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.