Backlog Coaching and Refinement for Beginners

Ike knew a few things
 about planning and action.

During his retirement in the 1960s, Eisenhower talked about his leadership style and the importance of planning.  He said, "Plans are irrelevant, but planning is essential." It occurred to me the person who led the allied invasion of Europe would know a thing or two about planning and success.  The agile manifesto is very clear that teams should respond to change over following a plan.  What agilists forget is we need some form of planning to make sure we can respond to that change.  Today, we talk about backlog refinement and coaching, which is a planning session that you will find valuable.  

Three years ago, I was presenting at the Agile 2018 conference.  The best part of the experience was sitting in on other people's sessions and learning about agile from a different perspective. One of those sessions was "Transplanting the Brains of a Product Owner and Scrum Master." The presentation featured a few references to Frankenstein movies and the product owner and scrum master seeing the development project from their counterpart's perspective.  

A principal takeaway was the idea of coaching a backlog.  Just as a scrum master should coach their team to be better at what they do, a product owner should coach the backlog so the stories are easier to understand by the development team.  A backlog should tell a story about how it is delivering value to customers.  A scrum master and product owner can work together at these coaching sessions.  I like to include a member of the development team in these meetings. I have nicknamed this process backlog refinement and coaching sessions, which speeds up sprint planning because the development team is more fluent in the customer needs. 

Doing backlog refinement and coaching sessions help improve the skills of the product owner.  The product owner understands how much detail they need to include in a story.  A coaching session allows the product owner to prioritize work and enable the development team to do preliminary estimates.  Finally, refinement and coaching make the process of backlog management emergent as customer value is determined.  Communication created during the backlog's refinement and coaching will strengthen the ties between the team's particular parts: the scrum master, product owner, and development team.  

Backlog refinement and coaching allow the scrum master and product owner to trade brains to see their roles from a different perspective.  The scrum master considers the time and deadline pressure facing the product owner.  The product owner understands the juggling done by the scrum master.  

In summary, backlog refinement and coaching builds teamwork on the scrum team.  The process of having a few collaborative story writing sessions with the scrum master and members of the development team will speed up sprint planning.  Finally, backlog refinement will make the backlog more detailed, estimated, emergent, and prioritized.  Eisenhower was right; a plan is worthless but planning with backlog refinement, and coaching will make the scrum team better.  

Until next time. 

Self-Care is no joke

Ike learned a few lessons about self-care.

We live in interesting times.  The economy for working people is a mess.  A pandemic is making it impossible for schools and businesses to operate in a typical fashion.  Finally, the social isolation necessary to fight the disease creates a feeling of anxiety and alienation.  Combine the above with the responsibilities of work and family, and you have a recipe for disillusionment.  I am aware of the privilege I have working from home and providing value to my customers remotely.  It is still challenging to maintain the energy and focus I need to get through the day. Exciting times are exhausting times.  Today on the blog, I would like to take about self-care.  

Servant leadership is difficult.  It ties up your energy and focus because you concentrate your time on others.  A leader can easily ignore their own needs and effectiveness.  Eventually, you fall into a cycle of failure as your body forces you to rest.  Eisenhower was famous for his chain-smoking and bouts of insomnia.  Napoleon struggled with hemorrhoids and gout.  The number of bankers who abused cocaine is too long to mention.  The physical ailments and addictions are a symptom of not taking care of your health. 

We spend time talking about success and accomplishment.  We often do not discuss the price people pay.  A leader is only as good as they are physically able to do the job.  Thus, it is crucial to take care of yourself because people are counting on you to be in the moment when they need you.  I am conscious of the reality that I have the privilege of taking care of myself.  I set my work schedule instead of having someone else do it for me.  I can work from home instead of at a factory, field, or construction site.   Compared with many workers, I have much more control over my day to day activities.  It means taking care of yourself is often a luxury that other people do not possess.  People with this privilege need to avoid squandering this benefit because others count on us to lead when times are tough.  

So here are a few things leaders can do to maintain health and improve their leadership.  The first practice all leaders should indulge in is getting sleep.  The global nature of the economy and the needs of off-shore business units means we need to sleep.  Software teams can be half a world away, and it means disrupted sleep schedules and plenty of early mornings.  I recommend seven to nine hours of sleep nightly.  When that is not possible, take naps so that your body does not do strange things.  According to doctors, a lack of sleep creates behavior patterns similar to drinking alcohol.  A sleep-deprived person has less judgment than a well-rested person, which makes the difference between success and failure.  

As for chemical substances, practice moderation, alcohol, nicotine, speed, and cannabis are legal and easily accessible.  Avoid using them because they can become addictive and act as a crutch during stressful times.  When I worked in advertising, I was staggered by the use of alcohol.  Most of the time, I ignored it, but often enough, someone would be drunk at an inconvenient moment, and disaster would follow.  Nothing is sadder than a middle-aged man slurring his speech during a sales presentation. 

Finally, detach from the office and expect others to do the same. It means not checking your e-mail over the weekend.  Do not bring your power supply home with you, so your laptop runs out of power.  It will prevent you from working long hours at home.  An e-mail in the middle of the night can wait until you get into the office.  We spend a third of our life working.  The other portion we spend sleeping.  Spend the remainder with family, friends, and loved ones.  Setting healthy boundaries is part of being a leader.  Playing with your children and taking a Saturday afternoon nap is a great way to recharge your mental batteries.  

The practice of self-care is not a luxury for leaders.  It is a necessity.  Get some sleep, avoid chemical substances, and detach from the office.  The people you serve will thank you. 

Until next time. 

Scrum depends on leadership.

Leadership is hard.

The global economy is filled with challenges.  The economic cycle of boom and bust.  Trade wars and political uncertainty dominate headlines.  Workers are flexing their muscles to retain the wages and benefits which kept them in the middle s class.  The agile reformation is in the middle of this environment.  We are striving to make business saner, sustainable, and satisfying.  It is hard work.  Often we are struggling with status quo thinking and the demands of the market place.  We test scrum masters and coaches daily.  The principle test is the leadership skills we bring to work each day.

The scrum guide has evolved over the years to discuss the changing role of the scrum master.  We describe scrum masters as servant-leaders with the ability to influence others without having real authority.  I have written numerous times about servant-leadership.  I am a big fan of people like Dwight Eisenhower, Harvey Milk, and Creighton Abrams.  I am also impressed by academic thinkers like Gilles Deleuze and Albert Camus.  What all of these people have in common is deep intelligence and the ability to overcome obstacles to accomplish great things.

Leadership is hard.  In the words of General Collin Powel, leadership is pissing people off to get things done.  It is uncomfortable.  Leadership is upsetting comfortable structures to achieve greater success.  It is emotionally taxing and a job that follows you around even when you are outside the office.  It is a skill that must be cultivated and rehearsed regularly. 

The alternative is a catastrophe.  People who are concerned with their advancement at the expense of others are toxic in an organization.  Those people will game measurements to make themselves look more effective than they are.  They will withhold support for others unless they can receive some benefit.  People work with these kinds of leaders not because they want to but because they have to do it.  Organizations succeed or fail based on the leadership skills of their people, and poor leadership will kill and organization.

By now, you realize that I feel strongly about this subject.  I have spent my entire career working with many different people.  Some were inspirational, and others were more interested in their success than others.  I prefer the company of inspirational people.   This week my leadership was challenged twice.  I was helping a professional team release software, and I had to perform agile assessments on other teams.  The common thread through these experiences is that good leadership was obvious to see, and lousy leadership was more deceptive.  Be on the lookout for these corrupt leaders; they will harm your business. 

Until next time.

Leadership and Eating the Elephant

Abrams as servant leader.

When I am not at the office, I relieve stress by pursuing several hobbies.  I am a big movie buff and love debating cinema of all types.  I also collect and play with toy soldiers.  I have been in the hobby for nearly forty years, and I am a member in good standing with the Historical Miniatures Gaming Society.  You pick up military history by process of osmosis when you collect soldiers.  Interestingly, some of the trivia I have picked up along the way have informed my agile practice.

I have written about military history in the past.  I recognized Eisenhower performing the greatest act of project management in history with his preparations for the D-Day invasion.  I also pointed out Richard Armitage’s efforts to save South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians during the fall of Saigon.  Military history has plenty of stories of heroism and cowardice.  People are elevated to their highest ideals or reduced to animalistic squalor. You are changed forever when you experience it.

It is the ultimate nature of warfare which makes it such a bad metaphor for business.  War is wasteful and is never sustainable.  Many of the lessons of war are not relevant in today’s office because the worst thing that could happen is losing your job.  In combat, a person can be maimed or killed.  It is why when I talk about military history in my agile practice I avoid strategy, tactics, or logistics.  I spent most of my time talking about leadership.  It is the leadership of ordinary people in extraordinary situations which inspires me and which I use to encourage others.

One of the most inspiring leaders I know is Creighton Abrams.  He was a tank commander in World War Two and was part of Patton’s Third Army in Europe.  Abrams nicknamed his tank “Thunderball,” and he had the name emblazed on his tank in bold white letters.  Abrams survived the war in spite of the German’s destroying “Thunderball,” seven times.  He was lucky, brave, and he led his troops from the front.  He never asked a soldier to do something he would not do himself and inspired tremendous loyalty.

After the war, he continued to move through the ranks commanding tank units in Korea and Europe during the early 1960s.  Where his leadership ultimately expressed itself was his command of the U.S. Forces in Vietnam.  Abram’s took over for fellow West Point classmate William Westmorland after his promotion to Army Chief of Staff in 1968.  Abrams assumed command at a dangerous time.  American forces had defeated the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive.  It was an ugly and brutal victory which turned a majority of public opinion against the war in Southeast Asia.  The Communist Vietnamese were going to keep fighting no matter how many people died in the process.  Morale was low, and the mission of U.S. forces in Vietnam was in question.

Newspaper reports asked Abrams how he was going to preserve the South Vietnamese government, beat the communists, and keep U.S. casualties down.  He responded, “when eating an elephant you do it one bite at a time.”  The quotation would guide him the next four years as he led the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.

Unlike his predecessor, Abrams shunned the perks of leadership.  He replaced the ornate wood desk first used by the French provincial governors, with the standard steel desk used in the U.S. embassy.  The mission of U.S. combat forces was simplified, and Abrams implemented the Nixon plan of Vietnamization.  By the time he left Vietnam to become the Army Chief of Staff, U.S. forces had reduced from 576,000 to 24,200 troops.  The big test of Vietnamization and Abrams came in 1972 during the Easter Offensive.  With a fraction of the troops he had four years earlier, he stopped a significant assault on the country.

Abrams was the kind of leader who accepted responsibility for both victory and failure.  The My Lai massacre became public during his tenure.  The Khaki Mafia swindled the army out of millions of dollars.  Finally, the battle of Hamburger Hill further inflamed anti-war sentiment.  Despite these challenges and unreliable allies in the South Vietnamese government, Abrams stood as an example and ate the elephant one bite at a time.  The main battle tank in the U.S. Army was named after him; the M1A1 Abrams.

All of this history relates to agile because we should embrace the servant leadership of Abrams.  Instead of hunkering down in our offices or via conference calls, we should lead with our teams.  Instead of grand gestures of reform, we should pile up a stack of little victories which will lead the organization forward.  We should act as servants to our teams and shun the privileges of rank.  The flaws of our organization should be transparent.  Finally, when confronted with a threatening challenge we will be able to adapt and overcome.

Leading change in an organization is difficult.  The adoption of the agile mindset in business is going to be the most significant change in civilization since the protestant reformation.  I draw inspiration from figures like Abrams.  He inspires me to take plenty of small bites from the elephant which is my career.

Until next time.

Planning is Everything

This scrum master
wants to be more like Ike.

It takes plenty of emotional energy to be a scrum master or agile coach.  Developers need guidance, product owners need constant coaching, and upper management is always asking for status updates.  It is psychologically exhausting.  Along with day-to-day chores, you are planning and setting strategy.  This week I want to discuss how planning and responding to change are not mutually exclusive.

According to the Agile Manifesto, responding to change is more important than following a plan.  Situations in technology are changing at a rapid clip and an idea that seemed plausible an hour ago can be hopelessly out of date.  Agility depends so much on responding to change.  The unintended consequence of this is business leaders abandoning planning altogether because “We are doing agile we don’t need plans.” Let me try to add a little sanity to this discussion.

The manifesto states, “…while there is value in the items on the right, we value items on the left more.”  Planning has some value and should not be abandoned because we are responding to change.  It seems like a contradiction.

Planning is an integral part of agile.  A scrum team does sprint planning before the start of a sprint to decide what they are going to do.  The product owner does release planning to prioritize stories in the backlog.  A plan makes it possible for an agile team to understand the nature of the problems they are trying to solve.  It also allows them to learn how to respond to change when the inevitable happens.  It explains why Dwight David Eisenhower said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”  When a team plans they are going over possible scenarios which might happen during a sprint.  The team is also doing much of the analysis necessary to start writing unit tests and code.

To use a metaphor from music, Jazz and Blues musicians still rehearse even though much of their music is improvisational.  The players outline key progressions and cords they are going to play.  It is the plan they use for their performance.  Once the concert begins, situations may dictate a deviance from the scheme.  Thanks to the outlines figured out during the rehearsal, these musicians can respond to change.  The same thing happens to a development team during a sprint.

So responding to change is important but you cannot respond to change unless you have spent some time planning to understand what changes might happen.

Until next time.

What Donald Rumsfield can tell us about being a Scrum Master

Donald Rumsfield back in the day.

Donald Rumsfield is going to be a controversial figure in history.  The Princeton graduate will be the center of plenty of scholarship about the Iraq war and the events surrounding the September 11th attacks.  Looking over his conduct of the Department of Defense and business career, I am not a big fan of his leadership style.  What I do acknowledge is his famous quotation about ambiguity and uncertainty.

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.”

This week on the blog some things a scrum master can learn about ambiguity from the former Secretary of Defense.

Known-Knowns

Every scrum master confronts these each day of their career.  The coffee pot is broken.  Active Directory permissions are not correct for a developer and the compliance committee will not allow a production push for two weeks.  These are the known-knowns.  They are the daily challenges and impediments which crop up and are expected.  These issues are easily solvable, have been solved in the past, or can be ignored with little risk.  As a scrum master it is your job to sweep these kinds of issues out of the way to make your team successful.

Known-Unknowns

This is what traditional project managers call risk.  These are situation which can plan for but might not happen.  The most famous example is Eisenhower’s communique he was to send if the D-Day invasion failed.  As a scrum master, things can go horribly wrong and allowances for these things are necessary.

This situation also happens when developers are asked to do something they have not done before.  In my case, it is using modal forms with Bootstrap 3.  This known unknown is taking longer than I expected to implement.  If I have more serious time pressures, I would use a different approach on the website I am refactoring.  I am learning this new skill and taking the time to master it because it will transform into a known-known if I do the work.

Unknown-Unknown

These are the surprises, calamities and disasters that befall a development team.  The production server has not been upgraded to the latest version of the .Net framework.  The network administrator won the lottery and had tenured his resignation immediately.  Finally, the third party API the application relies on changes without notice.  An unknown-unknown quickly becomes a known-known because of the severity of its impact.

These land mines are silent and deadly traps which make the life miserable for a scrum master and technical professionals the serve.  It has been my experience that many of these unknown-unknowns are the product of technical debt.  So to reduce the amount of ugly surprises, reduce the amount of technical debt.

Unknown-Knowns

Salvoj Zizek, a philosopher and cultural critic mentioned there is a fourth category which Rumsfield neglects.  The is the world of the Unknown-Known.  This is a piece of knowledge you have which you chose to ignore.  An example of this could be a tech-lead who refuses to write unit tests because his “code does not have bugs.”  In my experience, the situation crops up because politics, prejudice, or human nature prevents us from acknowledging the evidence we are confronted.  You see this situation in co-dependent relationships and dysfunctional teams.  It is the duty of a scrum master to call this out and make sure that developers are aware of everything they need to be successful.

A scrum master needs to understand and confront the known-knowns, the known-unknowns, the unknown-unknowns and the unknown-knowns facing his team.  Otherwise, the project might go as smoothly as the Invasion of Iraq.

Until next time.

The Greatest Act of Project Management.

This intense young man conducted
the greatest act of project management
in the history of western civilization.

One of the few hobbies I have is collecting toy soldiers and learning about the military history surrounding those soldiers.  This is an important anniversary because it is the 71st anniversary of D-Day and the 70th anniversary of VE-Day.  I am afraid that we can learn a great deal from this period of history from the arrogance of Hermann Goering to the quite leadership of Omar Bradley.  This week I want to discuss the greatest piece of project management ever accomplished, the invasions of Normandy and what people in the Agile community can learn from it.

Looking back the Second World War was the largest catastrophe to occur in western civilization.  Over seventy million people died in the conflict and it spawned, suicide attacks, the deliberate targeting of civilians, and nuclear weapons.  It was the product of economic collapse and punitive treaties.  Its aftermath is still with us today.

Dwight David Eisenhower, was a mid-level officer at the start of World War Two holding the rank of Colonel at the beginning of 1941.  He had a reputation as a good politician and staff officer for more senior commanders including Douglas MacArthur.  From the outside looking in, Eisenhower was condemned to be a mid-level functionary with a minor role in the war.  What changed was that General George Marshal the top military officer during the Second World War, noticed that Eisenhower or Ike as he was nicknamed, had a knack for getting people to work together without having to give orders or invoke rank.  In 1942, he was spending a majority of his time coordinating efforts between British, Free French and other allies in London.  His reward for his efforts was command of the Allied Forces in North Africa fighting Rommel and the Afrika Corps.

The lessons learned in North Africa and the Ike’s efforts to get highly competitive commanders like Patton and Montgomery to work together sealed his fate.  In 1943, he was appointed to the command the Allied Expeditionary forces in Europe.  For good or ill, Eisenhower would be in charge of the planning and execution of the invasion of France to create a second front against Nazi Germany.  The planning included everything from how to deploy airborne troops to how to get millions of gallons fuel across the English Channel.  It had to be conducted with complete secrecy because if the German’s found out they would roll the invading army back into the sea.  It involved schmoozing Winston Churchill over cigars and brandy.  It meant appointing Omar Bradley over Patton because he was a more level headed commander.  It also meant putting up with Charles de Gaulle who when notified of the plan called the entire exercise folly.

The invasion of D-Day was rehearsed twice and conducted in secret.  The launch of the invasion was even delayed thanks to bad weather.  In spite of all the planning, late nights, and countless packs of cigarettes that Eisenhower smoked, there was very little to guarantee the success of the operation.  When the word was given, 5,000 ships and over 150,000 people went into action.  Americans, British, Canadians, Free French, and numerous allies stormed the beach on June 6th.  Eisenhower said that once he had given the orders to launch the invasion, everything was out of his hands and he had to let the troops do their jobs.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Eisenhower the General.  He was able to sweat the small stuff while not losing site of the big picture.  He was able to deal with difficult and insubordinate people and get them to do a job.  He was willing to take responsibility for failure as well as success.  He respected the people who served under him and never considered a solider expendable.  Finally, we was able to relate to people higher up the chain of command and have them understand how he was going to accomplish the mission.  All of these skills should be possessed by a competent scrum master.

Eisenhower’s story should also be an example of how even a mid-level manager or leader can be thrust into a position of serious visibility and they will have to succeed when the stakes are high.  I keep thinking about that when I grumble about the fact I have a desk in the office about the size of a desk blotter.  Someday, I am going to have to step up and I damn well better be ready for the opportunity.

So this week, I decided to give you a history lesson about Eisenhower and relate it to being a scrum master.  The success of the Normandy invasions are not solely because of his leadership.  Countless troops and support people contributed to the success, but Eisenhower knew the ultimate success or failure of the operation would be pinned on him.  Sound just like what it means to be a scrum master.  So when the pressure gets you down and it seems like you will not be able to succeed just think about Ike and his lonely moments in the spring of 1944 when the lives of hundreds of thousands of people depended on him.  He was able to rise above himself and so will you.

Until next time.