socialist or Capitalist in practical terms, but in my observation the UK is more willing to intervene for the benefit of the people – especially the poorer and the USA is more likely to intervene for the benefit of business.

What has this to do with Agile?

So what does that have to do with Agile? Well it strikes me that there are a great many parallels. If we equate Socialism – a planning heavy form of governance, where plans are made by a few experts:- with ‘Waterfall’ and Capitalism – a responsive form of governance where the market leads and the many respond independently of governance:- with Agile, then maybe you can see where I am headed.

In small scale both Waterfall and Agile succeed, but as we scale both suffer in different ways. In Waterfall as in Socialism the planners become further removed from the market they are serving and are less responsive to particular needs and more and more out of touch. a great deal of overhead is needed to align the vision from the top and unsurprisingly they are often so far removed they get it wrong, corruption sets in and effectiveness (the true productivity) plummets.

By contrast in Agile as in Capitalism works very well in small scale but as we grow the decision makers are not able to see the big picture and whilst they are responsive to what they can see, they fail to see the larger system and optimize for themselves rather than the larger organization and problems set in with misalignment. There are some aspects of a business that simply don’t work by being responsive and need to be planned and organized.

Governance

So where does that leave us? Well at heart I am both a capitalist and an Agilist so I am biased, but the way I see it as we scale with Agile and in business in general we discover that we need governance, some degree of consistency, infrastructure and support and most of all a clear direction. But I believe we should keep that governance as small as practical and only govern that which we cannot govern ourselves.

In the case of big government I believe that includes socialised healthcare because normal market forces do not apply when it comes to our health and so the market cannot effectively provide what we need, I also believe that we should invest heavily in socialised education as better educated workers make everyone wealthier.

When it comes to Agile teams I don’t think the teams should do the hiring or decide pay and they don’t generally want or need to be bothered with administration or infrastructure, I feel that is governance that they should be spared, similarly I think ‘health care’ such as vacation, benefits, and support (HR) is governance. Start-ups will need to deal with all of this but at scale we shouldn’t have to. Nothing controversial so far, but where we may start to see differences of opinion is the level of governance needed for teams.

In my opinion we achieve the best results from small teams, that are given clear direction and are empowered and enabled, that means direction not a director, so team leaders, project managers or any other similar role is bad for teams, it is unnecessary governance and is in my opinion fundamentally anti-agile.

Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.

The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams.

That doesn’t mean we don’t need managers or leaders, but we don’t need them involved in the work. In Scrum we empower Product Owners to set direction and priorities but they stay out of the HOW, we empower Scrum Masters to coach us on process and guide us on improving flow, we even empower them to remove impediments on our behalf but we do not empower them to tell us HOW to do the job. In my opinion Project Managers (when they are deemed necessary) should respond to information provided by the team and not the other way round, they are a consumer of information only! They should convey no authority.

Where we need managers is NOT for doing the work, a suitably cross-functional team should be able to do that without an anointed leader. What we need managers for is the ability to create those cross functional teams, and do this by listening to what is needed, hiring and enabling the forming of those teams. We need leadership to provide clarity of direction, clarity of culture and clarity of values. We need managers to help us by enabling us grow as individuals in our individual careers in parallel to our goals for the team. We need managers for ensuring that we as an organisation are planning for the future so we can focus on delivering in the present.

If you feel you need a manager to manage the team doing the work then in my opinion you have failed elsewhere, it is a sticking plaster to a bigger problem, all you are doing by instilling team leaders/Project managers or team managers on a delivery team is masking a bigger problem elsewhere, possibly in hiring, training, education or communication.

The prime role of leadership is ensuring clarity, they have the big picture, making sure their employees see it too should be their number one goal, any other governance in the day to day job is an unnecessary overhead and a smell that there are problems elsewhere. The corruption inherent in larger systems needs to be cut out at the source not covered up with a layer of management. If you are hiring the wrong people then fix your hiring process, don’t hire people to manage problem staff. If you are struggling with consistency or maintaining values then it is an issue for education and clarity, putting a manager on as team is not the solution: enforcing values is not the same as instilling values.

In Agile, like Capitalism, we want government to be as small as possible and only get involved in things that we either can’t do ourselves or are necessary but unrelated to our day to day work. Unnecessary bureaucracy and governance are well, unnecessary.

Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

Hire the right people and let us do our job, educate don’t regulate, enable don’t enforce, but most of all trust us, don’t try to control us. Set a direction, then get out of our way.

Estimation is waste?

There is an ongoing debate about whether or not to use Estimates in your software development process, largely fueled by #NoEstimates, but as is often the case the battle has been picked up by many that have become over zealous without fully understanding but with great certainty tell you that you should never estimate.

There are many good explanations as to why estimating may not help you and some great explanations of alternative ways to get the information you need, or to help you understand why the information was not needed. But I want to focus on one of my pet-peeves – Thou shalt not estimate because estimating is ‘waste’ Every time I see that I shudder, and quite often I am left with the feeling that the person writing doesn’t understand either Lean or #NoEstimates.

Thou shalt not estimate because estimating is ‘waste’

What is Waste?

First of all the statement makes it sound like waste is bad, in fact the word does seem to imply that waste is bad. However, Lean is a lot less emotive with the term, Lean is often confused and simplified into simply the reduction/removal of waste. But this is a very lazy and incorrect interpretation.

Lean is about productivity first and foremost, and is about reducing ‘waste’ ONLY when AND if doing so does not impact the system productivity. In other words, in Lean ‘waste reduction’ is far less important than system improvement, but for whatever reason we get hung up on waste – especially when bashing others. We reduce waste to improve the system – waste reduction is not our goal it is just a tool to help us.

Is Estimation waste?

Is Estimation waste? The short answer is yes, but that is only part of the truth. Lean considers waste to be activities that do not directly add value to your product and can be considered either ‘Necessary Waste’ or ‘Pure Waste’.

Waste covers a whole host of things, but waste includes: Planning, testing, reporting, breaks, vacation, sickness, and a great deal of other things far too many to mention.

So calling Estimation ‘waste’ is akin to calling Planning ‘waste’, if we were to eliminate say planning and testing in an effort to reduce waste, we would very likely cause more and worse waste by producing the wrong thing (over production waste), in the wrong order(over production), or poor quality (rework waste).

In other words not all waste is bad and not all waste should be removed – simply calling something ‘waste‘ does not help the conversation.

Sometimes a little waste now can save a lot of waste later.

Is it beneficial?

The real question is whether the activity helps the system? and as a follow-up, is there a better way of achieving the same thing?

Questions to ask when considering waste:

Does this activity help the system to be productive now and in the future? (Would removing it impact our productivity)
Is there a better was to achieve the same outcome?

I can’t answer the question of whether Estimation is beneficial in your system, because every system is unique, if you are using estimation for forecasting purposes then I’d suggest that there may be alternative solutions that are better and #NoEstimates may be a good place to start. But forecasting is only one use of an estimate, your system may find that estimates are beneficial it is for you to decide.

Next time you see someone use blanket statements that eliminating ‘waste’ as an absolute and unqualified justification for not doing something, please challenge them to qualify their statement. Remember that waste is often necessary, our goal is more often to improve or understand the wasteful activity rather than eliminate it entirely.

Let’s consider a world without waste

If you are still unsure think what would happen to your system if you abolished all wasteful activities:

Vacations – typically 10% of your productivity lost.
Coffee breaks – 10 minutes every 2 hours = another 8% productivity lost
Toilet breaks
Stand-ups – yep they are waste too.
Demos, Retrospectives, Planning, all are ‘waste’

Just imagine how productive you would be with no direction, no feedback and no staff?

The Enemy of Agility is Ego

Over the years I have discovered that the more I learn on any subject the more I come to realize that I know very little, it doesn’t seem to matter how much I study or how much I learn, the awareness of scope of my ignorance grows far faster. Does that make me wise or just aware that I know very little? I suspect that I’m slowly fighting my way out of the valley of despair.

No need to improve

One of the most challenging aspects of being an Agile Coach and working with teams is that to improve you first need to accept that there is room to improve. There are a some teams and team members that believe there is nothing more that they need to learn, they are so supremely confident in their own capability and knowledge that they refuse to consider that there could be a better way to do things than the way they have always done things.

On the other-hand I can’t be confident that there is a better way, only that we won’t find a better way unless we look. I don’t like the notion there is a ‘best practice’ as this limits our thinking. But this puts unwavering certainty that this is the ‘best practice’ against encouragement to explore the possibility of a better way, certainty is very powerful.

Sometimes this ‘certainty’ is founded in fear, especially when dealing with transformations where former roles are called into question, I find this an understandable reaction, but the situations I struggle with most are the team members that become blinkered to opportunities, they have found one way that works (even poorly) and simply are unwilling to try anything different. Their Ego, prevents them considering anything else.

As a coach I have no desire to force processes or ideas on people, only to open their minds that there could be opportunities and alternatives. So it can be heartbreaking when people refuse to even consider alternatives, or worse impose their views on others through sheer force of will.

Perhaps I am mistaken and maybe the right answer is that if something isn’t broke don’t fix it, but that notion doesn’t sit well with me.

So how do we persuade people to open themselves up to learning new things?

I recently had an experiences that I found tough, there was a QA who refused to ‘leave his column’ on the board, he would not do anything that was not ‘testing’ and resisted anyone working with him in ‘his column‘ thankfully it is not often I see that level of obstinance. But this situation was further compounded by the rest of the team enabling his behavior. The developers were all too happy not to be involved with the QA aspect and were seemingly unmoved by his unwillingness to cross boundaries.

The QA column was regularly a bottleneck but rather than addressing this the team wanted to mask the issue by pushing cards through and raising new cards for rework. What was tough was that the team saw no need to experiment with alternative ways of working: suggestions included either helping the QA, or even getting the QA involved earlier, and despite raising QA as a bottleneck repeatedly in retrospectives the team didn’t want to change behavior even in the form of an experiment.

As a coach you can shine a light but not force a change. I felt the team was capable of far more but the team were getting things done and were seemingly content with the status quo. For me this is the dark side of coaching, where you must watch a team not reach their potential, out of respect for their independence. Ultimately it is a trust issue as things so often are.

Ownership of Columns

In general I dislike explicit roles when there is a shared responsibility, and I dislike the notion that a column on a board is in anyway related to a person or a specific role, the board should reflect the progress of the work (stories) not ownership of the work and when the two become muddled people become defensive and territorial.

When there becomes an association between a column and a person the focus moves from getting a story done as a team, to moving a story on to the next column, we switch our context of efficiency to a narrower view.

This is often seen as a subtle and unimportant distinction. But when the team loses a cohesive sense of ownership for getting to done and can hand off responsibility to another sub section of the team, bad habits emerge. At it’s worst I have seen teams (thankfully not one I coached) where at stand-up one part of the team will brag about how many stories they are ahead of an other part (be it front and back end or Dev and QA). In one extreme case I saw a team decouple testing from development by splitting stories and I overheard one standup where the developers were gleeful that they were now 3 sprints ahead of testing (the sprints were 3-week sprints). It is 9 weeks before they will see value from their work or even know if their work had value, and yet they were so proud.

Dunning Kruger Effect

Adjusting your mindset to one of learning rather than certainty can be tough, especially for those that grew up in a culture that rewards confidence and certainty, but accepting that you don’t know everything and being aware that there is always the potential to improve can enable you to become far more capable, the only thing stopping you is your ego.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

Bertrand Russell

Feedback: victim or beneficiary?

Feedback takes many forms, some is explicit and some can be inferred, even the absence of interaction is a form of feedback. Some if obviously well-intentioned, and some less so, some is invited and some is thrust upon us.

When you accidentally cut someone off in traffic, the feedback they give may be in the form of a horn and a hand gesture. There is no question this is feedback, it may even be useful when you have stripped away the anger and your defensive response – I did after all miss something, they are helping me see something I didn’t see myself and now I will at least have the option of improving my behavior in similar situations in the future.

Improvement is MY choice

Please note the word ‘option’, the decision to change my behavior is mine, I can choose whether I respond or how I respond, giving a peer feedback does not compel them to change the way you want them to, regardless of how forcefully you may give the feedback.

Many times you will receive conflicting feedback, or sometimes you just disagree with it. When someone gives you feedback and they are asking you to change behavior remember it is you that needs to change and there is no one Youer than You. It is up to you, you can choose what or whether to change.

A Feedback Culture

I work in an organization where there is a very strong culture of self-improvement and professional development, but there is also a distinct absence of management, we therefore rely heavily on feedback from our peers. Our internal processes encourage formal and informal peer feedback.

In an Agile community we rely heavily on feedback loops for improving our processes, stand-ups, demos retrospectives, not to mention the metrics we encourage in our development practices. These are all opportunities to respond to the feedback as a team to help us improve.

Peer Feedback

However, individual feedback from peers is much less structured and much less objective so it becomes much harder for the giver or receiver to be objective in the way they give or receive the feedback. Peer feedback is by nature personal and when things get personal the stakes get higher. We give feedback in a subjective way, and we receive and we respond to feedback in a subjective way, both are cursed with perspective.

Ostensibly the goal of feedback from the perspective of the giver is to affirm behavior we approve of (e.g. clapping and cheering) and to discourage behavior we dislike or disapprove of (booing). Context is also a factor we may be motivated personally or professionally.

For the receiver of feedback it is ostensibly to aid us in seeing things we are unable to see, to gain another person’s perspective on something. We may get to see things we can’t or don’t see for ourselves e.g. Am I speaking too quietly.

Whether the feedback is invited (“Can you hear me?”) or not (“Speak up!”) we are benefiting from another’s perspective on a situation.

Attitude

Sound’s great! But the attitude of the giver and receiver play a much more significant role in peer to peer feedback, and in how effective or valuable that feedback is, and what the consequences on the relationship are.

Let’s go back to the person I accidentally cut-off in traffic. Whilst there is benefit in being reminded that I need to pay more attention to my blind-spots I doubt very much the person cut-off and is giving me hand-gestures was overly concerned with my personal development or in helping me become a better driver. The reality is that their goal was not to help me improve, it was to vent their frustration, to express anger and to feel better in themselves by ranting at me, my welfare was not even remotely the concern.

And so it is with peer feedback, there are times when I really want to express my opinion, I don’t care whether the person improves, what matters to me is that I get my say and I can express MY feelings. This can come off as spiteful rather than supportive. and leave the person feeling a victim.

Victim or Beneficiary

The “feedback culture” has created an opportunity for some people to express a desire to ask to “give feedback” when really they are taking an opportunity to give someone a piece of their mind in a situation where the ‘victim’ feels they cannot respond. By calling it feedback we get a free punch and if they react badly or refuse to be verbally punched we can claim they are not acting in the spirit of feedback. I worry this is damaging our culture and is a misappropriation of feedback, the result is the artificial harmony we were trying to get away from. Dressing an attack up as feedback does not change it.

Before giving another person ‘feedback’ we need to reflect on it ourselves and consider whether our true desire is to help the person improve. Do we truly desire the subject to be the beneficiary of our feedback or is the act of giving feedback more about satisfying your own need for satisfaction and they are just the victim of your feedback.

Spirit of improvement

Please understand that I am not saying that the horn and the hand gesture are not feedback – clearly they are. Nor that I can’t respond to the feedback and improve. It is a question of the spirit of the feedback as much as the message itself. If I feel the feedback is given in the spirit of helping me I am far more likely to respond favorably, if I see the feedback as a veiled attack I am as likely to resent the message and in some extreme cases I may retaliate – I am less likely to see it as an opportunity for improvement.

Is your true desire is to help the person improve or do you want to make them feel bad? Do you want a good relationship in future? Then perhaps be more considerate of your approach. We all make mistakes, and we can all improve so let’s make the effort to be kinder in our delivery of the message – not necessarily the subject. Feedback needs to be clear and should not shy from difficult issues but the delivery can make all the difference.

TRUNK Test

When we rely so heavily on relationships and on feedback it is important to apply the TRUNK test for offering feedback:

Is what you are about to say TRue, Useful, Necessary, and Kind?

Goldratt User Stories

As a product owner we should be building products to deliver on the Vision and a set of defined objectives or success criteria. But often our plan is not closely mapped to those criteria or it can be difficult to measure whether we have achieved our Vision or delivered on our objective.

Let’s change the way we write stories

So I wondered if we could expand on a desire for delivering measurable value by changing the way we both plan projects/product and write our user stories?

Tell me how you measure me and I’ll tell you how I will behave.

Eli Goldratt

The notion of this is that rather than defining our User Stories in terms of behaviour, or actions or activities – in which we primarily focus on the ‘What’ we should change, our start point should become us defining the “needle we want to move” Let us start with the measurement of success. Understanding how we will be measured and identifying behaviour that impacts the measurement.

E.g. our goal is to increase the number of items per basket for online sales, our measurement is therefore the average number of items sold per transaction.

Equally it could be to increase the average value of the basket per transaction, or increase the number of units sold of high profit products

Hypothesis rather than Story

Our ‘story’ then would be to ask the Product Owner and Team to identify one or more hypothesis for ways that could impact that measurement. The notion being that a hypothesis must be tested before the story could be considered done.

This could take the form or a brainstorm session to identify the more traditional stories or it could simply be left for the team (in conjunction with the PO) to determine the best way (possibly two or three alternatives) to achieve the desired outcome after the story has been pulled.

This is building on the principle:

The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams.

Already happening?

You could argue that this is already the role of the Product Owner and that the Product already does this, and in identifying and prioritizing stories they have already considered the impact. In some cases I would agree with you, in a few cases I have seen products or projects with clear objectives in terms of the goal of the product and even sometimes a measure of success in terms of measurable objectives.

I have yet to see the end goals mapped even at a high level to the stories and features, in most cases success criteria are wooly or undefined and more often than not the Product Owner and team will brainstorm stories (story mapping) without reference to the goals, and even Impact Mapping often will not extend to measurable goals.

That is not to say that the Product Owner is not considering this holistically, the measurements are generally part of the consideration but many stories creep in that have no material benefit or impact on the success criteria of the product.

Measurements for Goals as the basis for Story Mapping

For reference I love Story Mapping, I consider it my favourite tool for Product Ownership and have been known to rave a little too much about it on occasion.

The start point in story mapping is typically to identify themes of user activities (you could call them epics but don’t get hung up on terminology they are essentially big rocks and then we will progressively break them down in to smaller rocks arranged underneath the big rocks.

We can then prioritise the work in the context of the whole rather than being constrained by a linear backlog which makes the context difficult to visualise.

It is also a fantastic tool for explaining the product for release planning and forecasting and so on. Like I say one of my favourite tools.

But what if instead of starting with activities or big stories, what if we started with our measurable goals or success criteria. e.g. new subscribers per month, revenue per visit, time to achieve objective using application etc. And we then identify stories that best enable us to achieve that goal.

There may very well be some overlap so there maybe the notion of tagging a secondary objective, but imagine if this helps us weed out stories that are not taking us to our goal or have limited value in the context of our goal.

We would ask which of these stories has the potential to move the needle the most? and prioritise accordingly.

Make it measurable

Focusing our efforts on measurable impact to the product should implicitly be the goal of any Product Owner so why not make it our explicit goal?

How do I know I am delivering Value?

Many of us are relatively familiar with the notion that stories should be expressed in terms of value delivered (Why) and how important the “Why” is for being able to maximize the outcome for the customer–

Who: As a …

What: I want to :

Why: So that …

When we talk of good stories we refer to INVEST as a means of helping validate that our stories are well written, I think this is a great tool for helping write user stories, we may even include Acceptance Criteria to help the team identify that the story has been completed in such a way that the value is best able to be realized, but I’d like to propose going a step further.

Expected Vs Actual

Whichever way the story is written the assumption is that the PO has determined the value of the story and prioritized it accordingly, but value is a very nebulous term and encapsulates all sorts of things many of which are assumptions or just plain guesses or personal preferences. We are also making the assumption that the story will successfully deliver the value we intend. Rather than accepting that it is a hypothesis that it will achieve our goal.

Up to this point we are assuming that the Product Owner is always making the right decisions, and their assumptions of the value delivered by a story are infallible. Speaking as a Product Owner, that is a rather hopeful assumption, often value judgements are little more than educated guesses, certainly they are very subjective opinions on value. Even market research is guesswork to some extent and particularly with new products or internal systems there is little opportunity for effective predictions of value. I don’t want to take anything away from the PO and their authority on making these judgements that is after all their role. But as a PO I would very much value a feedback loop which would enable me to validate that my decisions were right or wrong and give me the opportunity to course correct accordingly.

In other words it is necessary for us to make judgement calls but getting feedback on the accuracy or otherwise of those decisions would be hugely beneficial.

So what can we do?

We could add to the Acceptance Criteria to include some additional validation. Our Acceptance Criteria helps us validate that a story is implemented the way we intend it to be implemented, it does not however always enable us to measure whether the value is fully realized.

For example:

Assumption: We believe that adding a picture to listings on a product website will increase sales by 10% (our market research says so).

As an online customer,

I want like to see pictures of products

So that I can make more informed buying decisions (and thus buy more products) –

(Business Value: Marketing estimates sales increase of 10%)

Our Acceptance Criteria may stipulate positioning of the picture, the size and what to display if a picture is not available. We may even add some performance Acceptance Criteria such as average page load time. But that is not enough to validate that the value was achieved.

How do we validate that a story delivers Value

But how do we validate that this story does actually deliver the value we expect – whilst we can be confident that having a picture fulfils some aspects of the value – the better informed decisions, it might be that we are missing out by not having the ability to zoom on the picture, or it may be that our users are not bothered by the picture at all and would prefer another feature such as the “lead time” or “quantity in stock”

Validation Criteria

What if as part of this story we not only implement the feature to show the picture but we also include analytic measurements on the page load times, and even a measurement for the number of sales of a product or products per day and then evaluate 50% of users with the new feature and 50% without the pictures and compared the results. Or we could conduct focus groups on this feature or usability studies to get more subjective but detailed feedback.

As part of the story we could add an additional layer of Validation Criteria, this would be similar to Acceptance Criteria but would be a way to measure the value actually realized by the user

What do we gain?

Would including functionality or activities that enable us to measure that we have delivered the value we are expecting make the stories better? Would that information help shape our product and build a better product? Would it help us prioritize our backlog as we get a better understanding of value actually delivered vs value expected to be delivered?

We could either add stories for these measurements or consider these to be encapsulated in the delivery of this story.

Essentially we are asking whether feedback is valuable and if it is – how valuable is it to us.

Return on Investment:

When discussing this with a colleague the first response was that this is putting more upfront work and that is a challenge for the ‘lazy’. In Agile ‘Lazy’ is a virtue so this is important feedback.

Naturally there is an overhead in this but as with all feedback loops the information is valuable, knowledge is power and we just need to tune our efforts – our feedback volume to the right level to get valuable information with the minimum necessary effort. Another example of an Andon Cord where if the effort is too much and producing either too much information or nothing of value then we need to retune our feedback loops to give us enough valuable feedback to act.

Also many of these measurements will be applicable to multiple stories so the investment may end up being very limited but the feedback may be far reaching, and once automated the ongoing feedback can be tweaked to add extra sensors to give us more and more valuable information.

Some examples of value assessing measurements:

Website analytics: hit rates, click through rates, hot spots etc. The cost of these is minimal and is often something that can be applied even after development.
We could write stories to build into our application measurement for how our product is used, or the performance of our product,
We could add usability testing or focus groups, surveys of users
By using feature flags we could set up effective A-B testing to get feedback on structured hypothesis validation.

Please note that not all measurements need to be software driven – increased subscribers say may be measured entirely independently of your application.

Vision

But ultimately the biggest change would be in your initial vision creation, do you know your product goals and do you have a way to measure success.

Is your goal increased sales, or time saved, or efficiency improvements, or increased users or cost saving and regardless of your goals do you have a plan for measuring whether your product is achieving your goals.

This may seem like stating the obvious but I cannot count the number of projects I have been on where the stated aims were cost-saving or revenue generating and numbers were stated and yet after the project was authorized no one ever went back and assessed whether the project was a success or achieved any of it’s aims. Having an aim was enough to get the project started. Claiming a 10% increase in sales or reduction in costs should be something you can measure so measure it.

Ironically being able to map a story to one of your stated goals for the product could be another way to filter unnecessary stories if the expected impact is not one of your product goals.

Summary

This is a very simple change to your story writing process – an extra little consideration that could have significant implications to the success of your product, the addition of a very valuable feedback loop on value delivered (rather than value expected)

As a …

I want to …

So that …

And I can verify this by …

Post Script:

I presented this notion to a Product Ownership Meetup and the response was amazing the conversation was full of so many great ideas, and examples of how some of the product owners are already putting this in to practice – not explicitly but have made usability and measuring usage a key part of their Product Ownership methodology. I love the conversations this group has each month, but this month I came away with so many new things to think about.

The highlight of which was Goldratt Users stories – which will be the subject of my next blog.

Tell me how you measure me and I’ll tell you how I will behave – Eli Goldratt

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact. ― Arthur Conan Doyle

And it is this simple:

Work on the thing that adds the most value and stop working on things that don’t add value.

What is Value?

Two Problems

Example

Why be a coach?

For me it means two things.

Planning

Process

Summary

A good PO these days is hard to find…

1: Differentiating what is needed from what is wanted

2: Understanding what is required to create a successful application

3: Communicating effectively with both technical and business stakeholders

Summary

Measuring Capitalism

TL:DR Summary:

What has this to do with Agile?

Governance

What is Waste?

Is Estimation waste?

Is it beneficial?

Let’s consider a world without waste

No need to improve

So how do we persuade people to open themselves up to learning new things?

Ownership of Columns

Dunning Kruger Effect

Improvement is MY choice

A Feedback Culture

Peer Feedback

Attitude

Victim or Beneficiary

Spirit of improvement

TRUNK Test

Let’s change the way we write stories

Tell me how you measure me and I’ll tell you how I will behave.

Eli Goldratt

Hypothesis rather than Story

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

Already happening?

Measurements for Goals as the basis for Story Mapping

Make it measurable

Who: As a …

What: I want to :

Why: So that …

Expected Vs Actual

So what can we do?

For example:

As an online customer,

I want like to see pictures of products

So that I can make more informed buying decisions (and thus buy more products) –

(Business Value: Marketing estimates sales increase of 10%)

How do we validate that a story delivers Value

Validation Criteria

What do we gain?

Return on Investment:

Some examples of value assessing measurements:

Vision

Summary

As a …

I want to …

So that …

And I can verify this by …

Post Script:

Tell me how you measure me and I’ll tell you how I will behave – Eli Goldratt

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
― Arthur Conan Doyle

The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams.