Archive for the ‘The Agile Life’ Category
Publishing in the Cutter Blog
As practically all my work these days in done through the Cutter Consortium, I have shifted most of my blogging to the Cutter Blog. You can read my posts there by clicking here.
Enjoy reading and please let me know what you think!
Israel
Our Walls are Thicker
Indeed, not only were their walls thicker, they actually seemed to have razor wire on top and armed guards with vicious dogs patrolling each side of the metaphorical wall. All in an era characterized by tremendous advances in social networking and collaboration.
Click here for details of my Cutter blog post on the subject. Until you have the opportunity to do so, the picture below will quickly gives you the gist of it…
Juggling on the Berlin Wall (source: Wikipedia)
“Increase your own agility and stealthiness with this blog”
The Agile Executive has been featured on Online Universities list of the Best Management Blogs. The referees cited the following reasons for picking the blog:
When it comes to streamlined leadership, the clunky and the clumsy don’t find much favor. Increase your own agility and stealthiness with this blog.
I feel honored and privileged.
Late Night Thoughts on Stepping Into Cutter’s Agile Practice Director Role
http://www.flickr.com/photos/holia/3204431590/
I have just stepped into the role of Director, Cutter’s Agile Product and Project Management Practice. It has been a long time since I felt so honored. Little had I expected that a friendly 2008 email from Brian Robertson suggesting I write an article for Cutter, and a later invite from Jim Highsmith to join the practice would lead to my heading it now.
My preliminary thoughts about evolving the practice are summarized in the Cutter press release. I view Agility as much more than a ‘mere’ software method. I envision the combination of Agile, Cloud, Mobile and Social as transformative in nature. Specifically:
It is not ‘just’ about doing one thing or another a little faster. Rather, it is about enabling new business designs that utilize the ultra-fast pace and flexibility of multiple links in the company’s value chain. [Excerpt from the Cutter press release].
An example of the transformation I foresee is given in my 2011 prediction:
The paramount need to deliver faster/earlier is, for all practical purposes, dictated by today’s markets becoming hyper-segmented. For example, my (or your) Twitter network today is an evolving market segment. My Twitter network in March 2011 could easily be a different segment than the segment it is today. The only way to penetrate such fluid market segments effectively is by following the classic Agile mantra “Release early and often.”
Viewed from such perspective, Agility is more than a strategic initiative. It actually becomes a philosophy of life in the best sense of the word:
The real challenge, however, lies in how to go about solving problems when you don’t understand them well enough to get to a viable solution … when you don’t have a clear enough understanding of the problem to create clear solutions, you have to iterate. [Interview with Russ Daniels]
I will be the first one to admit that I don’t fully understand various facets of what it will take to make the Agile practice most meaningful to current Cutter clients and highly enticing to future prospects. Just as Russ suggests above, I plan to iterate.
And this, in the final analysis, is all that matters in an Agile practice.
Three Criteria for Qualifying as Agile
Agile methods have been gaining popularity to the extent that one sees the term Agile used beyond the domain of software methods. Agile Infrastructure and Agile Business Service Management were used in this blog and elsewhere. Recently I have seen the term used in the domain of Business Process Management (BPM). For example, a presentations entitled Best Practices for Agile BPM will be delivered in the forthcoming Gartner Group Business Process Management Summit 2010.
I have no doubt the term Agile will be adopted in various fields. Using BPM as an example, I propose the following three criteria to differentiate between agile (small A) and Agile (capital A):
- Beyond software: A software team carrying out a BPM initiative might use Agile methods. This fact to itself does not suffice to make the initiative Agile BPM.
- Methodical specificity: Roles, forums/ceremonies and artifacts for the BPM initiative must be specified. Folks might be already applying Lean, TOC or other approaches to BPM, but a definitive Agile BPM method has not crystalized yet.
- Values: Adherence in spirit to the four principles of the Agile Manifesto. Replace the word “software” with “product” in the manifesto (just two occurences!) and you get a universal value statement that is not restricted to “just” software. It applies to BPM as well as to any other field in which products are produced and used.
You might be impressively agile in what you do but it does not necessarily make you Agile. The pace by which you do things must be anchored in a broader perspective that incorporates customers and employees. A forthcoming post entitled Indivisibility of the Principles of Operation will explore the connection between the Agile values (plural) you hold and the business value (singular) you generate.
Predicting the Year Ahead
Cutter Consortium has published predictions for 2010 by about a dozen of its experts. My own prediction, which examines the crash of 1929, the burst of the “dot-com bubble” in 2000 and the financial collapse in 2008, is actually quite bullish:
I expect 2010 to be the first year of a prolonged golden age. Serious as the various problems we all are wrestling with after the 2008-2009 macro-economic crisis are, they should be viewed as systemic to the way a new generation of revolutionary infrastructure gets assimilated in economy and society.
In addition to the techno-economic view expressed in the Cutter prediction, here are my Agile themes for 2010:
- Agile moves “downstream” into Release Management.
- Agile breaks out of Development into IT (and beyond) in the form of Agile Infrastructure and Agile Business Service Management.
- SOA and Agile start to be linked in enterprise architecture and software/hardware/SaaS organizations.
- Kanban starts an early adoption cycle similar to Scrum in 2006.
Acknowledgements: I am thankful to my colleagues Walter Bodwell, Sebastian Hassinger, Erik Huddleston, Michael Cote and Annie Shum who influenced my thinking during 2009 and contributed either directly and indirectly to the themes listed above.
I Found My Voice; I did not Find My Tribe
Various Agile champions within the corporation often find themselves stuck at “level 1.5”, in between the following two levels:
- “I found my voice/passion.”
- “I found my tribe.”
The Agile champion typically gets stuck at this level in the following manner:
- He/she finds his or her voice/passion in Agile.
- Various other folks in the corporation agree with him/her and constitute kind of “private tribe.”
- However, the folks that agree are hesitant to come out of the closet and throw their full weight behind Agile.
- The corporation remains ambivalent about Agile.
This “1.5” phenomenon is at the root of a vicious cycle that dilutes companies, particularly these days:
- A round of layoffs is implemented.
- Just about everyone takes notice and tries to exhibit the “proper behavior/values.”
- Folks in the “private tribe” don’t dare come out of the closet.
- The passionate person who found his/her voice in Agile is like a fish out of the water. Sooner or later he/she looks for a tribe elsewhere.
- The company becomes more diluted on folks who are willing to try new things and have the drive to make them happen.
- The products and the supporting processes continue to be mediocre.
- Goto step 1.
IMHO The failure of many corporations to preserve Agile talent, and the resultant vicious cycle described above, is rooted in lack of appreciation how deep the connection between boredom and loneliness is. A young child does not know (nor does he/she have the vocabulary to express) what boredom is. The feeling the child expresses is that of loneliness. Only at a later stage does boredom get cognitively differentiated from loneliness. However, the two continue to be tied together emotionally.
Once the child grows up to become an Agile champion who found his/her voice, the boredom in the office is usually relieved. However, the twin sister of boredom – loneliness – cannot be satisfied through a “private tribe.” It requires full recognition and commitment within the corporation. In other words, it sort of demands that the corporation goes beyond recognizing the value (singular) of Agile and adopts the values (plural) expressed in the Agile Manifesto. If such adoption does not take place, an essential step to the formation of the tribe is curtailed . Without a full fledge tribe in his/her corporation, the induced feeling of loneliness sooner or later wears out the Agile champion.
This phenomenon, of course, applies to any professional passion an employee might pursue. John Hagel‘s Edge Perspectives post Pursuing Passion is a must-read for anyone who wonders how the corporation is impacted by losing the folks who got stuck at “level 1.5.”
What Sony Showed at Their Shareholders Meeting
Strictly speaking this video might not be considered an Agile topic. I would just say I had never seen as dramatic a demonstration of the importance of cadence as this artful “Did You Know?” video.
Many thanks to colleague Walter Bodwell for bringing this fascinating video to my attention.
Predictability is Bad for Your Business
I had the pleasure of meeting some old colleagues a few weeks ago. They work for a software company that pays a lot of attention to software engineering practices and invests heavily in software tools. Financial results, however, have not been great over the past few years.
Obviously, the disparity between the strength of the software engineering discipline and the relative weakness of the financial results is due to more than a single cause. One factor, however, was highlighted time and time again by my colleagues:
Predictability is killing us!
Paradoxical that this observation might seem, it is actually quite straightforward. Senior management in their company is really forceful about predictability. Hence, initiative, (affordable) experimentation and innovation have pretty much faded away. For most practical purposes it has become a check-the-box culture. All attempts to substitute reliable delivery for predictability seem to have failed so far.
One last “ingredient” to add to the story. This company is rich in talent. Generally speaking, the folks in the engineering trenches are gifted, knowledgeable, capable and dedicated.
How predictably poignant!
Technical Debt Goes Generic
Rally’s Richard Leavitt mentioned “his” technical debt in a conversation the two of us had last evening. As Richard is the head of marketing for Rally, I was expecting to hear about some deficit in the functionality, design, coding or testing of one of the market and customer facing websites his department deploys. I was dead wrong.
Richard was actually using technical debt in a generic sense. Anything in his department that they had to rush through and now plan to go back to and revisit/improve/fix is categorized as technical debt. The term applies to (say) laying the foundations for a marketing campaign as much as it does to re-architecting an application in order to improve its performance.
I don’t really know how wide spread the use of “technical debt” in this generic sense is. I am, however, impressed: another term of art is starting to get into the English language! How appropriate that such use of the term starts at a company that applies Agile values and practice to most of its operational and business processes.
The Agile Executive 