Looking Forward to the Next Decade

Back for another year in review.

Being a blogger opens you up to scrutiny and criticism.  I use this forum as a way to share knowledge about the agile reformation.  I attempt to argue in good faith and provide others with a voice.  I am a passionate advocate, and that passion clouded my reason leading to some big mistakes.  Fortunately, my discourse avoids bitterness so when I eat my words; I do it gladly.  The most treacherous blog of the year is my annual predictions.  Sometimes, I am an oracle with an accurate vision of the future.  Other times, I blunder like a drunken person in a dark room; time will tell if any of my predictions are correct.

The “Breakup,” of Big Tech-

Continuing issues with Facebook, Alphabet, and Microsoft will prompt regulators in the United States to pursue anti-trust suits and legislation to regulate the technology industry.  The efforts by congress will create tremendous pushback from the technology industry.  I expect to see billions of dollars spent on lobbying efforts.  Additionally, political candidates will fundraise and stump for votes by publicly bashing large tech companies.  The technology business does need oversight but I am afraid 2020 is going to have little meaningful reform.

Fighting Corrupt Agile-

As agile becomes more prevalent in organizations, bad actors and corrupt practices will flourish.  The article, “Agile is Whatever Management Says It Is,” was one of the most insightful articles in 2019 business press.  The article discusses how management professionals will demand behavior and process changes from others while clinging to their self-destructive practices.  It is up to us in the agile community to fight this corruption.

“Radical Candor” in the New Decade-

Kim Scott wrote an excellent book on the topic of business communication.  I feel that is will be used by business leaders to improve their performance and the performance of the people they serve.  The difference between “radical candor,” and “manipulative insincerity,” are going to be crucial for leading a successful global business.

I look forward to spreading the word.

The Awful Election of 2020- 

I steer away from politics on this blog.  The internet contains better takes on political rhetoric.  If you are a conservative or liberal, there are plenty of authors on-line to provide insight and perspective.

The presidential election is going to be awful.  The pugilistic style of President Trump and the cultish behavior of the GOP is going to make the election an exercise in pain tolerance.  Democrats will be accused of socialism, infanticide, and having over-due library books.  The very nature of what and who Americans are will come into question.  It will be ugly.  In victory or defeat, the president will be petulant, and regardless of the outcome, our nation will seem smaller as a result.  I hate feeling this pessimistic.

I hope these words are not too bitter.  I am sure I will have to eat them someday.  Thanks for spending the year reading the blog, and I look forward to more writing in the next decade.

Until next time.

Be on the Look Out for Workism

Even Elves need some rest.

The Christian holidays are close and it is easy to become caught up in the bustle of parties, shopping, and family gatherings.  The biggest challenge is weighing the exclusive demands of family and career.  Derek Thompson wrote an excellent article about the subject earlier this month.  As a member of the agile reformation, I want to remind my fellow professionals of the danger of workism.

Speaking for myself, I become a software developer for two reasons. The first reason was I was chasing the hype and wealth of the first internet boom.  It was a giddy and stupid time where Bill Clinton was president, and anyone with a “.com” at the end of their company name wasted millions of dollars.  I wanted to be one of those twentysomething or thirtysomething millionaires writing code instead of being told to smile more while casino patrons blew cigarette smoke into my face.  The other reason was I was good at it.  I became a wizard with Microsoft Office and was soon glancing at Visual Basic code like I was reading the morning news.  My dream of working afternoon drive at a classic rock radio station evolved into becoming a web developer.  The pay was better and it gave me a career that I did not enjoy in my twenties.

Looking back, I realized I joined the technology during a dramatic period of expansion.  I was one of the numerous anonymous workers who helped construct the contemporary internet we enjoy today.  I was an early consumer of social media with a MySpace page.  I was using a smartphone before the birth of Android.  I witnessed the evolution of Microsoft from an evil empire to an innovator in Cloud computing.

It was not an easy road to travel.  I failed numerous times, working for every type of business imaginable.  I became an entrepreneur and failed, and each setback and disappointment set the stage for more significant success.  These experiences helped me coach other professionals so that they avoid the mistakes I made in my career.

It is also a profession where less than one percent of the world population can do it successfully.  It often means cramming various amounts of work into a single workweek.  Developers and network engineers work long hours keeping the global economy working.  It is intellectually demanding and detail-oriented.  Imagine a world where checks do not manifest, or shopping on-line comes to a stop. It is a nightmare world I would not like to live in.

The lucrative work and the shortage of people who can do it successfully translate into long hours.  Thompson in his essay in the Atlantic talks about workism.  It is a career focus that puts family, friends, and community at arm’s length.  High skill workers benefit from long hours in ways that low skill workers do not.  If you work in technology, you are expected to work long hours because it is cost-prohibitive to find people who can do the work.  It is also the only way for a professional to advance in their career.  As Thompson says in his essay,

“At many firms, insanely long hours are the skeleton key to the C-suite and partner track.  Thus, overwork becomes a kind of arms race among similarly talented workers, exacerbated by the ability to never stop working, even at home.  It’s mutually assured exhaustion.”

Executives enjoy exploiting this arms race to get more out of their employees.  In the agile world, we need to push back against this exploitation.  Countless studies point out overwork is counter-productive.  Workism has severe consequences for employee health.  It hurts morale.  It also undermines the quality of the work.  Agile is about “Healthy Ownership,” a sustainable pace and delivering value to customers at a more reasonable pace.  Anything else is waste and exploitation. As an agile coach or scrum master, please be on the watch for workism.  It is a path that leads to poor quality and burnout.  The better way is Agile which is a more sustainable, satisfying and safe way to work.

I want to finish this blog by wishing all of my readers a Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and a joyous Kwanzaa.  I am sure I am missing some other holiday but I hope each of you enjoys time with your families and take some time for reflection.  I will back next week with my end of year predictions.

Until next time.

Ignore Product Delivery at Your Own Risk.

When we talk about agile and scrum, we often talk about the process.  It is a curious paradox because the agile manifesto clearly states, “Individuals and interactions over process and tools.”  I want to take some time to discuss the reason we do this crazy agile thing.

When agile began in a ski lodge in Utah, it was the product of seventeen leaders in software development.  It is not a perfect document and others have made numerous suggestions for revision.  The agile movement has balkanized because people have different interpretations of the values and principles outlined in the manifest.  Finally, the challenge of scaling agile to accommodate large software projects has further split the community into competing camps.  I have attempted to stay above the bitter disputes but I have taken sides on a few issues like no-estimates. The conflicts among agile professionals hide something which all of us agree.  The purpose of agile is to get work done.

Agile does not promise to get work done faster; it promises to get customers involved with work so that businesses can deliver value to those customers.  Agile professionals ship software, develop marketing campaigns and provide services that offer value.  Anything else is differences in style.  These styles range from prescriptive approaches for organizations beginning the process of agile to experimental methods which allow teams to self-organize and come up with unique ways of doing things.

Many of the disputes in the agile community are about how well people are following the steps of agile or scrum.  It is an unhealthy disagreement about the process. Instead, everyone in the agile community should focus on delivery.  The shipping of products is what pays the bills and continues to build the agile movement.

To review, agile is about delivery.  Individuals are more important than development processes, and both are subservient to providing value to customers.  Anything else is waste.

Until next time.

Requiem for a Software Developer

I use this blog to discuss two principle topics; software development and software developers.  It is an exciting topic, and the people who build software represent some of the best traits in the human species.  Today, I want to talk about one of them. 

Carla Robinson was an anomaly in the technology business.  She dedicated most of her career to one company.  Carla spent the bulk of her career at R.R. Donnelly, and when the company split, joined one of the spin-offs, LSC Communications.  She worked with AS/400 systems and wrote RPG code.  It was hours of staring into green screens and sorting through reams of sequential code.  She kept a legacy system alive, and as the technology business changed, she rolled with these changes. 

I knew Carla as her scrum master.  She was learning how to write C# code and unit tests.  What made her invaluable to her team was her manual testing skills and her business knowledge.  Often, she was able to answer questions about the product and how it helped the business.  She was a person of good spirits when times were tough.  Finally, she would not accept grief from anyone and demanded respect. 

She loved Bessie Smith, vintage Prince, and anything to do with dusty radio.  She was a colleague and to many a friend.  The world is a little less fascinating without her.  I imagine her enjoying some step dancing in the afterlife and feeling a sense of pride about a life and career well lived. 

Fair forward and not farewell, Carla.

It Takes Labor and Intelligence to Make Magic

It looks like magic but it is something else.

The software business is a strange beast.  Developers wrestle with ones and zeros to create things that only existed in someone’s imagination.  We exchange terabytes each second to help us shop, get driving directions, or book a vacation.  The raw computing power we hold in our hands dwarfs the computing power which puts people on the moon.  Science fiction author Arthur C. Clark said any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. We live in these magical times, where we can get anything on our phones.  It hides an ugly reality that it takes a tremendous amount of labor and intelligence to construct these systems.  It takes more energy to maintain those systems and keep the global economy spinning.  I need to pull back the curtain and reveal the hard work behind the magic.

Software is written to solve problems or to automate a process.  The first electronic computers were created to break the Nazi Enigma codes and to calculate the trajectories of artillery shells during the Second World War.  These machines were ugly and ungainly.  The early computers did not have formal systems of logic or operations.  Smart people would have to come up with those systems.  Fortunately, the allies had people like Alan Turing and Grace Hopper to pioneer those advances.

The vacuum tubes of the early days of computers would give way to the transistors and then semi-conductors.  The transition from glass tubes to silicon wafers leads to an explosion of innovation including programming languages like Pascal and COBOL.  IBM used a startup company from Seattle called Microsoft to create the first operating system for personal computers.  The world wide web was born, and soon businesses sprang up to generate billions of dollars of wealth.  In hindsight, all of this “progress” appears inevitable.  In reality, it is the work of tens of thousands of engineers and software developers who will forever remain anonymous.

These were people who sacrificed time with family and friends to stare at green computer screens attempting to squeeze additional seconds of processing time out of applications.  These were people who came up with algorithms that allowed efficient organ donations.  They were UI/UX designers who discovered horizontal scrolling hurt sales and created designs that improved closing rates.  It was late nights, cold coffee, and exhaustion, which constructed the technology we take for granted.  I am one of those anonymous foot soldiers in this march of progress.

As I became more experienced as a software engineer, I realized the way we lead those projects was not improving with the technology. We were doing the same crazy things and expecting the same results.  It is why I become a member of the agile reformation.  I wanted to make a change.

Today, many of the people making decisions about technology have not constructed that technology.  These people have ideas but no practical knowledge of how to make those ideas work.  Confronted with this reality, they have engineers, developers, and designers to make the idea a reality.  Unfortunately, because they think technology behaves magically, they believe its creation is a magical process.  It is not magic but the product of hard work and intelligence.  No amount of wishful thinking will change the realities of Moore’s Law.

It is why we have the agile manifesto and principles.  We want our work to be more sane, satisfying, and sustainable.  It is only four values and 12 principles, but they make all the difference in an organization. We do live in a magical world.  It is a world created by the sweat and toil of smart people.  By understanding the labor which goes into technology, we can make the world a little more magical.

Until next time.

Agile Pushing the Limits of Productivity.

100 Years ago the Great War came to an end.

November marks the centennial of the end of the First World War.  The Western Front of Europe was a muddy ruin.  Germany transformed into a republic in the aftermath of defeat.  Communists took control of Russia, and the old order of world affairs, unchanged since the collapse of Napoleon, was turned inside out.  I doubt any of the survivors of the “Great War,” could imagine what the world would look like in a century.  To us, life during the First World War would look familiar.  Machine guns, anti-biotics, and automobiles existed and played an essential part in the war.  To people from that time, our contemporary world resembles science fiction with our smartphones, air travel, nuclear weapons, and medical advances.  One hundred years is a long time and the pace of change is moving swifter.  We live in an agile world, and we better start adjusting. 

If you look at consumption figures since the First World War, the United States and the rest of the world can feed, educate and clothe more people than any other time in human history.  We are awash in money, and the global economy makes it possible to manufacture more wealth today than at any additional time in history.  The main reason for this explosion of wealth and prosperity is twofold; first, technology and automation have made it possible to manufacture items at the cost of pennies, the other reason is productivity per worker has increased geometrically.  We live in a world where Moors’ law trumps Marxist theory or the wealth of nations.

It is possible to create products around the world with teams in India, Ireland, and the United States.  In a global economy work no longer sleeps as it can shift around the world.  Our communications and technology are outstanding.  The way we manage technology resembles the time of the Pharaohs.  Large groups of people were forced to collaborate, often against their will, to satisfy the desires of a monarch.  The management of projects has not improved since the pyramids.  Glance around a contemporary corporation, and you see projects being managed in the same primitive fashion.  Instead of whips and drums to motivate workers, spreadsheets and Gantt charts are used to keep the labor moving forward. 

Smart people gathered together to write the agile manifesto as a way to come up with a sustainable, sane, and satisfying way to do work.  Waste is slashed, and more value delivered to customers as a bonus.  It was a merger between the needs of the business community and how humans work.  The alliance is imperfect.  Dark Scrum and Fake Agile are everywhere.  The distribution of the productivity surge is uneven.  Finally, we have bumped up against the upper limit of automation and technological advancement.  The productivity figures for the last twenty years will reveal this challenge.

Modern corporations are the last vestiges of feudal culture in our current society.  Executives act like royalty and increasingly perpetuate their privilege through networks of wealth and education for their children.  Culture considers the middle managers or professionals who make these whims a reality waste.  Finally, we squeeze every drop of productivity from the people doing the work.  It is a cycle of abuse which is self-reinforcing.  It is also an obstacle to increasing productivity.

Agile and Scrum do not promise to get people to work faster.  Instead, agile techniques promise to interact with the customer in more rapid cycles.  Personal agendas, waste, and bureaucracy disappear as the people who do the work come in contact with the people who purchase the product or service.  It is a threat to the current way corporations operate.

The structure of a large global business is becoming an impediment to the productivity of the people who work for them.  If we are going to match the growth of the last 100 years, we must change how business works.  It is why I joined the agile reformation and why I continue to fight my lonely struggle to make work better.  I want my descendants to have the same wonder I have over the progress we have made in a century.

Until next time.

A Year in the Life of a Scrum Master

Sharpen the saw, regularly.

Any scrum master worth their weight in salt, should take time out of their busy careers and take stock.  The book, “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” calls this practice “sharpening the saw.”  It is a chance to review the successes and failures of the recent past and see if you have gained any wisdom along the way.  I do not do it as often as I should.  The last year has been a crazy ride, and I want to share with you a few things I have learned.

A year ago, I left LSC communications. I was profoundly unhappy and filled with rage and contempt.  During my fifth anniversary, my manager joked, “Ed has been dragging this organization kicking and screaming to become more agile.”  I was an effort I was often fighting by myself. I was self-medicating with alcohol and over-eating to deal with the stress.  I was also making below-market rates for my profession.  I took the first opportunity offered to me to leave.  Three weeks later, I was cast aside like a used piece of facial tissue.  It was a valuable lesson.  If an offer is too good to be true, it probably is.

In the first quarter of the year, I worked for a non-profit which wanted to become agile.  I was hungry for a fresh start.  I let my hunger blind me to some distinct realities.  The organization was not serious about agile.  The firm would not hire or appoint product owners.  The managers would not share power with their teams.  Finally, my immediate manager wanted me to shut my mouth and maintain the Jira board rather than coach.  The second lesson learned, do not let hunger blind you to a no-win situation, which will further stunt your career.

I would spend the summer months looking for work and keeping my spirits up.  I could not have done it if I did not have the support of my friends, my family, and an understanding girlfriend.  Jobs come and go, but when you die, the only people who will mourn you are the people who loved you.  It is doubtful your boss or the VP of engineering will show up unless you neglected to check your code back into source control.

Finally, when I had a new opportunity, I set aside my preconceived notions and took time to learn about what works for my client.  It is not a mistake that the creator gave each person two ears and one mouth.  We need to listen to others with a frequency of two to one.  Learn the names of your colleagues and their children.  Find out how to make coffee that everyone in the office will drink.  Learn where the pain points exist and find out if you can fix them.  Share the values and principles of the agile manifesto and then be an example for others.

Plenty of things can happen in a year.  I feel like a different person. I am older and a touch wiser.  I want to bring that knowledge to other software developers and agilests.  I am grateful you are along for the ride.

Until next time.

Emotions are Intentional on Your Agile Team

Existential thinkers have plenty to say about emotions.

I have been busy working on a large project.  My life has become a dull whirlwind of train rides, conference calls, and e-mail chains, which never end.  The days tick by as we draw closer to our deadline.  Everyone is feeling the pressure.  As the scrum master and coach, I have to maintain a semblance of grace under pressure.  If I do not the team will continue to careen out of control, and the project will fail.  I have talked about emotions plenty of times on this blog.  Today, I want to discuss the intentionality of emotions and what it means for your teams.

I have been reading plenty of philosophy books on the train, and I have become intrigued with post-modern and existential philosophy.  In particular, the trio of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus.  Two of these writers earned the Nobel Prize in literature.  The third gave birth to contemporary feminist thought.  The three of them survived the horrors of the great depression and the Second World War.  In the aftermath, they were authoring a philosophy centered on individuals and the life choices they make.  Instead of grand narratives of history like Marx or Hegel, existential thinkers wrote about freedom and opportunity.  The existentialists spend time discussing psychology.  Each of them pushes back against the leading theories of psychoanalysis and attempt to provide a better way to discuss emotions.

As psychoanalysis grew in popularity and respectability, people began to accept many of its presumptions about human nature.  A central hypothesis was the concept of the “unconscious mind.”  The unconscious was a mental black box where we kept our repressed memories, emotions and irrational portions of ourselves.  Therapy could help us unlock some of the mysteries of the unconscious, but it would never be able to untangle the numerous tangled threads of repression, trauma, anxiety, and emotion each of us possesses.  If someone was easily angered the psychoanalysis would say there was nothing to be done because emotions are part of the unconscious mind and it will require extensive therapy to address the complicated issues causing the anger.

Existential thinkers reject this extreme version of the unconscious mind. To an existentialist, humans do have a conscious mind and an unconscious mind, but the unconscious is not a black box that cannot be understood.  Instead, the unconscious mind contains emotions, memories and hidden elements of behavior but instead of them obeying irrational processes they are rational and intentional depending outside stimulus.

For example, you are in a retrospective, and some stories did not get completed.  The inability to get work done becomes the main topic of the retrospective.  Two developers are upset by the discussion.  An existentialist would say this is natural because the two developers did or did not do something which caused the sprint to fail.  The feeling of anger, disappointment, or anxiety is a logical and rational response to failure.  If you are a good enough coach or scrum master the team should be able to express those emotions healthily.  One developer should be able to admit they are struggling writing automated tests.  The other developer should be able to confess that they do not have time to help the other developer improve their testing skills.  In a condition of psychological safety and openness, the team can work out how they can avoid failure like this in the future.

The scrum master should ask “What” style questions instead of “Why” centered questions.  When someone is angry, ask, “What is making you feel this way.”  It is less judgmental than asking why.  Ask people what they are going to do to change and what they can do when they feel angry or upset.  It is not easy, but it guides you and the people on your team to take ownership of emotional behavior.  It means that emotions are still irrational and exhausting, but the reasons we have them are not.  To the existentialist, a feeling serves a real need in each human.

As a scrum master and coach, it is up to you to understand emotions and how they are natural and rational responses to real situations.  It is up to you to ask questions about what is triggering emotions instead of why emotions are triggered.  Finally, a coach or scrum master needs to help others take ownership of emotions instead of dismissing them because emotions affect the team and the individual struggling to express them.

Until next time.

Grateful for the Agile Coaching Summit in Chicago

Left to Right: Ben, Me, and Mara.

A big challenge for any scrum master or coach is the feeling that you are alone in the organization you are leading change.  Cultural inertia, fixed mindsets, and the pressure to deliver have a way of draining a person of enthusiasm and devotion to the agile reformation.  Professionals like us need an opportunity to recharge our batteries and spend time among like-minded individuals.  The Agile Coaching Summit at the Guaranteed Rate headquarters in Chicago was one of those opportunities.

If you are an agile professional, there are plenty of opportunities to interact with others.  Social media features countless user groups for agile professionals.  Two significant conferences begin and end the summer, offering learning credits and a chance to rub shoulders with others.  The Agile Coaching summit in Chicago is different.  The Agile Coaching summit in Chicago is different.  It is more intimate with room for about 150 people.  Skill levels from new scrum masters to hardened coaches leading enterprise change at Fortune 500 companies are present.  What unites all of us is a desire to make a difference at our organizations and our devotion to agile.  It is a great mix, and it is why I attended the inaugural meeting and why I went this year. 

In a change of pace, we had not one but five keynote speakers.  Some were coaching language, others spoke about positivity, another was an improvisation coach talking about coaching conversations; finally, we learned about generational differences in the workplace.  It was upbeat, positive, and informative.  All these speakers spoke about the skills necessary to be successful leaders, listeners, and coaches.  Not a single one was an agile specialist.  The focus on these areas creates an impression that agile coaching is more about coaching others for success than agile.  It was a necessary pallet cleanser for a great conference. 

Saturday opened with coffee and breakfast and quickly moved into in-depth learning sessions.  I was busy learning about a wiki book imitative while others were discussing “agile fakes.”  Later sessions included conversations about how executives undercut agile, and it is always good to learn how to perform Kata experiments to change behavior.  The best part of this gathering is to see old friends and to meet new ones.  People swap war stories about creating organizational change.  We catch up on each other’s children, careers and personal lives.  I even spent time bantering about smart lights and how to set them up in a new house. 

Sunday is usually a laid back affair, but there were great sessions about coaching teams versus one on one coaching.  We had conversations about dealing with difficult team members and discuss product ownership.  It was a great weekend, and I strongly recommend it next year.  Many thanks to Emilio B. Perez and the folks at Guaranteed Rate for a successful summit and I look forward to ACS2000.

Until Next time.

Scrum depends on leadership.

Leadership is hard.

The global economy is filled with challenges.  The economic cycle of boom and bust.  Trade wars and political uncertainty dominate headlines.  Workers are flexing their muscles to retain the wages and benefits which kept them in the middle s class.  The agile reformation is in the middle of this environment.  We are striving to make business saner, sustainable, and satisfying.  It is hard work.  Often we are struggling with status quo thinking and the demands of the market place.  We test scrum masters and coaches daily.  The principle test is the leadership skills we bring to work each day.

The scrum guide has evolved over the years to discuss the changing role of the scrum master.  We describe scrum masters as servant-leaders with the ability to influence others without having real authority.  I have written numerous times about servant-leadership.  I am a big fan of people like Dwight Eisenhower, Harvey Milk, and Creighton Abrams.  I am also impressed by academic thinkers like Gilles Deleuze and Albert Camus.  What all of these people have in common is deep intelligence and the ability to overcome obstacles to accomplish great things.

Leadership is hard.  In the words of General Collin Powel, leadership is pissing people off to get things done.  It is uncomfortable.  Leadership is upsetting comfortable structures to achieve greater success.  It is emotionally taxing and a job that follows you around even when you are outside the office.  It is a skill that must be cultivated and rehearsed regularly. 

The alternative is a catastrophe.  People who are concerned with their advancement at the expense of others are toxic in an organization.  Those people will game measurements to make themselves look more effective than they are.  They will withhold support for others unless they can receive some benefit.  People work with these kinds of leaders not because they want to but because they have to do it.  Organizations succeed or fail based on the leadership skills of their people, and poor leadership will kill and organization.

By now, you realize that I feel strongly about this subject.  I have spent my entire career working with many different people.  Some were inspirational, and others were more interested in their success than others.  I prefer the company of inspirational people.   This week my leadership was challenged twice.  I was helping a professional team release software, and I had to perform agile assessments on other teams.  The common thread through these experiences is that good leadership was obvious to see, and lousy leadership was more deceptive.  Be on the lookout for these corrupt leaders; they will harm your business. 

Until next time.

Necessity and Urgency for the Scrum Master.

Necessity Matters.

Last week, I discussed prioritization and why it matters.  I received plenty of feedback and I want to devote extra time to the topic.

It has been my experience that the further one advances in the company the more people struggle with prioritization.  I blame this on individuals who have never had constraints on time, money, or energy placed in positions of authority.  I also suspect sales and marketing professionals advance into the executive ranks faster.  These individuals are trained early in their careers that “no,” is just one obstacle in the way of an eventual yes.  When they become responsible for operations or essential projects, “no,” has a very different meaning.  Unable to deal with shortages of people, money, or time they lash out or resort to deception to get things done.  It is an ugly state of affairs, and it will destroy the morale of a project team.

When I face this situation, I remember the 1999 movie, “Three Kings.”  The film features Ice Cube and George Clooney as gulf war soldiers who decide to steal a shipment of Saddam Hussein’s gold during confusion surrounding the end of the first gulf war.  The film has one moment which sticks out for me, and that is a monologue by Clooney’s character.  He asks his fellow soldiers what is essential.  After listening to several wrong answers, he says, “Necessity is the most important.  We need to know what is going to get us to the next moment and do that.”  When a ship is leaking, fix the leak.  When a house is on fire put out the fire.  Other issues can wait until the immediate crisis is over.  I have used this approach for five years, and I have seen its effect.  If you are in a staff meeting ask, “Is it necessary?” and if the answer is yes then inquire why it is necessary.  Eventually, people in the organization will start asking the same questions.

Some organizations have a culture of firefighting.  Jimmy Leppert observed these organizations are so focused on short term results they do not have time to focus on growth or excellence.  To get anything done, you have to become an arsonist to create a sense of urgency.  To reduce the “fire risk,” take away flammable material from the organization like technical debt and outdated software.  Next, take responsibility away from the “firebugs,” in the organization; people who create a crisis to get things done.  Finally, encourage fire safety with good engineering practices, automated testing, and code reviews among the team. 

People use urgency and necessity interchangeably.  Do not use these words for is a means to upset the process of prioritization in an organization.  It is arson burning down the business.

Until next time.

Helpful Tips Setting Priorities

Being a white-collar professional is a mixed bag.  With a few clicks of a mouse or the stroke of a pen, construction projects begin, or new markets born.  It is also suffering through bad coffee, office politics, and people who enjoy humiliating others.  It is a load of responsibility without much authority and being separated from your family to provide them with opportunities you never had.  As a professional, it amazes me to see who rises through the corporate food chain and who flounders.  It feels like the worst moments of high school when you thought you were not smart enough, cool enough, or pretty enough to matter to anyone else.  Those who do rise to the top often depend on the invisible people to manage the business and keep the global economy spinning.  One of the most critical skills of keeping the company moving forward is prioritization, and I would like to discuss it.

Roland Pilcher, in his excellent book about product ownership, talks about how every backlog needs prioritization.  Over my career, I am amazed by how many people in positions of leadership have never been forced to set priorities.  I blame this state of affairs on business cultures who are afraid to say “no” to executives.  It is the creation of a fantasy world where anything is possible, and the only limits are money and ego.

People who do not hear “no” often enough cannot set priorities, so it is up to others to teach them how. I have created a grid to help evaluate how to address priorities.  The Y-axis is importance with the high being very important and the low being trivial.  The X-axis is the urgency of a task from mission-critical to inconsequential.  Any work can fall onto the plane and based on where it lands determines how you are going to take action.

Mission Critical and Important - 

Anything which threatens the survival of the business or costs money falls in this category.  Consider it like the e-commerce site is down or your boat in the middle of the ocean is sinking.  You need to stop what you are doing and address it now.

Less Critical but Important - 

These are things which will improve the business and increase profits.  It could be an update to the company website which has full social media integration.  It might be the addition of a more powerful engine on your fishing boat.  Whatever the issue, speed to market means you should do it before your competitors do.

Need to have Items - 

Items which are less critical than the things above which are not time-sensitive are called need to have issues.  These items will generate profit, but they can be scheduled based on budget or staffing priorities.

Nice to have Items - 

When something is neither trivial or essential and it is neither mission-critical or inconsequential, it is known as a nice to have priority.  Things like changing the color scheme of a website or streamlining an ordering process fall into this category.  Fit these tasks in when time allows.

Egoware - 

In large organizations, some people have a tremendous amount of authority and the self-esteem to match.  These individuals look at priorities which may not be essential and give them urgency.  Often it is to satisfy personal preferences rather than business needs.  In the software business we call this kind of development Egoware.  Any organization which fulfills the construction of egoware is toxic, and executives, scrum masters, and coaches should work to eliminate it from the organization; otherwise egoware will choke out the more important work at the firm.

Willful Ignorance - 

The organization is often blind to these issues, which are essential but treated as inconsequential.  For example, a top salesperson is using his expense account to cover gambling losses.  Another example is a toxic person with a history of sexual harassment stalking the office.  In both cases, the organization is looking the other way and treating these risks as inconsequential.  Eventually, they will pay for this inattention, and the problems become more prominent and the financial dangers more considerable.

Things which can wait - 

If something is trivial and inconsequential; it can wait.  Often, we get ideas, or the business comes up with suggestions.  If they are not urgent or essential, they can linger for another day.  These items sit at the bottom of the backlog or project plan. If something can wait it should have “shelf life.”  After sitting in the “to do,” pile for a certain amount of time, it should be reviewed.  If the idea can deliver value it should be moved to the nice to have priority.  If it does not, then it should be scrapped to make room for other ideas.

Peter Drucker, the famous business consultant, said, “First things first, last things never.”  If you take a look at this chart it should be easy to determine what matters what can wait.  You can spot things which are dangerous or dysfunctional to the firm.  Following this approach will make you more competent than many executives at big companies.

Until next time.

We need to teach the agile reformation

Everyone in agile is an educator. 

I have a love affair with teachers.  My Aunt was a teacher and an elementary school principal.  My first wife was a teacher, and my current romantic partner is a teacher.  I owe my career and success to teachers who invested time and energy on me.  Teachers are the glue which holds society together, and without them, the world would collapse into a puddle of ignorance — teachers mater.

I some respects, I have become a teacher myself. I have spent the last few decades of my life learning software developments and project management.  Now I am sharing my knowledge with others and helping make business better one project at a time.  Being a scrum master and agile coach means you have to be a teacher.  The Agile manifesto and principles of agile are a foundation of a massive ecosystem of learning about how to make work more sustainable, satisfying, and sane.  It is a calling, just like teaching.

The world of agile is continuously changing. After the creation of the agile manifesto, we did not know how to scale agile to larges organizations; software testing was not part of the conversation, and many though it would only work with technology.  Today, thanks to the contributions of thousands of people we have solutions to those challenges.  We use agile in Human Resources, Education, Marketing and Finance.

To me, the reasons are clear why agile is growing.  The emphasis on transparency, inspection, and adaptation prevents organizations from being dogmatic about how they do things.  It is a pragmatic approach which makes an effort to deal with the chaotic nature of the contemporary world.  It is also a world view seen through the lens of engineering, where people fix problems and discover solutions.  Finally, it is an optimistic approach to the world where we make small and steady continuous improvements one sprint at a time.

The agile reformation is not entirely unicorns and glitter.  People are resistant to changes, and large organizations are notoriously hard to transform.  I have suffered numerous personal and professional setback in this field.  Every reformation has a counter-reformation.  Still the hard work and dedication to teaching others how to do things a better way is what keeps the movement going forward.  My love affair with teachers began when I was a child.  The love has grown stronger as I have become a coach in the agile reformation.

Until next time.

Agile guiding the three tribes of business

The tribes of business create a tower of babble.

I am grateful to be blogging again.  I took a week off to address some health issues.  Recovery from illness is nature’s way of forcing a person to review priorities.  It makes you take stock of what is essential.  I have spent the last ten years of my life involved with the agile reformation.  It is clear to me one of the biggest challenges faced by agile practitioners is helping others change the mindset from a command and control perspective to an agile view. It is going to require coaching and patience.  Today, I want to discuss the leading challenge coaches and scrum masters face.

Since Frederich Winslow Taylor published “Principles of Scientific Management,” over one hundred years ago corporations separated their workforce into three distinct tribes.    The workers who did the manufacturing, service, or sales work.  The next group was the owners or executives who Karl Marx called the bourgeois.  The final collection were managers.  The tribes formed a lopsided pyramid where power resided at the top, and those at the bottom were expected to carry out orders without question.  When we discuss “top-down” management it is executives giving orders to professionals.  The professionals then made sure the orders were performed by those doing the work.

The modern manager has only existed since the founding of the Harvard Business School in 1908.  Management training often began in the office and shop floor.  After the founding of the M.B.A. program at Harvard, growing corporations could hire college-educated people who understood finance and the legal aspects of running a large business.  Managers had formal training equal to doctors and attorneys.  The professional-managerial class created a disconnect between those who did the work and those who employed the labor. 

Labor unions and economic growth helped to conceal the disconnect between workers and managers.  The events of the 1980s helped change the dynamic.  The government slashed regulations and curtailed labor unions; business leaders wanted to do more with less.  Business outsourced non-essential parts of the company and contractors replaced full-time workers.  Finally, manufacturing was off-shored to countries with lower labor costs.  Each step along this path, it was professional managers who made those strategies work.

For creative activities like software development, entertainment, and advertising, the more with less approach was not working.  With no knowledge of the work, executives would give orders.  Managers could manage work but have no idea how long it would take to complete the job.  Finally, workers did not care what they were doing or why they were doing it so long as they got paid.  Work would linger, and projects would run over-budget.  Meanwhile, customers were receiving low-quality products which were not meeting their demands.  It was ugly, and everyone in the business world through it was healthy.

Because they felt there was a better way to do work instead of “top-down” management, some of the biggest names in project management created the agile manifesto.  Organizations would now benefit from workers interacting directly with customers.  Small teams would lead change instead of bourgeois executives coercing people to do things against their will.  The pyramid of workers, executives and professionals would be tipped over with all three tribes working toward a common goal of helping the customers.  It was utopian and viewed the world through the lens of engineering.

Since that moment, agile is eating the world.  Successful companies in the global economy embrace the concepts of agile and those who do not flounder.  The reality is much more complicated.  Dark Scrum is a constant challenge in the business world.  Bad Agile is everywhere, and plenty of bad actors are attempting to capitalize on the spread of agile.

Scrum masters and coaches are innovating and attempting to change business for the better.  To effect change, we need to stick to the basics and the agile manifesto and agile principles.  We need to embrace scaling for more substantial organizations, but we should not be bound to one particular scaling framework.  Finally, we need to embrace our technical excellence and increase soft skills.  I am a big fan of Kim Scott’s “Radical Candor,” and I am beginning to embrace “Co-Active Coaching.”  Together, by understanding how the different tribes of the business interact, by practicing technical excellence, and finally, by perfecting soft skills we can make the lopsided pyramid of the contemporary business world a better place.

Until next time.

Failure is the Foundation for Continuous Improvement

Failure hurts but it is the start of learning.

Summer is slowly winding down and children are heading back to school.  I find this time of year wistful.  I remember being driven down to college for my first semester away from home.  We were listening to an oldies station, and Arlo Guthrie was crooning, “The City of New Orleans.”   I still get emotional when I hear that song.  Being a university student changed me in ways big and small.  The most significant way was how; it pushed me beyond my comfort zones.  Being in college taught me about failure and learning.  The business community enjoys talking about winning and success.  I feel we need to take a more in-depth look at failure and how it is essential to continuous improvement and learning. 

The current political and social environment is depressing for too many reasons to mention.  One of the primary reason for this is the fetishization of achievement among business professionals.  We have to win at work, at life and our children have to be examples of our winning nature.  If you are labeled a “loser,” you are confronted with public shame or possible ostracism. People wanting to avoid this fate play it safe, doing just enough to get by and avoid making waves. It creates a feedback loop of mediocrity in organizations.

The fear of failure is a significant obstacle for continuous improvement.  The shame and stigma associated with failure often cause people to hide it so they can avoid blame.  As a coach, it is your responsibility to create an environment where people feel safe and admit mistakes.  Once it is possible to admit failure, then the team can examine what happened.  Reflections make it possible for the team to learn from failure and overcome their disadvantages.  The process is humbling, but if done correctly, it is going to create levels of competence and confidence, which will be the envy of other development teams.

I suggest to start with small improvements and then work your way up to more significant corrections.  Start with insisting that meetings begin on time.  Ask about what kinds of things are holding back the teams.  Take time out to listen to how people do work and how they want to improve.  Talking and listening is the best way to beat the feedback loop of mediocrity in organizations.  Give it a try, and you will see that failure is an organic matter where success will grow. 

Until next time.

Helpful Tips for Splitting User Stories

Splitting user stories require creativity and the right tools.

Being a product owner is hard work.  It is days filled with meetings and writing user stories.  You are under pressure to deliver working software, and if it all goes wrong, your career is often at risk.  One of the hardest parts about product ownership is a collaboration with the development team and estimation.  Software developers are notoriously hard to work with, and estimating software development is exponentially more difficult.   The estimation process is fraught with conflict and compromise.  Often, work is too large to be completed in the time box of a sprint.  The product owner in this situation should split user stories.  Today, I want to share a common technique to divide user stories.

I have a relatively straight forward process for writing user stories.  Once you write a story, the development team should try to estimate the story.  A story point estimate is a function of complexity, risk, uncertainty, and effort.  According to Kedar’s constant, the larger a story is in points, the riskier it is to complete in a sprint.  It means a set of four three-point stories are less risky to complete than a single 13-point story.  When you have essential stories with high point values, it is up to the development team and scrum master to request the story get split before sprint planning.   The product owner is often frustrated by this request. Breaking stories is additional work, and it implies the original story was too big.  I empathize with this kind of frustration.  Being asked to split a story is the team being conscientious.  It is also an opportunity to make the sprint more successful.

Richard Lawerence has written a fantastic post on how to split user stories.  I recommend you read it here.  For me, the most critical pattern is to break down work based on complexity.  Something complex is often the assemblage of smaller, more straightforward elements.  Suppose you are a sales manager for a cable T.V. station, the base rate for a 30-second commercial is $150 per broadcast so when a client purchases ten impressions they are invoiced $1,500 when the last commercial airs.  If you are going to write a user story with acceptance criteria, it will look something like this:

As a sales manager, I want to charge $150 per impression for a 30-second commercial because I want to generate revenue.

GIVEN I am a customer.

WHEN I purchase a 30-second commercial.

THEN I invoice $150 times the number of commercials purchased.

The rule is simple, and the team says following SOLID principles and authoring unit tests it would be two points worth of work.

The world of broadcast is time-sensitive, so commercials air during prime time between 6:30 PM and 10:00 PM are more valuable while ads aired after midnight are less costly.  The product owner realized this and added two more acceptance criteria to the story.

GIVEN I am a customer.

WHEN I purchase a 30-second commercial.

AND the commercial airs during prime time between 6:30 PM and 10:00 PM

THEN I invoice the customer $150 times the number of commercials
purchased plus a 40% premium fee



GIVEN I am a customer

WHEN I buy a 30 second commercial

AND the commercial airs during late night (between midnight and 5:30 AM)

THEN I invoice the customer $150 times the number of commercials 
purchased with a discount of 20%

During sprint planning, the team looks at the revised user story with the additional acceptance criteria, and they adjust the story points to eight because the story has become more complex.  A good rule of thumb I like to use for splitting user stores is anytime you see the contractions “and” or “or” it is an excellent place to divide a user story into smaller stories.  In the above example, one eight-point story, when divided into three stores with an estimate of two, each generates less risk for the sprint.  The story split also makes budgeting work easier.

Splitting user stories is a useful skill, and it helps make the development team more successful.  Start breaking user stories today.

Until next time.

Agile Slowing Down the Corporate Merry-go-round

The business world is a merry-go-round

The business world is cruel.  It is a perverse merry-go-round of glittering success and spectacular failure.  Billions of dollars are created and lost with a handshake.  Someone in the finance department has the power to destroy the livelihood of thousands with a spreadsheet. It is a world filled with fear and uncertainty.  I belong to this world.  I am an agile coach and scrum master.  Each day, I get on the merry-go-round to make sure others do not get hurt.  It is because the ride does not stop and spins faster each day.  As part of the agile reformation, I have a responsibility to make business better.

The three main pillars of agile are inspection, adaptation, and transparency.  Each day we should be able to understand what is happening around us.  Once we know what is going on around us, we should be able to adjust to the current conditions.  Finally, we should be transparent with information with no agendas or secrets so that we can start the process anew.  For those used to playing political games or hiding in plain sight, these values are dangerous.  Transparency means information flows freely in an organization.  Inspection demands we look at that information with healthy skepticism.  Adaptation means we take action and hold others and ourselves accountable.

Agile is not hard to explain to others, but it is challenging to execute.  People need to be vulnerable and trust each other.  The Harvard Business Review calls this psychological safety.  In cutthroat business cultures, this safety is absent; it is up to the coach to create these pockets of safety.  Once these pockets form, they must grow within the organization.  To borrow from the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, agile becomes a rhizome which rises through the organization and inspires change.

Business people have been comfortable with how they ran large organizations since the 1980s.  Shareholders were more important than customers, and as long as they had priority, everything would be fine.  The digital revolution of the last twenty-five years has upset that equation.  Businesses are being created and crushed at an increasingly fast rate.  Bureaucracy once designed to increase corporate value is now interfering with the customer experience.  Poor customer experience hurts the organization.  The realization is creating anxiety among workers and executives.  A coach needs to step in and point out the importance of customers, and speed to market.  The corporate headquarters lose sight of these simple truths.

Each day, I see good people working in dysfunctional situations, and they inspect and adapt.  As a coach, you have to point this out to people who can make a difference and get them to inspect and adapt.  It is this process which makes the organization more transparent and effective.  If employees can respond to change, then business leaders can do the same.  It takes a coach to make this message clear.

The merry-go-round of business keeps spinning.  It is a relentless machine, but the agile reformation makes the ride less scary.  Using inspection, adaptation, and transparency, you can improve the business culture and leadership.  It is not an easy job, but it is mine.

Until next time.

Have the Courage to Be Agile

The wealth of nations, the success of
agile requires courage and Adam Smith.

Technology is not a profession for wimps.  It requires hard work, intelligence, and creativity.  The profession also requires a level of courage you do not find in many white-collar jobs.  I want to discuss what type of courage it takes to be successful as a scrum master and coach.

One of my most popular blog posts talked about why some firms resist the agile mindset.  I place the blame upon a lack of psychological safety at most large organizations.  Additionally, I blamed the fear and uncertainty, which is inherent in a global company.  These factors combined create a toxic stew where everyone does the bare minimum and tires to remain invisible until they leave the company.  It is depressing and resembles the grim environment of a Franz Kafka story. 

To address the alienation and lack of initiative which festers in this environment, managers, put into place processes which if followed, have a better chance of yielding better results.  The processes become rituals and deviation from these rituals creates a reaction similar to blasphemy in the middle ages.  The process becomes the purpose of the organization.  In reality, the mission of any business is to create products and services which help customers.  Helping a customer creates revenue, and revenue should generate profit.  The description above has existed since Adam Smith and remains the best articulation of capitalism we have.  I think many people who work in business forget the simple principle of serving customers leads to profit.

The early days of software development reflected the spirit of Adam Smith.  Business people learned software development, and they used computers to address business concerns.  The first generation of programmers were the ones who helped automate payroll systems; they created the Saber travel system and provided the mathematics necessary to make the space program successful.  As computing became, more complex and specialized business, people began to abdicate their involvement in the systems which automated their business.  Project managers became go-betweens technology and business professionals.  Projects got more prominent, and the failures got bigger.  Millions of people had their potential squandered.

It was this waste of human capital, which leads to the creation of the agile manifesto.  I am part of the reformation which began on a ski trip to Utah. Many things unite us, but the main trait we all have is courage.  We all dare to go into the office each day and make a difference.  We are courageous enough to point out areas of improvement.  The agile reformation relies on the courage to be visible and vulnerable to our peers.  It takes courage to bet your career each day to make improvements.  It is easy to become invisible at a large organization; it takes courage to make changes.

I hope that I can maintain this courage for the remainder of my career.

Until next time.

Death to Agile-Lite!

Agile has not jumped the shark if I can help it.

I have been working as an agile professional for ten years.  It is equal measures a lucrative and frustrating career.  Servant leadership is hard to teach others and practice, which makes it profitable.  It is frustrating because you are struggling against decades of entrenched thinking inside the business. Fortunately, I have an excellent personal support system and a sincere devotion to what I do.  We are moving into a new phase of the agile reformation, and I would like to discuss it.

Agile is gaining more acceptance in the business world.  Its use has turned around significant organizations, and its application at Microsoft is beginning to create mythology which jealous rivals want to mimic.  Many of these competitors wish to have the success which agile brings to a company without making the necessary behavioral and cultural changes.  In their mind, agile is something you do instead of a goal to strive.  You take a few management consultants in the organization, apply a random scaling network, and then watch the productivity jump through the roof.  It is a foolish short-sided approach to organizational change.

Jack Skeels writes a great blog on this trend in the business world.  People see agile working, and they want its benefits without making the necessary changes.  He calls this, “Agile is anything Management calls it.”  It is no different than working for a traditional organization, except you are working harder to deliver the same disappointing results.  Furthermore, disillusionment sets in as you find yourself working to satisfy the nihilistic and selfish goals of someone else.  Steve Denning has a more polite description of this trend.  He calls it “agile-lite,” which is “…the adoption and tools of agile without necessarily deploying them with an agile mindset.” It is like a cargo cult which will build faux airports out of bamboo and reeds with the hope cargo jets will arrive bringing wealth.

So, what is an agile mindset?  It is an understanding of agile manifesto and the principles of agile.  It is a growth-mindset which is willing to try new things to improve.  It is ruthlessly applying inspection, adaptation, and transparency to the organization.  Finally, it is expending energy getting work done instead of managing up the organization.  To be successful, it requires more than lip service.  You cannot install Jira in your organization and expect it to become agile instantly.  You have to do much more, and you will have to escape your comfort zone.

Agile is eating the world, and it is approaching its twentieth anniversary.  As this movement enters its third decade, it is up to all of us in this community to beat back fake agile and “agile is whatever management wants.” Plenty of positive change has taken place, but more needs to be done.  Otherwise, we will be doing agile instead of being agile.

Until next time.

Four Simple things

It can get lonely.

The biggest challenge as an agile professional is leading organizational change.  Often, you are a lonely voice in an ocean of indifference.  People do not like the daily routines and rituals disrupted, and agile professionals are doing it with frequency.  The resistance is a natural response to change.  Humans have a craving for stability in an uncertain business world.  The situation sets the agile professional up for isolation and loneliness.  I want to discuss the support system you need to overcome the adversity.

Being a scrum master or coach is a difficult calling.  It requires tremendous emotional labor, and you are attempting to overcome decades of resistance to change within an organization.  To be successful, you need to have a support system which will help you get through the rough patches.  Here is my formulation of that system.

An Understanding Significant Other

If you have a spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend, they need to be understanding.  You are going to have unannounced late nights being with the team fixing production bugs.  As a servant leader, you will confront difficult emotions, and it will take you time to unwind from them.  It helps to have someone in your life who loves and respects you to listen. Finally, they should be willing to work with the ebb and flow that technology professionals encounter daily.  It is like being married to a police officer or firefighter.  The job always finds a way of intruding into the relationship.

A User group or Network of fellow Agilests

Many organizations do not have a large cohort of agilests.  It is why being a coach can be so isolating. It is why you need a regular group of people to meet with discussing current trends and new techniques.  It can be an online group or frequent meetup.  The purpose is to have a peer group which can provide emotional and professional support.  Often a problem you think is intractable is something someone else has solved.  The user group acts as a repository of information, a social circle of peers, and group therapy.

Support from Senior Leadership

Change does not happen, spontaneously.  Often, it requires outside events to force change or an internal mandate to make change happen.  An agile coach without the support of senior leadership is not going to be successful.  Cultural inertia is a common obstacle to change.  Often when you ask why something is done a particular way the response is, “…because we have always done it that way.” Senior leadership can give you a mandate and authority to improve a process.  Executives provide the nudge necessary when things need to change and when people dig in their heels.  Finally, senior leadership is a source of validation which makes the hard work and sacrifices worthwhile.

Allies in the Organization

As a firm moves along the agile journey, a coach or scrum master is going to gather like-minded people who are allies.  Organizational allies are gold to a coach or scrum master.  The people joining you will spread the message you are sharing. Associates will provide emotional and technical support.  Colleagues will support you during a difficult decision and join you for lunch when times are less stressful.  Cultivation of colleagues will keep the agile transformation going long after you have left the organization.

So to avoid burn out and isolation a coach or scrum master needs; an understanding significant other, a network of fellow agilest, support from senior leadership, and allies in the organization.  Without these things, an agilest will have a lonely run with an organization.

Until next time.