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.

Fight Bad Agile!

Command and control did not
 work then and it will not work now.  

I have been involved in the agile reformation for the last ten years.  In 2009, the agile manifesto was relatively young, and it was a quirky idea to make software better. Today we have three primary scaling techniques for agile.  The reformation has grown and splintered over the years, but the manifesto remains the pole star which every variation circles.  Now business professionals and executives are paying attention to the reformation.  Agile is eating the world, but instead of confronting opposition, we are dealing with corruption caused by the status quo as it exists in many companies.  The corruption creates bad agile, and it is up to coaches and scrum masters to call it out.

Last week, I pointed out that a common dysfunction in organizations is leadership spends too much time pleasing superiors rather than doing the necessary work to make the business successful.  The behavior hurts collaboration between departments and categorizes people as resources which can be swapped out like machine parts.  It is dehumanizing and alienating.  Agile helps fight this dysfunction with emphasis on cross-functional teams and less organizational friction.  The challenge of agile is it works well in the realm of the team, but as it attempts to scale out to the organization, it butts against status-quo thinking, entrenched political agendas, and the command and control mindset of most executives.

Put yourself in the shoes of a typical executive who has spent ten, fifteen, or twenty years in an organization. The executive has presided over budgets and deadlines.  The contact they have with the people doing the actual work is limited, and their knowledge of project management is slight, so they hire project managers to handle the responsibility.  Most of the time, executives spend time involved with pleasing superiors and political sparring with rivals.  An agile coach comes along who tells them they have the wrong career focus, and they have been leading their people incorrectly.  Agile, with its emphasis on inspection, adaption, and transparency, undermines political infighting within an organization, which means career advancement depends on results instead of deception.  It is going to create anxiety, and the executive is going to push back.

The executive is not evil in this instance; the new way of doing things creates uncertainty and fear.  It is natural they would be resistant when confronted with this upsetting of psychological safety.  As a coach, it is going to be your responsibility to address the resistance.  You are going to walk the executive through the process of shifting from a command and control mindset to an agile mindset.  It will not be easy.

Instead of telling people what to do, the scrum master will have to show them.  Lead by example, give the team what they need to succeed, live the agile manifesto and principles, and point out organizations friction where it exists.  Inspection, adaption, and transparency are designed to hold everyone accountable particularly executives.

Bad agile happens because self-interest and the status quo are more important than getting work done.  We tolerate double standards, and it creates corruption.  It is up to each scrum master or coach to reveal this corruption so we can mitigate its effects.  It is up to each of us to show instead of telling others what to do.  Finally, we need to create psychological safety among leaders if they are to embrace agile.  Otherwise, we remain stuck with bad agile.

Until next time.

People are individuals not resources.

Treat people like individuals.

The global economy is a big place.  Trillions of dollars slosh around the globe while people attempt to traverse the currents without drowning.  What business people often ignore is the people keep the global economy moving are individuals with lives, families, and challenges outside the business realm.  A person is more than a job description.  A person is a flesh and bone being with triumph and tragedy.  Each day billions of people wake up and struggle in the global economy to put food on the table.   The daily struggle is equal parts heroic, absurd, and necessary.  As leaders, we should understand the people around us as individuals rather than anonymous cogs in a wheel.

I often cringe when I hear professionals and business people refer to the people working for them as resources.  It is deeply dehumanizing. Each person working today is an assemblage of emotions, education, and experience.  Leaders should see these differences and put them to work.  Often, leadership is too busy showing off to their superiors to concentrate on what it takes to do the work.  It is a common pathology in business, academia, and government.  Agile Coaches and scrum masters have to help break this cycle of dysfunction.

The first part of the agile manifesto says, “Individuals and Interactions, over processes and tools.”  We need to embrace that value.  Each person working with us is an individual.  Each time we inspect and adapt, we should take into account not only the performance of the team but the performance of the individuals with the team.  In this way, we can coach others for success and help them work through failure.

What I am suggesting is hard work, but it will provide significant dividends.  Well lead teams have higher quality and deliver work faster.  Teams who work well together innovate.  Finally, teams who work well jointly make work more satisfying and sustainable for the business.  It is what happens when we treat people like people instead of resources.

Until next time.

Agile, Story Points and Rock-n-Roll

The Crüe are very rock-n-roll and agile.

Being an agile coach is filled with plenty of touchy-feely moments.  You have to deal with difficult emotions and move change through an organization which is satisfied with the status quo.  Other times a coach or scrum master must deal with the practical matters of scheduling a meeting and facilitating a retrospective.  Finally, you are learning new things and applying them to your clients.  My vision of how story points work has changed over the years.  Recently, I am looking at story points in a new way, and it is good enough to share.

My first thoughts about story point made me think of them as measures of volume.  A story point contained a certain number of hours, and it would be easy to convert the two back and forth.  After my first 18 months of being a scrum master, I saw the folly in that way of doing things.  It became apparent that story points represented something analogous to distance.  An Olympic runner can cover 3,000 meters in under four minutes.  I can walk it in about a half hour.  Story points provided a quantitative way to measure uncertainty and help communicate to upper management.

Now I see a story point as the sum of four factors; complexity, risk, effort, and uncertainty.  We sum all these factors together and round them up to the nearest whole number in a Fibonacci sequence.

So if I wrote it out a math formula it would look like this:

Story Point = Complexity + Risk + Effort + Uncertainty
F_N = [Story Point]

Where F_N is a number in a Fibonacci sequence.

The new acronym for this is CRÜE, after the rock band Mötley Crüe.  By today’s standards, this giant of 1980’s glam metal would flame out in the public eye.  The band was nihilistic, misogynistic, and poster children for the destruction of alcohol and drugs could do to a person.  Finally, the lead singer killed someone in the act of vehicular manslaughter.  In spite of all the baggage, you could count on the band to put on a great show.  You could also count on them to be blaring out of any stereo at a house party during the 1980s. People of a certain age have memories of significant life events happening with Mötley Crüe playing in the background.

As an agile coach, I will let the young people concern themselves with sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.  It is not my lifestyle.  I prefer agile, story points, and rock-n-roll.  If you are talking about story points, talk about Crüe; complexity, risk, uncertainty, and effort.

Rock on people and until next time.