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.