Category: Agile Coach

The Enemy of Agility is Ego

dunning-kruger-effect

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.

kruger calvin

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

 

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.

photo_of_the_day_ferrari_458_italia_dashboard

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.

From-the-book-User-Story-Mapping-by-Jeff-Patton

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.

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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.

success

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.

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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.

missing3

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

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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.

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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.

Navigation

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

Practically Agile

As a coach it is very easy to get wrapped up in theory rather than practice, the topic itself is challenging because it is so simple to understand but so difficult to execute. We see so many Agile Transformations fail, so many poor implementations of Kanban or Scrum and at times it feels great other time so futile, the concepts are neither complex, nor new, but they are very difficult to implement effectively and in a lasting manner.

Successful Agile Software Development is in my opinion based on three similar but intertwining thought processes and if any one is absent the strength of the whole is significantly diminished.

  • Systems Thinking
  • Community Context
  • Reflective Practice and Application

Sometimes we get focused too heavily on the principles and the values but the Manifesto begins with what I think is a statement more important than the rest.

Manifesto for Agile Software Development
We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.

At the very heart the manifesto is about getting better at delivering software.

“We are uncovering better ways” – it is a journey of discovery, we do not have all the answers.  “by doing it and by helping others do it” – It is not just theory, and we share our successes with others so they can benefit from our past successes and failures.

Systems Thinking

It sounds grand and perhaps I would be better served coming up with a less grandiose title but essentially the issue here is that YOU are not the center of the universe. You could mean you personally, or your team.

Systems Thinking = YOU are not the center of the universe

The goal is effective Agile Software Development, solving a problem for a user, with software.  Our system is the whole process from identifying a need, through to the delivery of a solution, and that solution being used to satisfy a need.

Our system is not coding; it is not moving a card from one column to the next.

Having great code on a branch that will not get to the user for months or years (if ever) is not satisfying customers, however proud you are of it. The same is true for designs or perfect architecture for features not needed .

Transformation failures

In my experience I would attribute a significant majority of unsuccessful transformations (and many business failures) as a result of a failure by members of the team to grasp that they are contributors to a larger system, it sounds insensitive, but you are just a link in a chain, a cog in the machine. Focusing too much on one small part is not helping the organisation or the system as a whole.

And yet we expend a lot of effort on improving local efficiency, and at the same time failing to grasp that your efficiency is irrelevant without context.  By focusing on your own local efficiency is at best doing nothing for the larger system and at worst making the larger system less efficient – by not focusing on what is needed.  The obsession with coding efficiency in particular kills a great many software products. I see teams actually proud of a growing pile of stories in need of testing, or a team dedicated to front end UI proud of having endless features complete against mocks and how the back end teams can’t keep up. Sadly these teams seem oblivious to the fact that they are not adding value to the system.

Community Context

Systems thinking refers to the context and the domain but within that is a team – often many teams. The teams are a collection of individuals – all distinct and all different, and your ability to work together (or not) can determine how well you are able to produce software. Teams that bond and grow together achieve amazing things, teams that fail to establish trust can and do churn without making much progress.

An understanding that software development is about people first and foremost, may sound an odd statement when media presents it as a lonely and socially awkward enterprise. But all aspects are about interactions, within the team, with users, with stakeholders, with other teams, the list goes on, but effective communication drives software development.

Those that master the understanding that product creation is a people centered activity and overwhelmingly a team activity will thrive, we build cross functional teams in the belief that self-organisation and motivated groups produce great software – and they do.

It can be tough adjusting from thinking about you as an individual to you as a member of a larger community, but when we can act in a way that best serves our community rather than ourselves we start to become a high performing team, it is worth noting that you do not create a high performing team by simply grouping a number of high performing individuals, often that is a disaster.  High performing teams arise when we learn that we are more that the sum of our parts.

The second part of this is that part of being in a community is sharing knowledge and offering support. The manifesto calls out that part of being agile is not just doing it but helping others do it.  We find ways to grow as individuals and together.

Reflective Practice and Application

Finally and this is the pillar that binds it together and makes it so strong.  We take time to reflect often, so much so that we become skilled in self-reflection and in giving feedback to others to aid their self-reflection.

I believe every team – not just technical teams should take a break and reflect regularly, no matter what you do, you can improve, but you need an environment conducive for that thought process. An hour away from your normal environment may end up being the most productive hour of your week if you can learn to reflect effectively.

Facilitating Retrospectives

Facilitating retrospectives is a difficult skill, getting past the noise to get at the real issues can be difficult and takes skill and practice, but both the facilitator and teams get better at this over time, especially if they reflect on how to improve this skill.

As a group and individually we should take time to identify learning opportunities, we continually observe ourselves and our teams looking for ways to improve. We learn to give and receive feedback in a way that helps us grow – not to diminish us.

We challenge our thinking, we question our beliefs and we look for ways to grow.

We learn how to experiment in structured ways trying new things and observing, we learn the value of metrics and measurements, both in our team and our products.

But the learning and reflection is for nothing if we do not apply what we learn, the application becomes yet another skill we can develop, may of us can become analytical and observant but continue to do the same things despite what we see.

If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got

Learning to apply our observations and reflections in a structured an effective way is another challenge, and bringing this back full circle to systems thinking we should focus on the area that is holding us back the most and deal with that alone, and then repeat the process.

5-focusing-steps-113297

Trying to fix too many things or focus on too much at once can lead to confusion and particularly if you are measuring impact of changes if you change more than one thing it can be very difficult to know which one had impact.

Summary

All three of these thought processes overlap, intertwine and often depend on each other, but when bound together are extremely strong, and we can and will get better at delivering software and helping others to do it.

 

Practicing what you preach

For this blog post I’d like to make a change from my usual style and share a personal experience.

For the last few months I have taken on the role of Product Owner for a new product our company is developing. It is a bit of a change for the company as they have limited experience in developing their own products, most of the work is typically implementing work on behalf of clients where much of the product development is obfuscated from us.

It is also a big change for me. I have been coaching Product Ownership for a fairly long time now. I previously lead the company’s Product Ownership Chapter and I run a local Product Ownership Meet-Up event each month and I frequently teach Product Ownership and Story Writing workshops.
You might say I am becoming an expert in the theory of Product Ownership. So I could be forgiven for thinking I would find it easy. It is also not my first rodeo, I have been a Product Owner of sorts previously for both hardware and software products .

Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, you’ll be a mile from them, and you’ll have their shoes.

Jack Handey

It’ll be easy he said…

Maybe it is because I have been coaching for quite a while now, but the transition back has been far harder than I expected. I am (too) impatient to see progress, I am finding it irritating to write stories for things that I find obvious or repetitive. I found myself tempted to make unilateral decisions rather than involve the team; I wanted to get involved in technical decisions; initially I hadn’t made time to create personas;  I was using expediency as a very poor excuse for not doing activities that I believe add value. (all things I used to coach against). In short I am a bad bad man, and a hypocrite too.

roadmap

We did however create a pretty good Story Map and Road Map, the team got together with some subject matter experts and over a few good discussion and we developed a pretty good understanding of our road-map and high level priorities, still at a high level but with enough understanding to make prioritization decisions. We have got in the habit of writing enough stories for the next week or two and there are a good set of wireframes to enable us to start getting feedback on our designs before we commit to the code. We have found a great balance between getting knowledge value, and then delivering working value.

As the product has progressed we have maintained the Road Map turned it into a living user story map and used it for forecasting and release projections and planning, such a simple tool but so effective for enhancing communication. It’s simplicity served us well, communication became very easy internally and externally, and when when we needed to the forecast was very straight forward – and informative.

user-story-mapping

Delivery Pipeline

The aspect I am most pleased with is that one of our first priorities was setting up a delivery pipeline alongside the first stories so now every commit we are able to deploy directly to an environment reflective of our customer (no mocks) and a releasable package is created after every check-in.  I cannot understate the significance of this and how this one decision has made almost every other aspect of the delivery process easier.

There are certainly things we could be doing better, but overall I am very pleased with what we have done and I am really impressed with the team, they are an exceptional team that makes my job easy. But most of all I feel I have a much better appreciation for some of the issues that Product Owners are facing and I am reminded what a challenging and important role it is in shaping a product, conversely my hope is that I have made the team’s job easier, being on hand to clarify my understanding of customer needs, making design decisions promptly and making clear the priorities. The joy of being part of a team is that we each contribute something vital to the success and we only succeed together.

I have worked to get and interpret valuable feedback from customers and stakeholders, and as ever this is a challenging task. It would be easy to pass on every request and turn it in to a story, but this is OUR product and our role is to interpret requests in the context of our vision, and the reality is that we reject more suggestions than we adopt, every person you ask has a different and often conflicting opinion of what is needed and that filtering process is challenging and daunting, I hope I have shielded the team from the frustrations that entails. But for product owners out there this filtering is one of the hardest but most important parts of the role.

leap faith

Challenges

The role itself is paradoxical at times, some days it feels like there is little to do, but everyone else is busy, other days you are making decisions that will determine whether the product will be a success or not.

Early on in the process it was hard to convey credibility, I am no SME in the domain and our teams are not used to decisions being made in-house, my vision was questioned, it took a lot of will to maintain my course and build trust, I had a rocky couple of months. I controversially chose to go against some of the key stakeholders and not implement some features they wanted, I was vindicated later, but I knew this was a risk and could easily have gone the other way.

This is the hardest aspect of the job especially when you want this to be a team activity and for the team to share responsibility and credit, but the reality is that the role of the PO is to get feedback from the stakeholders and the team, and then make a decision, that decision can be lonely as there is a lot of subjectivity and rarely a consensus.

Product development is very different to project delivery it is much more fluid and we have evolved a lot over the last 6 months the product has grown and improved and now we have two releases under our belt and a happy customer it is an exciting time for us.

DevOps-cycle-Extended

DevOps

I cannot overstate how happy I am with the team or how successful I feel this has gone, I feel like a minor player in such a great team – which I hope is reflective of how well we have worked together and that it means I played my role effectively – although I am pretty sure I was the bottleneck more often than I would have liked.

I will say that we got lucky with the first customer and the support of stakeholders and the team have made it very easy for me.  But the one thing that has made this most successful in my mind was the decision to deploy the very first story to a production like environment – that one decision set the stage for a smooth progression and confidence with every subsequent story. I’d encourage that to be the first decision any new team makes.

I was doing a demo the other day and as I was presenting I am thinking (with a disappointing amount of surprise) “Wow – what an amazing product this is” it looks as good as any product out there. Somehow being involved in the process meant I didn’t take the time to sit back and see what we had achieved until that moment.

This is only the first major release and we have many more to come as the product evolves and customer numbers grow. Naturally there are still a few quirks to iron out.

It is my hope that I have learned a lot from this project and be able to use the experience to be a better coach, I’ll be more able to empathize and advise with Product Owners and perhaps be more confident that when challenged I can still apply some of that theory and speak with confidence when I am coaching others.

I hope you will forgive the obvious pride at being part of this team, but aside from that it has served as a reminder to me how difficult being a Product Owner is and how much software is a team sport and the whole team should take pride in the outcome, without any one of us it would not have been successful.

 

The Zone of Acceptance

One of the challenges of an Agile Coach, or anyone in a management or leadership role is establishing what I have seen referred to as the “zone of acceptance” for individual team members.

The Zone of Acceptance is a term for the tasks an individual sees as something they are prepared to do as part of their job.  This can relate to tasks, overtime, meeting attendance and more.

In a traditional model where work is explicitly assigned, this took the form of a team member saying “that’s not my job” when asked to do something on the periphery of their role. E.g. being asked to write documentation or attend a meeting outside core hours.  This is a direct confrontation that can be handled directly, the team member can be coached to broaden the scope of their ‘zone of acceptance’ and have it explained that sometimes responsibilities extend beyond core hours and core responsibilities.

However, when you move to agile it becomes much harder to deal with. We introduce the concept of self-management and self-organization, there is no longer an external person pushing you to extend your boundaries.

change

What is my Zone of Acceptance?

In my house I will sometimes come home to find the kitchen bin full or overflowing, if I ask why it has been left like that my wife will in a ‘matter of fact’ tone reply – “That’s your job!”  I don’t doubt that it is, at some point we agreed a division of responsibilities – , the responsibility is clear.

But conversely my behavior in a different situation is far harder to manage. My wife may ask me to change our child’s nappy (or diaper as my wife calls it), I will generally willingly comply, but I rarely volunteer.  I would never say it is not my job, but by subtly avoiding doing it I am implicitly saying that.  She can ask on a regular basis but that in itself undermines the equality and self-organizing nature of marriage, she shouldn’t need to ask. We have an understanding that generally works and in this case the reality is that she is not asking me to take the responsibility, nor is she demanding assistance, but my help is certainly appreciated.  What I need is to broaden my ‘zone of acceptance’ and to be more proactive in my support. We are a team.

That is not my job

The same becomes true in an Agile team, if I were to hear someone say ‘that’s not my job’ or “I’ll hand that over the wall to a tester” or similar comments, they can be directly challenged, and the coach or the other team members can act accordingly. But far more common is seeing the team members forming natural silos for work, an often agreed line in the sand where work is divided and not challenged.  They will avoid tasks they are not interested in or don’t see as their role, find excuses for working on tasks they see as theirs and in some extreme cases work on something outside the board to avoid picking up a card that doesn’t fall into their zone of acceptance.  This behavior may not even be visible, a team can actually become very productive in the short-term by forming mini-silos, but that doesn’t make it right or healthy in the long run.

I see the role of a Coach (or any Agile minded team member) to challenge these silos, to encourage team members to broaden their zone of acceptance, and to get the team to inwardly think that it is their responsibility to get involved in Story writing, and coding and testing and to be active in all meetings, to volunteer to write documentation and present the Demo, and to challenge those that don’t become active members of the team.

“But I’m a tester I don’t know how to code” – is a common argument. My response – “So what!” a lot of coders I know would benefit very much from having a tester on their shoulder asking if they had considered this case or that case, challenging the use of TDD and actively engaging in what and why things are being coded even if they don’t understand the code syntax itself.  And perhaps more controversially the opposite is true, having a developer sit on the shoulder of a tester and see what and how and why certain tests are performed can help improve the way a developer writes code. I think we can make passable testers of most developers and vice versa, teams should want to challenge boundaries. In the long term I’d suggest those roles should become indistinguishable from each other and in an ideal world they would be one and the same – a team member who would do what they could and what was needed.

Jack of all trades

By this I am by no means suggesting that we create a team of jack of all trades – I am actually very much against that, expertise should be encouraged and my view is that testing; coding and design etc. are very different skills and expertise in each should be valued. But my view is that the comparison of skills needed to get a user story to ‘done’ will often form a huge amount of overlap and likely a combined involvement.

purple jigsaw

If each user story represents a piece in a puzzle, chances are that there are a few parts that will require a specialist in ‘Blue’ or expertise in ‘Red’ skills, but the majority of the work is shades of ‘purple’ something that does not require particular expertise  and could be achieved by anyone on the team or through a mix of people. We often use edge cases as examples so we can dodge the normal cases, when we see that we should call it out.

How do we expand the Zone of Acceptance?

But now what? We understand the problem, we know it is hard to spot and hard to challenge, so how on earth do we expand the zone of acceptance?

The first step is nearly always acknowledging there is a problem. Discuss it with the team – maybe as part of a retrospective and see if they recognize it as a problem too.
Let the team find ways to solve the problem. Once they see themselves as a team it becomes easier as they will be seeking ways to help each other rather than looking for the easy way out for themselves.

One team I work with identified this problem for themselves and their solution was to put a sign on their task board that said: “Have I done this before?” And another sign that said “Is this on the critical path?”

have I done this before

The idea was that when selecting a story the team member would stop and think:

  • First whether they were taking a task that someone else could take and learn – or maybe they could pair and teach someone else to share their knowledge;
  • Secondly “Is this the next highest priority or am I taking an easy option?  Some team members will cherry pick from the backlog rather than taking the highest priority item.

By having a written reminder it can become a challenge at stand up. The team members can call out each other if they see either of these behaviors.

Great Team Players

This barely touches the surface of this particular problem, but there should be a desire by the individuals on a team to (sensibly) broaden their zone of acceptance, for the focus to shift from what is the next best(or easiest) task for me to what is the next best task for the team – and even better what is most valuable for the customer.  And more significantly for this to be supported and encouraged by the team and the organization as a whole. Too often the organization rewards ‘star developers‘ rather than great team players, that message reinforces bad behavior and can be extremely corrosive to the organization over time.

Mindset or method?

Straw poll:

Should we teach practices and methods in the belief that an Agile mindset will evolve from the good practices?

or

Should we teach an Agile Mindset in the hope that with an Agile Mindset good practices will emerge?

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I know of a few Scrum Masters and a few Agile Coaches in each camp, and some that feel very strongly on this topic. And of course the choice lies at the heart of most Agile Transformations and the outcome will therefore be far reaching.

Method over Mindset

Around 10 or 11 years ago I was introduced to a new way of managing projects and a new software tool for doing it. I was trained in how to use the software, but not in the theory behind the tool.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act but a habit.

– Aristotle

The tool was amazing, it really blew my mind. As a Project Management tool/method it made more sense than anything I had used previously and I loved it, I happily used the tool and got good results. But despite having the tool I never learned the theory and didn’t even know where to look to find out more.  No lack of interest or enthusiasm but I was content to use the methods and it helped in my current situation but I was never able to make the leap to more than a method despite my enthusiasm.

It is a little beside the point but the tool was Critical Chain for Project Management and before I was introduced to Agile I thought this was the best option out there for Waterfall projects (probably still is). Sadly despite it being so great, it was still based on the assumption that the end state was known at the start of the project, which for me is the ultimate failure of Waterfall thinking, and my primary reason for moving to Agile.

Only much later did I discover the theory behind the tool was The Theory of Constraints and the 5 focusing steps, IF only I had been shown that and I feel my enlightenment would have come much sooner.  But a method without understanding the theory leaves you unable to adapt and improve, I was limited to the context in which I was shown.

What is more I had a co-worker that struggled with the concept of slack and wanted to follow the method apart from that one aspect – the lack of understanding left him unable to differentiate between a necessary aspect of the method and an arbitrary one, and ultimately for him the tool didn’t work because he rejected the necessity for slack.

A lack of understanding of the theory leaves you unable to differentiate between a necessary aspect of a method and an arbitrary one.

– John Yorke

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Method over Mindset, the Return on Investment

Another consideration is that teaching theory takes considerably longer and has a much lower conversion rate. That is to say that I could teach the Scrum framework fairly quickly – a matter of days, and be pretty confident that the instructions are clear and ‘could’ be followed effectively. To take that same group and to teach them the theory to the point of understanding the why behind each of the practices could take weeks or months, and likely longer before they are fully understood. It is also possible that some will never grasp the theory but are still perfectly capable of being good team players.

Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection

– Mark Twain

Many organizations are interested in the short-term results rather than long-term understanding and so there is a desire to do the least for the most impact. So we see the evolution of phrases like ‘Scrum-but’ as a means to discourage deviation from the defined framework. Our goal becomes to repeat, rather than understand.

Mindset over Method

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If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea!

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The flip side of this is the desire to teach/show the impact of having an Agile Mindset and then having the individuals identify a solution using that knowledge.

Clearly this is a much greater challenge, even those with an Agile Mindset will initially lack any practical applications to draw upon, even the most Agile of mindsets is limited to what they have experienced or read about, and contriving a new bespoke process to your environment may ultimately be the most desirable solution. However, it is impeded by the ability to share that vision and understanding with others, and limited by your understanding, ability and creativity.   And frankly do we really think that we are able to come up with a better framework than Kanban or Scrum on our first pass at an Agile Transformation?

A middle ground?

As you have probably guessed I am not a fan of either approach. I believe that most people will not become Agile overnight and even the most eager of minds will take time to absorb and understand the implications and possibilities of Agile.

I further believe that teaching Scrum as a closed framework that must not ever be deviated from is not the solution. Instead I would compare it to learning any new skill, we teach good practices and when you have mastered them you are ready to move on, we may teach a variety of good practices so you have some comprehension of the possibilities available, that way you do not limit your thinking so just one solution.

But we learn to master the basics, and we learn to question ‘why?’ when we feel we have mastered the basics and we understand why, only then we are in a position to start to evolve.

Applying Lean and XP and Kanban to the Scrum framework can let you grow in understanding within a safe set of guidelines. And when you understand the mindset enough to comprehend the limitations then maybe you are ready to craft your own solution.

If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.

― Albert Einstein

 

Why I recommend Scrum

Personally I love Scrum as a foundation for a transformation to Agile for those undertaking software development projects, not because I believe it is better than Kanban or other tools, but because to succeed with Kanban you need a level of self-discipline and understanding that is often absent for those new to Agile, and it becomes far to easy to gold plate or run long.

Scrum adds some safety nets and feedback loops that counter many of the usual “human nature” problems that arise from teams new to self-organization. Self-organization is a skill we need to learn and develop like any other. Scrum is so simple to learn, and easy to follow (if you are willing) and once you understand the Agile mindset it is a great framework for evolving into a great Agile team. But like any tool if used inappropriately you can make a mess. But any change requires a good guide.

That being said for support or reactive work Kanban is ideal as the discipline generally comes from outside. It is never a one size fits all.

Leadership

Method without mindset can only take you so far

Teaching the mechanics without teaching the theory is only half the task and whilst it is sufficient for many consultants to get paid, what they leave behind is a culture unable to improve, and without improvement entropy will set in.  I believe both some guidance on the mindset and instruction in some methods are both necessary for a successful Agile Transformation, along with a healthy amount of enthusiasm and patience from those leading the transformation.

 

 

 

Motor City – A Kanban Game : Overview

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Game Overview

The game is designed to reflect a simplified operating of a delivery pipeline for a car manufacturing plant.

The player accepts orders from customers, chooses which products to make and allocates resources and manages the plant to deliver cars to customers in the most effective way possible.

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Kanban

Each player manages a separate board representing a factory, the board is laid out as a Kanban board and the production is tracked as it moves across the board.

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Wip Limits

In the core game WiP limits are optional. Players may choose to apply WiP limits to manage flow, or just use their instincts.

If played for fun the WiP limits are not explicit, but if using this in a training environment I’d encourage explicit limits and for them to be strictly enforced to enable the class to evaluate the impact of WiP limits on the game.
I’d also suggest that each player experiment with different WiP limits to compare the impact with each other and discuss the results.

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Accepting Orders

At the start of a shift a player may choose to review and accept an order, once accepted an order must be delivered and if the player fails to complete an order they will be penalized.

Sourcing Materials

Each shift all players may choose to source materials for their production, this is done by selecting vehicle cards from the available selection, only 4 cards are visible and players may only choose from those available – this adds some competitiveness over resources, and an element of understanding your constraints and dependencies.

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Production

At the start of each hour within a shift one player rolls dice to determine the available production points for all players (all players get the same to make this game about the allocation of resources rather than the luck of the dice.

Each player is allocated a quantity of Manufacturing, Assembly and Quality production points which they can allocate over the course of the hour. Unused production points are discarded. The player also has the option to trade production points of one type for another but at a 4:1 ratio to indicate the impact of repurposing machines.

The vehicle cards are pulled through the system and production points are allocated as they progress through the system.

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Bottlenecks

There are a number of potential bottlenecks in the system and how you manage these will heavily impact the result of the game.

Game Success

Ultimately the winner will be the one that manages the production most effectively to meet their customers’ needs. It is hoped that applying Kanban and Theory of Constraints Practices will be rewarded, although there is an element of game mechanics and chance.

Purchasing the Game

The game is for sale at $120 + postage and is available now.  Game contains 4 game boards so is suitable for 4 players (or 4 pairs).

Please email me at john.yorke@yorkesoftware.com to arrange to buy the game.

Thank you for your support and encouragement.

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The 4 steps to successful software delivery

After [reading / posting] a recent article on waste, (read it here), someone asked me why we shouldn’t do work that we will need later if it is more efficient to do it now?  You have already dug the hole—doesn’t it make sense to do all the work in that area together?

This is very similar to the argument for splitting stories horizontally along business layers: “We can be more efficient if we optimize and specialize.”

Yes, you might achieve local efficiencies by taking these steps. But local efficiency is not the most important factor in your decisions. Efficiencies and optimizations need to be considered in the context of the whole system.

The primary goal is to Maximize Value Early

For both project and support work, our goal is to maximize value for our organization, and to realize this value as early as possible.  In a consultancy firm, there is a slight abstraction, as work is paid based on time and materials, and these steps are distributed between client and team. Regardless of who owns the following steps, success depends on shared awareness of these priorities.

The 4 Steps

The four steps are designed to focus our energy where it will have the most impact first, and then building upon the previous step by shrinking the focus area through each subsequent step. Hence they are in descending order of impact.

1 – Prioritization
(Selecting Which Project/Product to Build Next?)

The most important decision your organization needs to make is which work will bring the most value NEXT. This has the most impact on your company’s bottom line, so should get the lion’s share of effort and focus.

Program Management

 

Describing the value a project will bring is far and away the most important aspect of software delivery. If possible, create a formula for calculating business value to help with these decisions. If you are unable to quantify or qualify the value to the organization of the work being undertaken (at a high level), then you are likely working on the wrong thing and all other actions you take could be waste.

Some projects/products will obviously bring in huge amounts of revenue. Others may save huge costs in manual entry and work-hours. Some may support business-critical systems that, if not supported, create extensive risk and potential cost. A project might also fulfill a safety or regulatory concern, or business objective.

Naturally this is complicated and can be difficult. Priorities change. Time factors and organizational politics come into play. A lot of the time you will be making informed guesses about value and costs. But this decision dwarfs all of the others in the impact to the bottom line, so is critical to put the right amount of effort here.

I would consider this to be the responsibility of the Program Manager or Project Management Office, but I see the responsibility to be to identify the projects that will bring most value to the organization as the end of their role. “Day-to-day Project Management” responsibility lies elsewhere.

I would however strongly encourage this decision-making process to be transparent and inclusive.  Hold a regular Project review board and invite the stakeholders. Make the process clear and help everyone understand how the decisions are made. I would also suggest a visible roadmap of work planned.

Finally, I would encourage you to not plan beyond your company’s horizon. If new work is likely to emerge in the next 3 months that may significantly change priorities, then only plan for 3 months.  Only start a product or project at a point you feel committed and certain it will be completed. Starting something with the expectation of pausing or pivoting suggests it wasn’t the most important thing to work on next.

2 – Direction
(Product Ownership – Building the right Product)

Whether this a new product or supporting an existing product, it is important to ensure that you build the right product,  Product Ownership is covered in lots of detail in other places so I won’t go in to details but I suggest watching this video:

po nutshell

Like prioritization in Step 1, the most important responsibility in Product Ownership is Maximizing value–Are you working on the most valuable thing next?  You do this through experience and through feedback from users and stakeholders.

Feedback is crucial. To get frequent user feedback, you should be thinking about how you intend to deploy your software and then update it regularly. You should be thinking of this before or with your first story.

Deployment and ongoing updates should not be an after-thought.

Product Ownership is also about maximizing the work not done. The product should meet the needs and goals but only do what is necessary. There will be a point when the returns diminish. All work carries an opportunity cost, and at some point your time is more valuably spent elsewhere. Understanding this is vital.

Finally, I want to stress the importance of getting value to the customer quickly. Value is only realized when the software is used. We should be striving to getting the software in use as soon as possible. This may be in an unfinished state. It may be only a partial solution, but it should be adding value. e.g. it can be used alongside an existing product, or it could be used for this workflow but for another you use another tool etc.

Feedback from people actually using your software is the most valuable feedback you can get.

Just like prioritizing projects, prioritizing stories has far more impact on the success of the project than the following steps.

3 – Quality
(Build the Product Right)

Building the right product is more important than building it right. Building the wrong product is just a waste. But that doesn’t mean that quality is not important.

Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.

Henry Ford

When assessing cost of software, it is easy to focus on the initial development cost alone. But support maintenance and future enhancements all fall into the total lifetime cost of a product. The cost of defects magnifies over time, and the cost of supporting poor quality code is significantly higher and more risky. Re-learning and knowledge transfer are painful and costly to an organization and I can think of numerous examples where companies have been forced to abandon projects or replace software because they lost a key employee who had the knowledge locked in his head–or software so fragile no one dares touch it.

Good practices such as Test Driven Development, Pair Programming, Behaviour Driven Development and Automated Regression Testing may seem costly at first. But when considered in the context of lifetime cost, they are a sound investment. More importantly, they enable the right business decisions to be made because there is a confidence in the software.

Quality code with a solid set of tests enables refactoring and new features to be added with the knowledge you are not causing unintended consequences elsewhere by breaking older functionality. This reduction in risk is a considerable advantage, especially when supporting older applications.

This is not a carte blanche to gold plate or over-engineer. Quality Code is the right code for the story and No More. We write just enough to satisfy the story and we write it well. Over-engineering applies to the GUI too–we don’t add features or over-engineer.

4 – Efficiency and Improvement
(Building it Better and Faster)

By this point we should be working on the most valuable product to our company. With that taken care of, our next focus is to work on the most valuable feature or story for our users/customers. We should be doing it in a manner that enables us to be confident in the work and able to expand it later.

But guess what? You can do it better.  We should reflect on the decisions we made and how we make them. Are we making the right decisions?  What helped us make those decisions?  Are we making the wrong decisions? If so what could we change to avoid repeating those mistakes.

The reflection and improvement should be done at all steps and should incorporate the learning from all stages.  If we continually look for ways to improve we will get better and better.

If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got

Henry Ford

 

What about efficiency of developer effort?

So what of the original question about being more efficient with horizontal splitting of stories, or the perceived inefficiency of re-working the same area of code later?

It is a question of impact and perspective. In both cases the question is founded on ‘efficiency’ being a measure of the developer’s efforts.  What I would like you to consider is that in terms of delivering value to your users and ultimately your company efficiency should not be measured in terms of developer effort, but should be measured in terms of delivered value.

Efficiency should not be measured in terms of expended effort, but should be measured in terms of delivered value.

The most valuable decision is to work on the right project – this dwarfs all other decisions by an order of magnitude. But it is at a different level of scope than this question.

The next most valuable decision is what to work on. This generally best considered from the perspective of delivering value to the customer quickly and of being able to respond to their changing and emerging needs.

When we split horizontally or when we do extra work, we know we will need later we may give the appearance of making more efficient use of developer effort, but in doing so we reduce our ability to adapt to changing needs and more significantly we delay the time to deliver the next most valuable feature.

This is an example of working with a waterfall mindset. The measure is that while it delays us this week, we will make back the time next month or next year. So if we are not planning to deliver this to our customer until next month or next year, it might appear to make sense. But you may not have considered two factors.

If we are deploying frequently, we are realizing value with every release and in the value of our software isn’t massively more than the cost of developer time to create it, then it is likely we shouldn’t be working this project at all. So ultimately the cost of developer effort for having to rework the same code later for a new feature is insignificant to the value gained by delivering sooner. We should measure ourselves based on value delivered not the effort to deliver it.

The second consideration is that the work you are doing on the assumption of needing it for a future feature may not actually be needed. That feature is by definition lower value and less important as it has been prioritized lower.  There is a pretty reasonable chance that the customer may change their needs or there is the possibility of the project being cancelled or considered good enough as it is.  That work may never actually be needed and you would have delayed the project for work that had no value. The efficiency you are trying to achieve may just be an illusion.

This is the business equivalent of spending $10 today to save $1 next year.

When considering efficiency and improvement, remember your goal is to maximize value to your customer and to realize that value as quickly as possible.  Ask yourself if the efficiency improvement you are proposing fulfills those goals? If not it may be just be an illusion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weeks of coding can save hours of planning 

In the context of Lean manufacturing there have been numerous studies that estimate that the proportion of value adding time in a production cycle is around 5%. The other 95% is deemed to be waste.  These studies also conclude that by far the biggest waste is overproduction.

Anecdotally I think it is a very similar story in Software development although my fear is that the proportion of value adding time is even lower.

Waste takes many forms but broadly speaking effort as a team/company fall in to three areas:

1 .   Valuable Effort – Value adding activities, these activities cost time and money, and there is a consequential opportunity cost but they add some value.   However, the value may be able to be realized more effectively.

2.  Obvious Waste – Non-value adding activities that are evident. These activities cost time and money (and opportunity cost) but add no value to the product being created. Examples are vacation, breaks, sickness.

3. Valueless Effort – Non-value adding activities masquerading as Valuable Effort, they cost time, money and have an opportunity cost but add no value to the product being delivered.

Waste Reduction is Not Your Goal

I will be covering the wastes in more detail but it is very important that waste reduction is NOT the focus of your efforts,  Waste Identification is a supporting activity for the Theory of Constraints, any efforts to improve a part of your system that is not the bottleneck is a waste in itself.  But identifying waste can aid in your efforts to improve your bottleneck so is a great tool to support your other activities.

 

The 7 deadly sins

Lean identifies 7 wastes  (recently adding an 8th Waste)

  1. Overproduction
  2. Inventory
  3. Tranportation
  4. Over-Processing
  5. Waiting
  6. Motion
  7. Defects
  8. Wasted Potential of People

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

Peter Drucker

Overproduction

Overproduction is considered the worst of the wastes and ultimately it is this particular waste that is the basis of much of the Agile Manifesto for Software Development.  Which is why systems thinking is a topic I keep coming back to.

Agile is founded on the premise that at the start of the product we know the least and lack of flexibility is the biggest constraint in the success of software development. Traditional methods plan, create, test and support endless features that were unnecessary, the cost of this waste is unfathomable and big enough to trigger the Agile movement and challenge the way we work.

Overproduction was also the primary waste identified in the book “The Goal” by Eli Goldratt, and if you haven’t read that book I would heartily recommend it. The book is . great primer for the Theory of Constraints and for understanding Lean thinking. 

Planning is Waste?

But Agile has not completely fixed this problem, and in my experience development teams regular and persistently develop unnecessary features.  With many teams choosing to work without sufficient time spent planning; story writing; prioritizing; and without consideration for whether the work they are doing adds any value now or more significantly adds the most value next.

Road mapping, planning and even story writing are often incorrectly perceived as ‘waste’ and the avoidance of waste is used as a justification to get back to coding on something that is likely not valuable and almost certainly not the most valuable activity to be worked on next, which is a far more insidious waste than the planning ever could be .

Features “not needed yet” are implemented on the basis that it will save time later, or features are added because “We know we will need it later” – (7 words I dread to hear.)

We work to look or feel busy, in our minds we translate activity as being productivity when there is little correlation between the two in the context of software development. In software, creativity; problem solving and planning are far more valuable efforts than unfocused coding.

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

Abraham Lincoln

In most cases features have no value until they are in the hands of a user and being used for productive effort. So any activity not spent getting the next most valuable feature into the hands of a user quickly is just waste.

Writing extra features that are not used or rarely used extends the production time but brings little or no value, it also compounds all of the other wastes because by it’s nature production of something of little value needs to go through the system thus exposing an unnecessary feature to all the other wastes.

When you next start work on something ask yourself: “Is this the next most valuable activity for our customer?” If you cannot confidently answer that question then maybe you need to spend more time planning so you can spend less time coding something that is not needed.

The worst case scenario

In software the biggest risk to any project is that it will be cancelled or obsolete prior to being used by your customers.  This may sound obvious but if a project is cancelled ALL of the features are/were waste. All that effort produced no value for anyone.  That time, effort and money could have been spent elsewhere.  So getting your product right is only any good if you get your product delivered.

Delivering value to your customer quickly is the best way to mitigate the risk of your efforts being wasted, and Done is not really done unless it is in the hands of a customer and actually being used for a productive purpose.

 

Overproduction is a big topic and deserves a little extra focus so I’ll delve deeper into the other wastes another time.