Focus is the Key

The older I become, the more I am struck by how the contemporary office is resistant to change. The COVID-19 pandemic proved we could work from home and deliver value to customers, but business leaders are pushing employees to return to the office. We are also seeing business leaders demand employees become 'hardcore,' whatever that means simultaneously. We are seeing business leaders juggling more opportunities and distractions than concentrating on the core of the business. The trend of the superstar CEO and founder is becoming tedious, and it is time that coaches and agile professionals emphasize the importance of focus if we are going to make the business world better.  

Ed Zitron in Business Insider this week points out the hypocrisy many business leaders illustrate when they complain about the work ethics of their employees. Zitron points out that many CEOs do not create value for their firms and are "A chaotic blend of unproductive micromanagement and highly paid absenteeism." The problem is that there are too many temptations for an executive to moonlight outside their core responsibilities. Today, a CEO has meetings to attend, boards of directors to sit on, and a television appearance on cable to show the shareholders they are making a difference. Lost in this busy work is the operation of the business and leading the people who work there. 

The lack of focus on the part of executives directly impacts the firm's bottom line. The fact that distracted leaders struggle to deliver value means that as a coach, you must point out the destructive behavior to the organization and then guide people to fix it. Leadership and getting people to work together toward a common goal is hard work. It requires dedication and commitment. The result can get tedious. Frankly, it is more fun to appear on television and make public speaking engagements talking about how good you are at business. 

The sad reality is television opportunities and public speaking engagements are transitory. A business leader who is absent doing other things puts the business's long-term survival at risk. As a coach, you need to concentrate on what is essential, and that focus should be on the company and its executive leadership. Anything else is a wasteful distraction. 

The economy is becoming more challenging, so now is the time for a change of perspective. Instead of building personal brands, concentrate on customers' needs and building the business's brand. Take a good look at your organization's operations and see what you can do to improve. It is not glamorous, but what's best for the business's continued success. 

Until next time. 

Agile defeats Brutality on the Battlefield

War isn't about the brutality

Since the beginning of this blog over ten years ago, I have been an advocate of working differently.  The IT world was and still has plenty of talented jerks.  Women and people of color are underrepresented in the ranks of Software Engineers.  Finally, LGBTQ people labor under a cloud of etiquette in the technology business, which is a shame because much of the business would not exist without the contributions of Alan Turning.  Over my career, the situation has improved, but we have significant improvements yet to achieve.  I have fought for this change my entire career.  Reform is difficult in the best of situations.  Even so, it's even more complicated when people fetishize the past that did not exist or feel threatened by people involved in decisions or creative processes.

The most exciting thing to happen in the last fifty years of American history is the gradual acceptance of the variety of people who make up the United States.  The law and public opinion witnessed the approval of the religious and those who do not believe.  Gay people can live their lives openly, and that acceptance has led to a debate about the commercialization of the gay rights movement.  Technology workers from India and Pakistan have exposed American to Muslim and Hindu cultures.  We even see women participating in politics on a level not seen before.  

The progress generates a vocal and sometimes violent backlash.  Individuals in our society struggle with dealing with different types of people with who they do not understand or identify.  Both politicians and media figures have embraced this backlash to make money and gather political power.  This week pundits Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson lamented the state of our military for being too 'woke.' Never missing an opportunity to call attention to himself, Texas Senator Ted Cruz joined the public debate.  The conversation was so disingenuous that republican representative Adam Kinzinger decided to call out Shapiro's bad faith arguments.  I decided to share the tweet below.  

Good point Ben. What branch were you? https://t.co/DA8o17zY90

— Adam Kinzinger🇺🇦🇺🇸✌️ (@AdamKinzinger) September 25, 2022

I am not a military veteran and do not even understand the daily sacrifices our service members experience.  I do have a strong background in military history and war gaming.  It gave me some insight into the changes which happened to the United States military since the war in Vietnam and the shift to an all-volunteer army.  Shapiro, Carleson, and Cruz are wrong.  Brutality and firepower do not make a military successful; instead, it is diversity, intelligence, and agility.  I have first-hand knowledge about this subject because I am hosting two Ukrainian refugees in my home.  The stories they tell about the brutality of Russian troops are chilling.  There is also widespread evidence of war crimes committed by entire Russian units.  

A modern battlefield is a place that demands grace under pressure, the ability to improvise, and finally, a will to fight, and based on what we see in Eastern Ukraine, the Russian army lacks those values and skills.  The reason is that the Russian military still thinks it is fighting the Second World War despite its tanks, artillery, and planes. 

While attending training as a product owner, the instructor said something interesting to the class.  He said, "The largest agile organization is the U.S. Army." I chuckled a bit at that notion, but he reassured the class that it was true because everyone spends time in training to do their job.  Soldiers in the field are constantly tinkering around to do their jobs better.  Finally, after a mission, military people have "after-action reports," where they attempt to understand what they can do better.  "There is no way you have a volunteer army without an Agile mindset," he said. 

It brings me to a few articles on the web.  The first is from the Atlantic this week from Phillips Payson O'Brien.  I will include his article here, but he points out that the brutal army of Russia is getting its head handed to it because the Ukrainian military is more flexible, technologically conversant, and willing to learn.  Additionally, unicorn soldiers prove that LGBTQ troops are as deadly and heroic as heterosexual troops.  

The more informative article is from agile coach Dmytro Yarmak who became a Ukrainian Military Officer overnight and February 24, 2022.  Commanding a Ukrainian artillery battery, Yarmak says many of the skills he has as an agile coach make him a better leader of troops.  Empathy, pushing decision-making down to ranks, and giving people purpose and mastery instead of orders is how he runs his unit.  It is a powerful lesson that victory belongs to the agile instead of the brutal in war.  

This blog is a bit of a departure for me.  I do not like to talk about current political events and would instead focus on the ups and downs of the business world.  The Ukraine war has lasted six months, and I can no longer ignore it and its impact on the planet and my family.  It also reinforces my belief that we can have a more sustainable, sane, and satisfying work world if we abandon notions of brutality and ignorance for something more agile.  

Just as the Cultural Support teams of the United States Army proved that women have a role in combat during the Afghanistan War, it is evident that agility on the battlefield is more critical than brutality.  Something I doubt Shapiro, Carlson, or Cruz would understand.  

Until next time. 

 

Don't Hate Agile, Hate Bad Agile

The internet is awash in pixels about the trend of “quiet quitting.” Plenty of talented people have sounded off on the subject online.  I do not think I can contribute anything more substantive to the debate.  Instead, I want to talk about another trend popping up on the web.  Many people are talking about poor agile implementations, and I think we need to discuss it.   

Agile is a growing paradigm in the business world, and as an early adopter, I have seen a few bothersome trends.  Allen Holub on the Continuous Delivery YouTube channel gave some strong opinions about agile and how it is failing organizations.  I am an outspoken critic of poor agile implementations and dark scrum, so when I heard Holub bemoan the state of Agile, I found myself chuckling along in agreement about most of the things he had to say.  

The first trend is the shift from technology professionals becoming agile advocates to project management professionals advocating agile.  It is a standard survival strategy for business people to pivot when they see changes in the market.  The cohort of PMP-certified professionals witnessed the changes in the market and then retrained to become scrum masters and SAFe professionals.  It is not an alarming trend, but they took the values from traditional project management and business leadership and attempted to dress them up with agile terminology.  The effect was the worst of conventional project management combined with the frantic nature of iterative development.  Not to over-generalize, but these people are dogmatic and accustomed to enforcing rules instead of the pragmatic delivery of solutions.  These people enforce laws and generate outputs, but customer value is an afterthought rather than a central focus.  

Next, business leaders feel that their problems will evaporate if they do agile instead of having an agile mindset.  Jeff Sutherland points out that agile and scum hold a mirror up to the organization.  It is then up to the organization to effect change based on what they see.  Often problems are hiding in plain sight.  Philosopher Slavoj Zizek calls this unpleasant part of human nature Unknown-Knows.  We can ignore evidence when confronted with it.  I have witnessed many business leaders act this way because they cannot effect change or feel the necessary change might impact them negatively.  A manager loves the rapid cycle times, feedback, and transparency that agile offers but only sees accountability pushed down to the teams as valuable instead of accountability, which percolates into the organization as part of the agile mindset.  I liken the situation to someone who wants to get into better shape but can’t seem to quit smoking.  

Finally, the licensing and training for agile professionals are creating what Holub calls “a priesthood that does not understand the scripture they are professing.”  I am a big supporter of formal training in the technology business.  The pace of change requires any good professional to relearn their job every eighteen months.  The proper training and curriculum by the various organizations like SAFe, Scrum.org, and the Scrum Alliance are exceptional at teaching the formal theory of Agile, but in the trenches work of delivering software is often ignored.  It creates a situation where people trained in this manner fall back on the processes they were taught instead of concentrating on the individuals and interactions necessary to get work done.

A classic example is my recent interaction with an agile coach with a PMP certification and SPC credentials.  This person never wrote a line of software or delivered value to customers.  The only experience they had was providing reports to upper management.  Suffice to say; they failed spectacularly.  

The agile reformation is over twenty years old and is starting to show growing pains as the initial enthusiasts become supplemented with careerists and ticket punchers in organizations.  Don’t hate agile; instead, let us hate the people diluting and undermining its effectiveness.  I fight that lonely fight each day. 

Until next time. 

Meetings Do Not Have to be Awful

This blog has covered the basics of user stories, spikes, and dependency management.  Each of these skills is necessary to be a good product owner, and scrum masters need to be familiar with them if they are going to coach their teams to success.  I believe that well-written user stories and an adequately managed backlog will make the development process smoother.  It will also make the development team deliver value to customers at a more steady pace.  However, even the best backlog and well-written stories will create questions and confusion, particularly on teams that are not co-located or segregated into silos.  It is a situation where a coach needs to step in and facilitate delivery.  

A common joke in the business world is that you can avoid a business meeting if people learned how to send comprehensible e-mails to one another.  The truth is communication by e-mail is often the least effective way to collaborate on a complex task.  Tools like Slack and Microsoft teams are popular because they provide instant gratification of text and instant messaging.  Video conferencing tools like Zoom and Google Hangouts offer the illusion of being in the same physical space to allow people to solve problems.  These collaboration tools are not perfect, but as more people work from home, these tools are necessary to enable people to work together.  

The global economy is complicated, and the systems which keep it going require more expertise than one person can acquire. Hence, meetings are a necessary evil of the contemporary business world.  Since we spend so much time in meetings, it is up to agile professionals to make sure those meetings are productive.  I wanted to share a few tips to make those meetings more bearable for everyone involved.  

First, a meeting should only include the bare minimum of people needed to decide to get work done.  It is similar to the two-pizza rule which Amazon made famous.  Thus, if you are having issues with data in a database causing errors in a restful web service when you gather people together for a meeting, have representatives from each team who can do the work attend.  Have team members work together to fix a problem collectively rather than write up a defect and have it vanish in the product backlog.  I was borrowing heavily from the notion of mob programming because of lingering problems with differing priorities.  When you bring people together and give them apparent issues to solve, it creates a focus level that allows others to solve problems. 

Next, each meeting should have a simple goal.  If the team stays focused on that goal, the team will be more productive.   For instance, if the team needs to decide, any other discussion outside of the need to make a decision is wasted.  If a meeting is necessary for information gathering and consensus, then the forum's focus is different.  Keep the goal simple and make sure everyone knows what that goal is so the team can accomplish it. 

Finally, tune out distractions and focus during the meeting.  It is difficult to ask others, so lead by example by turning on your camera, putting away your phone, and avoiding muti-tasking.  Keeping the team focused will make the meeting go by faster.  Limiting distractions will also allow the team to concentrate on the meeting's primary goal, which should be part of each meeting agenda. 

One of the vital principles of agile is that face-to-face communication is the preferred means of exchanging information.  Meetings with the bare minimum of people, a clear goal, and few distractions are ideal for this principle.  The proper facilitation of meetings will make them less awful.  It will also help break down the silos which make your organization less agile.  

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.

Goodhart's Law is Going to Get You.

Goodheart's law strikes!

Information technology is hard work.  I have written about it before on this blog.  I have plenty of empathy for others who work in this profession.  I do not have much understanding of poor service or lazy behavior.  I am even less forgiving when large organizations brag about their success in public and struggle to do the basics in private.

I am at a client, and I have the following interaction with someone from the help desk; they said, “Can we close this ticket? If it ages any longer, it effects out SLA.”  My first reaction was surprise.  My second emotion was anger.  The help desk person was asking permission to close the ticket and open a new one because if they did not fix the ticket at a particular time, it would reflect poorly on him and his consulting company.  He was going to lie to make his response time look better than it was. 

It is human nature to please others.  British economist Charles Goodhart coined the maxim, “When a measure becomes a standard, it ceases to become a good measure.”  When you judge or pay people based on a measure, they will game the system in any fashion to make themselves look better.  You see this in economics.  It happens in video games and depressingly at work.  My help desk technician was living proof of Goodhart’s law.

Martin Fowler wrote a great article on the subject, and it outlines how to avoid this trap in agile practice.  Metrics are abused regularly in business.  In a large organization, the only way leadership can track progress is by reviewing these metrics.  Thus, the people doing the work are more focused on the outputs of hitting the metric numbers instead of the outcomes satisfying the customer.

I see service level agreements or SLAs as a necessary evil in business.  You have to hold vendors and third-party partners accountable.  Such a contract controls my current situation.  In a perfect world, my help ticket would age, and someone who could help me would respond to my issue.  The technician was afraid that if the ticket aged, they would receive a poor performance review or get fired.  It is an ugly situation, and if a company is going to succeed, they with have to address it. 

Large organizations need to focus on execution.  To focus on this goal, metrics and SLA’s need to be used judiciously; outcomes are superior to outputs.  It is a message which did not reach the help desk or his boss. 

Until next time.

Avoiding the Dumpster Fire

I have seen this ugliness before.

Technology is evolving and improving.  What is not improving is how we lead technology projects.  I have been in the business for twenty years, and it is clear how we lead technology projects needs significant improvement.  Last week news broke Hertz rental car was suing Accenture for 32 million dollars because it could not deliver improvements to its website.  I am surprised this kind of thing does not happen more often because plenty of large projects burn through obscene amounts of cash.  On the blog this week I want to talk about project failure and how it should provide businesses with a model on how not to do large projects.

Nathan Allen writes an excellent blog on all the things which went wrong during the Hertz affair.  It would be amusing if it did not involve the squandering of millions of dollars.  It contains all the usual culprits in a massive software delivery death march.  Salespeople made promises to executive and then forced technology professional to keep them.  Poor infrastructure at the client exacerbated poor development from the consulting company.  The deadlines were unrealistic, and the client abdicated all responsibility for the success of the project.  Add in a pinch of arrogance from a top tier consulting firm, and you have a perfect example of what scrum masters and project managers alike call a dumpster fire. 

Nothing is more dispiriting than working on a dumpster fire project.  It stinks, and it is fraught with getting your career burned.  Often, developers put their heads down and hope no one blames them for the catastrophe.  The main reason for this state of affairs is large projects are so big that any small setback will grind the project to a halt.  The state of affairs undermines the psychological safety of the people doing the work, and everyone is afraid to step forward and be honest with project leaders.  I suspect this was the primary factor why the project failed.

Deadlines were missed and missed multiple times.  When it was over, 32 million dollars disappeared.  What makes the entire episode more galling is Accenture refused to do more work unless Hertz paid more money to fix a broken project.  Failure crashed into failure setting more money on fire, and the only solution was to throw more money into the flames.

I have worked with several people from Accenture.  They are very good at selling products and getting paid, but they are not good at delivering results.  In the world where they work, it was more important to get paid than it was to provide value.  According to the agile manifesto, this is a refutation of the value of customer collaboration over contract negotiation.  It is clear Accenture is more interested in contracts than helping customers.

I entered the agile reformation because I wanted to build things rather than toil in obscurity.  I have worked on projects where we extracted money and value from the customer rather than deliver it.  Working on a project like this does pay the bills, but it does not move the practice of software development forward or improve the reputation of the development profession. It is up to experienced agile and project management professionals to pour cold water on these dumpster fires.  The business needs to set a standard which is more than watching piles of money burn.  Otherwise, we will have more trash fires like Hertz and Accenture.

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.

The fight against alienation is real

Don't inflict help

Any time a professional person attempts to change an organization they belong they are going to face a backlash.  Socrates would argue that this kind of behavior was the product of ignorance.  The philosopher would say once people knew the difference between objective right and wrong, people would choose right.  It was an optimistic view of human nature and one which is non-existent in the contemporary office.  Business people can be nasty, cruel and brutish as Thomas Hobbes would call them in “The Leviathan.”  A business person can exhibit the manipulative insincerity of Machiavelli’s “The Prince.”  Worse of all, professionals can exhibit the traits of the “Ubermensch” running roughshod over the “last men,” as Nietzsche would call them.  Backlash, is natural in human progress and it is up to coaches and scrum masters to address it.

Fear and uncertainty dominate the contemporary office environment.  Lots of factors are to blame for this state of affairs, but the principal factor is the shareholder value postulate of business.  In this postulate, shareholders or investors are the most important constituency in a corporation.  Customers, employees, and communities which also rely on the corporation receive secondary treatment because they are not as important as shareholders.  It is how we have educated a generation of business leaders since the 1970s.

Combine this trend with the deregulatory actions of the conservative movement, and you have a recipe for sterile and exploitive work environments.  It does not matter if you are blue collar, white collar or in service industries you are generating wealth for others with little upside to yourself.   Karl Marx called this the “labor theory of alienation.” It is one of the few things which Marx has written which has held up to scrutiny over the years.

So the agile coach is often in an environment where people are alienated.  People work hard enough not to get fired but not too hard because they will be singled out for extra responsibility with no subsequent increase in pay or authority.  The “company way” keeps a person paid and provides a modicum of security.  It is a miserable and uninspiring way to work.  Thus, the coach or scrum master is fighting on three fronts.  The coach must address the apathy of individual team members.  Next, they are changing the perspective of managers who often benefit from the alienation of the workers they are supposed to serve.  Finally, inertia in the organization acts as an easy alibi to resist organizational change. It is frustrating.  You are hired by organizations to help them change, and they actively oppose the change.

What I have discovered over the last few weeks is organizations want to improve; they do not know how.  Companies need scrum masters and coaches to help them.  They are looking for individuals to offer help rather than inflict it on the organization.  Often a scrum master acts as a therapist or pastor to an organization.  A coach needs to practice non-violent language and help others find solutions rather than dictating those solutions.  It is not easy, but anything worthwhile is going to be difficult.  Backlash is natural and it is up to the agile community to turn it back on itself to effect real change.

Until next time.

Why Companies Resist the "Agile Mindset"

Bad leadership creates a mindset which is not agile.

It is difficult explaining agile to others outside my profession.  The Agile Manifesto outlines four values and twelve principles which govern how people should approach work.  It is up to people like myself to make sure the manifesto and principles are not abused.  To be successful, it is not enough to have talented professionals doing the work and following a successful formula.  Those professionals need to collaborate as a team willing to take risks and innovate.  Scrum masters and agile coaches call this the “Agile Mindset.”

I have been working in the orbit of agile for nearly ten years.  It is a rewarding and challenging line of work.  Plenty of business leaders like the results agile brings to software development teams.  Research from the Standish Group has shown projects done in an agile manner are more successful and have fewer budget overruns.  Business leaders should be falling all over themselves to implement agile based on this knowledge.

In reality, agile faces serious organizational and cultural hurdles. I say this because agile places a strong emphasis on continuous improvement and corporate transparency.  For managers who are incompetent, absent, micromanaging, or power hungry agile is a threat.  Ken Scheweber says agile holds a mirror up to the organization.  Resistance to agile happens when an organization does not like what it sees and attempts to smash the mirror.

I have experienced this resistance first hand.  A manager was reduced to spasms of rage when I said he could not poach a developer for another project until a sprint ended.  A network administrator deliberately denied technical support for continuous integration and continuous builds because they did not want developers, “…touching my servers.”  Finally, I remember someone from governance say they had been doing production rollouts the same way for ten years.  It was puzzling to them why anyone would change a system which was working correctly for them.  I have seen and heard almost every alibi and excuse NOT to be agile.  Why is it happening?

The answer is the fear and uncertainty built into each corporation.  It is not enough to be profitable.  A corporation must be profitable according to the expectations of shareholders if not share prices can fall precipitously.  Years of retirement savings can vanish in an afternoon.  The focus on this shareholder value forces companies to squeeze profit out of anything.  For instance, employees are expensive, so layoffs, “right-sizing” and automation improve profits without doing the messy work of developing the product or increasing sales.  A Keurig machine where employees bring their coffee replaces a coffee pot with free coffee.  Employees are expected to do janitorial work, or empty trash cans less frequently.  Failure to maintain these profit figures or increase them leads to unemployment which is a pathway to financial ruin.

The power-hungry pursue leadership so they can inflict harm on others rather than suffer the everyday indignities of office work.  The absent hope invisibility will protect them from accountability.  The incompetent bluff their way in the organization and pin their failures on others.   The micromanager lacks trust that people can do their job, and it is a threat to their livelihood. Each of these poor leaders is anti-agile.  Poor leadership drives away good employees and slowly choke the organization.  These individuals survive because the pace of business at a large organization makes it easy for these individuals to hide in plain sight.

With lousy leadership, the only people that stick around are bad employees.  It becomes a feedback loop of awfulness.  It is why an agile coach spends plenty of time struggling against the organization, and it can be lonely.  It is sobering because you will face it often in your career.  So be prepared for resistance to the “agile mindset.”  It is not because people do not want to be successful.  Instead, the fear and uncertainty of a modern corporation discourage the mindset from happening.

Until next time.

Some thoughts on personal change

A typical day for a scrum master; doughnuts and coffee

I have called working in the business world bipolar, toxic and an excuse for mental illness.  I still feel this way, but along the way, I have encountered numerous pockets of decency and professionalism.  I have made plenty of friends along the way.  This week, I took a massive step in my professional career and resigned from my present organization.  I will be joining another firm on November 19th.

When I was growing up in the 1980’s, my parents and teachers spoke about how a career was a pathway or process.  You would join a company and throughout your career advance up the organization.  Your loyalty to the organization came with a measure of job security, and a means to support a family.  I was instructed people succeeded and failed based on individual merit.   The recession of the early 1990’s and over twenty years of being a technology professional have proven those ideas false.

I have spent plenty of time around the damaged, neurotic, and mean people who make up a significant minority of business professionals.  In my worst moments of vulnerability, I have choked back tremendous amounts of rage and bitterness.  In my better moments, I have forced myself to see the good in others.  I was disappointed from time to time, but often my optimism was rewarded.  I leaned on colleagues to muddle through the long days and lack of support, and I relied on my fellow agile coaches who saw something in me I did not.

It is easy to see the bad in the world and wallow in nihilism.  Creating a reformation is going to be hard work.  A modern shareholding company is the closest thing contemporary society has to medieval feudalism, and those in power will do anything to remain in charge.

Fortunately, there are others like me who are agitating for change and a serious business case for making those changes.  Developers, agile coaches, scrum masters, product owners, and random strangers want these changes.  Together, we will work to make the modern corporation more sustainable, sane, and satisfying place to work.  I have spent five years learning to be a great scrum master and coach.  It is now time to put that experience to use expanding the agile reformation. 

Until next time.

Agile Exposes the Bad Boss

A bad boss is just toxic.

I was getting on an elevator at the office and I decided to make small talk with someone as we were heading up to our respective floors.

“Ready to set the global economy on fire,“ I joked.

My fellow traveler got a gleam in their eye and said, “The flames are so colorful.”

I got off on my floor and breathed a sigh of relief.  The metaphorical pyromaniac was too eager to be pulling my leg.  The experience brought into stark contrast how tired many of us have become in the business world. The daily frustrations of working in a modern office force many professionals into the cynical behavior of inflicting harm on others as a means of satisfaction.  It is perverse, and it is wrong. The cynicism in the elevator is one of the reasons I have been such an enthusiastic proponent of agile.  I firmly believe there must be a better way to structure work so that it is sustainable, sane, and satisfying.

Inc. Magazine and Monster.com pointed out this week that 76% of bosses in business are “toxic.”  This toxic leadership is why so many people rely on jaded cynicism.  It is crucial as an agile coach and scrum master to break this cycle of toxicity.  According to the article in Inc. magazine, a toxic boss exhibits some or all of the following traits.

1. They are power-hungry
2. They micromanager
3. They are absent
4. They are incompetent

It is up to people like me to expose these bosses to the organization and coach them to be better.

The Power Hungry

Working for a power-hungry boss is a little like being a supporting cast member in Game of Thrones; you are going to wind up suffering a cruel ending to satisfy someone else’s ambition.  It surprises me how many business leaders think servant leadership is similar to the game “Masters and servants.”  The reality of servant leadership is much different.  In the end, what everyone needs to understand is a power-hungry boss is concerned about one thing; themselves.  A power-hungry boss will put personal interest over the needs of the company and employees.  Agile exposes the power-hungry because they often become impediments to shipping solutions.

The Micromanager

The hardest part of leadership is the lack of control we have over our fellow humans.  A leader can spend years training people to do the right thing and meet a certain performance level, and they can still disappoint at critical junctures.  To combat this helplessness, managers create processes and steps which they expect people to obey like robots.  It creates an illusion of control where employees do what they can to avoid hassle rather than what is necessary to succeed.  Thus, reports have perfect typography and proper tab spacing, but the data within that report shows lead conversion is falling.  The emphasis on working solutions instead of comprehensive documentation in agile should expose micromanagers.

The Absent

Over the years, we tell countless stories about military leaders who “lead from the front,” instead of from behind a desk.  I am currently reading one about William Slim who commanded the 14th Army of Burma during the Second World War.  It is easy to get caught up in the trappings of authority.  In an office of cubicles, having your office is a status symbol.  It gives you the power to shut people out and focus on administrative duties.  The autonomy and control over who has access is a powerful motivation for people to advance into leadership.  In reality, a leader has to be more visible to the people they are leading.  A leader should know about the people who make them successful.  If the leader is not around and they become distant figure the people who make them successful will ignore them in time of crisis.  Agile attempts to counter this kind of toxicity with its emphasis on face to face communication.

The Incompetent Leader

A leader should not be able to do your job, but at the very least they should understand what it takes to do your job.  What I have discovered over the years is people who have never managed a computer network or written a line of code often lead technology teams.  These people know how to manipulate budgets and control the project, but they do not know how to direct technology professionals because they think they are no different than shipping clerks or factory workers.  Agile with its emphasis on cross-functional teams and delivery exposes the incompetent.

I am a big believer in the idea that you should tell and expose the truth wherever you find it.  Sooner or later, someone in a position of authority is going to act on that truth.  I feel this way because it is how we defeated leaded gasoline and paint.  It is how we have reduced smoking in the United States by half since 1964.  It is an approach which led to the birth of agile.

If we are honest with ourselves, we should acknowledge the power-hungry, micromanagers, the absent, and incompetent and expose them so their toxic effect on the workplace can be mitigated.  It matters, and if we are not successful, all we can do is watch the pretty colors as the world burns.

Until next time.

Some Thoughts About the Holiday Rush

A little holiday rush

It is the final rush of 2017.  The business is pushing to squeeze as much profit out of the holiday season while the technical professionals are scrambling to bring on-line systems promised by the executive team.  It is a busy time and filled with pressures both personal and professional.  I find it hard to cope with this strain.  You spend time keeping the commitments of others and struggle to use the difference supporting family and friends.  This week I want to make sense of the holiday rush. 

For as long as I have been a business professional, the one motivation I have seen in business is fear; visceral, cold, unforgiving terror.  It is the anxiety that you are not hitting your sales figures.  It is the panic of the payroll system not interfacing with the accounting software.  It is a shame that comes with a sixty hour work week not being enough to deliver what your manager promised. 

The reason I became so enamored with agile and scrum is I wanted to work without fear.  I have been fired the week before Christmas.  My spouse left me because I finished up a consulting contract early.  Each meeting with quality assurance or my manager triggered spasms of fear.  There had to be a better way.  Agile and scrum provided a means to do things differently and escape that fear.

I have been in the agile practice for eight years.  I have had tremendous successes and bitter failures.  I have lost countless hours of sleep and overeaten junk food.  I have struggled against organizational inertia and corporate indifference.  I would not change a thing because the changes I have made mean that one less developer is living in fear.  That makes it a worthy goal. 

So as I fight crowds to get my shopping done and stay up late to ship software on time; I understand the sacrifice and frustration I put in for 2017 is worth it.  There is a little less fear in the office.

Until next time.

The Hero's journey is no substitute for a product

A hero's journey is not a substitute for a product.

Each entrepreneur goes through a sort of hero’s journey.  If they are lucky, once that journey is finished they will emerge out of the other side stronger, wiser, and accomplishing something amazing.  It is no secret the technology world uses the language of science fiction and fantasy.  That is why a company which becomes extremely profitable it is called a unicorn.  As an agilest and entrepreneur, I convince myself that I am lucky and smart enough to aspire to this status.  It is the story I tell myself.  In the dark moments, it is what keeps me going.  This week, I want to talk about when story telling crosses the shadowy line from inspiration to deception.

Carl Jung, one of the founders of psychoanalysis, articulated the idea the human species has a “collective unconsciousness.”  This collective unconsciousness is the common characters or myths humans use to describe themselves.  The collective unconsciousness also describes what the human species aspires to become.

Joseph Campbell then built on Jung’s work in 1948 with his book, “The Hero with A Thousand Faces,” which talks about the similarities between the mythologies of western and tribal cultures.  Roman Gods were compared with the traditions of Native Americans and Australian Aborigines.  The similarities were too hard to ignore.  We had academic proof that the human species has a common story telling tradition.

Now that this knowledge was out in the open it did not take long for others to exploit it.  One of them was a University of Southern California graduate, who just has a hit film entitled “American Graffiti.”  The other was a technology entrepreneur who cultivated the image of a mystic shaman while he sold music players and later phones.

To be successful, a company needed a story and a heroic figure to pitch that story to the media and client.  It was a way of cutting through the clutter and getting the message out.  That lesson was not lost on Elizabeth Holms who dropped out of Stanford to found her company Theranos.   She created an image which was a frittata of Hitchcock’s icy blond, Steve Jobs techno shaman, and the elegant intelligence of Meryl Streep.  Her story was simple, she was going to change the world making blood testing affordable and less invasive.  She was smart enough and stubborn enough to found a company and make it happen.

The technology press swallowed the story hook, line and sinker.  Soon she was featured in press write ups, on television promoting her company, and receiving millions of dollars in venture capital.  I will not go into the details of Theranos and the fraud they committed.  Vanity Fair Magazine has already done an outstanding job on that front.  Suffice to say, Elizabeth Holms had a good story to sell but didn’t have a product.  Her blood testing tool was nothing but fantasy.

The lesson here is that every story should have a grounding in reality.  You cannot change the world with your products if your products do not work.  The rumpled engineers have to build something before the myth makers in sales and marketing come along.  Telegenic good looks and a story are not a substitute for business acumen and a product.

Anyone who grew up during the stupid and giddy time of the dot.com bubble should have known how this story was going to end.  They chose to ignore it and suspend disbelief because the story was good.  Instead of a hero’s journey, what the public got was a true crime story of fraud and greed.
It is a sobering lesson for an entrepreneur and consumer.  I hope that we are smart enough to recognize it before it happens again.

Until next time.

Product Owner Anti-Patterns

If your product owner behaves like this
way they are doing it wrong: very wrong!

Every scrum master needs to be on the lookout for some anti-patterns in how product owners do their jobs.  In a perfect world, the product owner and the scrum master are like siblings working toward the same goal.  The reality is that mismatched business priorities and lack of cooperation by business partners can happen in any organization.  So this article will help you recognize the smells which you should look out for as a scrum master.  I hope a few of you will be kind enough to provide some suggestions of how to deal with these anti-patterns.  Many of these examples come from Roman Pichler’s excellent book on product ownership.

The Under Powered Product Owner

We have all seen this product owner.  They have the look of an abused animal.  They are not empowered to say “no” and they when they say that they speak for the business you know what they are really saying is they speak for their boss who will overrule them when it is convenient.  The under-powered product owner is a figurehead who is their because the scrum process says so.  The people with the real say will not abdicate their authority to let this product owner do the job.  The authoring of user stories consists of being called into the boss’s office to take dictation from the boss.  Priorities are set by the boss and if something goes wrong it is the fault of the development team rather than the boss.  Everything is a priority so nothing is a priority until something goes wrong which triggers a spasm of unsustainable development. 

The Over Worked Product Owner

According to Certified Scrum Master training, each software project should have a product owner and a scrum master along with a group of developers ranging in size from five to seven people.  Executives look at this as a waste of resources and often assign multiple scrum masters over many development teams and do the same with product owners.  The by-product is the over worked product owner.  Currently, at my firm I work with a Product owner with his work divided among four software development teams.  What this does is that it forces the Product owner to only spend the minimum amount of time necessary to get stories written and to make sure that priorities are getting fit into the sprint. The stories are rewritten by the scrum master or another developer so they are clear enough to be understood by the other developers.  Stand up meetings, retrospectives, and demonstrations are missed because they are not considered critical by the product owner.  The only time they turn up is when something goes wrong or when upper management is paying attention.  Quality suffers, and the notion of sustainable development is nothing more than a sick joke.

The Absent Product Owner

Sometimes projects are kicked off and the executives who demand the work can’t find or won’t hire a product owner.  The software is still expected to get written but no one can be bothered to write the user stories.  Software developers and scrum masters should just be smart enough to find out what creates user value.  This creates situations where what is constructed is often not what the business wants. Fortunately, the failure process is faster so the executive can ask questions like “what is wrong with you people?” and “this is a simple business process why am I paying you so much money to screw this up?” 

The Product Owner by Committee

Some projects have a great deal of visibility and multiple project teams; this creates the product owner by committee.  These are individuals who are all empowered to write stories in the backlog and they are also equally empowered to set priorities.  This pulls the development like taffy and forces the scrum master and the development team to juggle priorities with dexterity of chain saws.  One mistake creates, the loss of a limb and the destruction of a career.  In addition, the horrific aftermath generates meetings which are outside the scrum process and cut into the productivity of the team.  This is why many of us in the agile community are discussing how to scale large projects because multiple development teams and product owners leads to this situation.

The Rogue Product Owner

This is a product owner who has his own personal interests in mind rather than the needs of the business when creating work for the development team.  You know when you work for a rouge product owner when your boss comes to you and asks what your team is working on.  This is because the team is making life easy for the product owner but new customers are not being generated because the features to attract those new customers are not prioritized as highly by the product owner.  This undermines the agile process because the only value being created is for the product owner instead of the business. 

So there you have it; five different anti-patterns for product owners.  Be on the watch for all of them otherwise your life as a scrum master is going to become very painful.

Until next time.

The Drivel in Your Office

It looks cute and adorable but the by-product
of a bull and grass might be cluttering up your office. 

It is good to be back on the blogosphere.  I took a week off because a combination of personal and professional pressures made it hard to get anything done.  I have been finding it difficult to do any writing of a meaningful nature.  This week, I want to talk about the little things that add up and make you miserable in the office.

One of the common things office workers describe in great detail is called the spiral of rage.  In short, little annoyances pile up which are outside your control.  An office printer low on ink, combined with no coffee at the coffee pot, an irritating co-worker and unrealistic deadline pressure combine into an explosive and combustible mixture where you are a helpless passenger in your angry body.  We tend to trivialize these emotions and call them first world problems but to people in the cubical near you they are very real.

These problems impact productivity and the happiness of the people in the office because they illustrate the lack of control, empowerment, and authority they have earning a living.  They can’t pick up a phone and ask for help because there are too many layers of corporate bureaucracy between them and the person that can fix the problem.  What makes this more maddening is that the person who can fix the problem is a few desks down but is powerless to help without an e-mail from someone at the corporate office.

I call these situations “drivel” because it sounds sophisticated and it is more professional than the term my father uses for the by-product of grass and a bull.  In Harry G. Frankfurt’s essay “On BullS#%t”, he says that “drivel” is not lying but rather the use of language to obscure.  The contemporary office is filled with “drivel” and it is up to us as scrum masters to deal with it so our people can concentrate on work.

I find that most “drivel” is caused by the toxic mix of lack of authority and the devious application of authority by others.  For instance, that co-worker who can’t help fix the problem is overworked with numerous requests so they use the e-mail from corporate as an excuse not to help.  That person may also use that alibi to spend some time looking up train sets online or day-trading stocks.  The situation makes you feel equally powerless to do your job.

Another situation comes to mind when I was an entry level programmer at ServiceMaster.  Robert Pollard, the CEO, had just asked the office to go to business casual.  He still wore a bow tie to work.  Many of the executives continued to ware dress shirts and bow ties.  When promotions were announced, the executives who wore bow ties were advanced over those who did not.  It was a sick game of copy-cat but the message was loud and clear.  If you wanted to advance in the organization you needed to ware something other than business casual.

So “drivel” instead of shipping product guides your business.  It is aggravating but it is something that every scrum master needs to deal with and I am looking forward to hearing from other scrum masters about how you deal with it.

Until next time.