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When you introduce agile methods to very traditional organisations there’s a side effect most people underestimate. This is, I believe, where the first line in the manifesto is most appropriate:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Traditional organisations are geared for efficiency – keeping individuals busy to the point where you lose overall effectiveness if you ever need to synchronise between parts (which you inevitably do for software these days). Calling a meeting is frowned upon as it takes up lots of time, so out of necessity, most communication occurs over email or IM. As Alistair Cockburn pointed out a long time ago, these are pretty ineffective channels of communication. Relying solely on these types of channels only turns to a build up of frustration as issues go unheard by the right set of ears. In traditional environments, these often turn into build ups set to explode at the most random of moments.

Image from Nic Jacka’s flickr stream under the Creative Commons licence

Perhaps you’ve seen it? Think about when one person hijacks a meeting to highlight an issue (typically important one) not being addressed, or when someone spontaneously shouts at someone for no apparent reason. It might even be as bad as someone having a temper tantrum, literally throwing things across the room. Traditional environments often do not provide mechanisms as outlets for this.

Therefore, when introducing practices such as daily stand ups, planning meetings and retrospectives, the first few times you run them, expect an avalanche of unresolved issues and emotions to ensue. This is fine. Expect this from some of the quieter members as you give them explicit permission to talk about important things that need resolution where traditional structures have not given them that permission to talk about them.

Treat it as you would the opening of a previously shaken soft drink bottle for the first time. You’ll have to be ready to clean up some of the spilt liquid, but you don’t have to worry about picking up broken glass. Now that the bottle’s open, you can work to address the real issue at hand.

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I’ve been quiet on the blogging front because I’ve been busy doing other sorts of writing. One of my focal points is around leadership, both in teams in general, and around agile situations. I think it’s important that if you’re leading, you need to be seen to demonstrate the values and the suggestions that you speak of.

Wonderful, you have great intentions behind what you do. It’s even more powerful if you demonstrate the behaviours that you speak of. I think part of leading is knowing when to act. If you’re simply preaching at people, I don’t think you will be very effective as a leader.

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Businesses need to be comfortable that not all projects are going to succeed. Out of a portfolio of projects, people need to be comfortable that these projects will not achieve what they originally set out to do. Don’t expect that, even with agile methods and values guiding your teams, these projects will achieve what they set out to do.

Some projects aren’t set up for success. Poor organisational governance, leading to unrealistic expectations established from the outset often set up a project for a real death march. Or perhaps projects spun out of the whims of one set of people only to not understand what organisational capabilities they really have. Sometimes it comes down running a project with the wrong mix of skills and without a support structure in place that creates a time bomb waiting to explode.

Don’t forget that agile and lean methodologies cannot guarantee success. At the heart of it, agile will surface problems and make them visible. Organisations need to be prepared to confront the truth (many are not ready for this level of transparency) and support changes that will make it better.

For projects destined to fail, your best result is often to Fail Fast, take those lessons and then do something differently. Avoid the situation where a project sucks up resources that could be more effectively allocated. And don’t forget, just because a project didn’t achieve what it set out to do, it’s only a true failure if you don’t learn anything from it.

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Last week reminded me how hard communication is to get right. Last week reminded me of how important it is to be visible with information as early as possible. Last week reminded me of what happens with the people involved don’t have access to information early.

Successful teams applying agile principles quickly involve those impacted by the situation, equipping them with as much information as early as possible. These teams call upon agile practices such as daily stand up meetings, retrospectives, and frequent showcases to achieve this. Better and earlier access to information helps all parties involved come up with more options. More options creates more opportunities to have better conversations, and more opportunities to collaborate to meet everyone’s needs, and ultimately end up with a solution that everyone is more likely to feel committed to.

Compare this to those teams who hoard information, selecting and filtering the information others hear. Filtering and transforming information limits the number of options, often adding additional stress because the team now how to come up with the perfect option. Even with contributions from others, the pool of options will often be tainted by solutions not entirely appropriate or relevant. More importantly, if the people affected by a decision aren’t involved, they will end up less committed to the solution and often, cause more problems because of resentment.

No one likes to be handed decisions. That’s why the Agile Manifesto emphasises “Individuals and Interactions”, and a key principle of Lean Thinking is “Respect for People”.

The moral? Remember to involve the appropriate people in the decision making process as early as possible. Even if you suspect there is only going to be one solution, be transparent with the information you do have in the hope you may end up with more options, or at least, the outcome is no surprise.

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Thoughts about the second day
Ivar Jacobson gave an equally uninspiring keynote, talking about “What they don’t teach you about software at school: Be Smart!” In it, he focuses on the fact that it’s not only enough to try to “Be Agile”, but you need to “Be Smart”. Unfortunately many of the items that he talked about didn’t really seem to be any different from “Being Agile” and that he had obviously targeted the wrong audience.

I’m glad the conference ran with an open space session, this year introduced by Willem Van Den Ende and Lasse Koskela. I suggested a topic titled, “The Kanban, Lean, Agile Divide” and I felt we had the best quality discussions during this open space. I wanted to answer a number of questions including:

• Did people know about the Kanban Community?
• How active were people in that community?
• Did people perceive a divide?
• And if so, why?

Out of around the 12 people participating, probably only two or three hadn’t heard about the community, and only one or two people were active in participating (in the mailing list portions). We had lots of discussion as to what people considered as Kanban as well.

First page of notes from the open space session

We noted down the mailing list, available on Yahoo Groups: Kanban-Dev and several “published” resources including the paper, Kanban Vs Scrum, and the book, Scrumban.

When asked about what Kanban was the participants, here’s what we recorded:

• Elements of one piece flow (particularly limits to WIP or Work In Progress). Translated into practical terms, it meant focusing on one story at a time (as a team or as a pair)
• Kanban was an alternative scheduling technique
• Unprescriptive, or less prescriptive (relying on other practices to help out)
• Constantly evolving
• “Good for maintenance”
• Most people considered Kanban a “Practice more than a methodology”, though there was general agreement that some people are trying to turn it into more than that
• Focused on delivering “Minimal Marketable Features”
• Quote from Tom Poppendieck, “Scheduling and Workflow are orthogonal”. We expanded upon this for a bit and a more concrete example is you can use different scheduling techniques such as Kanban or Timeboxes with the same workflow such as a simple, “To Do, In Progress, Done” workflow.

I recorded that some people were still doing sprint/iteration planning whilst using Kanban though I don’t remember if we got into the details.

I also recorded two concerns, such as knowing, “When do we get stuff done?” and a very “Loose Terminology” leading to lots of confusion, particularly the overloaded associate with Kanban (as a practice) and Kanban (as a methodology).

When asking the question, “Is there a kanban divide?” some answers included, there is maybe a divide in a community sense, and when probing further, when interpreting Kanban as a practice, not a methodology there wasn’t however there was definitely a sense when treating Kanban as a methodology and not as the practice with a feeling that some people in the community wanted to make money.

Last page of notes from the open space session

We asked why the community divide and understandably, there was no real community around to openly discuss Kanban (as a practice) and felt similar to those that had been around during the XP early days. There didn’t seem to be any general list for “agile practices” with extremeprogramming and scrum-dev mailing lists. It’s also not the first time practices have had their own list, like the pairprogramming or the test-driven-development lists. We did note down that there were several potential ones the community could have joined including lean-agile, lean-dev instead of creating their own kanban-dev.

In the afternoon, I went along to the panel on Lean Software Development although I seemed to come away with the same questions and less answers. One of my questions about budgeting was answered by the next morning’s keynote, while another focusing around the lack of discussion around practices seemed to be dismissed by Mary Poppendieck as, “I don’t believe in practices”, maybe best surmised as, “I don’t know” (which I would have also been happy to take).

The evening was an impromptu beach BBQ held by the awesome folks at Agical. Whilst a small company, I’m glad to see them still as passionate and having grown year upon year with more enthusiasm about a huge variety of topics. The BBQ was amazing and I know that everyone had a great time.

More to come…

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Steven List asks the question, Are Retrospectives an Anti-pattern? Of course, retrospectives are a topic close to my heart so I naturally wanted to share my view of them. The conversation apparently started on the Kanban Development mailing list and Steven’s post already captures some great discussion. I won’t repeat it here, but I find the dialogue echoing the same sentiments about other agile practices and whether or not they’re useful. For me, it’s too extremist and not particularly helpful. They make it sound like you need to choose from two positions: Either you run retrospectives, or you don’t.

I think the more interesting question is, “When are retrospectives most useful?” To help explain my thoughts, I’ve put together the following: A Model for understanding Retrospective Impact (click on it for a slightly bigger view).

What is a retrospective?
Being specific and clear about this term is important in the discussion about whether or not retrospectives are useful. Some people’s understanding of a retrospective can differ from other people’s depending on each of their experiences. The conversations on the Kanban list seem to imply retrospectives are solely an iteration focused ritual (and of course, there is no such concept of a Scrum or XP iteration in Kanban). Though I appreciate Kerth’s original definition, I think in the agile community, Derby and Larsen’s definition better captures its essence:

A special meeting where the team gathers after completing an increment of work to inspect and adapt their methods and teamwork.

I like this definition best because its ties the concept of improvement (inspect and adapt) based on a shared understanding (the team) according to some unstated time period (an increment of work, noting it’s not specifically tied to an iteration).

What is impact?
I think it’s also important to define the term impact. One of the definitions by the Oxford Dictionary seems most appropriate:

a marked effect or influence

I want to emphasis that you can have a high impact retrospective without necessarily taking a lot of time, and that the opposite is entirely possible too (a long retrospective with a low impact). Note that I’m not going to discuss how to run retrospectives that have the highest impact (a totally separate topic worth its own set of posts).

Effect of team dynamics
The state of the team has an enormous influence on the impact of retrospectives. A high performing team will naturally have better communication amongst its members, and are more likely to fix things that get in the way of their goal. There will naturally be better and more frequent individual improvements, identified and implemented more frequently without the call for a specific meeting. This doesn’t mean that retrospectives are never a practice they call upon. Rather, it’s a practice that has less impact as there are many other items in the toolkit that get called upon. Sometimes it’s important for the group to get together, establish a common understanding and to inspect and adapt noting there may not be any specific regularity to these particular meetings.

In contrast, a dysfunctional team are less likely to call upon individual improvement practices, and thus, retrospectives play a more important role, providing an explicit opportunity to improve. I use the term dysfunctional in this sense to capture a broad category including newly formed teams, or simply groups of people. This does not necessarily mean the team cannot advance, nor that it hasn’t had a chance to advance, just simply the state it exists in.

Environmental Effects
I would classify a majority of environments as chaotic. In chaotic environments, improvement isn’t second nature. Through practices that start with good intentions such as auditing (“I want to have confidence you are doing what you say you are doing”), people in these environments become afraid to suggest changes, and are often fearful of attempting anything different because they’ve been punished for a failed experiment in the past. In these chaotic environments, retrospectives have a significant impact by providing an explicitly safe environment for teams to make, commit to, and hopefully be supported in making changes. Retrospectives have a higher impact in these environments because the majority of other activities doesn’t encourage learning, innovation and improvement.

In contrast, a nurturing environment welcomes fail fast innovation, rewards learning from failed experiments and supports continuous improvement in an explicit, non document centric approach. In these environments, the outcomes from implementing improvements and passing on tacit learnings is more important that meeting audits and compliance. Retrospectives have less impact in this environment because individuals are more likely to suggest and implement improvements without the need for a special meeting, and without the need for an entire team. Once again, it doesn’t necessarily imply that retrospectives are not useful (some issues require a shared understanding across the entire team) or that they are regularly scheduled events.

Avoid deciding between whether or not you run retrospectives. Consider when is it best for you to run a retrospectives instead.
Understand what situation you find yourself in using the model above and ask yourself whether or not retrospectives have the potential for the most impact (dysfunctional teams and chaotic environments), or where energy is better spent pursuing other activities because retrospectives have less, but not zero, impact (high performing teams and nurturing environments).

In the next set of posts, I hope to describe different situations I’ve seen first hand and what impact retrospectives had in relation to them.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Writing low quality software is easy. Achieving high quality software is much harder. Leadership and safety are essential factors in achieving and maintaining high quality.

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My last post triggered a few comments, with having a common goal for a team to rally around somehow also implied groupthink, and thus, Wisdom of the Crowds is a better alternative. I want to clarify a few things:

The point of the original post?
Organisations where I’ve seen them have successful delivery, they also had, what I would consider, true teams. People working together towards a common goal. I’ve also observed many other organisations struggling to deliver, and often, because of multi-project context switching, they had what I would describe as “groups of people” instead of a true team.

Not all teams have groupthink
When I think back to great teams I’ve worked on, the individuals complement each other strengths and, at least in my experience, respond better to unplanned events. Talking about the “taboo” topics is fine because everyone is already comfortable working with each other. I compare this experience to what I see around committees, newly formed teams, or even teams that remain unbalanced (due to a particularly strong member or something) where other participants are too polite, or don’t want to cause a commotion even though it may be the right thing to do.

Understandably, when Felix saw my diagram, he (rightly) feared groupthink. In my experience, I feel it is symptom of poor performing teams, and is more likely to happen with “groups of people” (think of all those traditional project managers who make a decision for the team!). I do acknowledge it can still happen in a high performing team.

I believe the trick to making this work is having a leader in the team that ensures that conflict is handled in a safe environment, not simply quashed, silenced or bullied away as these eventually lead to group think.

Wisdom of the crowds don’t necessarily mean all crowds are wise
When I see many groups of people, I don’t automatically see a lot of wisdom. It takes another step before you can benefit from wisdom of the crowds. Often it means asking the right question, the right amount of diversity, and a lot of independence to actually benefit from it. I see the right question the same as having the right goal shared amongst people. It doesn’t necessarily mean everyone is doing exactly the same thing to get there, it just means that everyone is pointing in the right direction.

An example: Brainstorming using sticky notes is one way that I’ve worked in that avoids groupthink and tries to harness the wisdom of crowds. In my last team, we used it to come up with different solutions to tackle a key design problem (note the shared goal!) We each wrote ideas down independently on sticky notes before presenting them to each other. We even spent some time investigating and proving out a number of solutions to gather some hard data about the pros and cons. What made it work was that we all understood what it was we were all trying to get to (the shared goal), not necessarily how we get there. I felt that this was an example of a real team, a situation where everyone was comfortable disagreeing with each other, and openly discussing each option. It certainly didn’t feel like a committee or a random collection of people. I can only imagine what the outcome would be if we did though.

Once again, your comments welcome.

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When I go into different organisations, I see many of the people doing the work (analysis, development and testing) split across multiple projects. In my experience there are plenty of reasons why this is just a bad idea, and probably the biggest one that I see is that the split priorities for an individual conflict with a model for ideal teamwork.

What does your organisation have more of? Teams or groups of people “working together”?

There’s a big difference between the two, particularly if your organisation is interested in tapping into the benefits of teams. Unfortunately most of the time organisations miss the mark.

How can you convert groups of people into teams?
Split priorities create natural conflicts between groups. A lot of management theory I’ve read describes how to get the most out of teams by rallying them towards a shared goal or set of goals. At the individual level, setting different goals for different people establishes a dynamic that, at some point, individuals’ priorities will conflict and without a broader shared goal, will go unresolved. Setting the same priority for everyone is, in effect, putting everyone into the same team. Leaving people split across multiple projects, is in effect, setting different sets of priorities for an individual.

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Definitely a post well overdue (think end of March), although I thought I’d still put it out. Four years at Thoughtworks for me has:

• Taken me to four countries (Australia, United Kingdom, India, Canada). Even more if you take into account conferences and other invites (Finland, Sweden, Norway, Italy, USA)
• Let me see eight different client organisations (from small to extremely large)
• Worked on seven different delivery projects

Picture taken from BFick’s photo stream under the Creative Commons Licence.

• Advised on two pure consulting engagements
• Presented and participated at five different global conferences
• Participated in five different internal conferences
• Seen me focus on two main programming languages and platforms (Java and .Net)
• Broaden my experience as a developer, technical lead, analyst, agile coach, full time trainer, and facilitator.

There’s been plenty of happy moments, sad moments, lots of learning, lots of growth, and plenty of insight balanced with plenty of humility (in that there is still so much to learn).

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