agile transformation

Start With Scrum?

chriswmoody2 Comments

“Start with Scrum.”  Have you ever heard someone say this?  I’ve heard this statement multiple times over the years when folks are talking about agile transformation, and it rubbed me the wrong way.  The problem is, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. In many ways, it makes sense right? Scrum can help someone wrap their mind around work decomposition, shorter feedback loops, retrospection, and being connected to the customer more through user personas. But why are so many teams struggling to find agility with scrum? I think I finally can explain why I think this approach isn’t the right thing to do if your end goal is agility.

1 – Scrum is a framework and agile is a mindset.

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Source: Michael Sahota

Last year when I was presenting at the Global Scrum Gathering, we borrowed from Michael Sahota who said something to the tune of “If you adopt agile practices you could see a 20% benefit. If you adopt an agile mindset you could see 300% benefit!” So many people I meet that are interested in agile for their organization just want the benefits but without the mindset shifts needed to get there.  I don’t fault them for that because when you look at the Agile Manifesto it reads out very well and sounds like positive things for most rational people. What is sorely missing is the “counting the cost”. If becoming agile as an organization was as simple as doing some training and doing the Scrum Events, there wouldn’t be agile coaches.

2 – Scrum is so 1990’s.  (just like these awesome “hackers” in 1995)

hackers

Look…I love scrum.  I really do!  It’s something that opened up a doorway for me to be exposed to agile manifesto which has changed my life and career aspirations.  But, while I was working on a blog post entitled “The History of Agile” it dawned on me that Scrum was a response to waterfall. And it was a tremendous leap in the right direction away from fixed cost/scope/timeline type projects.  Then came along the agile manifesto which was a response to scrum and the various flavors of agility frameworks sprouting up. But we need to look ahead and allow the agile mindset to lead us into the great unknown.  Ron Jeffries, one of the great original thought leaders in agile even said “I may have invented points.  If I did, I’m sorry now.”  The point is, we need to inspect and adapt as technology changes, culture changes, and people change.

Here’s another awesome 90s picture just because I found so many great ones to use for this article.

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3 – Training wheels can create improper habits.

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I was listening to a presentation by Joshua Kerievsky last week and he told a story about teaching his daughter how to ride a bike. He said that many people talk to him about how Scrum is like training wheels for their organization to adopt agile.  He pointed out though that training wheels don’t actually teach you balance, they just teach you how to steer and peddle.  He took his daughter to the park one day and had her learn how to ride a bike by keeping her feet of the peddles and just pushing herself and lifting her feet to learn the balance.  She quickly got comfortable with keeping balanced which is typically the hardest part of learning how to ride a bike.  And in no time she was ripping around on the bike!  What’s the lesson here?  You don’t always need training wheels to begin your journey towards agility.

In conclusion, starting with Scrum may not be the right strategy for your team(s).  My personal guidance as an agile coach is to only start with Scrum if you envision something close to Scrum being your destination. And even in that is your situation, always start with trying to adopt an agile mindset before trying to implement a framework. By doing this, you are allowing your organization to tap into their creative potential, untethered to just one framework.

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I want to use agile, but my organization doesn’t want to

chriswmoody2 Comments

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Fear not agile warrior, you are not alone and help is on the way.  They are many situations where someone just knows that agile could help or even change the face of the entire company if utilized…yet someone or many people within an organization are opposed to the idea.  So what should you do?  First off what are some reasons someone would be against agile?

  1. The’ve been on a team where agile was used, and failed.
  2. They don’t know enough about agile or have misconceptions.
  3. They don’t believe agile is right for their organization/product.
  4. They’ve worked with an Agile Coach/Scrum Master/Consultant that was not very good at their role.  Yes, not everyone does their job well…even in the wonderful agile community.
  5. They are from the past (I kid…I kid! That was an IT Crowd reference)

Now for the part you really came to this blog post for: What are ways I can help my organization adopt and/or support agile?

  1. Start emphasizing agile principles in whatever work you are doing. As a consultant that works on a wide array of projects with a variety of methodologies, I’m often tested with how to apply principles on a personal level. Getting out of the theoretical and nitty gritty practical application is a great exercise towards see if/how agile could work at your organization. If this is something you feel is “out of your league” or you just don’t have the time to do, it’s OK.  There’s other ways to makes strides towards becoming more agile.
  2. Propose solutions to problems from an agile perspective but without using agile lingo. Some people are just turned off to agile terms and immediately roll their eyes when you say “backlog grooming” or “daily scrum”. But if you are able to problem solve using agile principles you could begin to win over even the harshest of critics.
  3. Create a mini scrum board for tracking your own work. I heard a story of a person who was trying to advocate for their company to adopt agile, and started doing a scrum wall in a shared space.  Pretty soon scrum boards were up all over the company.  Some were labeled “Inspiration wall” or “Wall of vision”.  Everyone from IT to Sales was using them. Baby steps can be better than no steps, right?
  4. Contact consulting companies. See if they would be willing to share about agile within your organization.  Some consulting companies will do this for free because it’s a great way for them to help your cause, as well as demonstrate their expertise in this area should you need their services down the road. Or see if they are willing to just share free resources with you.
  5. Join user groups and contribute to the agile community. There have been times where my primary daily function was far from an agile focus, but I was able to stay energized by attending local groups or writing blog posts in my personal time.  Also, sometimes effective reflection comes when you are looking in from the outside.
  6. Find a new opportunity.  (Please take this with a grain of salt as it’s just my opinion.) This for many reasons isn’t the first option anyone would like, but it may be the right solution. As the industry seems to be moving more and more towards adopting agile, it’s less likely that a company is just flat out rejecting agile. It could be that they proclaim to use agile but it’s very broken or dysfunctional. These kinds of situations can cause stress if you are a firm believer in the agile principles. But is the disappointment or stress consistently outweighing the rewards or satisfaction experienced? If yes, it may be time to look for new opportunities.   Robbie Bach wrote a relevant article you may find useful called “Knowing When To Walk Away“

What about you? What advice would you have for someone in this scenario?  I’d love to hear what other people have done or are doing.

How to measure success in an Agile organization

chriswmoodyLeave a comment

**Re-posted from https://www.slalom.com/thinking/how-to-measure-success-in-an-agile-organization where this article was originally published.

Any organization adopting Agile faces the challenge of figuring out how to measure success. “How will we report to executives?” and “How can we standardize reporting across multiple teams?” are some of the first—and most important—questions that pop up. Answering these questions without compromising the spirit of an Agile transformation is critical to adoption.

Why? Because every metric you put in place will generate some type of behavior, be it positive or negative. That’s why it’s imperative to exercise a vast amount of diligence when working to define your metrics.

In the world of Agile, success can look very different than it does in a traditional Waterfall, fixed-scope environment. One of the cornerstones of Agile is to work on what’s most important to the business and deliver value as soon as possible. Here’s an example: the team goes into a sprint or release and commits to completing five items. But after work begins, the team learns that the number-one priority will require much more work than expected due to new requirements or bugs discovered during development. Poor planning isn’t to blame; the team just has to make adjustments based on new information. Everyone agrees to focus on the number-one item to complete by the end of the sprint, leaving items 2-5 unfinished. They refocus, successfully complete item number one, and deliver it on time. But the team only delivers 20% of its expected scope at the end of the sprint.

To many Agile teams, this could be considered a complete success, because ultimately the percentage of original scope isn’t as critical as delivering on what’s most important. So in this scenario, the traditional measure of committed vs. completed can be a poor measuring stick.

Let’s look at what could happen if the success of this team was measured by what it completed. The team learns that good numbers are more important than delivering on the top priority. They then start padding their estimates to ensure that they have plenty of time to finish without any risk of backlash. Now you have valuable energy being wasted on navigating a process rather than getting things done. You’ve invited some of the more negative aspects of the Hawthorne Effect to come and run rampant on your project and team.

For an Agile organization to be successful, there has to be a general assumption that people are working hard and want to do their best. The role of a good leader is to enable teams to work smarter, not harder.

Here are seven traditional and not-so-traditional ways to measure the success of your Agile team.

1. Measure teams rather than individuals. A study conducted by Team Builders Plus found that “individual performance data are of less value (judging from the ratings and number of organizations tracking it) while team data reinforces collaboration and problem solving.” Collaboration is a key part of any Agile team that focuses efforts on the outcome of a project rather than a single person’s output.

2. Keep track of the percentage of the highest priority items being delivered. If your team’s focus is on delivering what is most important first, you can keep track of this trend over time. If the team is always delivering on priority two and three, but missing number one, you can use it as a coaching opportunity to help increase collaboration.

3. Measure the team’s satisfaction. You can be leading a team that is delivering at a high level, but if they’re miserable, you’re in a dangerous place. Part of a team’s success is the overall satisfaction of its members.

4. Evaluate your software. There isn’t a universal solution for determining if you have “working software.” Some of this relates back to customer satisfaction, but you could also measure if the work being done is truly solving problems—or if, in fact, it’s creating more.

5. Show the business value delivered. This may require more work up front, but if you have an idea of the value for a particular story or project, you can tell the story of the value that was delivered.

6. Provide a narrative, not just data. Why spend time collecting, packaging, and sharing data that really has no bearing on a team’s success? Sometimes even providing 3-4 sentences can give much more useful information than a pie chart. Visualization of data is definitely a good thing, but think carefully before defaulting to visualizations.

7. Measure anything the business says is important. Easier said than done, but as a guiding principal, focus on what the customer is saying is important. If they only care about 2-3 things, why give them 15?

Now you’ve got the metrics, but what do you do when ground forces at the executive level are resistant to Agile? First off, don’t react when people are critical or have a different perspective about what should be measured. You’ll be more successful showing people how Agile can enable the metrics they want.

Of course, there’s still a chance you won’t be able to reconcile the expanse between the pro-Agile and anti-Agile parties. In VersionOne’s annual Agile survey, 53% of people said an organization’s inability to change its culture was a barrier to adoption. There’s no silver bullet here. Another revealing statistic from that same survey was that 35% said trying to fit Agile into a non-Agile framework was a barrier to adoption. The research speaks for itself:you can’t always expect the metrics that work for a Waterfall project to apply to an Agile project.

The workplace is full of spreadsheets and databases, amassing ever-increasing amounts of information. With that, the definition of success—specifically in information technology-centric groups—has changed dramatically over the last 10 years. I’m a firm believer that success in its purest form can be measured by how happy your customer base is with the product or service you provide for them. That’s why the Agile Manifesto emphasizes “individuals and interactions over processes and tools.”