Archive for the ‘Starting Agile’ Category
A Seven Year Retrospective
The results measured by Michael reaffirmed for me a core belief that I had developed as a young man in the Israeli army: ordinary people can achieve extraordinary results. We did not have, with all due respect, extraordinary talent at BMC; our development tools were nothing to write home about; the problems of communicating effectively across 10.5 hours of time zone difference from Austin, TX to Pune, India were very real; and, we were subject to repeated layoffs. What we accomplished was primarily a matter of doing the right things by an extremely important stakeholder – the business unit employees.
Click here for a detailed account of the 2004 experience from a 2011 perspective.
Definition: Agile Methodology
Agile Methodology is actually a bit of a controversial term. Various authors consider Agile a method, as distinct from a methodology. Others, prefer methodology over method. For example, using the Merriam-Webster dictionaries, Alistair Cockburn makes the following distinction between methodology and method in Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game :
- Methodology: A series of related methods or techniques
- Method: Systematic procedure
Alistair views Agile as a methodology in the sense defined above. For example, he discusses Crystal as a family of methodologies. The reader is referred to Alistair’s book for a an excellent analysis of the various aspects of methodologies. As a matter of fact, Alistair tracks down the confusion between method and methodology to certain inconsistencies between various versions of the Oxford English Dictionary.
On the other hand, best I can tell from various conversations with him, Jim Highsmith seems to prefer the term Agile Method. This preference is reflected in Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products. It is possible that Jim’s preference is due to writing his book from a project management perspective.
Rather than getting in-depth to the method versus methodology controversy, I would simply cite two definitions I find useful in capturing the essence of Agile methodology, or method if you prefer.
An interesting metaphor for Agile has been used by Jim Highsmith in a 2009 Cutter Advisory:
Visualize a house structure with a roof, a foundation, and three pillars… The roof is business goals — the rationale for implementing agile methods and scaling to larger agile projects. The foundation is agile values or principles — principles that need careful interpretation as to how to apply them to larger teams. And finally, the three pillars: organization, product backlog, and process/practice.
The simplicity of the metaphor makes it quite effective in communicating what Agile is in a concise way without losing the richness of the various elements in Agile.
Using Scrum as an example, colleague David Spann gives the following down-to-earth summary of the key structural components of Agile in a 2008 Cutter Executive Report:
Scrum, as a management methodology, is elegant in its design, requiring only three roles (i.e., product owner, ScrumMaster, and self-organized team), three ceremonies (sprint/iteration planning, daily Scrum/debrief, and sprint review meetings), and three artifacts (product and sprint backlogs and the burndown chart) — just-enough practical advice so agile teams do not overcomplicate the development lifecycle with too much ceremony and documentation.
Needless to say, the structural elements will change from one Agile methodology to another. However, examining an Agile methodology through the {roles, ceremonies, artifacts} “lens” is an excellent way to summarize an Agile methodology. Furthermore, it enables easy comparison between the ‘usual suspects’ of Agile – Crystal Methods, Dynamic Systems Development, Extreme Programming, Feature Driven Development, and Kanban. The reader is referred to The Business Value of Agile Software Methods: Maximizing ROI with Just-in-Time Processes and Documentation for detailed comparisons between the various methods/methodologies.
Definition: Agile Development
The difficulty to concisely define the term Agile Development stems from the very nature of the Agile Manifesto:
- The manifesto is a statement of values. By the very nature of values, people share them in a loose manner. Both definition and adherence (“But do they really practice Agile development?”) are qualitative and open to interpretation.
- The manifesto values are relative. The manifesto is quite explicit in stating “… while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more:”
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiations
Responding to change over following a plan
Agile development is often described in terms of the software method in use. For example, in his foreword to Agile Software Development with Scrum, Bob Martin summarizes Agile methods as “… people oriented software processes that work without getting in the way,” Martin Fowler emphasizes another aspect of Agile methods in his own foreword to the very same book:
… a new breed of software processes which are based on an empirical approach to controlling a project.
A more detailed definition is given by authors Rico, Sayani and Sone in their October 2009 book The Business Value of Agile Software Methods: Maximizing ROI with Just-in-time Processes and Documentation:
Agile methods are contemporary approaches for creating new software based on customer collaboration, teamwork, iterative development, and response to change. Combining communication and interpersonal trust with a flexible management and development framework, they contain just enough process to capture customer needs in the form of user stories and to rapidly create working software. However, the key to Agile methods are rich, high-context communications with customers along with cohesive teamwork.
On the other hand, such an authority (and signatory to the Manifesto) as Jim Highsmith does not seem to define the term Agile Development per se in the second edition of Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products. Instead, Jim defines Agility through two statements:
Agility is the ability to both create and respond to change in order to profit in a turbulent business environment.
Agility is the ability to balance flexibility and stability.
Likewise, in Agile Software Development, Alistair Cockburn focuses on discussing what is core to Agile, emphasizing the properties of Agility through the following citation:
Agility is dynamic, context specific, aggressively change-embracing and growth-oriented. It is not about improving efficiency, cutting costs or battening down the business hatches to ride out fearsome competitive ‘storms.’ It is about succeeding and about winning: about succeeding in emerging competitive arenas, and about winning profits, market share and customers in the very center of the competitive storms many companies now fear.
Rather than trying to reconcile all these worthy definitions, I would suggest five context-dependent approaches to the definition, as follows:
- For the reader who tries to understand what Agile is all about: It is the mindset that really matters. Read the Agile Manifesto and the corresponding History.
- For the reader who is anxious to put his/her hands around an Agile implementation: Pick a specific Agile method – any method – and study it with special emphasis on the roles, process and artifacts of the method. It could be Crystal, Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), Kanban or any other method that shows promise as a good fit for your specific environment. Consult 10 Steps for Starting an Agile Start-up for a down-to-earth blueprint for implementation.
- For the reader who tries to assess whether a project team is really Agile: It is a maturity curve issue that manifests itself in quite a few disciplines. For example, see the various kinds of maturity models surveyed in the BSM Review blog. You will probably need to determine the maturity model that suits your environment and apply it to the method you are practicing.
- For the reader who needs to explore Agile in a business context: You need not worry about the technical aspects of Agile. See the category Benefits of Agile in this blog.
- For the reader interested in applying Agile beyond development: Extending Agile changes its definition. See the various posts on the subject by Eric Ries in Lessons Learned.
Please remember: when it comes to defining Agile Development, you have a problem of choosing, not of choice. It is the use to which you put the definition that determines the choosing.
Socializing Kanban with Your Executives
The topic Socializing Agile with Your Executives has been a major thread in this blog. A convenient to browse compilation of posts on the subject can be found in the Starting Agile category. In particular, two recent posts – The Business Value of Agile Software Methods and It Won’t Work Here – are quite specific on the data to use and the line of reasoning to follow in such discussions.
When it comes to socializing Kanban with your executives, you might choose to start the conversation by looking at the defect tracking system your company is using. Chances are your executive will “discover” the all important aspect of flow simply by examining the system with respect to some natural questions such as:
- Have more defects been closed than opened over the past month?
- What is the average time to close a reported defect?
- How many defects have been open (in one stage or another) in the system for more than a year?
- When a defect moves from one stage in the system to another, how does it get aligned with the various activities that need to take place in the release management system?
- If development and QA were to stop everything they do and just work exclusively on closing defects that have already been captured, could they clean slate in six months?
The power of this straightforward approach lies in the ease of making the mental jump from defect to Kanban in the context of the tracking system. The breaking down of an epic or a story to granular components that can be pushed to members of the Agile team is not always an easy concept to grasp (and often times a technique teams struggle with in the initial phases of an Agile roll-out). In contrast, one can simply visualize defects entered into the tracking system as inputs to a de-facto Kanban system. Obviously, the defect/Kanban maintains its identity as it “flows” through the system all the way from being reported by a customer to communication of its resolution to the customer.
If your defect tracking system does not easily lend itself to answering the questions listed above, you might try one of the public domain data sets from Mining Software Archives. The specific data, of course is not likely to be applicable to your company. The criticality of flow, however, could probably be demonstrated by making a few fairly straightforward assumptions on the operating environment behind the data.
It Won’t Work Here
Two major obstacles to vetting Agile topics effectively with executives were identified in the post entitled The Business Value of Agile Software Methods:
- Lack of hard quantitative data.
- The “It won’t work here” syndrome.
As indicated in the post, the data provided in the study How Agile Projects Measure Up, and What This Means to You and the book The business Value of Agile Software Methods address the first obstacle. This follow-on post is about the second of the two obstacles – the resistance to Agile transformation in the face of hard data on its benefits to other companies.
Resistance in the form of “it won’t work here” is typically anchored in one or more of the following five beliefs:
- Uniqueness: “Some very unique elements exist in our company. These elements render industry data inapplicable.”
- Secret sauce: “Something very special element existed in the companies reporting great success with Agile. Our company does not possess nor have access to the ‘secret sauce’ that enabled success elsewhere.”
- Cultural change: “For the Agile initiative to succeed, our corporate culture needs to change. The required cultural change takes a lot of time and involves a great deal of pain. All in all, the risk of rolling Agile is unacceptably high.”
- Affordability: “The company is strapped to the degree that investment in another software method is a luxury it can’t afford.”
- Software is not core to us: “We are not a software company, nor is software engineering our core competency. Software is merely one of the many elements we use in our business.”
Various other reasons for not going Agile in the context of a specific company are, of course, cited at some frequency. The five reasons listed above seem to be encountered most often by Agile champions.
Use the following counter-arguments to turn around these beliefs:
- Uniqueness: Very rare occurence. Companies use similar business designs, apply fairly standard operating procedures, utilize common technology, are subject to the same regulatory constraints that their competitors are, have offshore sites in places like India, etc. Discussion of your company vis-a-vis its direct competitor usually suffices to overcome the uniqueness claim.
- Secret sauce: The ‘secret sauce’ is neither secret nor difficult to concoct. For example, the secret sauce used by BMC Software in its successful Agile initiative had four simple ingredient: intentionality, know-how, flexibility and patience. Based on insights by colleague and friend Alan Atlas, I have recently added mutuality as the fifth ingredient. Your own secret sauce might be somewhat different, but I very much doubt that an extravagantly exotic sauce will be needed.
- Cultural change: Myth has it that Agile would only work in the Collaborative culture. Reality is it will work in any of the four core cultures identified by Schneider: Control, Competence, Cultivation or Collaboration. See Four Principles, Four Cultures, One Mirror for an approach to building Agile on the strength of whatever culture prevails in your company/organization.
- Affordability: The question to ask is whether you can afford not to improve your software. Tools are readily available to quantify your company’s technical debt. Monetize the technical debt and include it as a liability line item in a pro forma balance sheet. Doing so is likely to shift the discussion from affordability to how to create elbow room for handling the technical debt.
- Software is not core to us: Indeed, it might not be but it is likely to become so in just about any industry. Use an analogy like the record industry vis-a-vis the publishing industry. The record industry has been decimated by software over the past decade. Chances are a similar decimation is likely to occur in publishing unless the industry transforms itself. (Some of the decimation that already took place in publishing has become quite visible recently. For example, last week Bloomberg LP announced completion of the acquisition of BusinessWeek for a paltry $5M).
You will need to be realistically patient with respect to the time it takes for the considerations listed above to sink in. It could easily take six months just to forge a consensus on the subject in the executive team. It might then take another six month to operationalize the consensus. Chances are there is an elephant hidden somewhere in the “room” if you don’t carry the day with within a one year period of diligently vetting Agile with your executives.
Don’t Take Your Boss to Lunch
During my Agile 2006 presentation I made the following recommendation to the audience:
Don’t take your boss to lunch; take him/her to the daily stand-up meeting.
The point I was trying to get across is straightforward: there is no substitute to “touching” Agile and being touched by Agile. Instead of preaching the benefits of Agile, get your executive engaged in the Agile process.
Last week, colleagues Ken Collier, Jonathon Golden and I were on a Cutter Consortium consulting engagement. The CEO of the company we were consulting to immersed himseld in the workshop. I would say he spent about 50% of his time in the three day workshop in which we worked with his team on Agile and refactoring.
This CEO certainly got it [Agile]. And, he took his CTO and us to lunch.
It might have been a breach of my own counsel don’t take your boss to lunch…
How Hard Should the Agile Champion Push?
A question which often comes up in the course of the Rally Agile Success Tour is about the balance to strike between conviction, passion and politics. By virtue of his/her interest in the topic, the Agile champion is often more knowledgeable than his/her superiors on what Agile really is and which strategies are best suited to roll it out. A thoughtful push toward Agile values, principles and practices may lead to major improvements in the way an organization practices Agile. In contrast, an overly hard push might lead to regression in the state of Agile affairs. Moreover, it could easily lead to a breach of the psychoilogical contract between the Agile champion and employer.
Reading The Bureaucratic Phenomenon – a book recommended to me by Forrester’s Tom Grant – I found the following nugget:
The power of decision making within a bureaucratic system of organization is located exactly at the points where the stability of the internal “political” system is preferred to the achievement of the functional goals of the organization.
The specific nature of the bureaucracy with which one has to cope changes, of course, from one company to another. No matter what kind of bureaucracy the Agile champion has to cope with, the observation cited above applies. The Agile champion can successfully push hard as long as he/she does not cross the fine line between achievement of functional goals and “political” stability.
10 Steps for Setting up an Agile Start-up
Mapping the Agile thinking, theory and practices to the realities of the target company is a tricky part of making Agile happen in a sustainable manner. HubOne’s Nick Beaugeard, known to readers of this blog from his post Enterprise Product: $50,000 and 8 months – You Must be Kidding, shares with us his recipe for so doing in a start-up environment. He manages to weave the pragmatic details with the core principles behind software development in general and Agile methods in particular. For example, consider the following insight provided by Nick:
In fact, when developing an API, the unit tests are your clients!
Readers of this blog might want to compare and contrast the thoughts Nick expresses in this post with those of:
- Ryan Martens on prescriptive versus adaptive rollout of Agile (click here).
- Eric Ries on iterating on the problem definition and developing the customer base in parallel with iterating on the solution (Click here).
Here is Nick:
After my last post, where I discussed the concept of implementing the tools and process before you get people on board, I though it appropriate to provide some prescriptive guidance on how we achieved the process. This post is primarily aimed at start-ups where you have total control over your infrastructure, computers, network and internet connection. If there is enough interest, I’ll produce another post of how to perform the same, but in a corporate environment.
I believe, and my experience has shown, that preparing your work environment, tools and process before the team starts coding helps eliminate costly and lengthy discussions about tools and process. In fact, in my experience, most developers are pleasantly surprised to find the environment ready and working and slip into the processes extremely quickly.
So, please find below my ten steps. Following this process really helped us get up and running quickly. Whilst we used Microsoft Development tools, this equally applies to their open source equivalents, so feel free to substitute specific tools, just not the requirements and process.
- Authentication, Network and VPN. Setting up the core of your environment is critical. As you are more than likely working on secret software at the outset, you need good, auditable mechanisms for authentication and logon. In addition, we don’t want our developers to have to do anything except start their PC or laptop and login, and we really want them to be able to work remotely. If you don’t feel qualified or able to complete the steps below, any good local IT Pro should be able to set this all up for you. To perform this, we implemented the following:
- Network Connection – we are in Australia so our networks are not fantastic. We subscribed to a good ADSL 2+ plan (24Mb) with a 80Gb limit. We implemented a modern ADSLwireless modem/router and configured it correctly. This gave us acceptable internet connectivity.
- Domain – We implemented a domain controller running on Windows Server 2008. This gave us corporate authentication, auditing and identification. The domain controller was hosted on our private network (see 1.c)
- Routing and VPN –our internal development network needed to be protected from internet connectivity so we implemented a Windows Server 2008 machine with two network cards (called multihomed). One card was connected to the router and one connected to an Ethernet switch. We used a private IP subnetfor our development Local Area Network (LAN) and enabled Microsoft Routing and Remote Access. This gave us the ability to authenticate domain users to VPN into the private network for remote working. We then configured our router to allow access to the server for VPN Access.
- DNS –one of the issues you face with ADSL is that your Internet IP Address changes often. The solution for this was to use a solution from DYNDNS (www.dyndns.com) which allowed us to register a host name, coupled with a client application which ensured our host name for VPN always pointed at the correct IP Address.
- DHCP –it’s a real pain, especially when using VPN when your client machines are configured for static IP addresses. We used Microsoft Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) to ensure every machine had a unique IP Address and that our networking became just “plug-and-play”
- Version Control and issue tracking – in my experience, there are four critical systems needed for any software development team. These are:
- Version Control – Also known as source repositories, these systems allow control over check-in, check-out and versioning of source files. I cannot recall the number of times we backed out an individual source file to a previous “working version”. Without this in place, I can guarantee you’re going to struggle maintaining a good code base!
- Bill of Materials– the way I use these is to highlight each of the key deliverables in a project. When building Enterprise Profile Management, our BOM had 345 separate items, everything from the corporate website, to graphic design, to core components of the API. The Bill of materials is a way to track the overall progress of the project. Each item in the Bill of Materials should have at a minimum a title, description, owner, due date, % complete and %tested. We also use the bill of materials to determine our release criteria (more on this later).
- Build System – the biggest mistake a development manager can make is to not build the software regularly. We build our software system every time there is a new check-in (called continuous integration). Even with a very small team, the ripple effect of changes could go un-noticed for ages without building regularly. As an aside, we also have a Nabaztag (www.nabaztag.com) bunny which tells us whenever there is a build, whose check-in caused it and whether it succeeded or failed. While this is really annoying, it focuses the developers on good check-ins. We might also make the person who broke the builds buy us a round of beer, but that’s a secret!
- Issue Management – More important than email, IM, or indeed any other form of communication in the development team is issue management. I believe that in a project of any size, you’ll be hard pressed to ever finish if you don’t have good issue management. Issues should contain a title, description, history, assignee, status and indicate which version/iteration of which product the issue applies to. I don’t actually think a spreadsheet will cut it here. If there’s one investment you make, make sure it’s issue management.
We used Microsoft Visual Studio Team System for all of the above. Being an ex-microsoft product team member, I am familiar with the way the product works, but there are lots of plug-ins available for scrum, agile (MSF) and CMMI. To do this on a startup budget, we were able to join the Microsoft BizSpark program (http://www.bizspark.com) which gave us instant access to Microsoft’s developer tools. I’d highly recommend taking a look at that program!- Backup – Now is the time to do a backup and recovery operation. You have no real data in the system and how you installed it all is probably fresh in your mind. Trust me, every first recovery operation fails. You need to imagine your office has been hit by lightning and you have no servers, and just a backup. If you can successfully recover your environment in under 24 hours, you’re in a good place. Document how to do it and test it regularly.
When we were developing Enterprise Profile Management, our server with all issue management, reporting, builds and version control failed (the processor fried). We were taking backups, but the restore failed. It took me 22 hours to perform a forensic recovery of our production platform. Luckily the developers could work offline, but we still introduced a ton of integration bugs. Don’t skimp on backup.- Email, IM and Web Conferencing – You’re going to be working remotely at some time, whether you think you will or not. We quickly implemented the following tools:
- Email – Google Gmail for your domain (www.google.com/apps)
- IM – Windows Live Messenger and Skype (www.live.com, http://www.skype.com)
- Web Conferencing – Dim Dim (www.dimdim.com)
Note: there are lots of other tools out there, we just chose these (with little science, but they’ve worked well for us)- Coding Standards – Getting at least some coding standards in place before you write any code is really important. Good Version Control Systems should be able to validate code against your standards on check-in. My key coding standards are:
- No String Literals – All strings must be externalised in resource files for later localization (a process called globalization)
- Commenting – I insist that every class, method, property, event and interface be commented. There’s method in my madness here; obviously code commenting is important but with proper commenting (especially in C#) and tools like sandcastle, you can automatically create documentation like ours at http://api.hubone.com.
- No Short Cuts – This one was a little contentious – Our code will in the future (hopefully) be worked on by people who had no idea of the concept. Writing out If…then constructs and property accessors in long-hand makes the code much more readable for novices, junior programmers, support teams and architects alike.
- Unit Test Everything –I insist that every method, property, event etc, etc has an associated unit test. These we execute as a part of the build. My goal is to have over 80% of any code written covered by unit tests. In fact, when developing an API, the unit tests are your client! Although this increases the programming effort up front, it actually reduces the total time taken to ship the product. I havelost count of how many times our massive unit test library has saved us from nasty regressions that we could never have found from UI testing.
- Write some code –Don’t worry, you don’t need to be the world’s best developer to write some code. All you need to do is think carefully about the different items in the Bill of Materials and start prototyping the methods, properties and events that will make it all work. Ensure you adhere to your coding standards. The goal of this exercise is to effectively build a skeleton of your application before the developers get on board. This can make them hyper productive when they start. They’ll probably end up getting rid of every line of your code, but it will get them in the rhythm of how you want the platform to look. As the architect of our platform, I used this period to prototype and test all of my assumptions of how things would work. By the time the developers got on board, I had a passable working prototype of an API with unit tests and coding standards, although there is almost none of my code in the final product, this enabled us to get running really quickly.
- Don’t write a test plan – Write the user documentation instead, and use this to test your application. That way you’ll know your application does everything the user guide says it does and you won’t double up on a test plan and the user guide (which should end up being pretty similar anyway). I wrote our user guide because I knew what I wanted the product to do and it’s also a fantastic way (sometimes they only way) you get to communicate with your customers.
- Give ownership, responsibility and praise – You will have no choice. As you get developers, testers, writers and others on board, you must give them ownership of components. I find that if I give someone total ownership, they always deliver. People are proud when they do great work and if they feel and really have ownership over something, it will be their best work. Not only that, but they’ll pull out every stop to impress you, the team and your customers. If you hire correctly, you’ve got great professionals in the team. Respect them as professionals and the results will be awesome.
- The best wire framing tools are not wire framing tools – You’re a start-up, right? Then you’ve discussed your ideas with potential customers and you deeply understand their needs. You could sit down with any number of wire framing tools and attempt to design components. How about you take a different approach? Write functional code which does what you (and therefore your customers want) – Developers find it far easier to code from a working model and they can re-use portions of your code. All of this streamlines the process and you can take your models to customers (with caveats on your poor coding skills and lack of stylistic ability).
- Constantly review and drive – We spend some time every day in front of a whiteboard discussing options, vision, checklists and almost everything else, but in a start-up, it’s not really a democracy. I run my start-ups like a benevolent dictatorship – I hold the final decision, but let everyone have input. I’m the one talking to customers, and sometimes I bring customers in to explain a requirement, but at the end of the day, how it works is up to me (I have the most to lose if it doesn’t work!)
Notice here, we never had a specification, requirements specification or design, we build the code a piece at a time and made it work. We’ve gone back and documented some core functionality, flowcharts and features, but at the outset, it’s more important to make it work. I’ll share a caveat, though, I’m also the software architect so I can hold the requirements for scalability, security and reliability, and guide the team to accomplish those goals.
Hiring the team can happen sometime between points 7 and 8, I don’t recommend you do it before!
If you’d like more information, please feel free to get in touch at nick@hubone.com, and if you’d like a copy of the software this built, we can be found at http://www.hubone.com.
Think About Pilot Teams, not Pilot Projects – Guest Post by Alan Atlas
Rally’s Alan Atlas shares with us his insights on picking a pilot project for Agile. His post nicely complements the account Sue McKinney and Pollyanna Pixton gave about their approach to bootstrapping Agile at IBM (click here). It also touches on some of the points made in our post The First Decision to Make. Whether you agree or disagree with Alan, his thoughts are always intriguing. You will find additional insights by Alan in The Scrum Mechanic.
Alan has been professionally involved in high tech for nearly thirty years. His career spans top technology companies such as Bell Labs and Amazon as well as various intriguing start-ups. He brought to market numerous products, including OSF Motif and Amazon’s S3. His passion for Scrum has recently led him to make a career switch into full-time Agile Coaching and Training with Rally Software.
Here is Alan:
Picture this: You’re an Agile Coach and you arrive for the first day of your new, monster engagement at a large enterprise that has hired you to help them become Agile. You’re very excited as you walk into your first training session with a select group of employees. As you start the training, you are greeted with questions from your happy, excited audience. “Can we get this over with early?” “I don’t want to be here. My manager said I had to come.” “What is this all about, anyway?” “I have a friend who got fired for advocating Scrum. I don’t want anything to do with it.” “Why am I here?” Is this any way to start an Agile transformation?
A necessary step in Agile adoptions is picking where to start. Consultants often help management or transition teams with the selection of so-called pilot projects. Project teams are then notified that they are the lucky winners in the Scrum Lottery. The result can be a (not entirely incorrect) feeling amongst employees that they are being forced to become Agile, which can lead to the scene I just described.
This command-and-control (C&C) approach can easily erode trust, destroy motivation and handicap an adoption program because it ignores the critical contribution that team buy-in and ownership can make toward successful implementation of the new development process. At best, it leaves a mild bad taste in the mouths of the employees and gives them a good reason to believe that this Scrum thing is just another management flavor of the week. At worst, it removes the single most important success factor in Agile adoption: the active and enthusiastic participation of the team.
Is there a reasonable way to avoid the pitfalls of the C&C approach and still meet the legitimate needs of management? Can we start a transformation with excited, enthusiastic employees instead of sullen ones? Can management make a decision to ‘go Agile’ and still establish a collaborative relationship with employees? Can we take advantage of the inherent appeal of Agile methods to increase our chances of success? I think the answer to all of these is, “Yes!”
Agile’s people-based approach tells us to view the world from a team-centric point of view and not a project-centric point of view. Applying this to our Agile transition itself, we realize that we don’t need to assign Scrum to projects. Instead, we can let teams choose to adopt Scrum (or not to adopt, to be fair). It’s the team that will make the Agile process work and lead to success, not the project itself. This approach will maximize the likelihood of success by finding the teams that want to make it work.
The way to ensure the success of early Agile transformation efforts and simultaneously to align management and employees without coercion is to provide teams with the permission and knowledge to make their own decisions, and then for management to support those decisions. Teams that choose to ‘go Agile’ will make it work. Teams that are told to ‘go Agile’ might or might not make it work.
Implementing this isn’t hard. Start by making introductory Agile training available to the target organization (a few two-hour classes spread throughout a week is a good start for all but the largest organizations). Announce that teams are welcome to try Scrum, and tell them how to request further team training and coaching (don’t neglect to make sure their immediate management is on board). There might be reasons to give priority to certain teams and possibly to delay others, but in general the teams that want to do Agile should be allowed to do it. The company is now supporting and leveraging teams that want to transition to Agile and allowing those that don’t want to change to continue as they are. This in itself is an important message to all that the Agile philosophy is being taken seriously by management.
The result of using this approach is that there is no bad taste among employees, the most enthusiastic teams self-select to participate in the new experiment, nobody is forced, and management demonstrates its willingness to support employees in the new endeavor.
No managers were harmed in the filming of this scenario. 🙂 Seriously, we put the focus on teams without negating any of the needs of the enterprise. The ability of teams to get further training can still be managed. The identities of the teams can be known so that there can be followup assessments, monitoring, and support. In the cases where it is necessary, teams that have interdependencies or other complexities can be staged appropriately. The biggest and most important difference between this scenario and the more traditional C&C scenario is that here the teams that are excited and interested about Agile become the first in the water.
Using this method for starting your transition doesn’t change anything else about your organizational Agile initiative. You still have all of the cultural, technical, engineering, management, organizational, and human issues to deal with. It just gives you a way to pick the starting point in a more positive and Agile way.
The Agile Executive 