Empathetic relations come before education

As an agile coach and scrum master, I find myself in a peculiar place.  I have been with one organization for five years, and I am unable to increase their agile maturity.  We are stuck.  We are going through the motions of agile but work is not sustainable, and dysfunction exists between the business partners and the development team.  This week, I face an agile implementation which is stagnating.

As an agile coach and scrum master, you need to take a hard look at yourself and how you do your job.  It is lonely and unforgiving.  You need to evaluate how you can improve and how you help others.  In many respects, you are acting like a teacher, therapist and camp counselor. 

Where do teachers go for support?  How do therapists deal with human suffering without being crushed by its weight?  What does a camp counselor do when they cannot be enthusiastic?  The answer to all of these questions is they depend on the support of peers and more experienced professionals.  There is an entire branch of therapists who treat other therapists.  Teachers have support groups and working teams.  Camp counselors rely on directors and adult leaders for support.

Scrum masters are very alone and are misfits in many organizations.  They belong to a company, but they spend a majority of their time fighting the corporate culture to meet goals.  Their managers misunderstand them and because they do not have any real authority often ignored by others.   For me, I depend on the support of others from the agile coaches’ symposium in Chicago.  I count on my immediate manager and interact with other coaches on LinkedIn. 

I depend on these people like a drowning person clings to piece of driftwood. Leading organizational change requires the stamina of an Olympic athlete, the patience of Job, and the self-esteem of Rod Blagojevich.  Few people have all three of these traits.  It is why I have to depend on the coaching of others.  It is a both a means to improve and receive the support I need to get through the day. 

Currently, I am dealing with exceptional levels of toxicity from business partners.  The situation has deteriorated so much one product owner will not speak to me directly but will tell someone else to convey information to me.  It may be acceptable behavior for mean girls in high school but is outrageous for a business person to act in such a fashion.  All I can do it take responsibility for this professional failure and make the best of the situation. 

Someone I respect said, “Empathetic relations come before education.”  This week that message clobbered me like a sixteen-ton weight.  Crushed by this new knowledge and experience, it occurs to me that I can not just attempt to teach others the skills of agile with the power dynamic of a teacher to a student.  For greater agile maturity at an organization, the coach needs to relate to the business partners as peers. 

If agile is going to grow then, people must want to be open, committed, focused, courageous, and respectful.  It is now clear to me I cannot use the coaching style of a movie director or drill sergeant.  I cannot be a teacher at this stage.  My knowledge needs to be offered as a friend.  If not, then agile will stagnate and not mature at an organization. 

A failure is a useful tool.  It educates more than any success possibly could.  This week, I experienced a failure I might not recover from at my current firm.  Whatever the future might bring, the lessons are going to stick with me the rest of my career.

Until next time.

The Social Compact of Agile

If you don't set priorities your office could be like this.
From the Iron Mitten web site.  

One of the biggest challenges in technology is there are not enough people to do all the necessary work.  Only about 18.5 million people in the world of 7.4 Billion people can maintain software and modern computer networks.  That means that less than .05% of the world have the skills to keep the global economy spinning. It would not happen without dedicated project professionals and smart technologists holding everything together.  Without prioritization, the gears of the industry would grind to a halt, and that is what I want to talk about this week.

When Thomas Hobbes wrote “The Leviathan,” in the aftermath of the English Civil War; he spoke about something called the social contract.  The social contract to Hobbes was an unwritten set of rules where individuals traded their liberty with the state in exchange for safety and protection.  Ignore the social contract, and society would collapse, and philosophers and social scientists still use the idea of a social contract to explain how communities work.

In the world of business, we also have social contracts.  People who have more authority have offices instead of cubicles, so they meet with people in private.  When it is time to distribute profits, shareholders receive preference over employees.  Finally, no one gives human resources any trouble because they have the authority to hire and fire anyone.  None of these rules are written down, but we all know they exist.

In agile, there is one social compact.  The product owner sets the priorities, and the development team says how long it is going to take to do the work.  The developers may disagree with the preferences, but they have to accept them.  The product owners may not like how long it will take to do the work, but they have to agree with them.  It is the trade-off which makes agile work.  If neither the developers nor the product owner respects this setup, then the implementation will fail.

It is well and good if you have only one project and one team.  What happens when you have multiple projects and not enough teams to do the work?  It is when prioritization becomes more critical.  Business leaders need to be part of the process, and they need to know what is being worked on and when.

There are plenty of processes to set priorities.  The most significant challenge for me is the mindset of the business of professionals.  Sales and marketing professionals are trained to think each “no” is one less objection to “yes.”  It is admirable for a sales professional; it is madness for a large organization as self-interested and selfish people scratch and claw to “yes.”  Projects hopscotch up and down in priority as developers struggle to stay ahead of the shifting needs of the organization.  Unclean code is released to production because someone needed a feature released “today.” I continue to struggle with this challenge.

So as a scrum master or agile coach, you need to enforce the social contract of agile.  That social contract is product owners set priorities and developers say how long it is going to take to do those priorities.  If you can do this, you just might succeed.

Until next time.

Smoke detectors explain technical debt

Should have checked the smoke detectors.

Since the holidays, I have made a point to spend time with people outside the technology field.  This experience has been beneficial because I spend my time explaining what a scrum master does and how we do it.  This review of the basics is allowing me to reflect on work and how to make it better.  It is a fresh perspective which has allowed me to look at old concepts in a different light.  This week I want to revisit technical debt.

I own my own home.  Since I am a homeowner, I have smoke detectors.  These little battery powered devices warn me when there is a fire or when I am burning a roast on the stove.  So smoke detectors offer protection to a homeowner so they can escape the house quickly and call the fire department.  Smoke detectors are so useful you receive a discount on your home insurance if you have one, and, in some municipalities, you are required to have at least one in your home.

Smoke detectors have one significant drawback; they are battery operated.  When the batteries run out, and a fire breaks out you are helpless.  The smoke detector companies fix this by forcing the alarms to “chirp” which is a friendly reminder to change the batteries.  This week, I awoke to my smoke detector “chirping” at 2 AM in the morning.  Like many men my age, I attempted to roll over in bed and ignore the situation.  Ninety minutes of insomnia later, I wandered the house searching for batteries to replace the faulty one in the “chirping” detector.

The next morning over an extra cup of coffee, it occurred to me that I treated my smoke detector like many organizations treat technical debt.  I do not change batteries until I have to and usually it is at an inconvenient time.  Fortunately, being a former boy scout, I was prepared with batteries in an easy to find location.  I swapped out the batteries and went back to bed. 

If you are a homeowner, you have four strategies to deal with smoke detectors.

1. Change all the batteries at once typically during daylight savings time.
2. Change individual batteries when they run out of charge and begin chirping.
3. Ignore chirping smoke detectors until you get fed up and change the battery.
4. Remove and disconnect all the smoke detectors and hope you never have to deal with a fire.

As a homeowner, I use strategy two and three.  I know others who use the other two approaches.  Swap out smoke detectors and batteries, and you have the four classic strategies companies use to address technical debt.

The most efficient way to deal with technical debt is to follow the first strategy by changing batteries and updating systems on a regular basis.  By doing this, you reduce expected outages.  Agile and scrum encourage this approach.

Many CIO’s and managers I know consider this madness because there is a not enough time, money or people to keep updating systems.  It means they rely on strategies two and three.  It may be suitable for a chirping smoke detector on a cold night but is lunacy for a multi-billion dollar enterprise.  It creates situations where firms could lose millions of dollars while they wait to bring systems back.   

So the next time someone looks are you funny when you talk about technical debt just explain it to them like changing the batteries in a smoke detector.

Until next time.

Eat up

I feel like a shark!  "Chomp!"

Social movements and organizational change are difficult to measure, and it is particularly hard to do in the world of business.  The business press concentrates on investing and accounting.  Since the beginning of the agile reformation, those of us involved in the change have openly wondered if we are making an actual difference.  As 2018 begins, it looks like agile is becoming mainstream and successful.

In 2011 a famous editorial appeared in the Wall Street Journal, It was titled, “Software is eating the World.”  The principal thesis was for companies to succeed they have to behave more like software companies.  It was a daring argument.   The seven years which followed have vindicated that notion.  Google, Tesla, Amazon and a funny project called Bitcoin are dominating headlines and the business community.

Tesla is still struggling to meet its production commitments and Bitcoin, to me, feels like a blue sky stock but what all of these firms have in common is a willingness to innovate, iterate, and move fast to satisfy customer demand.  Even companies who lost their way are embracing blockchain technologies, cloud computing, and rapid software development. 

It is satisfying to know that my career choices have mirrored changes in the business.  While business is changing business leadership is struggling to keep up.  Organizations charts still matter in many places.  Command and control measures which existed for years are difficult to discard, and inertia prevents most organizational change.

It has created a quandary and spawned an entire industry of coaching and consultants, who are attempting to show others how to do business with the agile paradigm.  What these coaches discover, is a business is a social construct along with a business entity.  The ego of a director may be more important than the needs of the company.  Board members excuse a lousy quarter because they golf with executives.  Whole industries condoned sexual harassment and assault as long as the abusers generated revenue.  

Which is why I find the turnaround at Microsoft so fascinating.  They went from a sales culture under Steve Balmer to an engineering culture under Satya Nadella.  After product failures like Zune, Vista, and Windows Phone, the organization decided to place its future in the hands of a software engineer who felt building better products was the path to commercial success.  It is a gamble which has paid off handsomely.

Microsoft has embraced Agile, and it is paying enormous dividends.  That is why this week an article appeared in Forbes called, “Agile is eating the World.”  The reformation is growing, and the success is getting noticed.  It is a satisfying development to me.  I am no longer a lonely missionary in the wilderness, but a professional at the table is making a difference.  It is nice to see the times change.

Until next time.

Saying good riddance to 2017

Would you invite these two over for dinner?
This image captures 2017 better than anything else I have seen.

I want to say good things about 2017; I really want to do it.  The sad reality is that the last year was the equivalent of inviting guests over for a dinner party and they allow their toddler to break your china and defecate on your tablecloth.  The world of politics, business, and agile felt like that disgusting and awkward dinner party.  This week, I take a look at last year’s predictions and look ahead to 2018. 

My first prediction came true in ways I did not expect. The new president and the Republican Party kicked off a wave of deregulation. It was not your garden-variety deregulation typical of GOP control of the White House; this was something radically different.  The Secretary of Education had no experience in educational administration.  The new Secretary of Energy on the campaign trail demanded that the department is dismantled and then used his position to promote the interests of the fossil fuel industry.  The head of the EPA is building a secure secret office and treating the organization he is leading as a security threat. 

By far, the most egregious in a colorful cast of characters is Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.  The Goldman Sachs alumni made a career exploiting financial regulations and staying one step ahead of regulators.  Now he is in charge of those rules, and it looks like a repeat of the events which led to the great recession of 2008.  Adding insult to injury is his spouse who has appeared in public with the personae of a Walt Disney villain blended with a trust fund sorority sister.  Her words about how she and her husband do more for the economy are going to live forever in history books written about this period. 

My second prediction was the brief life and death of Net-Neutrality.  Ajit Pai served on the FCC board and said net-neutrality was unnecessary in 2015 when the board supported it.  With the election, he and the Republican members became the majority on the FCC board, and the net neutrality rules were repealed.  In spite of 22-million comments supporting net-neutrality and opposition by 80% of the public, the repeal went through.  It is going to be a considerable give-a-way to companies like Comcast and Verizon.  It is going to hurt innovation and turn internet service providers into protection rackets charging businesses and organizations extra to have high-speed service.  I hate this turn of events and will work with my elected officials to reverse this decision. 

So that was last year, what trends are we going to see in 2018.  I forecast three events. 

Democrats Resurgent?

I made a political prediction in 2016, and the election threw it back into my face.  This time around I am going to say that Democrats have a credible chance of retaking the Senate and the House of Representatives.  Plenty of things can happen between now and November, but if Democrats are smart, they might have a chance.  Some credible polling and research are showing this might happen.  If it does happen, I hope the new Congress will attempt to unwind, the budget-busting tax cut and work on regulating the internet like a utility so that net-neutrality does not come and go with each regulatory change of power. 

The Battle of Home Assistants.

Google and Amazon began a pretty and bitter war last year, and it will get worse in 2018.  The competition between “Alexia” or “Google Home” will get more heated.  It should be good for consumers, but it is going to be a mess.  Home thermostats, lights, and even appliances are going to be affected by this conflict.  It is a battle for billions of dollars in revenue so grab some popcorn and enjoy the spectacle. 

I will own my brand.

For me professionally, 2017 was a tough year.  Thanks to the good folks at the Agile Coaching Symposium in Chicago, I realized that I am part of an elite group of professionals.  We are a caring, creative, and hard-working group of souls who just want to improve how people work.  I am going to embrace that community further.  I am going to put in for my Certified Team Coach credentials from the scrum alliance.  I will also try to become a presenter for the Agile Alliance in fall.  I hope to learn more about LeSS and how it might help my organization. 

So that is my take for 2018, I look forward to sharing it with you. 

Until next time.