Category: Agile Transformation

Remote work doesn’t have to mean working alone.

I have seen a number of articles recently that refer to the stages of remote work or maturity of your remote team as a linear progression to only one possible Nirvana. The Nirvana in question appears to be 100% independence, 100% asynchronous communication and no need to ever have any work-related human contact at all. Some companies even go so far as to explicitly not allow work related conversations insisting that all are in writing to avoid knowledge silos.

Whilst I understand the reasoning I find myself disagreeing with this conclusion. Yes – Being remote opens up the possibility of hiring from anywhere in the world, which means that there are the potential of round the clock time zones. Yes – being able to work whenever you want around your other commitments and family demands is an amazing benefit. And Yes the inevitable consequence if those are taken to the limits can lead to a conclusion that effective asynchronous written communication as the necessary means of communication. But it is not the only possible outcome.

For some companies especially those embracing full flexibility or round the clock time zones this may be desirable on some level. But I do not see it as the inevitable solution nor a desirable solution for all. Just like in the office there are different solutions depending on the circumstances.

How much flexibility is necessary?

Not all companies will have employees around the world or even want to. Many will already be in a single time-zone or a few closely connected ones so time zones are not an issue. And when it comes to flexibility how much do you really need? Is that flexibility worth trading human contact?
I used to work in an office, including drive time I was committing a 10-11 hour block of time every day. Now I am at home we adopt a core-hour system where we ask people to be available for meetings in a daily 6 hours window. Essentially if there is a team meeting booked in that time period we expect you to make every effort to be there, but this gives a huge amount of flexibility. I have more flexibility than I could possibly need especially in comparison to an office. I have gone from 11 committed hours to 2 or 3 per day with a lot of flexibility around that. Some may want more flexibility than this but if it means giving up human contact that extra flexibility comes with a very high price tag.

If I have sufficient flexibility and I don’t need round the clock time zones, why then would I choose a policy of avoiding human contact? In a pre-covid world it has become a widely accepted truth that co-located cross-functional teams are more effective and more productive. Agile prefers Individuals and interactions over processes and tools, and Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. I’ll happily trade some small loss of flexibility for a highly interactive and effective team.

Our History

Two years ago when I was asked to create an all remote Agile software development office I began with the assumption that this meant effective interactions and extensive collaboration.
The principles behind the manifesto spell out some essentials:

Business people and developers must work
together daily throughout the project.

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

The most efficient and effective method of
conveying information to and within a development
team is face-to-face conversation.

None of that supports asynchronous written communication. So you could say that we went against the crowd when creating a remote workforce as we prioritized real-time human-human interactions and rejected, where possible, written interactions.

We should be pioneers in creating remote Agile teams with a focus on co-working and collaboration.

The path less followed

Going against the crowd is always risky, but part of being Agile is that We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. At the time I felt we were in a position to experiment, not with remote work, that was a commitment the company had made, but on how we implemented our remote office. I worked very closely with a like minded colleague and we came up with a plan for Remote Agile Teams. We decided that we would become pioneers in creating an environment for remote Agile teams with a heavy focus on co-working and collaboration.

We were already largely working as external contractors and not in a situation where we were working as closely as we would ideally like with stakeholders. Just like everywhere else, business-side stakeholders are busy and we were often limited to planned meetings and infrequent touch points. It became increasingly apparent that remote working actually gave us more opportunities to work closely with the business side. Perhaps not face to face physically but our interactions were more effective and more frequent than before. This increased interaction has led to far better outcomes. Because we were all remote there were fewer barriers to interactions with clients.

It was liberating to witness business-side representatives reduce their turnaround time on critical features. It was nice to no longer worry about booking our highly sought-after meeting rooms. And lastly, it was reassuring to realize that the focus should not be on face to face but on determining the appropriate form of communication given the constraints. With a newly established and excellent track record, we began reevaluating these principles and felt confident enough in our abilities to embrace the spirit of the Agile principle and even build upon them in a virtual office setting. 

But to do so we needed the right environment, an environment where business stakeholders and delivery teams could effortlessly work closely together daily. Real-time collaboration was key, and we intentionally removed as many barriers as we could to allow for effective communication channels. We relied on training, the right tools, and clear expectations to make this happen.

Is Remote Work compatible with our software delivery practices?

As we follow the Agile principles, we were heavily relying on practices like Pair Programming, Mob Programming and Test-Driven Development. We strongly encourage automated delivery pipelines and team ownership of the code and of the product.  In a remote setting, this posed a challenge as we had to consider how we would ensure effective communication and how to deal with connection lag. 

To be successful we needed tools and environments that enable our teams to continue with pair programming just as they did in the office. In the office, developers would typically share control of a single computer but with two keyboards and two mice attached. Remotely this posed a harder challenge as we also had to factor in remote communication and lag. The ability to share screen control, see the same things, and communicate clearly in real-time became a challenge. It was crucial to find the right tools for this as it was far more complex than simply sharing a screen.

There were other practices that we needed to support remotely such as stand-ups and retrospectives which are closer to meetings but have individual attributes that needed to be maintained in a remote setting.

Proximity, Awareness & Spontaneity

In looking for ways to enable remote work effectively we did a lot of research and experiments. In our research three terms came up again and again. Proximity, Awareness & Spontaneity these are not simply features of a tool, but words that describe feelings people want to have when using a tool. Software to support remote workers like this is not just a collection of functionality but a virtual environment where we are able to recreate human to human interactions. The best tools allow people to engage on an emotional level.  We added breakout rooms as a 4th pillar to round off the expectations we had for a remote environment.

Summary

We created a virtual environment where collaboration and co-working was enabled, supported and effective. Yet, we didn’t follow the ‘standard’ work-from-home model that most remote workers are used to. Our environment can be described as a flexible all day interactive workspace which expects ongoing, frequent, and sometimes sporadic communication. We created a sense of situational awareness of our environment and of our colleagues to allow for spontaneous conversations between our team members and between our teams and our business-side stakeholders. We feel close to our colleagues and have minimal barriers to interactions with them. We have an environment where pairing and other agile practices are not only supported and seamlessly enabled but are effective and productive. 

We are a workplace that routinely over-communicates, extensively collaborates, and empowers team members to quickly discuss a solution and make decisions. We are able to do this throughout the day and often with short-notice or no-notice. We have working agreements that support variations in time zones but also reflect a need for high-frequency interactive collaboration. We have tools and policies that preserve our culture but allow us to grow and evolve with new work techniques. 

In short we are Agile in a remote setting. We believe we are pioneering an alternative to asynchronous working and are hopeful that this is the start of a rapid growing trend.

Two years ago I was asked to set up a remote office with the intent to grow an additional option for our employees and clients. Today we have numerous teams working in this environment, and due to Covid we now have over 500 software delivery team members working from home but still together, we are based all over the USA and in the UK. The patterns we set up for 100 employees scaled seamlessly for the rest of the company So after two years working with remote Agile Teams we can confidently say that not only is it possible to have remote Agile teams, but that they thrive and are exceptionally effective.

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.

deadly-assumptions

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

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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

victoriaspongecomet

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?

doc

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.

—————————————

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.

 

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.

 

Are you working too much?

Would it surprise you to learn that the person in your team or company that regularly works 60 hours a week (and makes sure everyone knows it) is very likely the least productive person on the team?

The person working 60 hours is likely the least productive person on the team.

And I don’t simply mean that productivity diminishes after 40 hours, I mean absolute total productive output is less from someone working 60 hours compared to someone working less than 40.  The reality is that you would actually get more done by NOT working that time than you will working those extra hours.

This is a hard pill to swallow in a culture where ‘working hard’ is seen as a virtue, and the more hours I work the more virtuous I am. Long hours are often assumed to show commitment, dedication, loyalty. Maybe they do, but they don’t show productivity. If your company values those things above actual productivity then so be it, but understanding that it is about those attributes rather than productivity is a rather brutal fact to face. However, if you want to produce more and maintain high quality then you need to work less hours.

Parkinson’s Law

I am likely to offend a few hardworking people with this but my assessment of the findings of these studies is that is is a subconscious manifestation of Parkinson’s law. “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” If I expect to work 60 hours then I’ll make my work last 60 hours.

parkinson 2

Not just a European thing.

Europeans have a reputation for favoring reduced working hours and I’m sure it is an ongoing frustration to those in America that despite typically working more hours, American companies are consistently similarly or less productive than their European or Japanese counterparts despite the longer working hours and less vacation.
Interestingly, the study I’m quoting was actually a 12 year study by the Ford Motor Company of production in the USA.

Henry Ford… again.

Before I go into the study in more detail I’d like to go back in time and talk about the history of working hours and in particular Henry Ford.

If we go back 150 years there were campaigns all over the world to reduce the working week from 16 hour days, 6 days a week – 96 hours was considered a normal working week for many. Forward thinkers pushed for limiting the working day to 10 hours with breaks for food – a radical concept at the time.

MayDay

Over time much of this became law despite fierce objection from industry, and by 1914 a normal working week was 9 hour days, 6 days a week.  The pressure until then mostly came from humanitarian motives and agendas, and perhaps because of that, businesses took steps to prevent it taking hold, reducing pay in line with reduced hours so a reduction of 20% of hours came with a reduction of 20% in wages, this undermined the whole movement.

But then came Henry Ford. Ford created the 5 day working week, and a limit of 40 hours, but best of all he did it for profit and not for social good.  At the time his factories worked 6 days and 9 hours a day (54 hours per week) just like everyone else, but he reduced working hours by 25% and instead of cutting wages he doubled them.

The productivity increases resulting from reducing hours were so significant that Henry Ford was attacked by the Wall Street Journal “To double the minimum wage, without regard to length of service, is to apply Biblical or spiritual principles where they do not belong.” going on to say “in his social endeavor he has committed blunders, if not crimes. They may return to plague him and the industry he represents, as well as organized society.”

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Henry Ford may have paid his workers a good wage, but it wasn’t out of charity — it was a good business decision that some say helped the middle class take off.

As you can imagine his competition was not happy either, paying more for “less hours” was maddening, but what really made them mad was that productivity jumped up massively. People simply couldn’t get their heads around the idea that less hours  increased overall productivity.  Slowly the competition copied Ford and got the same results, productivity went up for less hours, and eventually this carried across to office workers too. But even with those startling results and seemingly unquestionable evidence we stubbornly cling to the notion that more work is more productive.

I have written more about Henry Ford here.

Back to the present.

Last time the proposed reduction in hours was met with hostility but eventually it was seen as beneficial to everyone, especially the business owners that fought so hard against it.  Once again studies show that reducing hours will increase overall productivity, and once again industry is pushing back on it in the face of the evidence. Challenging established culture with only facts is apparently not an easy battle.

Studies repeatedly show that long hours (40+ hour) results in reduced productivity, reduced quality and a less healthy lifestyle, and yet society still perceives the number of hours worked as a measure of hard work.
It is as if we see more value in the hours worked than the output of their labour.  Someone that works 30 hours and produces 30 widgets  is seen as less valuable than someone that works 60 hours and produces 25 widgets, because he works so much harder.

In our culture we see more value in the hours worked than we do in the output of our labour.

In our culture we see more value in the hours worked than we do in the output of our labour.

How did we get into such a mindset and how do we challenge that way of thinking.  Surely we should reward the more productive and effective person? But we don’t, we reward the inefficient, we lift up Jane for being here at 7:30  PM finishing up her work and we criticize Anne who got all her work done and left at 4.

Part of the problem, especially in knowledge work, is that productivity is not easy to measure, just like quality and mistakes are hard to quantify.  So rather than focusing on what is important we focus on what is easiest to measure – number of hours in the office, it is ironic that in our laziness in finding effective measures we end up working longer hours.

So what about overtime?

There is more bad news in the 12 year study by Ford they found that overtime (over 40 hours) results in reduced productivity in the long term.  40 hours is the very limit of maximum total productivity for a manual worker, this applies in both the short and long term.

Short term (less than 3 weeks) there are productivity gains for working beyond 40 hours, but after 3 weeks those gains disappear and actually reduce productivity afterwards. Even just 2 weeks of overtime and then stopping results in more loss in recovery than the gain made in the short term boost.

In other words, yes you can make a short-term gain using overtime to meet a deadline, but it will cost you more than you gain over the following weeks. So use it wisely and expect a recovery period.

Bad news for knowledge workers

For knowledge workers the news is worse still, the point of peak productivity is under 35 hours, and any hours above that are actually damaging, quality is markedly worse, mistakes and resulting corrections mean that productivity reduces dramatically when knowledge workers work beyond 35 hours, primarily because fatigue, stress and concentration have a profound impact on the quality rather than the quantity of work. We simply cannot be creative when tired, we struggle to solve problems come up with ideas or compose constructive discourse and debate, we are actually very likely making things worse not better and the clean up cost for knowledge work – bad decisions, introduced bugs, stifled creativity is far more damaging than not being there.

Worse news for Lawyers

Lawyers are typically in an unfortunately situation where they bill by the hour rather than by quality or even quantity of work. They are essentially encouraged by their business model to be unproductive (not consciously, it is just a product of the business model). Essentially a 60 hours week for them is the result of rewarding bad behavior, if you pay for time then they will take more time, pay for productivity and we become more productive. We also reward with status the hard working person that is willing to sacrifice his weekend for the appearance of working harder. More encouragement of bad behavior.

In ‘bill by the hour‘ work environments it is a challenge to change the model, productivity is very hard to measure – even if we see stress, mistakes and problems taking longer to solve. So it is hard to convince clients that working less is more productive, especially when it means charging more, and it becomes even harder when we can’t even convince ourselves because this notion is so culturally ingrained in us.

What now?

It is pretty simple really if you want to maximize the productivity of your teams, then reduce their maximum working hours to less than 32 hours (without reducing pay).  They will work harder and more effectively for five 6-hours days than they will for 8 or 10-hour days. Your overall productivity will be higher.

Or work 8-hours, 4-days a week and you will find your teams will be more focused, more energized and and noticeably more creative.  They will be happier, harder working and make less mistakes.  They WILL get more done and it will be higher quality and more creative. They will also be refreshed have a happier home life.

Or we can ignore the brutal facts and continue to pretend that working long hours is a good thing, and praising the guy that works 60 hours a week and yet produces less than a part-time worker.

Note: my wife finds this particularly amusing as I work long hours and when I’m not working I’m blogging and when I’m not blogging I’m working on my game or running meet ups – there is a significant degree of hypocrisy and self-denial at play here.

Summary

Let’s not underestimate the difficulty here, this is a complex topic, and it is unlikely to be accepted any time soon, there is a lot of resistance – and that resistance is not based on facts or data.  There are numerous studies on this topic, all with the same findings.  Oddly enough despite the strong resistance to this idea, I couldn’t find a single study that didn’t find that overall productivity went down when hours went above 35-40 hours.  There were even some studies that showed that regularly working 60 hours resulted in the same number of mistakes and level of performance as being drunk.

(If you see a study that contradicts this please share it, I spent quite a few hours on this but couldn’t fine one – and no, the contradiction has not escaped me.)

Decision Makers

Decision makers typically work longer hours and it is effectively their money, asking them to pay more for the perception of ‘less‘ work is never going to be an easy decision.  We come from a puritan culture where we make a cultural assessment of someone based on effort not outcome. Deep-down we know this is not objective, I think we know this is wrong, but culture is not based in logic and changing culture will take more than facts and figures. It needs someone like Henry Ford to lead the way again.

References:

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/crunchmode/econ-crunch-mode.html

https://www.igda.org/page/crunchsixlessons

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.

 

 

 

Is culture observation or aspiration?

There has been a lot of talk recently about culture and it’s importance when creating organisational identity,  but there are two ways I see for an organisation to create a culture.

A short story…

I was once told a story of how the British and US army engineers take two different approaches to footpath planning when creating their bases.

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The British planned in advance and they laid the footpaths to a defined route and the soldiers were required to follow the specified paths, and were corrected if they didn’t.

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The US engineers on the otherhand would delay laying the footpaths until the base was in use, they would observe the routes taken and where the soldiers walked and would lay the paths when the preferred routes were clear.

The belief (or so I was told) was that people will find the most efficient route on their own.

Each has it’s own merits, and is itself likely a reflection of the culture of those two organisations.

A deliberate culture or a reflective culture

I see this as being very similar to a company’s culture. You have two main choices: either you decide the culture you want, you lay it out and then make decisions that reinforce the path you set. This means hiring practices, rewards, punishments, recognition, and everything in between, you continue to do this until the normal behaviour is to follow the path set.  Your culture is by your design. But to get the culture you want requires a lot of correcting of behaviour until it happens.

Or the alternative is to wait and see, behave the way you behave naturally and the same for the others around you, soon enough a culture will form and it will be a culture that reflects the way you behave. The good news is this is your real culture, the bad news is – this is your real culture.

There are problems with both of these, choosing a deliberate culture that goes against some of your natural tendencies or is unrealistic can lead to it not being followed and the result is that you claim one culture but actually have another, this can be very damaging especially to those that believe in the defined culture.  If you follow the rules but others get ahead by other means it can be corrosive.  A lack of defined culture can also bad as there is no safety check on poor behaviour, left unchecked it quickly becomes the norm and then it becomes your culture, which is the case for women in IT.

Women in Tech

One great example could be seen with Women in Tech, where most companies would say their culture does not set out to exclude or marginalise women, but without a deliberate culture to seek out diversity we have allowed the lack of diversity to become the normal state and for the culture to be one that unintentionally discouraged or excluded women. Often evolving from small companies that have grown by surounding themselves with like minded individuals. Unconsciously biased towards those similar to them.  It will take time and effort and a deliberate culture to break through some of those barriers we have created over the years.

But this is seen in all aspects of an organisation, if your culture tolerates something for long enough, maybe because it is easy to ignore when small, it can become a much larger issue when you grow.  If you are not explicit about the culture you want then you may not be able to shape the culture you have. In larger organisations sub-cultures can form in different areas and this can be even more damaging, without a clear global culture factions develop and the inconsistencies undermine the larger whole.

Agile Transformation

One of the reasons that Agile Transformation is so hard is because it is a culture change rather than a process change, you are defining a new culture and that will not happen overnight. All the previous actions that were normal, the rewards, the metrics the measurements are very hard to undo.  Empowering people to be self-organising when they have only known command and control will take a while to adjust.  I believe this is why so many agile transformations are unsuccessful, some processes are changed but there is no desire or will to change the culture, there is a general wish to change to Agile without actually changing.

The solution

The solution in my opinion is to do a little of both.  Be aware of the culture you want and be explicit about it, shout it from the rooftops, and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it, until everyone in your organisation knows you mean it and you believe in it, be clear where you aspire to be. This will still take a very long time to have impact.

But also be aware of where you are now, the unwritten culture you have now is just as strong and just as real. Be especially aware of the behaviours that your culture currently has that you are not happy about.  If you are honest about your weaknesses and failings you have a far better chance of changing. Seek out and coach those that are not behaving the way you aspire to be, remember they behave that way because it is your culture.

Culture change wont happen overnight but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be intollerent of any behaviours that don’t reflect the culture you want.

Are you ready for the fallout?

There is an old saying – An Agile Transformation is easy, you only have to change two things: Everything you say, and everything you do.

But actually, as obvious as that joke was, it is also wrong. You only need to change one thing, you need to change the way you think.

Project or Product

It is my premise that when we talk about Agile Transformation what we mean is transforming our thinking from considering our deliveries in terms of ‘Projects‘ to thinking in terms of ‘Products‘. And transforming from measuring people in terms of their effort, to measuring them in terms of their collective contribution to a shared goal (the value they add).

Project : an individual or collaborative enterprise that is carefully planned and designed to achieve a particular aim.

Product: an article that is created or refined to satisfy a need.

As we have all discovered, software product development is complex, both in the development itself where we face a host of unpredictable variables, complications and unknowns. But, more significantly, it is very difficult to know what you want until you see it and consequently there are an abundance of quality software products that do not effectively fulfil the need that triggered their commission.

We have learned that reviewing progress regularly with stakeholders and modifying based on that feedback is far more likely to result in a successful product.

In most cases is is a fallacy to believe that for a complex and bespoke software solution you can know your end state before you begin, regardless of how well you analyse. And no matter how good at planning you are if you don’t know the end state your plan is flawed, and as you cannot predict the unknown even the best plans are unreliable.

We have come to realise that bespoke software delivery is far more akin to product design and development than it is to project delivery.

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

Peter Drucker.

Agile Transformation is about moving from Management to Leadership

Peter Drucker is an inspiration here, traditionally we put so much effort into getting things right, to be more efficient, or to do this, by that deadline. That we forgot to ask if what we were doing was bringing value. We put all our emphasis on measuring and monitoring effort, or efficiency, rather than assessing if we are achieving our goal.

If you are considering an Agile Transformation it is likely that you have discovered that efforts to ‘manage‘ projects is leading to the wrong results and the focus needs to move from a focus on effort to a focus on value. To set a direction and ‘lead‘ the way in product development.  Try to stop measuring output and to start measuring outcomes.

Impact on Project Managers and Business Analysts

But this is a major cultural change for many companies and not an easy one. It is a complete shift in perspective, moving from planning the delivery of a project to collaborating on the creation of a product.

It is particularly difficult for Project Managers.

For project management to be effective the end state needs to be [largely] known, and for the steps to get there to be familiar and [largely] predictable. With a known end state and predictable building steps, a Project Manager can effectively work towards that aim.

But bespoke software is far more complex and is generally dealing with many unpredictable variables, the biggest variable being the end state. In the majority of cases the end state is not known at the outset and emerges in the course of the product being developed. The true end state needed to fulfil a need or want can very often be significantly larger or smaller than initially anticipated.  The ability and flexibility to pivot based on emerging information is crucial for delivering value and the product being a success.

Business Analysts similarly must adapt, project planning generally relies on a knowing as much as possible at the time of planning, and so there is heavy reliance on the Business Analyst. Product Development is again a mindshift for a Business Analyst, there is no longer a need for detail up front, in fact in most cases it is a waste due to the likely and frequent change of direction and priority as we learn so much as the product emerges.

Business analysis in an agile software product development means an early assessment generally at a high level is all that is needed, with detailed analysis happening much closer to when the work is done,  at this point much more is know about what is actually needed and so we are not wasting time analysing something that will not be done.

An Agile Mindset

Agile is a mindset far more than anything else, and when you start to look into it, there is nothing new, nothing original, and you will be surprised to find that whilst the word Agile has been used a lot by the software industry in the last 20 years or so, the practices and behaviours are just the good practices and behaviours of general management going back a century and possibly even a millennium or two.

‘Agile’ as we have come to know it whether we mean Scrum, Kanban, Lean, Lean Start-up, or any of the many other Agile frameworks is, in most cases a collection of historic good practices and guidelines identified by successful leaders and businesses in the past, they have been collected under one umbrella polished up a bit and marketed – very successfully – which is likely why you are reading this.  I say this to discourage the notion that ‘Agile’ is new and untested, there are certainly some misinterpretations and misapplications but the underlying principles are sound and based on a lot of experience.

Just as an observation, if you looked back at the early days of the Ford motor company as an example from over 100 years ago, and you assessed them against modern standards of agile my guess is that they would hold up very well.

Agile Transformation should not be your objective

Agile Transformation is often presented as the objective, when in reality it should be a strategy to reach a goal. Taking some time understanding what your goal really is, will make any transformation far more likely to succeed.

  • Are your customers dissatisfied?
  • Are your products missing the mark?
  • Do you(or your clients) feel you are not getting value for money?
  • Are you slow to market?
  • If you are creating software products for internal teams are they not having the impact you expected?
  • Are people circumventing your tools?
  • Is your ROI on software development too low?
  • Are you losing key development staff?
  • Is there a lack of transparency in the software development process.

These are just a few of the many reasons a company may want to undergo an Agile Transformation, they are all global business issues, and that is a key point: Agile Transformation is not an initiative just of the software department, it is a change for the entire business. It is a major cultural change that will impact your business from top to bottom. From the way you sell your products, to the way you hire staff, and particularly to the way you measure success.