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.

The Development Team Must Be a Shark

The development team is like a shark.

As a boy, I thought sharks were the coolest creatures alive.  They were ultimate predators who created panic at beaches across the nation.  Steven Spielberg made one of the biggest movies of all time featuring a shark.  Sharks were a staple on public television, and today we can enjoy an entire week of shark programming on Discovery.  The more I have learned about sharks the more I respected and admired them.  As a scrum master, I have used sharks as a metaphor for the operation of a good scrum team.

A shark is a living fossil.  It has not evolved substantially in 200 million years.  When you are the top predator in the ocean natural selection is not a powerful influence.  It does give a shark several disadvantages.  The brain of a shark is smaller than the brain of a dog.  Sharks do not breed quickly, and the creatures plunge into irrational frenzies with the presence of blood and prey.

The biggest disadvantage sharks possess they have primitive gills.  Unless a shark is swimming with its mouth open, it cannot breathe.  It is a significant disadvantage because most fish today have gills which can filter oxygen out of the water without swimming.  Thus, a shark is doomed to swim from the moment of its birth.  A shark must swim, or it dies.

Software development teams should use the shark as a metaphor for how they should operate. Organizations need to keep swimming and moving forward.  A team needs to gain new knowledge and techniques continually.  A team has to deliver software regularly.  A team has to respond to a changing environment.  A team must keep swimming forward.

As a scrum master, it is up to you to keep the team swimming.  You need to ask compelling questions.  You must insist on delivering software into production at regular intervals.  Finally, a scrum master should encourage the team to pursue “Healthy Ownership,” with collective responsibility of outcomes.

If you cannot inspire the team in this fashion, you will have a drowning shark, and you will be dead in the water.

Until next time.

It is worth it!

The work is worth it.

I have been doing plenty of reflection.  I blame the dispiriting winter season in my hometown of Chicago.  The cold winter nights force you to confront your past and ponder your purpose.  My friends and social media contacts are asking me plenty of questions about my weird profession.  These kinds of existential moments make me want to do a little explaining.

I joined the agile reformation in 2009.  I was working as a contractor for a family run medical supply company.  I was thoroughly miserable.  I had no job security and little hope. I spent each day grinding out code for capricious people who treated everyone not family as medieval peasants.   Family disputes would boil over on to the sales floor, and anyone caught in the crossfire could lose their job.  It was such a dispiriting place to work.  I witnessed the ten-year-old grandson of the founder tease a salesperson saying, “Daddy says you are fired.”

In the middle of this night of the soul, a project manager decided the team should try “agile.”  It began with daily stand-ups and doing releases in two-week chunks.  It ended with unemployment.  The project manager left for a better job.  The IT Director realized I had more credentials than he did so I was a threat, and it made me expendable.

Between job searches, I did research and the more I learned about Agile, the more I realized it was a better way to lead software projects.  I also realized that the concepts while simple to explain were hard to implement.  Thanks to the Agile Manifesto and the early proponents of the scrum, there was a way to perform technology work without abusing people and providing better value to the business.  I would spend the next four years as a developer spreading the word about this new approach.

Things finally came to a head when I left my last role as a senior developer and became a scrum master full time.  I was no longer some developer mentoring others.  I was leading other teams and setting an example.  I thought I was ready.  I was wrong.  Over the last five years, I have been tested and challenge in numerous ways.  I have succeeded in public ways and failed in equally public fashion.  I am not the scrum master I was five years ago.  Everything I have learned along the way has made me better.

I keep thinking about a quotation from Dave Burgess I tweeted out last week.

"It is not supposed to be easy- its supposed to be worth it!" Nice wisdom for scrum master from #tlap #agile #leadership

— (((Ed Wisniowski))) (@eeeThree_ed) February 13, 2018

The last nine years of my agile journey have been challenging, but it has been worth it.  I am a better leader.  I am a better developer.  The software is getting shipped on time, and the office is a little less capricious.  I do not have entitled ten-year old’s threatening to fire me, and the business community seems to be catching up to my way of thinking. 

This hard journey is probably worth it, and I am proud to be sharing it with you.

Until next time.

Is your business ready for the next SharkNado.

Are you ready for the Next SharkNado Attack

It you missed it last week of the biggest events on Twitter in a long time was the premier of the B-grade monster movie SharkNado on the SyFi channel.  As the title implies, it was a monster movie featuring man eating sharks which sucked up by a tornado and then dropped on the unsuspecting population of Los Angles.  News anchors from cable television, celebrities of all stripes, and political figures chimed it to remark how awful the film was.  It generated so much buzz that the network decided to rebroadcast the film early because the overwhelming demand.  There is a lesson here for any business person.  The web and social media can be a powerful thing creating demand for your business.  In this blog post, want to encourage you to be ready when the next SharkNado hits.

The universe of social media is composed of many services; Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit being the largest and most influential services on the web.  Facebook acts as a global community for everyone from your parents to people who are interested in dressing up as cats to go for contact.  According to Yahoo news, about 1.1 Billion people call Facebook the place they go to share information with friends and family.  Twitter is known as a micro-blogging service and users can only type 140 characters at a time.  What makes Twitter so popular is the speed of how information is shared and it is also relatively unfiltered so it is the tool of Occupy Wall Street and rebels in Turkey.  Rumors and misinformation swirl about but within this river of information are plenty of nuggets of information gold.  Watching Samuel L. Jackson root for team USA during the Olympics was extremely funny and I highly recommend Jack Tapper’s feed from CNN.  Finally, Reedit acts as a clearing house of blogs and photographs on the web. They also have an “Ask Me Anything” or A.M.A feature which has become the place for politicians and other thought leaders to try out new ideas.  For the sake of disclosure, I use Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn as my social networks to promote this business.

So what does this mean to you a small or medium sized business? It means you also need a presence on social media web sites; at the very least Twitter and Facebook.  You can promote specials and talk about your business in an unfiltered manner.  If people like your content they will share your tweets and Facebook messages extending your reach.  It is also cheaper than advertising on radio, television, or newspaper.  This makes it a low cost means to promote your business.

We at E₃ systems understand this strange world and would like to help you.  We leverage Facebook and Twitter and can show you how to do the same.  Please contact us and we will show you how.  So the next time a SharkNado hits you will be able to use it to boost your business.

Until next time.