Being Agile - Say it, Do it, Prove it

I was working with a team recently and as we talked about all of the planning that Agile entails, I broke it down into very simple terms - Say it , Do it , Prove it. That is really what Agile is about.  Anything else outside of these three concepts is noise to your ability to deliver product and services to internal and external customers.  As Product Owners in an Agile organization, you need to understand all of the effort and dynamics involved in getting your teams to Say it, Do it, Prove it.

Delivering what you say you are going to deliver is the best way to build credibility with your stakeholders.

For Agile teams, this translates into being effective at decomposing your stories into small enough increments so that you are confident in your understanding of the user story and estimates that the team believes in.

1. Say it = Release Planning and Backlog Grooming -
   1. Starting at a high level, the Product Owner is responsible for saying what is important to the organization from a value standpoint and beginning the process of developing a user story backlog that supports this vision.
   2. User story decomposition is so important to effective Agile teams and the Product Owner must start with a set of well-formed stories that provide context to the team.
   3. What is 'context'?   Context is anything that provides definition.  It is basically what the product should do from a functional standpoint.  One of the biggest mistakes many teams make is writing declarative stories that start with the 'How'.  This,\ in turn,  puts the technical team on the defensive as they may have many different ways to implement the feature.  As a Product Owner, be sure to steer clear of writing stories that define how you think the feature story should be implemented.  I know that as we all become well versed in technology there is a strong desire to show off our technical chops, however, as a PO you need to provide context from a business standpoint that your tech teams can consume. I've heard time and again from engineers that they would really like to understand how what they are developing delivers business value or solves a particular pain point for the customer.  The team works much more effectively when they are completely grounded in the business context of what they are building.
2. Do it = Sprint execution 
   1. An important element for teams to address once they are ready to take stories into a sprint, is that the goal during the Release Planning and Backlog Grooming activities was to begin to build out the context of 'How' the story will be implemented.  It is so important for teams to understand that there is essentially a handoff from the PO to the Scrum Team and that each of them is responsible for building what I call contextually rich user stories.  Gojko Adzic calls this Specifications by Example.  Effective teams who deliver fast and with high quality work closely as a team.
   2.  I believe that the combination of User driven stories and context driven specifications (examples) forms an extremely strong definition of both Ready and Done. which is why I coach my teams to utilize BDD as the basis for developing their User Story acceptance criteria.  The team works together to complete BDD acceptance criteria forming a clear understanding of the boundaries of the feature.  This provides the PO with a concise view of what to expect during the Demo.
   3. Another key benefit of writing BDD as part of your user story writing is that the test automation engineers can easily consume this as part of their code development for the automation.  PO's should push to get to this level of context as it also means that your test engineers can start developing their test automation code once the story is ready for development.  They can essentially perform TDD in that they can write their automation before the feature is actually developed.  Once developed the automation should run cleanly and both speed and quality are attained.
   4. The goal of teams should be to deliver user stories that do not require much further elaboration once the sprint begins.  You want your teams focused on delivery ,not on discovery.
3. Prove it = Retrospective
   1. You have done all of the work to clearly define your user stories with high levels of context.  With all of this effort, the Retrospective should be an easy affair to show the work that was defined in the stories.  The PO should not have any surprises.  In fact, if the team misses any test scenarios after the story has been started, the PO should consider that more of a missed requirement over anything else.  Since the entire team developed the stories,  there can be no finger-pointing at anyone.  It was a shared miss and everyone must accept it.

It sounds really simple when broken down into these 3 basics phrases.  The truth is that 'Being Agile' is much more involved than simply 'Doing Agile'.

"Being Agile" means exposing all of the inefficiencies in your product development processes.  It requires that the organization be completely honest in assessing what is not working and committing to letting the teams that do the work fix these processes.  You cannot top down drive the type of organizational change that is required for Agile continuous improvement.  Real organizational change is fostered at the top but truly owned by the Scrum teams that form in support of any Agile adoption.

Agile, Change and the things we can do

We home school our children and a few years ago my wife decided to utilize stories and a Kanban board to manage the kids work flow every day. Doing this provided her the ability to build a backlog of work tasks that our children were going to work on (no we didn't have them perform estimations or commitments :) )  Each day she puts up the work that they need to complete in the Not Started column and then the kids can decide which ones that they want to work on and pull the ticket into the In Progress column.

Once they are done with a ticket my wife reviews the work and if accepted moves the ticket to Accepted.  This approach provided our kids with some level of control over their work flow and also an understanding that they weren't done until Mom signed off on their work.  This way of managing their work provide them visibility to how much is left for the day and more importantly the topics that cause them more trouble.

Now that my daughter is working on her first business/website (she's 13) we are using an Agile Discovery process where we are building a User Story backlog (she's learning VOC) and developing low-fi wireframes (she's learning design) for her website where she will be selling her customized jewelry made out of recycled products, photography of the animals she has seen across the country and raising awareness of animal conservation.  She's now comfortable with an Agile process because we laid the groundwork during school.  I think in many ways teachers could utilize this process which would provide visibility to high performing individuals and those that are struggling.  Taking a page from Scrum perhaps the high performing individuals can provide support to the ones that may be struggling, just like we would expect our Scrum teams to do when someone is struggling with a particularly gnarly code problem.

Agile is most commonly associated with Software Development, but really the iterative continuous improvement concepts apply to anything you want to focus on.

Agile can be applied to changing your habits.  For example if you want to lose weight, write an Epic stating that value of losing weight, then write several thematic user stories with your intermediate goals and then write stories for your sprints with specific activities you need to accomplish (exercise, etc...) put it on the wall for your Kanban tracking.  If necessary have a standup with people who are supporting you so you can report on your progress, impediments (Ben and Jerry's is right next to my office...)

An underlying principle of Agile is the need to change behavior, not just of the teams building your product but those that want them built.  You can't have a smooth running organization if you don't address the intrinsic  behavior of people in general.  Agile can provide the framework for helping make this change by providing a shared language.

When we work in an organization we may think we are all working towards an end goal (ie making great products, making money, etc...) but as soon as an organization begins to grow people who don't know each other and who may have no shared experiences need to start communicating.

I recently completed McCarthy's Core Protocol training  and one of the things I came away from it was that getting people to have a shared framework of communication is the most important thing that high performing teams and organizations should focus on, the rest will come as a result of this effort.  If you deliver this you deliver the ability for these teams to produce great product anywhere/anytime.

Think about it this way - We are all organic systems, who behave based upon the experiences that we take in over our life time.  Since no two humans are organically the same ( not even your own family) we end up with an ineffective communication driven by our life experiences and trained responses.

Core Protocols and in my mind Agile, provide a framework to establish a common language, just as we do with disparate technical systems (isn't that what a service based architecture is all about?), we write code that provides a common communication protocol between them, removing the impediment their different languages pose to having them communication effectively.

As you begin to start to adopt Agile understand that though the practices you read about, such a Release Planning, etc... are extremely important, the need to provide your teams and organizations a shared communication framework are equally important to long-term success.

Sound Agile - Aligning Agile with Soundness

As I indicated in my last post I renamed my blog to Sound Agile and I'll be writing about Agile from the perspective of Soundness and how organizations should be evaluating their Agile adoption. I spent quite a bit of time trying to decide what I wanted to name my consulting business and blog (both are called Sound Agile) and I ultimately wanted to convey what I have seen as successful with respect to the teams and organizations I have worked with over the past 10 years.

Thanks to my wife for providing me a word that when I looked at it provided me with the right context to what I had been trying to convey.

Sound: 

adjective

1. free from injury, damage, defect, disease, etc.; in good condition; healthy; robust: a sound heart; a sound mind.

Supporting Manifesto - Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

a. Free from Defect - Speaks to Quality that we strive for in Agile. b. Healthy - Speaks to your employees health and well-being c. Robust - Speaks to building scalable products. d. Sound Mind - Speaks to teams keeping a clear and open mind to improve

2. financially strong, secure, or reliable: a sound business; sound investments.

Supporting Manifesto - Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

a. Sound business/investment - Speaks to the value proposition that Agile focuses on. b. Financially strong, secure and reliable - Speaks to the ability of Agile teams to delivery products that are foundational to your organizations long term health and security.

3. Competent, sensible, or valid: sound judgment - This speaks to trusting that the people that you are hire are compentent and when following Agile ceremonies such as Standups, Retrospectives and Planning are able to deliver product that is built on solid decisions.

4. Having no defect as to truth, justice, wisdom, or reason: sound advice. - This speaks to the continuous improvement and Retrospectives that drive this effort.

5. Of substantial or enduring character: sound moral values - Speaks to team commitments, believing and supporting themselves, the foundation of Scrum.

We spend so much time writing and talking about things that we should, could, might do to deliver Agile,  We hear people talk about how 'Agile' are you, tell people that doesn't 'Sound Agile' and I think we have muddied the waters of what Agile should be.

When you hear Sound Agile you may be inclined to add an additional adjective 'Sounds Like Agile' and to some degree that is expected.  My focus however will be on the soundness of Agile from the perspective of organizational change an area that isn't really talked about as much as the other elements of day to day Scrum.

I look forward to comments and input to my blog as my writings will form the basis for the types of coaching and consulting I hope to do in the future.

Technology isn't important, Product is

We are so enamored with technology today, what it can do, the excitement it brings to us as technologists that we have lost sight of the fact that technology isn't the end game for a business. Why?  Because if your organization could figure out a way to run their business so that it wasn't dependent upon technology they would do it in a heartbeat.   The people who own and run businesses don't care about the underlying technology, even those who classify themselves as technology companies.  At the end of the day technology enables the business to develop product.  They aren't in the business of  developing technology as  end product and I think that goes for companies who deliver 'technical' products.

Many teams I've worked on in the past 10 years have isolated themselves from the organization, instead telling stakeholders they were  focusing on technical excellence.  Leaving the stakeholders wondering why they weren't delivering what they wanted all in the name of technical excellence.

I worked on one project that was so late that the business ending up exiting the market that they were in.  In response the Development manager said if only the stakeholders knew how cool the technology was that they had worked on they would change their mind.  Really?  They could care less, all they wanted was a product that would keep them in the market and making money.

Though the amount of information we can process has exploded we aren't really solving really new problems, they are just much larger in scale and are required with much higher availability.  At the end of the day business runs on information that drives product decisions that build value.  Like any other part of the organization we are responsible for delivering value, not technology.

If we could deliver data to our business without all of this cool technology like hadoop, etc....they would be just as satisfied.

We should spend much more time on how we can deliver what we need for the business with less over building systems that continually build in complexity because we aren't product focused.  Think about it, organizations that deliver at scale, such as car manufacturers continue to refine their processes so that complexity is removed, whereas we seem to have to add complexity in order to deliver value.  They add technology where it makes sense not just because it's the latest thing.

Technology isn't important but our technical product is.  We have architects, tech leads, dev managers, however I don't often see them actually defining the technical product that the business needs, rather they evaluate specific pieces of it, SQL server over Oracle, Java over .Net, etc.....and with each iteration individual personalities can influence the type of technology being implemented, often times in direct competition with the documented tech stack that company operates in.

What we end up with is a technology product that doesn't scale well and adds cost to the organization in both resources and revenue delays.  When confronted with the mess we've made we tell the organization that can solve the problem with a new platform.  Unfortunately we often fail to fully deliver on that promise for the same reasons that we got into the situation in the first place.

This is not to say that we don't try to build systems right. Executives also need to bear responsibility for not providing the Engineers you have hired the support and time necessary to actually build technical products that deliver value to your business product, they are one and the same in today's world.

When your technical team is forced to meet dates, the inherent compromises that need to be made typically result in short cuts to your technical product in order to deliver the most for your business product.  You can do this in the short term, but if you don't provide your teams time to shore up these short cuts your technical debt continues to grow.  And like any debt you eventually have to pay it.  Pay it at the end of every release like a credit card you won't incur finance charges.  Continue to pay just the minimum and you eventually can go bankrupt.

Agile and the Management Impact

You're a technology manager in an organization that has decided that they are going to adopt Agile.  Thunk......now what? You've spent years becoming the high performing manager you are today, managing the day-to-day details of your team, holding things together, making decisions big and small....You are the leader, success of your team hinges on your ability to make decisions that impact the way the team works. Your team is successful because of your management efforts....Sound like you?

This Agile thing is telling me that my teams are now going to be 'self-organizing' and be able to make decisions on their own...what the heck am I going to do?

Managers who are asked to move their organization to Agile may often believe like they are providing the path to the doorway out of the company.  This resistance can be one of the primary impediments to successful Agile adoption and as an organization Sr. Management needs to be aware of this paradigm and provide support to middle managers that Agile is not about replacing them but truly about getting them into a position where they are focused in the truly valuable parts of their job - Strategic Planning, Employee Development..the bigger picture.

Stephen Covey teaches that successful managers are the ones who are able to remove themselves from the quadrant of activities that are Urgent and Important and focus on the activities that were Important but Not Urgent, meaning remove yourself from day-to-day decision-making over planning and strategy development.

So many of us can get sucked into the day-to-day minutiae of our teams that we end up ignoring the bigger picture areas which should be our focus.  Why?  Because dealing with Important and Urgent activities is an addictive feeling, you feel like you are making important decisions when in fact your team is probably more than capable of making them without you.

Agile provides your team with leadership opportunities that aren't found in more traditional process control organizations.  Step back and let your team grow.  I've been amazed how teams, when given the opportunity, can solve process issues and impediments to productivity that I would have never thought of.  The collective minds of your organization are capable of great things.

As a manager you need and want to embrace this power and provide support for you team.  Let them help you and help the organization deliver on the promise that Agile provides.

How can you help?

• Understand that for your teams to succeed they need to fail, yes I said that.
• Don't attend their ceremonies (standups, retrospectives)  Why?  The team needs to be able to speak openly and honestly about what is working and not working without you being present.
• Use the working metrics available to you, velocity, burndown.  If your team says they are going to do 'x' story points and they do that consistently, what else do you need to know?
• Don't force your opinions on what they 'SHOULD' be doing.  Have confidence that you have hired great people and they like you want to succeed.
• Work closely with the Product Owner and Scrum Master to discuss any concerns you have.  Understand why things are working a certain way before leveling your judgement.
• Don't act as a Scrum Master or Product Owner of the team. Why?  You manage their careers and it's highly unlikely that the team will receive the benefits of iterative continuous improvement if they don't feel confident that they can say when things aren't working well.
• Don't believe that everything is great the way it is, anything can be improved.

Agile will provide transparency with respect to the areas of your organization that isn't working efficiently.  As a management team you will need to focus your attention on addressing these impediments as your Agile teams mature.  If these hurdles and impediments aren't dealt with you will reach a ceiling on the ROI that Agile can provide.  As with your teams, management needs to be honest with themselves about broader organizational issues so that a stronger and more effective organization emerges.

Agile isn't just about delivering software faster, it's much more than that.  Understanding that will make the transition your Agile smoother.

Agile Discovery - Addressing fixed date/scope projects through upfront planning

Most of the Agile projects (perhaps all) that I have worked on over the years have started with an express understanding of scope AND a fixed date for the delivery.  One of the common myths I think people have about Agile is that when you 'go' Agile this issue goes away, it doesn't. By ignoring the need for some level of planning prior to taking on an Agile project, teams start with a deficit of knowledge (ie well groomed story backlog).

I'm a huge proponent of having teams take on their project backlog with an initial Discovery workshop that includes the entire team and can take anywhere from 1-5 days depending upon the size and scope of the project being considered.

I've used this approach to plan out a 6 month release with tremendous success, typically delivering more value than the stakeholder asked for and with virtually no defects.

I think this planning effort is key for teams to realize high levels of iteration productivity.  The time to build context in your stories and features is not after the iteration (or train) has left the station.

Many of you, especially Product Owners, will make the assumption that it's a waste of time for the team to perform a Discovery session that builds out stories and acceptance criteria at a lower level for more than an iteration out.  The concern that everyone has is that if we don't start coding immediately we'll be behind and won't make our commitment.  The truth?  Having a user story backlog that is well formed and understood by the team allows the team to stay focused and productive over trying to design and address context while trying to actually code the feature.

What do I mean by Discovery?

Once a team receives a project from their stakeholders with a set date for delivery, the 'scope' of the project then becomes the key to meeting the delivery expectations.

If the team just starts coding with the first few stories that are available they are already in story deficit, they don't have enough work to keep the iteration engine going, meaning Backlog Grooming, Pre-Iteration Planning and Current Iteration planning.  High functioning Agile teams understand that the iteration engine only works when you have a product backlog that is clearly prioritized, has sufficient context and can be worked on with no real impediments.

For example if a team has a six month project which consists of 12 two week iterations the team needs to identify the following:

• Story Themes - What are the functional slices of the features/product you are delivering.  Themes form the basis for building your release plan.  Themes will hold the high level user stories that are identified in Discovery, typically greater than 40 points.
• Epics - These are the larger User Stories that are identified during discovery as they relate to the Story Themes.  These will typically be larger than 40 points.
• Features - As Epics are decomposed they are further brought into focus as distinct features that can be worked on a independent units of work.  Features will typically be sized between 21-40 points and have a much greater shared understanding by the team of what it will take to deliver this.
• User Stories - As teams continue to decompose Features that are able to get to the granular set of work, complete with Acceptance Criteria (such as BDD).  These are the items that are addressed in iteration planning.

My experience over the years has seen teams be able to spend anywhere from 2-5 days working through the Themes, Epics and Features such that we have a strong understanding of how the project will unfold from a release standpoint and a lower level set of Features and User Stories that help UX work ahead of the Delivery team.  This process has proven successful for the teams I've worked with who have tried it.

I'm not suggesting that an entire 12 iteration project needs to be flushed out to the user story task level, however getting further than the Epic level with a few features and a few stories will allow teams to be very focused on iteration level delivery on a consistent basis.

This effort can provide a higher level confidence level for the team with a small spike of investment in upfront planning.

Planning is an important element of successful Agile teams, don't short change it when working through new features/functionality.