Change is Necessary to Fix Problems.

The banks we patronize today significantly differ from those that existed one hundred fifty years ago. The America of 1873 was still in the middle of a southern reconstruction, with federal troops still occupying the defeated confederacy, and most banks were locally owned and serving local communities. Each banker personally knew each depositor and recorded transactions on paper. Large corporations own banks today and dominate large swaths of geography and customers. Millions of customers conduct billions of transactions daily in the physical world and online. These systems must be accurate to the penny, available twenty-four hours a day, and meet the increasingly demanding needs of customers and regulators.

It requires an army of skilled specialists to keep the system working. It makes working in the postmodern economy difficult because you need to navigate the complicated procedures of control and bureaucracy to make a change, which keeps the global economy spinning. It is not easy, and I will discuss this on the blog today. 

James Beniger wrote a book entitled “The Control Revolution.” He argues that increasing industrialization and an expanding economy demanded that businesses and governments develop better control systems. Trains collided on the tracks, food rotted in warehouses, and money only moved as fast as people could carry it from bank to bank. Something had to change if business and prosperity were going to expand. Fortunately, we have developed innovations like paper checks, just-in-time inventory systems, and the corporate bureaucracy we all experience. These innovations make our global economy possible. 

As a technology professional, these control systems are robust but tend to resist change. So being able to pivot to new technologies of changing customer and regulatory demands feels like swimming against the tide. The number of people and their vest interests means that as an agent of change, you run into a giant wall of inertia. 

I experience systems operating until the effort to sustain them becomes overwhelming. People enjoyed train travel until the trains started to collide. It became paramount to train companies and the government that the death toll had to stop. The combination of telegraph lines, electric track switches, and synchronized clocks helped to end the collisions, and train travel was the dominant means of getting around the country until the end of World War Two. 

As an agile person, point out a problem, show how it costs the organization time, money, and energy, and propose a solution. In an interview promoting his series about work, former President Barak Obama said that leaders are looking for people to solve problems. If a problem is big enough, a good solution will find a receptive audience. It is why coal is used less for energy generation, and wind, solar, and natural gas are replacing it. 

Change is complicated and messy, but it is necessary even with complex systems. Otherwise, we will be forced to accept failure and stagnation, which is never sustainable. 

Until next time. 

Cultural Forces in Your Business Hurting Agility

One of the principal selling points of Agile is the ability to deliver solutions quickly to the market. One of its central guides is Jeff Sutherland's seminal book "The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time." The business community embraces speed but forgets some of the other essential features of Agile, which are transparency, empiricism, continuous learning, and value delivery. Today, I want to look into why this is happening. 

My business career spans over twenty years, and I am amazed at how global corporations resemble feudal societies and how unwilling they are to change. Executives lord over divisions with minimal knowledge of the work necessary to generate profit insulated from understanding and empathy by wealth. The boyars and professionals who plan, budget and design are in the middle. Philosopher Ernest Gellner called these people doctrinal specialists or 'clerisy.' Finally, an organization has unwashed masses of people making products and providing services. It is hieriarchial and fedual. This type of culture is excellent at perpetuating itself but creates a situation where people wallow in inertia, and innovation suffers in the long run. The condition explains why Agile became such an interesting cultural movement in business. People proposed breaking through the inertia and developing new product delivery methods. 

Sadly, we encounter a few problems as we embark on this journey. First, executives lack collaboration incentives, creating political competition in large organizations. For example, a director of network services receives a bonus if the computer network is up for 99.9% of work hours. A sales division gets a bonus if they can increase sales. These incentive structures put the two groups in conflict. New products and sales methods mean website changes and alterations to the company computer network, which creates a risk of lowering the network uptime. In this scenario, it is not in the interest of the director of network services to help the sales division get new products to market. An executive with knowledge and authority needs to step in to break the impasse, but those individuals are hard to find in the corporate world. Thus, professionals check off boxes to match the bonus structure they operate under. 

The next big problem for agility in the business world is existential. The power imbalances between the people doing the work versus those making the decisions and paying the bills create a risk-averse workforce. Take this workforce and place them in sterile cubical farms while forcing them to attend conference calls with other offices. It establishes soul-crushing alienation among the people who should be leading change. 

Finally, the clerisy of business professionals and managers feel threatened—agile delegates decision-making and authority down to teams, shifting the responsibility toward more coaching roles. It isn't enjoyable for people used to giving orders and expecting compliance. It also does not help that command and control styles of management are rewarded via perverse incentives, with promotions often awarded to leaders who perpetuate those practices. Peer pressure and groupthink are potent social forces in organizations. 

The combination of poorly constructed incentives, corporate power imbalances, and the clerisy of middle management make delivering value increasingly difficult. Agile is not dead, but it struggles against these dysfunctional cultural forces in organizations. The coach and consultant in each of us must recognize these challenges and treat them like modern constraints on productivity. It is easier said than done, but if we can improve business cultures, we will enhance profitability, and profitable companies benefit workers, which is a worthy trade-off. 

Until next time.

My Skeptical Endorsement of SAFe 6.0

The philosopher Heraclitus said you could never enter the same river twice. He observed that change is so prevalent in the world that even though we are crossing the same river, its properties are consistently changing, so it is never the same each time we cross it. The same could be true about the technology business and agile. The last three years have been a whirlwind of change. Many of us in the industry are grappling with these turbulent gusts and making sure our systems continue functioning regardless of which way the wind blows. The Scaled Agile network announced changes on March 14th to its certification process and frameworks. I sat through the demonstrations so that you do not have to, which is the topic this week on the blog. 

The big news was the announcement of SAFe 6.0 from the scaled agile network. In a YouTube video announcement, the Scaled Agile network talked about the changes and how they would make SAFe better adapt to the business world and exploit technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and Cloud Computing. Color me skeptical because these changes make sense but appear to be additional complexity to a system difficult to implement and achieve buy-in from technology professionals. I am more credible with technology workers when I  talk about agile in SAFe environments rather than the particular teachings of SAFe. 

What was also grating was the nature of the presentation about the new release. Instead of rolling out to an audience of supporters or press the way that Microsoft or Apple does with its products, Scaled Agile produced a perky infomercial with the glossy sheen of an infomercial promoting nutritional supplements or pressure washers. Was the leadership of Scaled Agile afraid of being heckled by its practitioners? What were they afraid of? I am not sure, but now I want to attend the Scaled Agile summit to get a less party-line response to these new improvements to SAFe. 

According to Dean Leffingwell, one of Scaled Agile's founders, "The future deserves a better SAFe." I agree, and some of the improvements do look encouraging. First, there is an emphasis on getting business people to adapt to the needs of agility. Those in the trenches of software development have said this for years, but it is nice to see the acknowledgment. Next, the belief that a business should be a continuous learning culture is now a core value in 6.0. Business leaders will resist being graded like technology professionals, making implementation difficult. Technology people build things that work. Managers and Executives are judged by how likable and persuasive they are in the organization. As a result, business people are good at reducing costs and creating paradoxes, such as the two olive paradox, but could be better at providing customer value. The value delivery is much more complex and nuanced than reviewing an excel spreadsheet. Finally, Scaled Agile is putting together standards for objectives and key results for competency, flow, and business outcomes. The benefit of this initiative is that I can measure something instead of relying on hearsay to effect change.

I will upgrade my credentials to the new standard and adapt to a changing situation. It is easy to look at scaled Agile as the consulting version of a multi-level marketing scheme, but I will give the organization the benefit of the doubt. They still support SAFe 5.1, and their efforts to better train its members are reasonable faith efforts. SAFe does need to change, but it could have been a minor improvement instead of a splashy overhaul. It is the only agile thing to do. 

Until next time. 

On Making a Radical Change

Leading change within organizations is an all-consuming activity. It dominates my life because human beings change so long as they do not have to change personally. Any change is uncomfortable, awkward, and challenging to process, mainly when it involves a person's career. This week, I am making a significant change in my life, and I feel compelled to talk about it. 

I have two rules regarding this blog. I avoid discussing partisan politics because there are better places to find that content. I also do not talk about my personal life. The apparent reason is that I consider it vain and not crucial to my overall mission of talking about making business more sustainable, satisfying, and sane. I share my thoughts about software development, agile, leadership, entrepreneurship, and improving business each week. I have upheld these rules for over twelve years. I am a lonely voice in the wilderness. Today, I am going to break with tradition. 

My career is typical of many people of my generation. I attended college only to graduate into an unwelcoming job market, and then I stumbled into a different profession after spending my young adulthood working various odd jobs. The internet and technology gave me a livelihood and a calling. I did pay the price for that call. Being a junior programmer meant years of career instability. The constant stress of fixing problems for impatient employers with tight deadlines impacted my ability to remain married and live a healthy lifestyle. The blog you are reading was born during the wreckage of my second divorce.

My tool for dealing with stress and failure was food. I ate, and I overate. I gained weight by combining this pathology with a sedentary career and lack of exercise. At my heaviest, I was three hundred and forty pounds. Consequently, this neglect leads to complications like gout and high blood pressure. During the summer of 2022, I was on vacation, and my weight prevented me from enjoying myself. The heat was too much. Walking from place to place was exhausting, and I felt like I was a wet blanket with the woman who loved me. It was a moment of clarity, and I decided I needed to change. My obesity was starting to impact my relationships and my health. This week, I am undergoing weight loss surgery, starting a year-long process of living a better and healthier life. 

If I had to take this drastic step to effect change, I wonder why executives and professionals struggle to make a change when they have their moment of clarity. I can speculate, but it will not be helpful as I need to concentrate on my health and the journey I am about to begin. 

Change can happen in small increments or through drastic action. Weight loss surgery is necessary if I want to stick around and continue my professional mission of improving the business world. I will be a different person with the same dedication to making life better for everyone who works in an office one cubical at a time. 

Until next time. 

Organize Development Teams to Deliver Value

I am working on a large software development project.  By my estimate, we have over one hundred teams working on this project.  Since it is a significant financial client, we use Scaled Agile Framework for the Enterprise, or SAFe for short.  It is a complex process with lots of moving parts and little room for error.  I am also experiencing a common problem with large SAFe implementations, and I want to discuss it today.  

SAFe is the de facto standard for large software projects.   For executives, it helps standardize the process and is a reasonable attempt to coordinate numerous agile teams.  Unfortunately, most business leaders do not understand how value flows through the organization.  The larger the organization, the more difficult it is to know how the firm generates value for customers.  Thus, teams are organized not around value but by technical specialty.  Front-end developers work on one team, database specialists on another, and middle-ware experts on APIs are on a different team.  It is a logical way to organize technical professionals, but it makes delivering software on large projects a headache.  

Specialized teams are fantastic if you organize your business to embrace the status quo.  Still, suppose you are attempting to innovate or build new services to help customers.  In that case, you need cross-functional teams because specialization means no individual team is accountable for getting work finished.  It becomes a deranged relay race where work passes to others, and no one is sure it has reached the finish line.  

For instance, if you are a clothing company offering a new mobile application for customers to customize their styles.  You could do the following: hire a design firm to build the mobile application and take an in-house technology team to hook into the current sales and invoicing system.  Finally, you have a group of manufacturing engineers take that data to reconfigure the factories to address the customer demands.  As an executive, it makes perfect sense, but the reality is that the mobile application developers do not understand how to communicate with the sales system.  The manufacturing team does not have what they need from the mobile application or the sales system to create high-quality products on demand.  They are traveling a logical path along a road to ruin.  

What makes the situation more troublesome is that SAFe has the concept of release trains which says these three teams above should be able to work together, hand off work, and get things done.  The trouble is the decision maker does not understand how the software and system should work, so they do not know how to construct the teams.  A team of mobile specialists, a team of sales and invoicing specialists, and manufacturing engineers is a straightforward way to break down the groups.  Alas, these teams will not work well together.  Instead, reconstitute the units, so mobile developers, sales and invoice specialists, and manufacturing engineers work on the same team.  Condense these three teams into two.  

What will happen is when a mobile developer has a question about the data they receive from the sales and invoice system, an engineer with experience will be able to help on the spot.  Likewise, the manufacturing engineers will understand what the sales and invoice system is doing because they will be working side by side with the necessary technical professionals.  Finally, the three teams blended into two sections, one for standard sizes and the other for children's; they can share solutions to make each group more efficient.  Instead of work being passed around like a hot potato, people work together to deliver value.  

Some of the biggest problems in SAFe happen when work passes between teams.  As a coach and agile professional, it is your responsibility to reduce this dysfunction as much as possible.  Organizes teams around value to the customer instead of technical proficiency, ensuring work when assigned can be taken from beginning to end with zero handoffs between teams.  It will make your release trains more efficient and save you from unnecessary headaches.  

Using Agile to Save an Organizational Shipwreck

The agile reformation has been my passion and livelihood for over ten years.  I strongly believe in making work more sustainable.  The global economy is highly complicated, and it takes intelligent and conscientious people to transform it one cubical at a time.  I spend my time writing extensively about agile and corporate culture.  Over the years, I experienced many of the ugly realities of being a business person; the lack of job security, erratic behavior from vendors and clients, regulators with good intentions, and plenty of colleagues who act in bad faith.  

The business world resembles being shipwrecked and trapped in a lifeboat.  After days of hunger and thirst, each survivor attempts to cannibalize the others or throw them overboard to the sharks to save themselves.  Rescue is elusive, and the ocean threatens to destroy everyone.  The agile movement is a friendly shore to find refuge.  Unfortunately, I see business organizations ignore this kind of relief and remain adrift.  I have given this plenty of consideration, and I have a few informed opinions about why organizations prefer to be shipwrecked.  

Inertia is a concept from physics, and Issac Newton first described it as the ability for an object at rest to remain at rest or an object in motion to stay in motion.  You expend energy to overcome the force of inertia.  In business, this energy equals the expenditure of time and money, which are precious resources.  The corporate culture of most organizations attempts to minimize the wasteful use of time and money, so inertia builds up and acts as a weight on the organization's ability to change.  People are content to avoid rocking the boat and terrified of risk, and being shipwrecked is preferable to rowing to safety.  

Fear is another factor.  Companies have to generate a profit and meet the expected profits of their investors, creditors, and shareholders.  It puts pressure on leaders to wring as much money out of the organization.  Lay-offs and outsourcing are necessary tools in this process.  What it does is create a level of uncertainty and fear in an organization.  It forces people to ignore inefficiency or waste because exposing it might lead to unemployment.  Thus, agile with its rapid cycle times and inspection heightens fear in the organization. People who are afraid have two choices;  they flee the company, or they fight.  It is the people who remain behind who throw sand in the gears of change.  To them, the status quo at an organization is preferable to changes that are threatening.  

Fear and inertia create a cycle of dysfunction within an organization.  I must also point out poor leadership as the third piece of the triad.  Those individuals struggle to keep promises and prefer hoarding information and resources.  You point out problems to this kind of leader, and they politely ignore them and often like to fire the messenger who brings them those problems.  It is about control for those people, and anything which is a threat is resisted.  Using the Pareto rule, 20% of your leadership team creates 80% of your waste and inefficiency.  Agile is good at finding these people, but out of self-interest, they will fight back.  

Combined, fear, uncertainty, and poor leadership create an environment deeply resistant to agile.  It is just like being lost at sea.  I will continue to educate and train others about making work more sustainable, satisfying, and sane.  With a bit of luck, more of the shipwrecked will find friendly shores.  

Until next time. 

An Agile look at the Olympics.

The Olympics bring out the sports nerd in me.  I can sit for hours watching events I never get a chance to see.  I fell in love with curling watching the Olympics, and I never miss an opportunity to watch fencing when the summer games come on.  My fantasies of being an Olympic athlete are unrealistic, but I learn lessons of determination, leadership, and character from these elite athletes.  Today, I would like to share a few of those lessons.    

As a coach, listen to your team members.

Simone Biles was having concentration issues when she was qualifying during the games, but something was wrong when she got lost in the air during a vault.  Biles talked it over with the coach and said she could not go on.  The coach listened and agreed.  When someone comes to you with performance issues or problems with focus, the best you can do is listen.  Once you have heard someone out, take the best action for that person and the team.  I believe Biles coach did that, and Team U.S.A. won a silver medal.  

Being a champion is more than finishing first.

Kevin McDowell ran the race of his life in the Men’s Triathlon.  At one point, he was leading the race.  The cancer survivor gave it his all and finished the race in sixth place, the best Olympic finish by any U.S. male.  While running the race, he grabbed water for other competitors who could not reach it.  His battles with cancer and the sportsmanship he showed on the course make him a champion to me.  A person like that on your team is going to inspire and elevate everyone around them.  If you had to choose between winners and champions – pick the champions.  

Leave everything out on the field.

I watched U.S.A. softball play Japan in the gold medal match.  Everything which could go wrong for team U.S.A did.  One player hit into a freakish double play to end a rally.  When it was over, the U.S.A. won silver instead of Gold.  Pitcher Cat Osterman’s interview moved me after the game.  She said she left everything out on the field and was proud of the team. She encouraged younger players to stick with the sport and aspire to become future Olympians.  Your team needs to take pride in their work and do their best each time, even if the results do not lead to immediate success.  

Excellence is everywhere

We often have a skewed version of success.  Top salespeople sell more than others.  Broadcasters with ratings are more respected than those with personal integrity.  We value the winners who are the most visible and public with their accomplishments.  A person has spent years perfecting air pistol at the Olympics, someone has been weight lifting anonymously in the Philippines, and a mathematician peddled 85 miles for a gold medal.  The quiet dedication to craft and excellence is everywhere.  As coaches and agile practitioners, we need to encourage and recognize this kind of accomplishment. 

I have another week to nerd out about the Olympics, but the lessons will last a lifetime.

Until next time. 

Find the Right People to Begin Your Agile Journey

I spent time away from work to be with family on the Alabama coast, and I am glad to be back.  Taking time away from projects is a healthy way to recharge and discover new perspectives mentally.  Unfortunately, it creates a backlog of work that you need to sift through when you return to the office.  While I was sorting through my e-mail to achieve the elusive inbox zero, it occurred to me agile is becoming more mainstream.   

When I joined the reformation, 2009, it was composed of misfits and developers who saw the old way of doing things as needing significant change.  Today, I talk with executives who ‘want’ agile.  The secret of agile being a better way to manage complicated projects like software development is now public knowledge.  As this information spreads, business leadership struggles to find people who can make it happen within their organizations.  Today, I will discuss the struggle to find good and great agile professionals. 

Speaking from my own experience, I had the zeal of a newly converted person and still look back at my embrace of agile as my “road to Damascus” moment. Early converts to agile and scrum were enthusiastic. We gained experience working as scrum masters, product owners, and developers.  Now, we are looking for the next steps in our career training and leading others to be agile.  

For business leaders new to agile, people in my cohort of agile practitioners are a large pool of labor, but the front-line scrum masters and product owners are scarce. The challenge is how do you find people to fill those roles. Often they have to train people internally or hire outsiders at a premium.  The challenge is how do you find good people to fill those roles.  

The first thing you must do is take an unflinching look at the organization’s culture.  Is conformity valued over results or delivery?  If it is, it will be hard finding internal scrum masters or software developers.  Agile professionals are iconoclastic and have an entrepreneurial streak.  Suppose the organization is crushing these traits out of the workforce. In that case, they will not spontaneously come to life because you rename a project manager or business analyst a scrum master after a two-day training course.  

Like people who resolve to lose weight or quit drinking, an organization needs to take small and concrete steps to transform.  The agile wannabe leaders must find scrum masters from outside the firm willing to buck the organizational status quo to get things done.  It also means abandoning micromanagement, rewarding people willing to question established ways of doing things, and creating psychological safety so people can try new things and make mistakes.  These are not easy things to do and could take years to complete successfully.  

Where leaders have an advantage is recruiting product owners.  There are plenty of people inside your organization with business knowledge and tenure.  They are the people who know all the secrets in the organization, and they make perfect material for craft product owners. Before you send them off to training, make sure they are empowered to set priorities and say 'no' to others in the organization.  Finally, make sure the new product owners are doing the job full-time. Product Ownership requires undivided attention to write stories, communicate with customers, and measure value delivered to the organization.  If you expect them to handle accounts receivable while acting as a product owner for the new accounting system, you deserve failure.  Pair these people up with an experienced scrum master or coach, and you have a recipe for success.  

Finally, look for people who are stoic and realistic.  The contemporary business world produces toxic people; either they are so optimistic it is alienating or so hostile they act like cancer on their work. Find people who are willing to look at a negative situation and say, “Wow, this is broken, might as well get started and fix it.”  If you find people like this and place them in positions of responsibility, your ability to become agile has a reasonable chance of success.  In the words of agile coach Michael de la Maza, “There are no solutions, just countermeasures.” Find people willing to implement those countermeasures.  

Finding good talent will be a significant challenge as we attempt to rebuild the global economy in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Agile is not something you can buy off the shelf and magically implement at your organization.  It will require organizational change, people willing to take risks, and finally, a commitment to being uncomfortable and hold oneself accountable.   

Agile is not easy, and your first step on your journey is acknowledging that you need the right people to help you make the trip successfully. 

Until next time. 

Agile Coaching Requires Walking Away.

The path of the righteous man requires walking away.

I have been focused on plenty of goals in my career.  I have spent time coaching teams and individuals.  Often, I have to work on projects and help the team turn them around.  Other times, I discover the more esoteric points of my job, like putting together training videos.  This week, I found another necessary part of my career.

I have been working with a large project for twenty weeks.  We went from getting nothing done to pushing releases every two weeks.  The developers were fighting with the QA people on the team, and morale was low.  This week, I walked away from the group and let them stand on their own.  It was a difficult thing to do, but if the team was going to grow, I had to walk away.  

Being a coach means that you have to make your role obsolete.  Teams can only improve with outside help for only so long, and then you have to step away.  The team needs to be able to grow and stand on its own.  Ziran Salayi wrote an excellent paper on this subject in 2019. 

Coaching a team is challenging and a profound emotional commitment.  Walking away from the team breaks emotional attachments, but it is necessary to help the team learn to improve without outside intervention.  As a parent, you place training wheels on a bicycle and run alongside to show them how to ride.  Inevitability, those training wheels come off, and the child learns to ride without adult supervision.  Along the way, the rookie bicyclist will take a few spills, but they will develop a sense of independence.  

Letting go and walking away is critical to the success of a team you are coaching. An organization coached correctly will take ownership of your instruction and bring them into new and more powerful directions.  For instance, if you impress on people the importance of quality, when you leave the team, the team should be eager to create their ways of improving software quality.  Leaving a team is like taking off the training wheels.

A good agile coach is like a character from popular culture.  It is the type of character who rides into a dusty town in the west to restore law and order, like Cleavon Little in "Blazing Saddles," or a mysterious woman who opens a chocolate shop in the 2000 film “Chocolat.” I take inspiration from Samuel L. Jackson’s character Jules Winnfield from “Pulp Fiction.”  At the end of the film, Winnfield abandons a life of crime and foils a robbery without firing a shot.  I am never going to be as cool as Samuel L. Jackson, but I do know how to exit.  Walking away from a team is not giving up on them; it is encouraging them to thrive on their own.  Walking away is part of being a coach. 

Until next time. 

When Culture Eats Agile for Breakfast.

Bad Culture is like canoeing over a waterfall.

I am very fortunate to have family and friends who are into musical theater.  For an aging high school theater nerd, it is always fun to sing along with a show tune while driving.  The funny thing about musical theater since the Second World War is that it has tried to tackle social issues.  “West Side Story,” addressed gang violence and racism.  I remember “A Chorus Line,” exposing me to gay characters.  Finally, “Hair,” had a rock-and-roll soundtrack and a fiercely anti-war message.  Over the weekend, I was running an errand, and the family was listening to the “Hamilton,” Broadway cast album.  I had an unusual emotional reaction, and then I began to think about my agile journey.  

One of the essential songs in the show, “Hamilton,” is “The Room Where it Happens,” where the characters Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson make backroom deals and compromises to keep the American republic moving forward after the revolution.  It is an excellent song about power and the practical matters of running a country.  It is also an ironic song because Hamilton’s rival Arron Burr jealously wants to be in the room where those compromises happen.

I thought back to a previous position where my manager would joke that I attempted to drag the company toward agile “kicking and screaming.”  The last two years of my career were so frustrating because I would propose solutions and fixes, but because I was not in the room with the decision-makers, my expertise was ignored or actively discouraged.  I would even complain to my manager that I wanted to be in the place where the decisions occurred.  Naturally, when I had my exit interview, I cited the firm’s lack of agile adoption as the reason for leaving.  Looking back at the experience, I realized my efforts were not going to gain traction because the culture of the firm was not going to value agility.  It valued tenure and experience over actually getting work done.  The stock market has rewarded the organization appropriately.  I was never going to be in the room where it happens because I had not paid the twenty-year commitment of time and adequately ingratiated myself with the other leaders.  Shipping software and delivering value was considered a threat rather than a virtue in that organization.  

The rough learning experience helped me grow and develop as a professional, but it reinforced the notion that culture is more influential than agility.  A dysfunctional culture or organization is going to actively fight against agile because agile quickly exposes the rot in the organization, and that threatens the careers of people who professionally benefit from that inefficiency.  People will quickly ally against any change, which is threatening.  The 14th State of Agile report echoed this state of affairs when they said cultural acceptance of agile is lagging because of leadership, not understanding it, and the organizational culture resisting its improvements. 

It occurred to me that unless you have senior leadership working alongside agile coaches and scrum masters, the rest of the organization will continue to do what it has always done through the force of inertia.  Even if I were in the room for decisions, at the old organization, it would not have made a difference because the leadership would not have understood a word I was saying.  So as a coach or scrum master, pay particular attention to culture because if they do not value the agile manifesto or principles, you are going to paddling against the current.  If the senior leadership does not understand agile, then you might as well go over a waterfall in a barrel.  

Agile works, but if you don’t have the right culture, you are up a dangerous creek.  You do not need to appreciate show tunes to get that message.  

Until next time.  

Listening to COVID-19 and What It Means for Agile.

Pay attention to the world around you.

It is an extraordinary time.  The world economy lurched into a lower gear.  Many of us are cooped up in our homes attempting to teach children, work remotely, or pass the time because our jobs disappeared with the stay in place orders.  It is also a time where we have discovered how networked and interdependent we are.  A virus half a world away can create a wave of disruption.  In my physical –isolation, I have taken the time to process a few bits of wisdom.

The COVID-19 virus has exposed how networked the global economy and society has become over the last fifty years.  It has also acted as a great equalizer. The developed world is just as susceptible to the virus as the poorest of nations.  The mutation of a virus in bats which spread to humans now threatens everyone on the planet.  It is a slow-motion disaster which we saw coming.

Scientists, health workers, and professionals crunched the numbers and played out the worst-case scenarios.  When leaders listened, you had widespread testing and public health responses.  Where leaders decided to ignore the evidence, military quarantines of entire cities would be necessary, and health care systems were overcome with sick people.  The experts were right and we should trust that expertise more often.

It is easy to be smug in a time like now.  Hundreds of thousands of people are suffering economically as restaurants, bars, and nightlife shut down.  The education of millions of young people is upset by schools closing.  If experts were trusted and people gave credit to others who dedicated their entire lives to the study of science and public health, we might not be in such a difficult situation.  The reality of saying, “I told you so,” is only going to make the present situation more unbearable.

The distrust of experts comes from a particular place.  We often see these experts in comfortable offices and universities and think they lack real-world experience.  Many professionals have authority over others, and it creates resentment.  They are the teachers, doctors, lawyers, judges, and executives who make decisions about our lives.  Making matters worse, professionals often do not live in communities where their choices have the most impact.  It explains why those who work hourly like to use words like quack, shyster, and shylock to describe those with expertise.

One of the reasons I wanted to get into agile is because I wanted to be a different kind of professional.  I wanted to be responsive and empathetic to others. I wanted to show kindness.  Professionals must earn trust each day. It is up to professionals like myself to create ways to work, which are sustainable, satisfying, and sane.  If we are going to dig out of the economic calamity, we are going to discover better ways of working.  Agile will be one of the movements leading the way.

So the main piece of wisdom I have obtained while I remain in self-isolation is that respect of experts and professionals must be earned.  Earning that trust means treating others with decency and kindness.  It means having shared experience in good times and bad.  Agile will be part of this transformation, and I will continue to be part of it.

Until next time. 

Use Clear Language in Agile

Clear Language Matters.

The business world is a strange place.  Being a white-collar professional is different from more traditional jobs.  A plumber fixes broken sinks, and a firefighter prevents your house from burning down.  You can explain these careers to an elementary school child, and they will understand.  In a global company, job titles are opaquer.  Business Analyst, Programmer Analyst IV, and Programmer Analyst III are popular titles.  You cannot explain to small children and most high school students what these job titles mean.  I still cannot tell the difference between a programmer analyst III and programmer analyst IV other than the paycheck.  The jobs are complicated, and the language we use is involved.  It is also a language that is easy to parody and creates confusion for people who have never experienced it.  As an agile coach or scrum master, it is up to you to make sure the language is clear and informs.

I began to think more seriously about this topic when Molly Young wrote a great article about “Garbage Language,” which crops up in business meetings.  Young exposes lots of phrases used around the office, including; level-set, key-learnings, and complexify.  It is a fun and nasty read which had me chuckling about the dumb things I have often heard in meetings.  It quickly became a divisive topic, and business people defended their use of language as a way to save time and communicate with peers.  To people watching the argument unfold, it seems like a pointless discussion about something which does not have much impact on daily life.  The truth is more complicated. 

How we use language is critically important. It is particularly notable how we use language at work because misunderstanding can cost millions of dollars, ruin reputations, and kill careers.  I also have a more fundamental reason for being careful with writing; I studied communications and debate.  My training required me to learn how to use language clearly to inform or persuade.  With either the written or spoken word, a communication major is trained to the level of instinct to use easy to understand language.  If you use jargon, acronyms, or business-speak, you had better explain it.  When someone is not telling the truth is better to call them a liar than to say they are “insincere.”  Unfinished work is not “In-process,” it is incomplete.   The lack of flowery language is the strength of people educated this way.

Clear and understandable language is excellent if you are a journalist.  In the modern cubical farms of most offices, clear and unambiguous language is fraught with peril.  The contemporary office contains mediocre people with big egos.  Power balances between office workers and executives are cavernous.  Finally, the uncertainty of working at a corporation means saying the wrong thing to the wrong person could undo a career that spanned decades.  Thus, using the phrase, “put a pin in this conversation,” is safer to say than, “you don’t know what you are talking about, and you should talk with me after the meeting.”  The phrase that forces me to grind my teeth is, “…it is what it is.”  It is a verbal surrender to the status quo, thinking, and justification for apathy.  I spent too many years hearing it muttered back to me like some zombie mantra. 

As a coach, be clear and informative with language.  Agile, Scrum, SAFe, LeSS, and Test-Driven Development contain plenty of acronyms and jargon; skip them.  It may be shorter to use TLA, but saying “Three Letter Acronym” is more easily understood.  I know I use the phrase “stakeholder,” often, but I still take time to explain its meaning.  Finally, be transparent, candid, and truthful. It is better to admit something is broken instead of “underperforming.”

So today, our learnings were to circle back and discuss the knowledge use of language from a ten-thousand-foot perspective.  My ask is that you internalize that precise language is a win-win and can build synergies in your brand. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Start Writing Unit Tests!

It helps when you test your code.

Software development is a difficult process.  It is filled with trial and error.  Developers must contend with vague requirements and impossible timelines.  It explains why the profession has a high failure rate.  I think we can do a better job and today I would like to discuss the easiest way to help reduce failure.

When I first learned about software development, the notion of software testing was primitive.  Often software testers manually went through the software attempting to find bugs.  It was a tedious and time-consuming process.  Automated testing began to pop up in the world of JAVA and then spread to the Microsoft world.  At first, developers chaffed at writing unit tests calling it extra work and unnecessary. 

After the initial resistance, the engineers and developers began to see the importance of unit tests.  Unit tests ensured the code functioned when checked back into source control.  It also made sure a change in one part of the code would not break a different portion of code.  Automated testing had another impact.  Manual testing became unnecessary and if freed up people to deliver more value in the organization. 

Automated testing not only cut back manual tests, but it also makes the release of software faster.  What usually would take three weeks to release could now take as little as three weeks.  Thus, automated unit testing reduced labor overhead improved the quality of software and increased the time to market for software.  Instead of chaffing at writing a unit test, the real question is why you haven’t started writing them.

Until next time.

The Strength of Technology Pros

No rest for technology

Technology is not for the meek.  A software developer is relearning their craft every 18 months.  Technology companies come and go with regularity.  Businesses rely on software to remain profitable and when the software does not work it costs lives.  The men and women who work in this business have to be tough.  Part of that toughness is the realization you have to deal with failure and frustration.  This week on the blog, I will discuss these central conditions of technology.

Many people have romantic notions about scientists, engineers, and software professionals.  The stereotype is that we are super smart and socially awkward individuals who spend their days making inventions and applications which change the world.  The reality of technology is less glamorous; it is hours, weeks, and months of frustration.  It is executives and financers demanding the work to be finished immediately.  It is cold coffee and stale pizza.  It is loneliness and frustration.  In the end, you might have a brief moment which feels like the creator is touching your shoulder but those moments are rare.  Often you will see a solution to a problem which has dominated your life and now you will have to make it work for others.

It means traditional methods cannot measure these workers.  Science is notoriously fickle when it comes to new advancements.  Computer software is a handmade and messy process prone to error and cost overruns.  Software is eating the world, but it depends on a small segment of the world population to build it.  Innovation and invention do not fit neatly into a project plan.  The realities and pressures of technology create unhealthy levels of stress.

The heavy intellectual lifting combined with the anxiety caused by deadline pressure creates a toxic stew of emotions which can lead to physical problems.  Obesity and heart disease are common among software professionals.  Self-medication with cannabis and alcohol are also common within the trade.  All of my contemporaries have recounted stores of insomnia and anxiousness caused by grappling with a severe challenge.  For those outside the profession, the levels of stress and frustration are extreme.  To a developer, it is just another day at the office.

Creativity and innovation are difficult.  The pressure we place on people leading innovation efforts is unhealthy.  The repercussions are professional burn out, defective products, and the risk of cascading failure within complex systems which maintain the global economy.  In many respects, we live in a magical age.  Today’s smartphones are more powerful than the computers which put people on the moon.  With a few swipes, we can order food and find a possible romantic partner to share it with us.  Information can swirl around the globe in seconds and we have millions of people using the internet to solve problems only a century ago would have had the attention of a small group of specialists.  It is a fantastic period to be alive, but the cost is that many people take for granted these advances and forget they are the product of the human mind rather than magic.

It is why I say technology is not for the meek. It requires intelligence, training, and the ability to tolerate frustration and failure.  The strength has helped build the global economy, and I have enjoyed a peripheral role in this process.  Technology people are different, but they have to be; otherwise, the magical world we live in would not exist.

Until next time.

Your Job is to Work with Messy Emotions.

You get pulled in lots of directions.

An agile coach or scrum master is pulled in plenty of directions.  Servant leadership is difficult because you need to put the needs of the team ahead of your own.  It takes an emotional toll to do it properly.  It also requires practice and maturity.  Today on the blog, I would like to discuss the emotional work necessary to be successful.

I have spent the last three month at a new client.  It is refreshing, and it has taken me out of my comfort zone.  The experience has also opened my eyes to the emotional labor necessary to excel as a coach.  You must work with the emotions of the people you are coaching; everyone has good days and bad days.  A servant leader has to absorb those emotions and process them in ways which will benefit the team.  If this expectation sounds unreasonable Kim Scott the author of “Radical Candor,” says, “It is called management, and it is your job!”  A leader needs to put in the work emotionally to make the team successful.

The emotional labor expected of a leader comes in many forms.  A leader must listen to understand.  It is not enough to hear the words a leader must understand the context and emotions of those words.  Next, a leader needs not to take the ups and downs of the job personally.  For someone who takes pride in their work and has plenty of emotional investment in doing good work, this is challenging.  People are going to get angry with you and others are going to demand more from you than you can give.  The key is the anger and demands they are creating are usually their problems and not yours as Collin Powel said being responsible means pissing people off.  As a servant leader, this is inevitable.

Finally, to solve problems, you need to set aside your emotions and try to look at situations in a focused and rational way.  Again, emotional control like this is more natural said than done.  If you care about anything you are doing, you are going to have an emotional investment.  To succeed, a coach or scrum master has to set those emotions aside during periods of stress so that they can “work the problem,” instead of being an emotional wreck.

Human beings are emotional and messy.  Having some emotional control or awareness is tremendous work.  The product of that work will be the respect of the teams you serve and grace under pressure when things go wrong.  It will enhance your leadership and improve your standing in the organization.

Until next time.