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.

Looking back at Agile2018

Spending time with fellow
 speakers Michele Sliger and Erika Lenz

This year is a personal and professional adventure for me.  I journeyed to the Scrum Alliance coaches retreat in London.  Last week, I was a presenter at the Agile 2018 conference.  Each of these experiences has made me a better scrum master and agile coach.  Now, that I am back home and have a more stable schedule; I will be blogging on a more regular basis.  This week a few take-a-ways from the #Agile2018 conference.

Data and Metrics-

The Wednesday keynote was Troy Magennis who spoke passionately about data and agile.  He proposed that agile professionals find a better way to present data to others and that data should inform decision making rather than reinforcing existing prejudices. 

He also provided data showing notions of teams being smaller than nine people may be counterproductive in larger projects.   He pointed to studies where groups of eleven to nineteen people are less efficient by a fraction compared to seven to nine-person teams.  He then argued that fewer handoffs between teams would make up for this difference.  It was provocative, and I look forward to people testing out his thesis. 

Presenting for the first time. 

The conference featured numerous presentations on metrics and data in agile.  I believe the use of quantitive data rigor in project and business management is a good thing.  For the remainder of the conference, numerous sessions covered the use of data and metrics in Agile. 

Outcomes are better than output-

The Agile Alliance with its speakers unwittingly created a theme for this conference.  The idea was outcomes of real features and progress are more important than outputs of stories, unit tests or story points.  Countless presentations emphasized working code delivering real-world value.  My presentation about the Cobra Effect reflected this dynamic as well.  When we measure outputs, we get perverse incentives.  When we measure outcomes, we get a better perspective of performance. 

Facilitation and Radical Candor-

The life of an agile coach or scrum master is a life of responsibility without any authority.  It is paramount to successful organizational change coaches develop superhuman skills of persuasion and facilitation.  I attended several sessions on how to be more credible and persuasive.  Many of these sessions pull from the insights of Kim Scott, a former Google Executive, who authored the book, “Radical Candor."

I learned plenty of valuable lessons at #Agile2018, and I look forward to the next conference in 2019 in Washington D.C.  I better start working on my presentation outline. 

Until next time.

That awkward talk about scaling

Portrait of a Scrum
Master as a young man.

When the signatories of the agile manifesto got together sixteen years ago, they had no idea what they created would be the basis for a reformation in the business community. I have been part of the agile movement since 2009.  I am a short timer.  During my brief agile practice, I have noticed a trend.  Software projects are getting bigger, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to lead these projects.  This week I want to talk about scaling agile as software eats the world.

When I first learned about agile and scrum, I felt like the apostle Paul on the road back from Damascus.  It was like being struck by lighting and seeing the world for the first time.  The team did work in sustainable chunks.  Stakeholders would receive rapid feedback about how the project was going.  If something was wrong, it could be escalated quickly up the chain of command.  The ability to create software would become more sane and human.

I was deeply deluded.  I did not count on the ingenuity of my fellow software developers to avoid work.  I was blind to the inertia which exists in the modern corporation which rejects new approaches to solving problems.  Finally, executives and financial professionals see agile as a threat because it undermines their need for command and control.  Confronted with these realities, agile and scrum became a means to help small teams ship software promptly.  As individual groups became successful, management began paying attention.  Soon entire Agile consulting teams sprang up offering Scrum Masters and developers who could rapidly bring software to life.  For three years, everything was going well, until enterprise software application attempted to be agile.  It was 2012 and agile hit awkward puberty.

Software teams would be sprinting at different cadences.  Some teams would be sprinting every three weeks while others would be on a two-week cycle.  Network teams were not even sprinting and would treat requests on a first in first out basis.  Finally, the marketing team would be making promises which others would have to keep.  I and others would ask, how do you scale Agile across multiple groups and projects with hundreds or thousands of developers?

The answer has fractured the agile world into three camps; scaling with scrum, SAFe, and LeSS.  I have received formal training in scaling with Scrum and SAFe.  I am looking forward to attending LeSS training in the new year.  Each camp is involved in a friendly rivalry with each other.  Each approach seems to be dealing with project scaling differently.

My first exposure to scaling agile was called, “scaling with scrum.”  The approach was very organic.  As an organization grew, the backlog of work would splinter into smaller backlogs.  These backlogs would then be delegated to teams and completed. In the end, these smaller backlogs would bubble up into a “master backlog,” so that leadership could track what was happening.  I liked it, but it did require plenty of administrative work.  It also assumed that everyone was in perfect communication with everyone else in the organization.

My next exposure to scaling came from the world of SAFe.  This framework has caught on with more prominent organizations because it has a command and control structure which is very familiar with executives.  Scrum Teams bubble up into release trains, and those trains have particular departure dates.  Networking, Software, and Hardware all obey scrum or a Kanban approach to work.  Leadership over three or four sprints then witness a “product increment” and inform what direction to take next.

I like SAFe.  It feels like a good marriage of agile and corporate structure.  I see three principle drawbacks.  First, executives can maintain a top-down approach to innovation and control of the software process.  Next, SAFe depends on quality Product Ownership, and this is the weakest area of the agile movement.  Finally, working in a SAFe development environment feels like being a cog in a giant wheel.  If we can figure out how to mitigate these issues, then SAFe might be the future of agile.

As an agile coach and scrum master, I have borrowed liberally from the scaling frameworks.  One of the tenants of the Agile Manifesto is, “…responding to change over following a plan.” So I found it necessary to incorporate elements of SAFe which work with those which can wait.  I use scaling scrum with scrum all the time in my agile practice.  I also rely on the suggestions and directions of my peers and management to get software shipped out promptly.

In my opinion, we are still in the awkward years of the Agile Reformation.  We are very good at shipping software from small teams, but when we try to scale to large multi-national corporations, we still have plenty of work to do.  Software is eating the world, and if we are not careful, it will consume agile and scrum.

Until next time.

Agile is about Deadlines

I have nothing on Martin Luther
but I know a little about software development.

Five hundred years ago a German monk named Martin Luther hammered 95 theses to a church door.  He was calling attention to corruption inside the Catholic Church and started the events which created the protestant reformation.  The agile manifesto is only sixteen years old, but it has produced a transformation in the business world.  I consider myself one of the evangelists spreading the word.  With every reformation, there is a counter-reformation, and today I would like to discuss one of the principle objections used by opponents of agile.

There is an excellent blog post written by the Wall Street Journal called “9 Myths About Agile.”  I strongly recommend it.  One of the most durable myths about Agile is the preconception that deadlines do not matter. Work gets completed, and deadlines are not necessary.  I wish to argue that deadlines are an essential part of the agile process and provide an example of how it works.

The most central feature of Agile and Scrum is the time box of the sprint.  For two to four weeks, the development team completes goals.  If they do not finish the stories in that period, then the sprint is considered a failure.  Failure is not a bad thing it is a learning opportunity for the team can to do better next time. Scrum relies on deadlines to focus effort and drive improvement.

Skeptics would then argue that sprints are well and good, but there are not firm due dates to communicate to upper management or the people paying for the work.  My reply is that with a sprint backlog following Roman Pichler’s DEEP model, it is easy to forecast when work will get completed.  The backlog is detailed to show the volume of work.   The backlog is estimated because it allows the product owner and the business to predict when work will get done.  The backlog is emergent so it can adjust to changing conditions as a project moves forward.  Finally, prioritization allows the firm to say what matters and what does not.

I am now going to provide a simple example.  The marketing department needs to incorporate social media into its website.   The works need to be accomplished by November 1st. The product owner gets to work, and come up with a list of features.  It should look like this:

• Milestone: Social media on corporate website (Due Nov 1st)
  • Feature: Facebook
  • Feature: Google+
  • Feature: Twitter
  • Feature: Pinterest

Now it is up to the Product Owner and development team to write stories.  After a week or two of effort the backlog looks like the following:

• Milestone: Social media on corporate website (Due Nov 1st)
  • Feature: Facebook
    • Set up a Facebook account.
    • Create Hooks into Facebook API.
    • UI for Social media on the page.
    • Create log internally when pages are shared.
  • Feature: Google+
    • Set up Google+ corporate account.
    • User Google tools to allow sharing of stories from the website.
    • UI for Social media on the Page.
    • Create log internally when pages and shared.
  • Feature: Twitter
    • Set up a corporate Twitter account.
    • Use Twitter API to post content.
    • UI for Social media.
    • Create log internally when pages are shared.
  • Feature: Pinterest
    • Set up corporate Pinterest account.
    • UI for Social media.
    • [Spike] prototype how to use Pinterest API.
    • Create a log when pages are shared.

The backlog looks typical to a scrum master or anyone on a development team.  The Vice President might understand what the group plans to do. The group estimates with story points because business people treat hours estimates as quotations of work.

• Milestone: Social media on corporate website (Due Nov 1st)
  • Feature: Facebook
    • Set up a Facebook account. - 2
    • Create Hooks into Facebook API. - 3
    • UI for Social media on the page. - 3
    • Create log internally when pages are shared. - 13
  • Feature: Google+
    • Set up Google+ corporate account. - 2
    • User Google tools to allow sharing of stories from the website.- 3
    • UI for Social media on the Page. - 3
    • Create log internally when pages and shared. - 13
  • Feature: Twitter
    • Set up a corporate Twitter account. - 2
    • Use Twitter API to post content. - 3
    • UI for Social media. - 3
    • Create log internally when pages are shared. - 13
  • Feature: Pinterest
    • Set up the corporate Pinterest account. - 3
    • UI for Social media. - 3
    • [Spike] prototype how to use Pinterest API. - 8
    • Create a log when pages are shared. - 13

The estimates from the team point out severe risk and ambiguity.  Also, the team has not worked with Pinterest, so they are going to do some experiments to understand how it works.  The sponsor of the product might get frustrated at this point and ask, “When will it be done? Can I have it by November 1st?”

The scrum master should be able to answer that question.  According to the backlog, there are roughly 91 story points of work.  The team can do 21 story points a sprint and each sprint is three weeks long.  It will take roughly twelve weeks to do the job. It is good news if it is June but bad news if it is September.

So a process of negotiation begins where stories get prioritized, and others ignored.  If the company sells food products, Pinterest may be more critical than Google+.  A media company which relies on breaking news might ignore Pinterest and focus on Twitter.  The product owner might notice that each social media site has its analytics suite and that an internal log is not necessary.  Fifty-two story points fall off the board.  We have 39 story points of work which we can get done in two sprints or six weeks.  If we begin in August, we will hit our due date.  The final board looks like this:

• Milestone: Social media on corporate website (Due Nov 1st)
  • Feature: Facebook
    • Set up a Facebook account. - 2
    • Create Hooks into Facebook API. - 3
    • UI for Social media on the page. - 3
  • Feature: Google+
    • Set up Google+ corporate account. - 2
    • User Google tools to allow sharing of stories from the website.- 3
    • UI for Social media on the Page. - 3
  • Feature: Twitter
    • Set up a corporate Twitter account. - 2
    • Use Twitter API to post content. - 3
    • UI for Social media. - 3
  • Feature: Pinterest
    • Set up the corporate Pinterest account. - 3
    • UI for Social media. - 3
    • [Spike] prototype how to use Pinterest API. - 8

So in this brief and simple example, I have shown there is a quantitative and drama free fashion to discuss projects where deliverables get negotiated, and deadlines get met.   Agile and Scrum can help people make educated decisions about what work can get done and when it will get done.  All that is required is a conscientious product owner, a dedicated development team, and a scrum master who will speak the truth to decision makers.

Agile is about deadlines, and I am willing to put my career at risk to prove it; just like that German Monk from five centuries ago.

Until next time.

Well Fargo is a Victim of the Cobra Effect

Anyone who follows this blog knows that I rarely hold a grudge and I don’t like kicking an individual or organization while it is down.  I am just not wired that way.  This week I am going to make an exception because of the lesson that can be learned for everyone in the agile community.  I am talking about Wells Fargo and their latest scandal regarding opening bogus new accounts for existing customers.

This isn’t the first time I have had my differences with Wells Fargo.  They were involved in a financial literacy campaign which denigrated humanities majors and liberal arts students.  Now thanks to federal regulators they are paying a $185 Million dollar fine for creating new accounts for customers without consent.  This gets to something the agile community call perverse incentives.

One of the central tenants of “scientific management” is that you measure how an employee does their job and then based on the data, as a manager, you figure out how to make that employee more efficient.  On the surface it seems like a smart idea.  A business person measures how work is done and then they strive to use that data to improve the speed and quality of the work.  This is where the perverse incentives come into play.  If you measure something and then use it as a performance incentive it ceases to be useful because it will force people to game the system to meet the metric.  This is called the “cobra effect” and I have blogged about it repeatedly.

Based on his testimony to congress, Well Fargo CEO John Stumpf said that he set up the incentives to “cross-sell” bank services to improve the company stock price.  This was the beginning of over two hours of uncomfortable questions and criticism from both Democratic and Republican congress members.  You know that you have done something bad when both Democrats and Republicans denounce you in public.

It did not have to be this way.  Stumpf could have measured performance and created training and education programs to make his staff learn how to better “cross-sell” products.  Instead, he used the blunt instrument of job incentives and it worked for a while until regulators and congress got involved.  Wells Fargo now faces additional investigation and possible criminal penalties.  It did not have to be this way but “cobra effect” can claim another victim and it could be a major American financial institution.

Until next time.