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My (limited) understanding of the Toyota concept of Standard Work is an emphasis of capturing what the current best practice is. It is not about sticking with a simple practice with an emphasis of using the standard as a place to improve. The emphasis on creating a standard process ensures repeatability and that you can teach it to people.

Where people go wrong is that they focus only on enforcing the standard (avoiding improvement) or forgetting to communicate an update to the standard when things change (people are taught the wrong things).

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One of the biggest teases developers use on their peers when they move into a non-developer or a less developer focused role is to tag them as “Post-technical”. I’ve heard this term ever since I joined the industry. My other interests around team work, organisational processes, coaching and training seem congruent with this attitude.

How do I try to balance these roles? Embedded coaching.

It’s as simple as working in the role of a developer and a coach at the same time. There’s something about working “on the front lines”, so to speak, that earns you a certain level of respect that you wouldn’t get if you were on the same team in the role of a project manager, or something you wouldn’t earn if you visited as a coach or advisor. It lets you build that trust and rapport on a daily basis that gives you insight into the things that drive people mad, or the things others may not feel comfortable stepping up and saying out loud.

Of course, there are benefits to also doing coaching from an outside point of view though I do think that embedded coaching is undervalued and often unavailable due to the delicate mix of skills required.

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Most of the teams I work with prefer using story cards to capture and manage requirements. For analysts who write story cards, it’s important to remember that they are that “placeholder for a conversation” and it’s useful to know about the three C’s, and understand the INVEST principles that make more ideal story cards. In this post I’m going to answer the frequently asked question: “How much detail should go into a story card?” Of course, please remember that this is just my answer to the question and unlikely a definitive one.

Before I begin to answer, I guess it’s important to understand why we even bother with story cards, something definitely worth a whole other post (and I’m sure there’s plenty of great ones out there). I’m going to distil this to just the essentials and skip the why (you can read it in other people’s posts). For the purpose of this post, I’m going to assume that story cards:

• Exist to help people have conversations about a small set of requirements
• Have an associated cost (an estimate)
• Offer some business value to people such as stakeholders or end users
• Help stakeholders prioritise requirements
• At some point may be implemented

The Short Answer
You want to have enough detail to meet the objectives above balanced against the cost of capturing and maintaining that detail in order to support as much change as possible.

The Long Answer

I like to draw the diagram below to visualise how much effort I’d put into collecting detail.

For stories that need to be implemented now, you want to have enough precision that allows developers and testers to be clear about what needs to be achieved. The waste of not having enough detail here is essentially rework in many of the downstream activities. If critical detail in a story is missing, it will lead to misunderstandings that, in turn, leads to bugs that, then, leads to additional coding time and additional testing time, delaying delivery of the business value. What is important at this stage is that everyone involved (the business, analysts, developers, testers, etc) share the same detailed understanding of exactly what is being delivered and what is exactly not being delivered.

For stories that need to be implemented in the distant future, you don’t need the same level of detail. The waste of capturing too much detail too early is essentially rework at the analysis level. Depending on how requirements are managed, this can be costly. Conditions change that may change requirements not yet in production, and I’ve seen many analysts who’ve written down so much detail and invested so much of their own time that they refuse to deal with the change. The want to avoid the change because they now have to rewrite reams and reams of documentation, or drop the last month or two of work to develop a different and better solution. What you need for stories in the distant future is enough detail to allow people to have that conversation over the same thing without confusion, whilst minimising the cost of capturing detail unless it impacts things like estimates, priorities or business value.

The Summary
Although it sounds like I’m saying don’t worry about future requirements, my emphasis is all about balance. You want to balance the costs associated with collecting and maintaining details for requirements that may or may not end up being implemented. Precision has a cost associated with it, and this cost always needs to be weighed up against its value. Excessive precision too early may increase cost via additional rework at the analysis level. Lack of precision too late may increase cost via additional rework in downstream activities such as development and testing.

Further References
James Shore writes more about the life cycle of a story and when you might want to start creating them. Read about it here.

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One of the searches that stumbled across my blog was the “Agile Coaching Reading List”. Running the same query returned a huge mish mash of lots of different things so I thought I’d put together my list of essential reads. Of course, simply reading the books won’t mean that you’re an expert (and I suggest working with another coach to develop that) though it’ll definitely help in providing context, advice or skills that you need to practice.

Methodologies and principles

• Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck.
• Agile Project Management with SCRUM by Ken Schwaber.
• Lean Software Development by Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck

Additional context

• Slack by Tom De Marco.

Teamwork

• Collaboration Explained by Jean Tabaka

Continuous improvement

• Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen.

Requirements and planning

• User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn.
• Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn.

Development practices

• Refactoring by Martin Fowler
• Test Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck.
• Pair Programming Illuminated by Laurie Williams.

You can easily add all of these books to Amazon from this list here.

Would you recommend anything else? What did I miss? Please leave a comment if you do. I’ll also post the other books I still think are worth reading that didn’t quite make the cut and why.

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Its Purpose?
Every project has meetings or events that repeat. Sometimes they occur daily, others weekly and others less regularly. Sometimes they are informal and ad hoc, other times formal and repeated. It’s important for new people to understand what you call each of these rituals, how they work and why these rituals exist. Understanding what you call them, how they run and why helps them become a fully participating team member faster.

How Did We Execute It?
Before any repeating meeting we would have, if we had a new team member, I would explain what we were about to do, and explain the reason we met. Some rituals I didn’t explain in great detail how we would conduct the meeting since it would be faster to let them experience one. I intentionally explained it in front of the group to ensure we all had agreement about what we were all about to do, and to help remind newer participants why we have them again.

Here’s what it may sound like (you may of course, have different resons for running stand ups in the example below that are just as perfectly valid):

Explaning what: We’re about to start our “Daily Stand Up Meeting”.
Explaning how: In this brief meeting, we stand in a circle facing each other and share information that we think others will be interested in such as what we did yesterday, what we’re planning to do today, and most importantly any blockers we currently have.
Explaining why: We do this in the morning to help start our day and talk about what we did yesterday to helps others understand what progress we’re making. We talk about what we’re planning to do today to double check our priorities are correct for the day, and we want everyone to talk openly about our blockers because we want individuals to feel supported by the team in overcoming any blockers.

Here’s another example:

Explaining what: We’re about to meet for our “Tech Huddle”.
Explaining how: In this session, we want everyone to share an important lesson they learned today, or a gotcha others should know about
Explaining why: The system is becoming complex, and everyone may discover new things (or even old things over again). By sharing some important lesson or a gotcha, we accelerate the learning process and avoid costly mistakes caused by relearning the same thing over and over again.

Image taken from Ron Layters’s photostream flickr stream under the Creative Commons Licence.

Why Is It Important?

It’s difficult for team members to fully participate in rituals unless they understand what expectations you have for them and understand why it’s important to participate. Explaining what you call the ritual, and how you conduct each ritual and the roles team members play is a first step in the right direction. Once they understand the what and the how, the new people understand what the name of your ritual means to them and are now enabled with the ability to participate. Explaining to them the purpose of the ritual and the drivers behind it them helps build a reason for them participate.

Giving them both the ability (what the ritual is called, how it is run and how to participate) and the motivation (the signficance and value of the ritual) helps new team members stand out less by helping them avoid coping strategies of silence (“I don’t know what to do, so I’ll just sit and watch what others do)” or resentment (“What a crock! Why are they wasting my time?”)

You gain a secondary benefit from explaining the ritual following the what-how-why strategy. Explaining the what and the how helps you understand how consistently you repeat your rituals, leading to standardised work. Explaining the why helps you focus on the value of your ritual. Often many rituals lack value and, as a result, you should drop them.

What I Might Try Next Time
The next time I explain my rituals, I think I’m going to try to write what I say down to see if I’m being consistent. This might also work well as project documentation useful in handover to support or to observers who sit outside of the project.

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We do a lot of group work during training so we split a class into smaller groups for more effective discussions. Over the last few months, we’ve used a number of techniques for splitting a large group and I thought it might be useful for some future trainers, meeting facilitators, or on projects where you need to randomly divide into different groups. They include:

Picture provided from Ben Tubby’s photostream under the Creative Common license

• Counting Off – Determine how many groups you want to split the group into (e.g. 3). Get everyone to count off to that number (i.e. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3). Ask for people with the same number to come together. Variations include letting the participants to count off, or to direct the count off (pointing randomly around the room). You might also use other similar concepts such as city names, animal names or different sorts of fruit and vegetables (staying away from numbers avoids the “We’re number 1 syndrome”.
• Line Up – Ask the group to arrange themselves into a line using some sort of order. This is a little bit more of an energising activity to introduce movement into the class. Different systems you can use include people’s height (shortest to tallest), first name or last name (alphabetical order), birth day and month (avoid year just in case people are sensitive about their age). Vary it up again by choosing ascending or descending order. Once they’re in a line, ask them to validate and then split the group using either Count Off, or simply split the line into equal groups.
• Group by Token – In this activity, decide on how many groups you’d like and how many people should be in each group. Pick a token system and choose the same token to represent the number of people in a group, and different tokens to represent different groups. We’ve used coloured notes, coloured lego blocks, different types of sweets. Put them into a box or a bag, and get people to pick one and then find people of the same group. For instance, if I had twelve people and wanted three groups of four, I might choose to put into a box, four blue lego blocks, four red lego blocks and four white lego blocks for people to choose from.

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I’m back from holidays, having been disconnected for the last ten days or so. I’ve finished uploading my holiday snaps (check them out here if you like) and checking all my emails so it’s time I got around to reflecting back on last year and what this new year may hold (even if it’s just that little bit late). I don’t do the whole New Year resolution thing although I try to revisit what goals I have.

In terms of conferences…

• I attended the Retrospective Facilitator’s Gathering held in Phoenix this year that continued to fuel my existing passion for one of, what I consider, one of the most effective agile practices. It’s helped me communicate even more with people about my passion for the tool, continued to refine my approach and understanding of the tool and helped others to see the value they add. It’s also put me in touch with a whole heap of other people that share this similar passion. I’m sometimes referred to as *the* retrospective guy in the UK office and even though I don’t agree with that statement (I don’t know everything there is to know about retrospectives, and I’m certainly not perfect at running them – I’m just passionate about them). I’ve even helped to organise this year’s gathering.
• I helped Tom Sulston out with his workshop, The Daily CI and I ran my Reface Your Team Space session at XP2007 in Como, Italy. Though I enjoyed the two sessions, I thought last year’s conference ran much smoother and had much better content than this year’s.

In terms of writing…

• I published my first article on InfoQ after writing a series of blog entries on Onboarding Strategies. I want to continue to add and refine these as I still think there’s important lessons here that I hear teams fail to do everyday.

In terms of opensource…

• Even though I’d contributed patches and bug fixes to some projects, last year I released my first real open source project, an API for printing to Zebra-branded printers written in .Net called Sharpzebra. I’ve hosted this project on Codeplex and I hope it eases someone else’s problems printing to this proprietary language.

In terms of growth and lessons learned…

• I’ve read much more on Lean and Theory of Constraints this year, and starting to feel like I have a better grasp of the concepts. Applying them in a practical fashion in terms of noticeably different practices is the much more difficult step I need to take next. For other people’s reference, read books like “The Goal”, “The Elegant Solution”, “The Toyota Way”, “Lean Thinking”, and “Toyota Talent”. I’m sure there’s much more to read as well.
• Only eight months after a disappointing situation, I finally made it to India to help conduct some training, giving me a full time focus on coaching, training and facilitation techniques. I also have to thank one of my fellow trainers, Rixt who’s been fantastic at helping me to be more aware of many other techniques and approaches that I then could practice and apply during the training sessions. I feel that the delivery methods for the course improved significantly over the three months the whole training team worked together on.
• This year I also first officially lead (at least from a technical point of view) an all TW team, and under fixed bid conditions, high expectations from the client and a very complicated domain with a few new people, delivered a very successful project to a very happy client. Reflecting on the experience, I extracted out many of the onboarding strategies I wrote about, and then applied it as the team almost doubled in size for the next release.
• I’m also very proud of the way, as a team, we handed the leadership over seamlessly to another person as I prepared to head to training. Transitioning the tech lead role is often executed haphazardly, leading to inconsistent visioning, confusion amongst the team and general chaos. I’m pleased that when I left the team, it was like they could work without me (which is a good place to be!)
• I stayed at the same client for most of the year, although ended up on two different projects – one of which I worked on the year before. Seeing the same project, or introducing new people to the same project months later taught me so many lessons about what decisions or approached work or don’t work taking a long term view of a project. I can’t recommend it enough to anyone to make sure they understand the consequences of the choices they make beyond their own time on the project.
• Tim Bacon (an alumni Thoughtworker and fellow agilist) introduced me to the Amplify Your Effectiveness crowd that seems to align strongly with members of the agile community. That, and the Getting Things Done crowd.
• I created two new retrospective exercises, one that I’ve blogged about called The Three Word Starter, and another I’m yet to blog about though I tried with a couple of teams in India.
• It’s not about what models you use, it’s about how you use them. This year, I’ve learned so many different models from so many different people, and although they appear trivial, watching people who really harness their energy constantly amazes me. I need to remind myself, it’s not about whether or not a tool is good – it’s how it’s used and how it’s applied.
• Doing the things you say is much more powerful than simply saying things. It demonstrates commitment, and belief in the things that you value and is often an effective way of leading change in teams. I’ve seen people say things and then do something completely else, confusing people to no end. Others simply say things and don’t do anything about it, making it less likely to occur.
• Effective feedback earlier is better than no feedback at all. It’s better than feedback too late to do anything to do with it. Of course, this takes energy yet it’s a very powerful thing if people respond to the feedback (it’s not always guaranteed). You can do at least your part by ensuring the feedback is timely, and well constructed.

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