Epics are a Big Deal

Epics, like this hard drive from 1956, are a big deal.

It is easy to be philosophical about agile.  I do it and so do other bloggers.  We want to connect our vocation to broader trends in business and economics.  This week, I will concentrate on the basics of agile because you cannot be philosophical all the time.  Today, I want to focus on epics and what purpose they serve.  

According to the Agile Alliance, an Epic is a recent innovation.  Mike Cohn introduced the concept in 2004, and epics represent larger user stories the team cannot complete in a single sprint.  These kinds of stories are great placemarks to contain similar work.  Business people rarely understood user stories, but they often understood epics because they did not want to deal with too much detail.  A business person would not understand a required field validation for a web form, but they would understand when an entire page was ready to review.  The product owner would create the epic and then place the stories necessary to complete the epic underneath it.  It makes it easy to understand the hierarchy in the backlog, facilitating plenty of helpful discussions.  

When a client or executive asks when something will be ready, with epics, you can have a meaningful conversation about deadlines.  For instance, a data entry epic has ten stories with an estimate of three-story points each.  The team completes twenty-story points a sprint, so you can say with confidence that it will take a sprint and a half to do the work.  If there are similar epics, you can project out the entire length of the project. 

Epics do have a drawback; an inexperienced team or product owner will often use them as hampers to hold unrelated collections of stories.  If this happens, the scrum master or coach needs to step in to make sure epics deliver value and provide meaningful organization to the backlog.  Otherwise, an epic behaves like an empty closet, which can hide clutter when others inspect the backlog.  

Epics are a way to organize the backlog.  Epics also provide a helpful way to forecast out the development for clients, and the judicious use of epics even aides communication with stakeholders.  It is a good practice to use them in your backlog.

I look forward to hearing how you use them.

Until next time. 

 

Pragmatism is the Foundation of Agility

Agile can trace its ancestry to this guy.

I spend most of my life working with technology.  Each day, I rely on the interconnections of wi-fi, electricity, and software to provide me with a living.  Each day, I interact with professional people all over the globe.  It is an intellectually demanding career as I attempt to help others innovate and meet the challenges of the global economy.  It is a career grounded in the Agile manifesto and empirical thinking.  It is also a career grounding in the American philosophy of pragmatism.  Today, I want to discuss the influence of pragmatic thinking on the agile reformation.  

Pragmatism arose out of American Universities in the aftermath of the civil war.  Diverse thinkers like Charles Sanders Pierce, William James, and John Dewey outline the main ideas of this mode of thinking.  According to pragmatism, the truth or meaning of a statement depends on its observable practical consequences rather than any metaphysical attributes.  It became a famous school of thought and guided many of the reforms which were part of the progressive movement during the early Twentieth century.  Dewey, in particular, believed in the power of education to make America a better nation.  

Pragmatists are not motivated by lofty ideas or tortured trials of logic.  Instead, they are experimental, testing out the practical consequences of ideas and comparing them to each other.  Today, this idea lives in the agile manifesto when we say, “individuals and interactions over processes and tools.”  Each organization is an ecosystem with different people, processes, and challenges.  It means that coaches and scrum masters need to avoid out of the box solutions for each problem.  An early morning daily scrum may not be practical for a team divided between two time zones. It is up to the team and coach to find a time that works for everyone.  Current structures may prevent people from doing estimation well.  It is up to every agile professional to find a way to size work.  Sometimes it requires no estimates or using billable hours instead of story points.  Thus, each organization is different, and it is up to us to be pragmatic about how we work.  

It is possible to apply the principles and values of the manifesto without being dogmatic and inflexible.  We must adapt, inspect, and be transparent without decision making.  We keep saying working software is an accurate measure of progress because anything else is a waste.  The work of any good scrum master should be creating software that delivers value to a client.  

It is why I think that the Agile reformation has its roots deeply sunk into the fertile soil of American Pragmatic thought.  We want to see the practical consequences of our work and the value we deliver to our customers.  Each scrum master and coach inherits from the legacy of the early pragmatists.  I am glad I am part of this club. 

Until next time.  

Agile Requires a Different Kind of Leader

The office has not changed since the jazz age.

The American office has not changed much since the jazz age.  At first, they were modeled after the workshops of cloth weavers.  Soon clerical work was mimicking the factories which grew out of the industrial revolution.  Before today, an army of office workers manually copies documents, did spreadsheets by hand, and processed payments.  Seated at long tables, these workers toiled under the supervision of bosses who micromanaged and made sure work was compliant. An office worker from the 1920s may not recognize the technology of today, but they will remember the command and control structure along with the micromanagement.  We have been managing our businesses the same way for over one hundred years.  It is about time we change.  

I joined the agile reformation because I believed there was a better way to do work.  Countless overtime, unrealistic deadlines, bureaucratic structures that guarantee nothing gets done, and poor leadership is rife in the modern workplace.   I suspect that this kind of toxicity explains why the use of anti-depressant drugs has increased so much in the last twenty years.  I promised myself when I was in a leadership role; it would be different.  

I am now a business leader, and each day I struggle to keep that promise. One of the critical skills is approaching people with curiosity instead of judgment.  Another necessary trait is emotional control because when things go wrong, others are counting on you to hold it together.  Finally, coaching others means letting them make mistakes and learn on their own.  The last trait is the hardest because the client and customer are unforgiving.  

It occurred to me many people advance to leadership roles playing office politics instead of delivering solutions to customers.  Hiding information, having personal agendas, and authoritarian styles of leadership are natural in toxic work environments, and poisonous people thrive within them.  Spread it around countless organizations, and it is clear to see why the business has not changed much over the last 100 years.  It is why the agile reformation is so powerful; it exposes this toxic behavior and makes business more successful.  Toxic people hate that and in large bureaucratic organizations spend plenty of time strangling these initiatives.   

The elevation of different kinds of business leaders will signify the growing maturity of agile in the business world because, without these new leaders, agile will fail.  If agile will grow in the next twenty years, we need a different kind of business leaders.  Someone who embraces coaching, servant leadership, and grace under pressure is necessary for scrum to survive further into the twenty-first century.  We better get started.  

Until next time. 

The Authentic Self is the Only Self a Leader Needs

We are all a little weird,
might as well bring it into the office.

We spend plenty of time discussing leadership on this blog.  I have spent most of my life learning lessons from a colorful group of mentors.  I have learned from marines, casino managers, technocrats, and creative professionals.  I have also spent time coaching young people in speech and debate.  The other day, one of my former students decided to blog about her experience working as a grade school principal.  I strongly recommend you give it read.  Something struck me in her prose and it was her observation that each day you have to bring your authentic self to work.  

Working in a global business can be dreary.  I had experiences of managers taking stuffed animals off desks because they did not look “professional.”  I vividly remember a vice-president saying, “I want the rest of the business to treat us as professionals instead of propellor heads.”  It meant that nerf guns, plush toys, and pictures of significant others came off desks.  It was sterile and depressing. Under fluorescent lighting and open office plans, we muddled through writing software.  It was joyless.  

I remember a plastic dinosaur left in a planter.  An administrative assistant adopted the creature and put a ribbon around its neck for a little color.  Six months later an executive having a bad day wrote a memo and instructed security to remove the planter because it did not reflect the professionalism of the firm.  The subtraction of the dinosaur did not increase the company dividend or share price.  It did not win a new customer contract or improve company morale.  It was a petty exercise in authority and power.  The experience stuck with me.  

Since childhood, I have always been a square peg in a round hole.  I was bullied mercilessly as a child by my peers.  I spent most of my middle school years getting beat up by others.  It was only in high school that I learned to begin the process of self-acceptance which continues to this day.  I found refuge in speech and theater.  I learned discipline from JROTC.  Writing allowed me to express myself in deeply personal ways.  I was a weird kid but that weirdness informed my personality and made me the person I am today.  

I bring that weird kid into the office each day.  I do not take myself too seriously but it took me about 25 years to learn the difference between being self-deprecating and negative self-talk.  I idolize goofy people like Bill Murray and Ernie Kovacs but discovered there was a time and place to be goofy and when to focus.   I have the perspective of a journalist in a business environment and I like calling out non-sense when I see it.   Naturally, my career has been very difficult because I am not a cookie-cutter executive.  I speak truth to power which is difficult for people unaccustomed to hearing “no”.  No one would accuse me of being a sycophant.  

Today, people still consider me a little weird but I try to be loyal to the people I serve.  I want to listen to their concerns and needs.  I am willing to tell a joke or wear a silly hat if it breaks tension on the team.  I will make bets with my team for them to surpass themselves which explains why there is a video of me somewhere on the internet dancing to the song “Happy” by Pharrell Williams.  I work for an organization that lets me be my authentic self and it makes me a better leader.  Being vulnerable and authentic is what makes leadership work.  I remember learning the term “mask of command,” in college.  Over my career, I have discovered the mask falls away and in times of crisis, you are exposed as the person you are.  It is better to have others know you as you are rather than as you want them to perceive.   

Being a leader is a life-changing opportunity.  To be successful, you need to put away your mask and bring your authentic self into work.  The people you serve will respect you.  It is the only way to make this opportunity worthwhile.  

Until next time.