Category Archives: agile

Only You Care How It’s Built

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Remember the last time you were really frustrated when using something? It didn’t work as you expected or you couldn’t find what you were looking for. As your attention focused on the people who built the tortuous tool, do you remember thinking to yourself, “That’s OK. I hear they have a great process.” No? The unfortunate truth is that the people you are building for will not care how you got there, only whether you solved one of their problems in a positive way.

I think this is one of the reasons behind the first agile value, “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. It is tempting, when integrating new practices, such as with scrum, to get caught up in the mechanics of a new process. There are new ways of working and new tools to learn, and these can take a lot of time, energy, and focus. It can be tempting to do things ‘by the book’ when first starting out, but that puts our focus on the wrong goal. The team is not there to perfect a process, but to deliver value to real people.

So why “Individuals and interactions,” and not “results”? Results don’t make a product, people do. The people are the invisible force that create the product. As one of the agile principles states, “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”

Pixar’s Randy Nelson has a fantastic definition of collaboration not as cooperation, but amplification. A good team that works well together will amplify each others’ skills and abilities to create better results than they would as individuals. This definitely resonates with my personal experience. My best ideas usually come when I’m engaged with others, not when I’m by myself. Sure, I have a few Eureka! moments wearing headphones, pushing pixels, but the bulk of them come from the interaction with other minds approaching the problem from different directions, each with their unique personal history.

There are many elements that create an environment that a allows a team to succeed. As implied above, clear goals and measurable results is one. I’ll go into that and a few more in a future post. In the meantime, what is it about your environment that supports or hinders your team? Do you have motivated people? Do your stakeholders trust you to make decisions on their behalf? Are you focused on value? What have you changed about your environment that has had a positive impact?

As always, I look forward to your comments. Also, please take a moment to rate this post by clicking the stars below the title. It helps me know if I’m on the right track and I really appreciate the feedback. If there is a specific topic you’d like me to address, add it to the Suggest a Topic page.

When Adding Waste isn’t Waste

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Naresh Jain over at Managed Chaos was griping about The Bloat Effect. The gist is that as time moves on, everything gets bigger and more bloated, including the software, the team, and the process. This makes everything less valuable as a result.

There is often waste in our process. Sometimes it’s given to us and we have to deal with it. Occasionally we introduce it willingly. Often, we start out bloated. We may have an idea of what the streamlined, efficient process looks like, but it’s not what we adopt. Often there are good reasons, or at least reasons. We are, after all, smart, intentional people.

First of all, a definition of waste. Anything that does not directly add value to the customer is waste. Anything that causes you to spend more time than is necessary, is waste. Anything built but not used is waste. Anything that hinders progress is waste. A common goal of any process is to minimize waste, but sometimes we need it. Sometimes waste in the micro saves work in the macro. Waterfall is kinda like this. The theory is that the more you can remove uncertainty with upfront work, the smoother the project will be, ultimately saving time than if the project had tripped over some of the intricacies later in the cycle, or at least having predictable results with predictable resources. Of course, we know how well that usually works out. Agile aims to minimize all of this waste through multiple iterations and is comfortable with whatever revisions may be necessary later on, based on what we learn.

Recognize the role that waste is playing.

If you are being asked to do something you consider unnecessary, find out what need it is filling. If there isn’t one, you may have an argument for eliminating the task. If there is, you may be able to find a leaner way to solve that need. If you don’t have the authority to make the change, you may have to figure out who in the organization can and convince them. Unfortunately, waste is often thrust upon us with no recourse. Then it’s back to a software version of the serenity prayer, accepting what we can’t change and working on what we can. Sometimes that’s just just ‘how it’s done’.

However, you may choose to add steps into your own process to save time later on. If you experience a frequent roadblock that causes a lot of churn, you may need to add extra steps upfront to deal with it. For example, if you have difficulty communicating new concepts to key stakeholders, perhaps more time needs to be spent fleshing out those ideas before they are presented, especially if you believe that they are justified by the business and user needs. Do you spend time that feels unnecessary? What steps could you take earlier to minimize this unnecessary expenditure of effort? Would the trade-off be worth it?

Simplify as you go

Even if you can’t immediately change the process, you can work to simplify over time. Just because there may be legitimate reasons why you live with the excess now, don’t let that keep you from working to improve the process. This is one of the 12 principles of behind the Agile Manifesto. Can you take a small step the next sprint, or the next release, to streamline? Can you keep educating those insisting on inefficient methods in better processes? Is it waste or is it really saving you time later on? People may be hanging on to tools and processes that they are familiar and comfortable with. Moving them away from them too quickly may be difficult or undesirable in the short term. As you demonstrate success, you will have the freedom and trust to make changes and put past process attachments to rest.

Is it Agile?

As you evolve as a team, you may encounter people who tell you that, ‘You’re not Agile.’ They may be right. You may not be capital-A Agile, but I think the key questions are:

1. Are we doing better this sprint than last sprint?
2. Are we making changes that we expect will enable us to perform better in the next sprint?

Adding value

To often I’m concerned less with removing steps than with adding them. It seems common to encounter an engineering team that has been using agile without the benefit of UX and now they are experiencing some pain. There is often the misconception that waste is anything that is not working code. At the recent Deep Agile Conference, James Coplien indicated that, “Rework in implementation is waste, rework in design is agile.” Adding in a quick usability test to uncover design flaws early is not an outdated process to be slowly abandoned. It is a positive practice that should be introduced where it is lacking. Engage with your users, gather feedback on your product/designs, measure your results. These are steps that do not directly contribute to customer value, but they are some key elements that form the foundation of a solid product. Waste needs to be looked at in the context of the entire product, not just the tasks that any one individual or team are performing.

Adopting Agile is Hard

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Before getting into the details of our particular challenges, I wanted to acknowledge, for all of you going through this, that adopting agile is hard, perhaps one of the biggest professional hurdles I’ve faced in recent history. While I’ve been in the same industry for about 12 years now, I imagine this is about as close as you can come to switching careers without actually doing it. You think you know what’s going on, but the rug keeps getting pulled out from under you. However, I also like the term ‘adopting’ because this is similar to adding a child to your family.

When you have a kid, your life is no longer the same. You’ll sleep less. There will be lots of screaming, and you will have to clean up more crap than ever before. Moving to an agile process seems a lot like that. The hope is that once you figure it out, life is better and you wonder how you ever lived without it.

Even reading about agile can be as confusing as negotiating the parenting section of a bookstore. Want to know how to get your baby to sleep at night? Here are 20 books that all say something different. Want to adopt an agile process? Here are multiple options, each with different interpretations.

To be fair, the looseness of agile, and scrum in particular, is one of the things I like most about it, and what also causes the most pain. If you were to ask a personified scrum process what to do, the answer would likely be, “It depends.” It may be true, but it doesn’t feel helpful.

Agile is more of a philosophy than a process. It dictates very little. We have five scrum teams working concurrently and each one works a little differently. One team has a number of outsourced members across the globe. Two others are working on entirely new initiatives The last two are refining existing parts of the site, although they move from making small tweaks to significant additions or revisions. Some teams do more costing and planning for each sprint, while others are very loose. Each of these teams have developed their own idiosyncratic scrum process that works with their unique situation. This is one of the powerful elements of the agile methodology, the flexibility. It is also one of the biggest challenges. Teams must define their process for themselves. Scrum only provides a framework. Each team is trying to do what is best for their people and their project, but it can be very difficult to work across multiple teams that are working differently.

There seems to be a sense of the serenity prayer to it. Agile is a new process and will require a lot of change. However, realize what you won’t be able to change and find a way to work within those constraints. I appreciate that this process acknowledges the realities of organizations and attempts to work with them. I found Ken Schwaber’s book Agile Project Management with Scrum very helpful in demonstrating this. In this book, Ken presents case studies of teams in different circumstances at different companies. In one case study, knowing that the program management office required Microsoft Project files for status reporting, the Product Owner adapted scrum reporting to fit within Project’s framework. Rather than trying to get another part of the organization to adapt in a futile battle against the windmills, teams in this book found ways to improve their process while working with the constraints they had to live with.

So if this feels painful or impossible, that’s normal. It means that you’re going through change. Recently, our Program Manager and resident certified Scrum Master attended a conference with two major agile gurus. After listening to the other people describe their problems, he says that he came away feeling that we are doing quite well compared to a lot of other companies! Given how hard it has been for us, I really feel for those who are not quite as far along the path.

As we figure things out, I’ll share what I can. Until then, if you have any questions, I may respond with, “It depends.”

If there is something particular that you would like me to write about, visit the Suggest a Topic page. You can vote on existing topics or add your own. I’ll do my best to address them in a reasonable time frame.