Agile Pushing the Limits of Productivity.

100 Years ago the Great War came to an end.

November marks the centennial of the end of the First World War.  The Western Front of Europe was a muddy ruin.  Germany transformed into a republic in the aftermath of defeat.  Communists took control of Russia, and the old order of world affairs, unchanged since the collapse of Napoleon, was turned inside out.  I doubt any of the survivors of the “Great War,” could imagine what the world would look like in a century.  To us, life during the First World War would look familiar.  Machine guns, anti-biotics, and automobiles existed and played an essential part in the war.  To people from that time, our contemporary world resembles science fiction with our smartphones, air travel, nuclear weapons, and medical advances.  One hundred years is a long time and the pace of change is moving swifter.  We live in an agile world, and we better start adjusting. 

If you look at consumption figures since the First World War, the United States and the rest of the world can feed, educate and clothe more people than any other time in human history.  We are awash in money, and the global economy makes it possible to manufacture more wealth today than at any additional time in history.  The main reason for this explosion of wealth and prosperity is twofold; first, technology and automation have made it possible to manufacture items at the cost of pennies, the other reason is productivity per worker has increased geometrically.  We live in a world where Moors’ law trumps Marxist theory or the wealth of nations.

It is possible to create products around the world with teams in India, Ireland, and the United States.  In a global economy work no longer sleeps as it can shift around the world.  Our communications and technology are outstanding.  The way we manage technology resembles the time of the Pharaohs.  Large groups of people were forced to collaborate, often against their will, to satisfy the desires of a monarch.  The management of projects has not improved since the pyramids.  Glance around a contemporary corporation, and you see projects being managed in the same primitive fashion.  Instead of whips and drums to motivate workers, spreadsheets and Gantt charts are used to keep the labor moving forward. 

Smart people gathered together to write the agile manifesto as a way to come up with a sustainable, sane, and satisfying way to do work.  Waste is slashed, and more value delivered to customers as a bonus.  It was a merger between the needs of the business community and how humans work.  The alliance is imperfect.  Dark Scrum and Fake Agile are everywhere.  The distribution of the productivity surge is uneven.  Finally, we have bumped up against the upper limit of automation and technological advancement.  The productivity figures for the last twenty years will reveal this challenge.

Modern corporations are the last vestiges of feudal culture in our current society.  Executives act like royalty and increasingly perpetuate their privilege through networks of wealth and education for their children.  Culture considers the middle managers or professionals who make these whims a reality waste.  Finally, we squeeze every drop of productivity from the people doing the work.  It is a cycle of abuse which is self-reinforcing.  It is also an obstacle to increasing productivity.

Agile and Scrum do not promise to get people to work faster.  Instead, agile techniques promise to interact with the customer in more rapid cycles.  Personal agendas, waste, and bureaucracy disappear as the people who do the work come in contact with the people who purchase the product or service.  It is a threat to the current way corporations operate.

The structure of a large global business is becoming an impediment to the productivity of the people who work for them.  If we are going to match the growth of the last 100 years, we must change how business works.  It is why I joined the agile reformation and why I continue to fight my lonely struggle to make work better.  I want my descendants to have the same wonder I have over the progress we have made in a century.

Until next time.

Grateful for the Agile Coaching Summit in Chicago

Left to Right: Ben, Me, and Mara.

A big challenge for any scrum master or coach is the feeling that you are alone in the organization you are leading change.  Cultural inertia, fixed mindsets, and the pressure to deliver have a way of draining a person of enthusiasm and devotion to the agile reformation.  Professionals like us need an opportunity to recharge our batteries and spend time among like-minded individuals.  The Agile Coaching Summit at the Guaranteed Rate headquarters in Chicago was one of those opportunities.

If you are an agile professional, there are plenty of opportunities to interact with others.  Social media features countless user groups for agile professionals.  Two significant conferences begin and end the summer, offering learning credits and a chance to rub shoulders with others.  The Agile Coaching summit in Chicago is different.  The Agile Coaching summit in Chicago is different.  It is more intimate with room for about 150 people.  Skill levels from new scrum masters to hardened coaches leading enterprise change at Fortune 500 companies are present.  What unites all of us is a desire to make a difference at our organizations and our devotion to agile.  It is a great mix, and it is why I attended the inaugural meeting and why I went this year. 

In a change of pace, we had not one but five keynote speakers.  Some were coaching language, others spoke about positivity, another was an improvisation coach talking about coaching conversations; finally, we learned about generational differences in the workplace.  It was upbeat, positive, and informative.  All these speakers spoke about the skills necessary to be successful leaders, listeners, and coaches.  Not a single one was an agile specialist.  The focus on these areas creates an impression that agile coaching is more about coaching others for success than agile.  It was a necessary pallet cleanser for a great conference. 

Saturday opened with coffee and breakfast and quickly moved into in-depth learning sessions.  I was busy learning about a wiki book imitative while others were discussing “agile fakes.”  Later sessions included conversations about how executives undercut agile, and it is always good to learn how to perform Kata experiments to change behavior.  The best part of this gathering is to see old friends and to meet new ones.  People swap war stories about creating organizational change.  We catch up on each other’s children, careers and personal lives.  I even spent time bantering about smart lights and how to set them up in a new house. 

Sunday is usually a laid back affair, but there were great sessions about coaching teams versus one on one coaching.  We had conversations about dealing with difficult team members and discuss product ownership.  It was a great weekend, and I strongly recommend it next year.  Many thanks to Emilio B. Perez and the folks at Guaranteed Rate for a successful summit and I look forward to ACS2000.

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.

How I became a Pirate Bear

I am a pirate bear. 

If you have been following this blog for any length of time, you understand that I have been an outspoken advocate of Agile and Scrum.  It has become the central focus of my career.  I am one of those eccentric and creative people companies want but do not know how to utilize.  I am an anomaly in the business world, and I am comfortable with it.

Like any other technology professional, I spend my free time learning new skills.  In preparation for the Scrum Coaches Retreat in London, I spent some time learning how to use #slack.  To be honest, I am still struggling with the platform.  It feels alien to me.  I have not mastered all the tricks, lingo or etiquette of a #slack community.  I think the same way I did eight years ago when I started using Twitter.  I was able to master that, and I will be okay with the new platform.

When you join a new social network one of the more important things you do is choose a name where others can quickly identify you and touch base.  The same is true with #slack and since the network does not allow for duplicate names people rapidly get creative coming up with handles.  I decided to give myself the moniker “The Pirate Bear.”  I posted a color picture of myself in a fez and began my journey in #slack.  I was swapping information, slide decks, and gossip with other agile coaches for a few weeks when someone from England asked why I chose “The Pirate Bear.” I did not have a chance to answer the question then but feel compelled to answer it now.

Since I began my vocation as a technology professional, I have been heavy.  I blame this state of being on the nature of the profession and by using food to cope with the pressures most technology professionals confront.  I am both big and tall.  It prompted the woman who loves me to label me her bear affectionally.  Additionally, many of my LGBTQ friends and colleagues say that I would pass as a “Bear” in the gay community. I felt awkward about this at first, but I embraced it as good-natured teasing from friends.

Piracy has been a significant theme in the zeitgeist since Johnny Depp wore the costume in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie.  Piracy has been the banner many rebels and outcasts have embraced since the age of sail.  Illegal radio stations sailed the North Sea offering programming the BBC would not provide. It became a pirate radio which has been copied by numerous radio stations around the world.  When Steve Jobs put together the product team of the first Macintosh, he told each of the engineers, “It is better to be a pirate than to join the navy.”  The secret pirate crew then changed personal computing forever.

It sounds very glamorous. The swashbuckling and mythology of piracy is quite appealing.  The reality is that a pirate’s life was dangerous and cruel with significant shifts between poverty and wealth.  A pirate sailor often faced execution if captured and often succumbed to illness at sea.  You chose piracy for many reasons, but the main reason is that you did not fit in anywhere else.

In the sclerosis of most corporate environments, if you are going to make a change, you will have to be a pirate.  You will have to be smarter, nimbler, and more unconventional.  You will suffer from being an outcast.  You may also fail in an embarrassing and ignoble fashion.  On the off chance none of that happens, you will cut a romantic figure in front of black sails and wallow in gold and rum.

Given a choice between the routine and tedium of a professional career and being a pirate; I choose to be a pirate.  It is why I am the pirate bear on #slack.

“Roar!”

Scrum does not have too many meetings

Each reform in society is confronted with a backlash.  The Protestant Reformation spawned the Inquisition.  It is natural that those threatened by it would oppose progress.  It is happening in businesses across the nation with the Agile reformation.  A common objection many have toward agile or scrum is there are too many meetings.  This week I want to discuss agile and meetings.

According to the scrum guide there are four events in scrum, they are:

• Sprint planning
• Daily Scrum or Stand-Up
• Sprint review 
• Sprint retrospective.

In the span of a work week, these meetings should be brief and informative.  A stand-up meeting should take approximately fifteen to thirty minutes.  If it takes longer, you should review how you are facilitating this meeting.  A sprint review is a demonstration to the business users and should take no longer than an hour.  Retrospectives allow a team to inspect and adapt their process.  Typically, this meeting is about sixty to ninety minutes in length.  Finally, there is sprint planning where the development team estimates stories and plans the next race.  Sprint planning can take as little as an hour and as much as six.

Based on this rough estimate we can determine how many hours the agile team is spending in meetings.  Based on a three-week sprint where is how it break down.

• Typical work week 40 x 3 = 120 hrs.
• Standup meeting – 0:15 x 15 = 3:45 hrs.
• Sprint Planning – 6 x 1 = 6 hrs.
• Sprint Review – 1 x 1 = 1 hrs.
• Retrospective – 1 x 1:30 = 1:30 hrs.
• Total Time budgeted in meetings = 12:15 hours of a 120 hrs. sprint.

Thus, a developer at worse case scenario spends just over ten percent of their time in meetings.  The remainder of the time is devoted to writing software and creating value for customers.  It is significantly less than in the world of waterfall project management with its numerous meetings to cover everything from architecture to problem-solving.

The scrum master and product owner spend their time in meetings, but it is to protect the team from being distracted from delivering value.  It is why I attend meetings about I.T. governance or architecture so that my team does not have to.  It is why the product owner is answering customer inquiries and meeting management.  We attend the meetings so the development team can concentrate on what is important which is shipping code.

It is why I find the argument that agile has too many meetings disingenuous.  People who are opposed to agile are not opposed to the meetings they are opposed to the routine nature of the meetings and the expectation to ship working code at the end of each sprint.  Transparency of this nature quickly exposes the unwilling, incompetent, or invisible people in an organization who do not deliver value.  When we discover these individuals, it creates a backlash in the organization.

So, scrum and agile does not spend too much time in meetings; it concentrated on what is essential.  An agile team’s first and foremost duty is to deliver value to the business; anything else is waste.  I am looking forward to hearing from you and knowing what you have to say.

Until next time.

This reformation may take a while

Progress takes time.
  Image courtesy of Pawel Jonca.

The history of progress and social change is rocky.  The first feminists from the Seneca Falls convention did not live to see the passage of the women’s suffrage.  Women would continue to struggle for equal rights and acceptance outside the home and today women in technology face the soft misanthropy of “Brogramer” culture.  It is discouraging that each step forward leads to another pushback from people who feel threatened by that change.  It has been on my mind as I see businesses struggle with accepting the agile reformation sweeping business. 

Like many technology professionals, I receive e-mail messages daily from recruiters.   These individuals want me to sell my home and relocate to remote parts of the country for six to twelve-month contracts.  I ignore these messages politely or reply that I am not interested in relocation.  This week I receive a notice for a “scrum-project manager.”  I was intrigued.  I glanced at the requirements, and this is what I found. 

• Two to three years’ experience in SCRUM
• Two to three years’ experience as a BA/Project manager.
• One or more years of Experience in JIRA.
• Great Communicator.
• Organized.
• Salary 50k to 75K

I did a double take and then attempted to unpack this request.  According to the Scrum guide, there are only three roles; developers, a product owner, and scrum master.  There is no mention of a project manager.  Agile and Scrum according to the manifesto put, “Individuals and interactions over process and tools.”  I appreciate the author of the job post understands that communication skills and organization are not optional for a scrum master.  Finally, the salary requirements are laughable and way below the $100,000 national median compensation stated in LinkedIn.  For a company attempting to adopt agile, this is not a credible offer.

The person who wrote this job requirement should be embarrassed.  The salary is in the lowest percentile quarter of prevailing wages.  The author does not understand the role of a scrum master, and they confuse agile experience with project management.  Anyone who is thinking about this role should reconsider.  It will stunt your career growth, and the company appears to be paying lip service to Agile.

It is my hope businesses will do a better job writing these requirements and recruiting proper agile talent.  Unfortunately, this means executives and human resources professionals still have a long way to go before they understand agile and what it takes to be a twenty-first-century company.  Just like the feminists of Seneca Falls, after seeing job requirements like this, I am afraid that I may not live to see that change.

Until next time.

A sweet and sour career

The stuff of life.

It is the Christian holiday of Easter.  I am spending time with my family and friends.  I am also taking a look back at the start of the year.  It seems like only yesterday, I was counting down to midnight and wearing silly hats.  Now, I am wrapping up the first quarter.  I am unsure where the time goes.  This week, I would like to do a little reflection on the ebb and flow of being a scrum master.

I have repeatedly said on this blog being a scrum master is a calling.  It takes devotion and a touch of insanity to lead software developers and organizational change. I spend my days helping people ship software and then my evenings learning how to be better at my profession.  Someone I respect very much calls it the “sweet and sour” of a career.  Experiencing hardship makes accomplishment more meaningful.

This week I discovered I would be presenting at the Agile 2018 conference in San Diego.  I will be talking about the Cobra effect and how you can fight it.  It is a pretty significant accomplishment, and I am deeply grateful for the opportunity.  It also encourages me that I am not some voice in the wilderness.  I have spent nine years as an agilest, and it is profoundly satisfying that people are interested in the insights I have picked up along the way.  It is a lovely feeling.

The sour is the daily grind of putting out software.  I take calls from India each day.  I work with product owners to help them be successful.  I have created close bonds with my development partners because the pressures of shipping software are enormous.  It is early mornings and late nights.  It is cold coffee and petty arguments.  It is what must be done to create value for the business.

I accept the sour to appreciate the sweet.  Family, friends, and loved ones talk me through the sour times and help me celebrate the sweet.  It is not glamorous or pretty, but I have found meaning in the Agile reformation.  My life is a mixture of sweet and sour.

Until next time.

Eat up

I feel like a shark!  "Chomp!"

Social movements and organizational change are difficult to measure, and it is particularly hard to do in the world of business.  The business press concentrates on investing and accounting.  Since the beginning of the agile reformation, those of us involved in the change have openly wondered if we are making an actual difference.  As 2018 begins, it looks like agile is becoming mainstream and successful.

In 2011 a famous editorial appeared in the Wall Street Journal, It was titled, “Software is eating the World.”  The principal thesis was for companies to succeed they have to behave more like software companies.  It was a daring argument.   The seven years which followed have vindicated that notion.  Google, Tesla, Amazon and a funny project called Bitcoin are dominating headlines and the business community.

Tesla is still struggling to meet its production commitments and Bitcoin, to me, feels like a blue sky stock but what all of these firms have in common is a willingness to innovate, iterate, and move fast to satisfy customer demand.  Even companies who lost their way are embracing blockchain technologies, cloud computing, and rapid software development. 

It is satisfying to know that my career choices have mirrored changes in the business.  While business is changing business leadership is struggling to keep up.  Organizations charts still matter in many places.  Command and control measures which existed for years are difficult to discard, and inertia prevents most organizational change.

It has created a quandary and spawned an entire industry of coaching and consultants, who are attempting to show others how to do business with the agile paradigm.  What these coaches discover, is a business is a social construct along with a business entity.  The ego of a director may be more important than the needs of the company.  Board members excuse a lousy quarter because they golf with executives.  Whole industries condoned sexual harassment and assault as long as the abusers generated revenue.  

Which is why I find the turnaround at Microsoft so fascinating.  They went from a sales culture under Steve Balmer to an engineering culture under Satya Nadella.  After product failures like Zune, Vista, and Windows Phone, the organization decided to place its future in the hands of a software engineer who felt building better products was the path to commercial success.  It is a gamble which has paid off handsomely.

Microsoft has embraced Agile, and it is paying enormous dividends.  That is why this week an article appeared in Forbes called, “Agile is eating the World.”  The reformation is growing, and the success is getting noticed.  It is a satisfying development to me.  I am no longer a lonely missionary in the wilderness, but a professional at the table is making a difference.  It is nice to see the times change.

Until next time.

Explaining being a scrum master to civilians.

A scrum master is a servant-leader

One of the things which make working in the 21st century so dispiriting is most people cannot easily describe the work they do.  During the middle ages, people were farmers, blacksmiths, nobles or merchants.  The roles and job descriptions were easy to understand.  Today, the work of content curators and account managers creates plenty of ambiguity and misunderstanding.  This week on the blog, I want to clarify the definition of a scrum master.

The Elevator Pitch

When I am at social functions, networking events or family gatherings people ask me what I do for a living.  I say scrum master and I get a puzzled look, and they ask me, “What kind of job is that?”

This is what I say.

“I build software and help developers and businesses develop software on time, on a budget, and with minimal bugs.”

The person nods and smiles, once this sinks in and switches to a new topic.

The Scrum Master Syllabus

When I describe the job of a scrum master, it often looks like a college syllabus.

A good scrum master is:

• An excellent communicator with individuals, small groups, and the organization.
• They understand the agile manifesto and principles of Agile and practice them every day.
• They are a trainer and coach making product owners, developers better and their job.
• They educate business leaders and stakeholders on how agile is making their business better.
• They are good listeners
• They have grace under pressure
• The can educate developers on TDD and SOLID development
• They are servant leaders
• They ship working software regularly.
• They make a god damn difference.

These are the signs of a good scrum master, and I try to aspire to these goals each day.

The bottom line.

Being a scrum master is a hard job.  It is also a calling of sorts closer to being a priest or pastor than a software professional.  A good scrum master can reinforce your belief and faith in agile, or they can turn into a tool of oppression.  I have never been into oppression, and I want to be someone who makes a difference.  That is why I am a scrum master and why I have such high standards for the profession.

I hope this clears up any misunderstandings.

Until next time.

March of the Flaming Squirrels

Pay attention to the Squirrels.

I have spent over 18 years working in technology.  In that time, it still surprises me how many people think what I do is magic.  Furthermore, those people think setting up complicated database and web systems are like plugging in a lamp and turning on a switch.  This creates all sorts of insane and absurd situations in the work place.

When I was a young person, one of the key measures of success was the ability to handle large piles of work with deadlines.  The metaphor my teachers used was the story of a squirrel.  Squirrels hibernate during the winter months but they still need to eat so during the summer months they spend a majority of their time gathering food to store for the winter.  They also binge eat in the fall so they have enough fat to hibernate.

I took this metaphor to heart and applied it to my undergraduate and graduate work.  Each day I spent a little time reading writing and gathering nuggets of information to help myself become successful.  It worked and it seems like a good strategy.  You do little things today so that big challenges of tomorrow don’t seem so daunting.  Then I became a software professional.

The technology world has too much work and not enough qualified people to do the work.  So instead of small efforts adding up to eventual success it takes super-human effort to prevent getting swamped from the demands of the business.  It is a like being a squirrel which is caught in a forest fire.  You still have to gather food but you also confront the grim reality of painful death.

I am spending much of my time telling business people why these “fires” are bad for the business and the software developers.  As author Jimmy Leppert says, “…firefighting creates a culture of arsonists.”  In my mind, where there are arsonists there are millions of dollars of destruction and countless maimed and dead animals.  The software developers become squirrels set ablaze.

I blame a lot of things for this.  Project are funded poorly with a fixed bid mindset.  Americans do a poor job training people to be engineers and technical professionals.  Many business leaders who manage software project have no practical knowledge about how software works.  Finally, short term thinking among business investors and leaders exacerbate this forest fire thinking.  Thus, your organization, which is a fragile ecosystem resembling a forest, is beset by arsonists with flame throwers and chain saws.

I do not have any cures for these problems but I do want to point them out so people who are smarter and more influential can fix them. In order to fix a problem, you need to understand what is causing it.  So if you see your technology staff running around like flaming squirrels you should be smart enough to kick the arsonists out of your organization.

Until next time.

I Can't Believe I was Being this Dumb

I can learn a few things from this guy.

A scrum master is a leader without any authority.  They are someone you follow because they help you become a better developer and help you finish projects in a timely manner.  It is not for everyone.  I spend much of my time in self-reflection and attempting to improve my skills.  I also have to control my autocratic and curmudgeonly nature when I am dealing with individuals who are not pulling their weight.  On twitter, I had an interesting interaction with someone I respect in the user experience field Gail Swanson and I think there are a few lessons to be shared.

Like many of us, she uses twitter as a place to vent frustrations, test out ideas and share knowledge.  I respect her and follow her because she has plenty of things to say about being a good user experience person.  Then she shared this on twitter.

Imagine if your boss referred to the male employees as 'boys'. Doesn't feel right, does it.

— Gail Swanson (@practicallyUX) August 12, 2016

I responded with the following

I use "Ladies. And Gentleman" is that acceptable? https://t.co/5enCJj4YpZ

— (((Ed Wisniowski))) (@eeeThree_ed) August 12, 2016

Finally, Angela Dugan chimed in and she might as well have dropped a mike.

@eeeThree_ed @practicallyUX how about "team" or "everyone". Unless it's a super gender specific topic/event, why even bother being specific

— Angela Dugan (@OakParkGirl) August 13, 2016

It took some time for this to sink in but it dawned on me that words and behaviors matter.  What I consider being respectful to my developers comes off as condescending and superior.  How I spoke to them effected their performance and it need to change right away.  I was being dumb.  So now, I use the terms “everybody”, “team” or “folks” to refer to the people I am working with.  I was doing something dumb and it took people I respected to point it out to me.

A contemporary scrum master has to interact with numerous people.  They work with off shore teams and on shore teams.  They are mixed by gender and religious affiliation.  I have Sikh, Muslims and Hindus working for me off shore.  On shore, I deal with evangelical Protestants, Neo-Pagans and Atheists.  What unites all of us is that we know how to code and that we are working on the same project.  I as the scrum master need to respect these cultural differences and keep everyone focused on the end goal.  My personal feelings or prejudices need to called out and controlled if I am going to guide these individuals to their goal.

It also means that the macho cruft that you see in software development needs to go away.  I am fortunate enough to work at an organization where women are incorporated into all of the development teams.  I think that has improved the development teams.  The testers, technical leads, developers, and QA people who are female are regular members of the teams and because of their skills have earned the respect of their male colleagues.  For our organization, diversity produces better results.

So there you have it; a scrum master needs to change and adapt.  The increase of off-shore development and the number of woman in the profession, has made me confront some of my own prejudices and make changes. I hope others can learn from my example.  I am just trying to be a better scrum master and guy.

Until next time.

Laquan McDonald can teach us something about scrum.

They look cute until they undermine your efforts

One of the hardest things for a scrum master to do is lead organizational change.  For example, showing developers how to do SOLID development and test driven development is not enough.  The developers should see the utility of what they are doing and be compelled to practice it.  If your development team refuses to follow your lead you are stuck.  This week I wanted to discuss what happens when institutional needs meets resistance from the front line employees.

There has been plenty of news in the press about the killing of Laquan McDonald.  The young man was carrying a knife and walking away from a police officer when he was shot 16 times by a Chicago Police officer.  Video footage of the police officer using lethal force on McDonald was caught on a dash board camera in a police car.  The audio for the event was lost because the microphones were either disabled or broken.  McDonald’s death has sparked protests and calls for the mayor of the city to resign and has made the election of the attorney general a wide open race.

What is not being said in all this protest is that police officers have been wearing body cameras and using dash board cameras for roughly five years.  The shooting of McDonald also included a three year effort by the city to prevent the video footage from reaching the public until a judge gave the order during the December of 2015.  So on the one hand you have efforts to make the police department more accountable and on the other the information is suppressed by self-interest by police, politicians and prosecutors.

Currently, news has surfaced that eighty percent of the dashboard cameras and body cameras have the audio feature disabled on them.   There is a great deal of doubt as to whether this is because of tampering among police officers or poor maintenance; either way the optics look very bad.

So you have a government which wants to make the police force more transparent and cut back on the use of deadly force in communities and you have a the members of the police force with equipment which does not make that happen.  There is a lesson here for the scrum master.  If you are going to institute change then that change needs to be embraced from the bottom up rather from the top down.  Otherwise, you will be confronted with sabotage, monkey-wrench efforts, and stonewalling.

It is a shame that it takes a dead kid and embarrassing headlines to make that point.

Until next time.

Globalization and a Scrum Master

Cold but keeping on.

Chicago in January, is an exercise in mental toughness.  I am sitting at my desk very early in the morning and it is single digits in Fahrenheit and deep in the negative in centigrade.   In spite of these difficult conditions, the tap water is still flowing and my house thanks to central heating is warm.  I am connected to the world wide web and each week day I communicate with my development team in India who live eleven and a half hours in the future away from me.  I live in the global economy and for good or ill it shapes my life.   This week on the blog I wanted to discuss what how scrum masters like us mean to that global economy.

One of the realities of technology is that it has increase the productivity of workers by a significant margin, the margin is so significant that wages have not kept pace with these increases.  According to Manfred B. Steger, in his book “Globalization: A Brief Insight,” this has created three visions of how the world economy works.  These visions are: market globalization, justice globalization, and jihadist globalization.  Agile and the scrum belong to the justice globalization vision of this new world.

The market globalization vision is pretty familiar to many of us in the United States.  It is dominated by notions of free-trade, economic neo-liberalism, and clear winners and losers.  Jihadist globalization is a rejection of those values.  It is a longing for “the good old days” whatever those were and can be represented by groups as diverse on the political left and right as ISIS and the militia groups occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.  Justice globalization in many respects is a triangulation of these two paths.  It incorporates values from Occupy Wall Street, Amnesty international, The Agile Reformation, and the latest innovations from the social sciences.  Let me explain.

Instead of globalization having winners and losers, those into justice globalization, see beneficiaries.  From the Uber drivers picking up passengers, to the members of the corporate board room; all of them receive the benefits of the work done and a services provided.  Work is sustainable, efficient, and provides dignity.  If it seems a little Utopian it is because it is.  Not only does it require changes in how work is done on the corporate level which is what I think the Agile reformation is attempting to do but it is going to require changes in government policy and cultural perception.  It is not going to be easy and it is going to require the collaboration of many people.

So where does the scrum master come in to this world?  We are the ones enforcing the values and principles articulated in the agile manifesto.  We are the ones making sure that the work is sustainable and of a high quality.  We have to be the ones saying “no” to people in authority when they are asking nine people to make a baby in one month.  We make the phone calls when there are obstacles in the project.  Each day, a network of technology professionals exchange phone calls across the world making sure that everything is going well and keeping the wheels of commerce spinning.  We are agents of social justice and change.  We make it possible to do business in the cold nights of January and the warm month of August.  Not a bad calling, if you ask me.

So to be a scrum master is to throw your lot into the world of Justice globalization.  Not a bad place to be in the 21st century.

Until next time.

Are these factors holding back your agile adoption?

When the emperor has new clothes we need to speak up.

Once in a while I see something and it inspires me.  I get fired up and feel like ranting into the night like some kind of crazed deviant looking for windmills to joust.  This week I had one of those moments and it steeled my resolve.  I am an Agile professional and I want to help change the way people work.  

It all began when I read a fantastic blog post from Isaac Socolick, talking about Legacy thinking versus Agile thinking.  This got me thinking.  It has been fifteen years since the agile manifesto and plenty of business organization are struggling to adapt to the new paradigm of how business works.  I have been part of this effort for the last six years.  Why is change so difficult for these organizations? I have a few hunches.

Legacy Funding of projects-

At large organizations products are funded on a limited basis.  Teams are funded, spun up and then they are wound down once the project is completed.  This is a standard water fall approach.  Once the project is completed then it was folded into the support stack of the organization to be forgotten.  No consideration for Net Present Value is made.  Often input for what the customer wants is ignored and the project is seen as a test for a project manager or executive who wants to advance.  Finally, the process is managed not by operations people who understand the business but by accountants and CPA’s who understand pushing money around the firm.  So projects are funded with a thrown together team, with a defined deadline, and with limited input from the customers.  No wonder projects fail so often in corporate settings.

Quid Pro Quo behavior –

I have mentioned this before in this blog but bureaucratic organizations are organized around rules and favors.  The rules are covered by regulatory compliance and common practices in the organization.  Favors are people deliberately circumventing those rules in order to accomplish something.  This sets up a system of favors which makes the Tammany Hall politicians of the nineteenth century look like pikers.

This forces business leaders to trade favors with each other to accomplish personal and business goals.  Many of these favors happen under the noses of leadership because to expose these favors would open the firm up to scrutiny from regulators or worse upper management.  So what happens is a “Tit for Tat” or Quid Pro Quo culture were executives do favors for each other rather than focusing on the customer.

Ego Driven leadership – 

Since Lee Iacocca took Chrysler in the early 1980, a new kind of business leader has emerged.  This was the business person and celebrity.  They were in the company commercials.  They spoke for the company when asked to testify to congress and they behaved like monarchs running their business empires with imperial control.  Unfortunately for every, Lee Iacocca there were numerous failures such as Carly Fiorina, Al Dunlap, and the most infamous Ken Lay who transformed Enron into securities fraud and criminal organization.

People seeing this trend in business decided to jump on this bandwagon.  These executives in training began worrying about their own personal brand rather than how they were going to run the business.  They discovered with a few accounting tricks they could cover up, poor sales, a lack of customer service and poor innovation.  They further burnished their credentials by leading legacy style projects which improved their brand but did not help the business.  Developers have had a name for this for years, they call it "ego driven development".  Well ego driven leadership is the byproduct and it is hurting businesses all over the world.

I got involved in Agile and the reformation it is leading in business for six years.  I have the enthusiasm of a new convert but I know that trends like the above are going to hold back the necessary progress which we are trying to achieve.  We need to expose these obstacles in order to remove them.

Until next time.

Servant Leadership means gaining knowledge and teaching others.

Clerks still get a bad rap but they are
leading the Agile Reformation. 

There are plenty of things to discuss when you get into the world of agile development.  There are certifications and long nights working with developers.  There are times when you feel like a nursery school teacher trying to get your people working together.  Other times there are moments of quite contentment where you realize you are doing the right thing and that you are making a difference.  Agile is many things.  It is not boring.  This week on the blog I wanted to share a little wisdom I learned many years ago as I wandered my college campus.

This week was commencement week at Illinois State University. Graduate students and undergraduates walked for ceremonies.  What made the experience more heartfelt for me was that some of the people walking were the children of friends and family.  For all those newly minted Redbird alumni, I just want to say welcome to a very special club.

The moto of the university is “And gladly would he learn and teach,” although it has been changed since I went to campus.  I thought this bit of wisdom came from the Bible but instead it comes from Chaucer and describes the medieval clerk.  A clerk.  The person who makes sure the bills are paid.  The person who makes sure the paperwork is in order and the person who for all of history has toiled anonymously under tyrants, kings, generals and thought leaders.  No one in elementary school dreams of being a clerk.  The life of a doctor, firefighter or astronaut seems much more satisfying.

Here is a secret, the modern world would fly apart without clerks.  The trains run on time because someone has a job to make sure that they do.  They have a staff of people who make that happen. The trains run on time in bad weather and during contract negotiations.  The trains work when budgets are cut and the politicians have unrealistic expectations.  Over the last 400 years clerks, using engineering skills and bureaucratic knowledge have created the modern world we live.  That is a mighty burden on a class of people which most of us look at with shame and contempt.

It is the clerk and the teacher who has the burden of 400 years of western civilization to maintain.  If we go back to the ancient Egyptians, that burden is over four thousand years of history.  All of it managed by clerks who were educated with the best knowledge of the past and willing to try and improve on existing practices.  Where I am going with this is that it is up to us, those of us many people negatively refer to as clerks to try and make a difference in our offices and communities.

The agile movement was founded not by business leaders but project managers.  These clerks were the people who noticed that what they were doing was not working and decided that some radical change was in order.  This is why we have the agile manifesto.  This is a reformation happening not from the C-suites or boardrooms of power.  Instead, it is taking place in the cubicles and the leaders of this reformation are clerks!

If you are wondering how this ties back into my nostalgia for my Alma mater.  The slogan is: “And gladly would he learn and gladly would he teach.”  A good servant leader is a lifelong learner.  Each day they take the knowledge they have gained and share it with others.  So whether it is explaining heteronormative theory to the HR lady or SOLID programming principles to a junior developer, it is up to a servant leader to be learning all the time and sharing our knowledge with others.  As a Scrum professional and agilest it is up to us to lead reformation by gladly learning and gladly teaching others.  I think that lesson alone has stayed with me since I was undergraduate.

Until next time.

The Agile Reformation coming to a cubicle near you.

Agile is just another Reformation
Martin Luther has nothing on us.

I am going to be missing the fun and excitement of the Scrum Gathering in Phoenix this week.  I am a little disappointed about this but it gives me an opportunity to concentrate on some changes taking place at my office and at my home business.  It looks like the unveiling of my Ninja Lion Sensei Master Cobra T-shirt will have to wait another year.  This week I want to talk about change and innovation.

I have been reading a fantastic book by James Burke called, “The Day the Universe Changed.”  In it, he talks about the changes in science and technology which caused the historical, political, and social change in Western civilization.  What strikes me most about the reading is how someone at certain points of history someone said, “this is not working!” and they went about finding ways of thinking that would work.  If it was not for this kind of exasperation with the status quo, I doubt we would have such modern innovations as germ theory, global telecommunications, and Snapchat.

Kidding aside, I think we are in the midst of another one of these flux points which Burke was so good pointing out.  I call it the Agile Reformation.   Since the fall of the Berlin wall and the spread of neo-liberal economics, there have been numerous counter movements to this “End of History.”  Unfortunately, many of these counter-movements have been backward-looking drawing on Communism, Socialism, and religious fundamentalism.  Agile with its focus on improvement, sustainability, and collaboration seems like a positive direction for the twenty-first century and I am glad that I am part of this movement.

This seems very pie in the sky but please hear me out.  We are confronted with numerous problems in Western Civilization.  Income inequity, climate change, pollution, and racial unrest are social and technological problems which are solvable.  The dreary nature of working for a modern corporation is solvable.  They are solvable because in a world of seven billion people there are plenty of smart folks who want to solve these problems.  This is where Agile comes in.  The principles of agile and the agile manifesto act as a framework for problem-solving.

I am very proud to be part of this way of thinking and leading change within my organization.  It is not going to be easy but if we do it correctly we can institute amazing changes and reforms one iteration at a time.  I hope you are with me on this.

Until next time.

Little Victories

A win is a win.

In the daily grind of business, you take your wins where you can get them.  This week I want to talk about one of those wins and a lesson learned in the trenches as scrum master.

Each quarter my product owner gives a presentation to the executive committee about how the business is doing and how the software development team fits into that vision.  It is dry affair filled with power point presentations and back slapping.  As I was gathering up metrics for the presentation, I noticed something peculiar.  The number or software support tickets had declined over the last fifteen months from an average of 40 tickets a month to 20.  The development team had cut the number of bugs that were in production by half in the span of a year.

I am pretty impressed with this accomplishment but it also taught me some valuable lessons.  First, change and improvement does not happen overnight.  It took numerous refactoring tasks, late nights, and admonitions to do things the right way in order to reduce the number of defects in the applications I was responsible.  Next, change requires everyone to change.  In this case, the developers, the business team, and I had to learn how to work in an agile process together.  It was not easy and everyone had to sacrifice a little of themselves to make it happen.  Finally, measuring results in a concrete fashion puts in perspective what you think might be happening.  I knew that we weren’t having as many support tickets but thanks to the metrics from the ticket system, I could quantify my hunch.

This means what has felt like a long slog for my development team and I is really the continuous improvement that business leaders always talk about.  It is not glamorous but over 15 months we have cut defects in half and are improving the products for the business.  I need to learn to be more patient with myself and others.  Small things do make a difference like asking that bugs get written up in the backlog and always asking why we do things the way we do.  It can feel like repetitive work and be very frustrating but if you keep at it there is a payoff.

Like many scrum masters and business leaders, I suffer from what is called “Impostor syndrome” that feeling that I am not good enough to do what I am doing.  What I have discovered is that I should learn to ignore that voice.  I am not an impostor.  I am a scrum master and servant leader to my team.

Finally, I realize that this improvement did not happen in a vacuum.  It took the efforts of my software development team and the hard work they put into the project.  They were the ones who wrote the code.  They were the ones who worked weekends and late nights.  They were the ones who saw me saying, “There has to be a better way,” and they found that better way.  They are the reason we had this happen.

It is not perfect by any means.  There is still a great deal of work to do but I do not feel like I am swimming against the stream as much as I did.  It is a little victory on the way to bigger victories and I will take it.

Until next time.

It is a mobile world and you are living in it.

Any time you can combine technology trends with science fiction and a dash of British intellectualism and throw it in a blender; I am going to be curious about end product.  Fortunately, The Economist did not disappoint when they published an article about a “The truly personal computer.”  It is a great article and you should take the time to give it a read.  This week I want to discuss some of the implications of that article and what it means to your business.

Since I founded my business, I have been adamant about creating applications which work well on laptops, tablet computers, and smart phones.  Being a technology insider, I realized that this is where the money was going to be and that with the growth of smart phones we would see new demands in computing.  The latest information from the February 28th edition of the Economist bears this out.

In 2014, according to Strategy Analytics over 1.2 billion smart phones have be shipped worldwide compared with 300 million personal computers and just under 600 standard mobile phones.  If you are a business this means that if people are going to interact with your business they are going to do it via a smart device.  This is a game changer.  You are going to have to change how you do customer service.  You are going to have to have a web site that is adaptive to smaller screens.  You are also going to have to be more responsive because users of mobile devices can price compare and trade information on the go.

Social media services like Yelp mean that restaurants need to pay better attention to customer service and food quality.  I am also seeing municipalities dealing with the disruption caused by Uber which threatens to make standard taxi and limo services obsolete.  None of this would have been possible without smart phones.  So the question isn’t why haven’t you learned to adapt to this strange new world of mobile computing; the question is how are your competitors exploiting it?  If you are unable to adjust your business is in for a rude awakening.

My business makes applications for trucking and logistics companies to manage inventory, fleet maintenance, and now transform manifests into invoices via QuickBooks cloud services.  It is an exciting time and we would love to tell you more about how we can help you succeed in this new age of mobile computing.  You will be helping yourself and your business.  Stop by our website; E₃ Logistics Systems or send us an e-mail we will be glad to help.

Until next time.

You are not a ninja!

Agile professionals are NOT ninjas!

Like most professionals, I tend to get ornery from time to time.  I am beginning to think that this is a healthy response to working in present day corporations.  Human beings have gone from being hunter gatherers to living in cubical farms in the span of 5,000 years.  It does not surprise me that there is not some kind of psychological backlash to this situation.  Further changes in the professional world like the hoteling of work spaces and the growing dependency on contract workers has made life in the corporate world seem like something out a Franz Kafka novel.  Today, I want to talk about something that have been bothering me over the last few weeks.  The growth of faux titles that agile professionals are using to try and describe themselves.

My irritation began when I noticed that someone began using the phrase “code ninja” to describe themselves and scrum master skills.  I have already blogged about what I think about people who describe themselves in this manner.  Now, I am seeing terms like “Agile evangelist” and “Wizard” cropping up in some discussions about agile professionals.  I understand why people are doing this to try and brand themselves and make themselves more appealing to the market but it really needs to stop right now.

We are agile professionals.  We are not wizards pulling rabbits out of our pointy hats and summoning a Patronus when an impediment crops up.  We are not Jedi because I doubt we would ever get the licensing from Disney to use the title and we don’t have cool light sabers.  This also means we have to deal with Sith and frankly the thought of executives with the power to force choke is a little disconcerting.  We are not ninjas because even though we are highly skilled professionals we are not being asked to kill people.  Finally, we are not evangelists.  Evangelism requires blind faith, total dedication, and the commitment to orthodoxy.  That is the antithesis of Agile.

Agile requires its practitioners to try new things.  One of the tenants of the manifesto, is we respond to change over following a plan.  Pragmatism, the scientific method, good engineering, and relying on a community of professionals is what makes us agile.  Contemporary evangelism tends to shun these values.  I will concede that it does take a leap of faith to try and change how contemporary business is done but we are no different than the professionals who applied W.E. Deming’s methods in Japan or the lean manufacturing professionals currently practicing in the United States.

Finally, if you call yourself an agile apostle and you are not one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto you deserve a good dose of scorn and ridicule.  Agile was not dictated to us like the Koran to Mohamed or revealed to us via golden tablets to John Smith.  It is the product of thousands of people attempting to pull business out of the 19th century and into the 21st. It is changing and evolving and responding to change.

Drop the silly titles and let your work speak for itself.  We are Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches.  We are servant leaders trying to help others be more productive and content with their careers.  We need to get our hands dirty, refactor code, attend meetings, deal with the personal problems of our developers and try to make a difference in the lives of the people we work with.  This is not glamorous or flashy work but it needs to be done.  I you want to call yourself a ninja or Jedi then I think we are not going to work well together.  Don’t worry those of us exhibiting the quite professionalism the job requires will still be here to clean up your messes.

Until next time.

Work to do in the shadows.

Change takes place when we work together in the shadows

Illness and the grey rainy weather of November in Chicago have put in a philosophical mood.  I have been contemplating a few things.  Today, according the United State Census Bureau there are 7.2 million people on the planet earth.  That is twice the population of when I entered this world pink and helpless in 1968.  How have we been able to double the world’s population without famine, war, and the complete collapse of civilization?  It struck me that what keeps the world civilized are many people working quietly in the shadows to keep it that way.  I am one of them and I am sure some of you are too.

When I was born the big intellectual book of the time was Paul R, and Anne Ehrilch’s “The Population Bomb.”  The book argued convincingly that as world population grew it would be harder to feed and provide for additional people.  What the authors did not count on were the smarts of scientists, engineers, and common people like me to solve problems.  The green revolution spread through the developed and third world during the 1950’s and 1960’s.  This gave the world enough to eat.  What started the green revolution?  Scientists and farmers who realized there needed to be better yield out of crops and figured out a way to do it.

During the 1940’s the biggest killer of children in the United States was polo.  Countless children died or were forced to breathe with iron lungs.  The March of Dimes was founded because they were looking for a means to wipe out polo.  It took huge efforts from science and government but the first vaccines began to appear in 1952 and polo was eradicated in the United States. 

The March of Dimes continues its efforts today but instead of polo they have focused on birth defects.  Again to the rescue, stubborn and determined people who worked quietly doing the necessary work.  People like Clair Patterson who determined the age of the earth but also found the link between leaded gasoline and lead poisoning in humans.  With opposition from the petroleum industry Clair proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that lead levels were rising.  With the help of congress and international treaties, leaded gasoline was banned.  As the level of lead in the atmosphere declined, we also saw the decrease in birth defects and problems caused by lead poisoning worldwide.

Again not glamorous work, but necessary to make the 7.2 million people of earth happy and healthy.  It is work being done be civil engineers to make sure that sewers keep our drinking water safe.  It is the work being done by infectious disease specialists tracking bird flu and Ebola.  This is the work of software developers helping build logistics systems which move goods and services across the country. It is doctors, janitors, clerks, nurses, and ordinary people making hospitals not only more effective but more efficient.

Some of you may be asking, where does agile come in to this picture.  For too long, the world of business has been dominated by too many damaged, neurotic, and just plain mean people perpetuating a cycle of abuse kept alive by the threat to take away living wages.  It is why investment bankers didn't leave their steakhouses and join the occupy Wall Street movement.  Agile and the agile movement, which I am proud to be a part of is not a revolution but rather an evolution of the business world so that it is more humane, sustainable, and satisfying to the people doing the work.  In other words, work is changing from toil serving unnamed shareholders or executives to a craft where people can take pride in what they do.  We have so much work to do but in just thirteen years since the creation of the Agile Manifesto the face of business is changing more of them are “doing” agile.  It is my hope that someday soon they will “be” agile as well.

This is because people, like me, are quietly working in the shadows to make it happen.  Please join me.

Until next time.