Business Leaders Need to Understand Agile — It has NOTHING to do with Frameworks

I’m a businessperson first and foremost, having led several companies. As someone who has been involved with Agile for 20 years, I struggle with the myopic nature of what Agile has become, which is almost entirely focused on implementing and mastering an Agile framework.

Agile is now mostly about the operational optimization of a framework with value delivery an assumed attribute, but Agile hasn’t established an effective way to understand or identify value. Teams are expected to understand what it is and how to deliver it. The problem with this is that to deliver long-term value to my business I need to understand what I need to invest in first. Value delivery is entirely dependent on investing in the right things at the right time for the right reasons. Satisfying my customers is certainly important but there are so many peripheral aspects of my business that aren’t tied directly to customer satisfaction that also require that we make smart investments. And investment decisions should be coming from leadership with them directly tied to strategic outcomes.

Every part of the organization has strategic needs, but often what my operational leaders provide for funding are things they want or think will be valuable to them, and many times these requests end up creating organizational dissonance as the initiatives being approved aren’t functionally or strategically aligned. There isn’t an Agile framework out there that has provided a solution that helps organizations optimize their value stream investments so that they both understand the outcomes that are expected and how we will deliver on those outcomes. Value in Agile is not quantified, it’s either inferred or objectively assigned by people who are required to commit to the delivery of value, rather they are committed to delivering the project, which may or may not deliver value.

For Agile to succeed as a business framework we need to have a clear and unambiguous way to quantify value, prioritize it and confirm that the value we planned for is delivered. Failure to provide this is operational malpractice and yet we spend millions of dollars working to implement frameworks that have no hope of making your organization agile, at best you get some improved levels of transparency but without optimizing your delivery capabilities around value then Agile as it is configured today will only get you so far from an investment return perspective.

Why Working Software is a Key Agile Principle

Why is working software one of the primary principles of Agile?

Because when we deliver something that was asked for we may or may not have gotten it right.

I know from my experiences the vision that someone has in their mind about how something should work doesn’t always align with what the development team has delivered.

Working software provides value to the development process by providing feedback – you asked for this now I delivered it.  Now you provide feedback – I asked for this but it isn’t working exactly the way I wanted to.

Agile accepts changing requirements as part of continual interaction between the customer(end-user) and the development team.  This is what we mean by accepting change as part of Agile.

Instead, this mindset is often I think taken as, I provided a large business requirements document that you must work from and commit to upfront, but at any time late in the project, I can change my mind about what I want and no matter the impact it causes you told me Agile accepts change. 

If that is your idea of accepting changing requirements late in the game, then you are playing the wrong game.

If your organization isn’t changing their engagement model to support these continual interactions between your users (or their proxy PO and business leadership) and development team and instead saves any interaction until near the end of the project, then all you have successfully done is shorten the cycles by which you are working in Waterfall, delivering your large project in 2-week increments and waiting until the end to review what the team has delivered and at that point telling us we didn’t get it right.

There is a reason that most of the Agile frameworks provide varying levels of engagement, from the team up to leadership.  The Agile Manifesto Principles expressly identify the value that can be delivered by having a high level of engagement – ‘Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.’

So if you are already working in Agile or considering adopting Agile as your delivery model then you must change the way you engage with the process if you want to have real success in your Agile adoption.

I still see too many organizations that have very little engagement with reviewing the work that their teams are delivering which means that we end up having a disconnect between the requesting and delivery process, which will cause lower productivity and quality while delivering lower levels of value.

The Neuroscience of Agile

Over the past year, my interest in neuroscience has grown and one of the interesting things that have come out of my learning is that the brain, as it turns out, spends quite a bit of energy thinking (subconsciously) about what might happen in the next moments in time. 

Historically it had been thought that the brain reacted to stimuli and then formulated a response (think fight or flight).  But the brain is much more active in its planning whether or not we will need that type of response. Our brain is constantly evaluating what we are doing at the moment and trying to predict what our response will need to be in the upcoming moments.

That implies that our brains are tuned to short-range planning, so it should not be surprising that humans are not all that good at predicting what will happen further in the future. 

That’s not to say our brain doesn’t look at what has transpired historically and provides us an ability to guess what the future of something might be, but ultimately we simply aren’t wired for success in long-term predictive planning.

So given our brain is good at predicting what will happen in the very near term, I find it interesting that software development processes evolved over the years to encourage long-term planning, asking people to say today what they will do 6 months from now, especially given all of the unknown variables that exist in complex software development work.

At best we are guessing about what we will need to do 6 months into a 12-month project.  The brain simply isn’t set up for the successful long-range planning that Waterfall requires because we can’t anticipate what might happen as it is too far out into the future.

I suppose all of the Waterfall gates and approvals are designed to provide us some level of comfort or false confidence against the unknowns we accept as a risk to our projects.

Software development is a complex thing, you are asking people to develop in or on top of a complex environment where everything can’t be known upfront and the human brain no matter how much you try to plan for the future, really must be focused mostly on the more current aspects of their project, eg - what am I doing today and tomorrow and at most next week.  Sound familiar?  Short incremental development cycles followed with an inspect and adapt check-in?

So if our brains have developed to be very good at short-term planning why would we not want to adopt Agile as a way to deliver our software development efforts?

Agile aligns to a natural strength, short-term planning with fast feedback loops, which provide us an ability to react and respond to what we are seeing and learning. 

Those fast feedback loops inform everyone as to what just happened and what is about to happen so that if needed, we can react and change our course.  Our brains are set up for this type of behavior. Asking us to plan tasks months in advance is asking for failure on multiple levels, be it productivity, quality, context, or value.

As you either consider adopting Agile or making your current effort more successful, spend a good amount of time redesigning your planning process top to bottom, to support a short-term planning cycle.  You will find everyone more supportive (and happy) of working this way and you will see more value being delivered.

To learn how you can be better at Agile contact me at Michael@soundagile.com

Why Do We Need to Scale Agile?

That is a question I have been grappling with over the past few weeks because even though I’m an Enterprise Agile Coach, who is typically brought in to support scaling Agile, usually via SAFe, I struggle with the whole concept.

Scaling Agile on its surface sounds anti-Agile as it implies a level of structure and conformity that will kill creativity, which is what Agile is really about.

However, ever since Agile had success in small settings, there has been a rush to sell Agile to large organizations as the cure to solve all of their issues.

Scaling frameworks sprung up to support this desire to move to Agile and with it came everything that will kill real Agility.

Here’s the thing, those initial successes you had were with small teams, working on things that could be isolated from the rest of the organization, and were provided a space to try new ways of working, without the pressure to conform operationally to a fixed date and scope project.

That was my experience, working in a completely Waterfall world I became the Scrum Master for a team that was going to build an entirely new product. We were very successful and in about six months we had a market-ready product. Though everyone was impressed that was the end of the organization’s experiment with Agile but was the beginning of my journey towards it.

It was many more years before I worked at an organization that needed to change everything about how they worked and it was the first time I had a view of what the needs of a larger organization might be related to working in Agile.

Though we were provided space to work differently and to make mistakes, we also as a group kept ourselves informed as to what other teams were doing and if something was working we’d look into whether that made sense to adopt.

We become more structured in how we worked through months of trial and error, while engaging our leadership to gauge what they needed so that we moved towards a common goal and outcome.

Though we worked in projects (note the Agile Manifesto has the word project in it so it’s not something that goes away) we helped our business and PMO partners understand that by moving to Agile we were providing them much greater transparency as to how we were progressing and more importantly it gave the business a greater understanding of the complexity of the work we did on their behalf.

Over the next 18 months, we went from a poorly performing development group to one that had gained the trust of the business and was given ever-larger initiatives to work on, ones that transformed an entire organization.

The key thing you need to understand with Agile at scale is that the primary thing you are trying to do is to unleash the creativity of your people. You hire tons of very smart people and then turn around and tell them exactly how they have to work, we don’t like that.

The problem with this? Your organization isn’t typically set up to support this and the scaling frameworks don’t even address people and creativity as important elements of Aglie.

By unleashing creativity you are allowing your people to figure out best how to work as a team, across the organization, and deliver increasing amounts of productivity, quality, and value.

I believe what has been the focus of scaling Agile is to provide Sr. Leadership an allusion that Agile is a thing we implement, like Salesforce, and then turn on. If everyone follows the same processes, attends the same ceremonies, and acts in the same manner, then the entire organization must be Agile, right?

If you are on an Agile journey already or are thinking about starting one, don’t start with a scaling framework first. If you need one later, consider it.

Instead, start by changing your organization structure so that it supports letting people who do the work figure out best how to do the work. What is required from Leadership is to establish guidance focused on:

o How the organization makes decisions — What is our mindset for them? We’ll align our decision-making around those expectations, ensuring we are all on the same page.

o How the organization decides what is valuable — This one is the hardest, look to your strategies first. By providing understanding to both what is value and how we can derive it, your teams will make good decisions on what work will bring the best value in the moment.

o How we will empower you — Allow failure to be part of the journey. No framework will expunge the need for failure, what frameworks do is focus on activity over outcomes more often than not. Celebrate failure for the learning it provides.

As you consider Agility in the organization know that there are foundational aspects of your operations that must change, from HR, Finance, Sales, Marketing, and Technology, everyone must be engaged in the journey, it’s not just a technology thing. This is what scaling is about, allowing people to make the necessary changes to enable Agility, not laying a rule-based structure over another rule-based structure, and hoping things will get better.

Agile Your Way

My experience with Agile stretches back almost 20 years when a healthcare organization I worked for asked me to take on a new product development effort that was languishing. When meeting with the developers they asked me if I’d support them doing the project in Scrum. Not being familiar with it I did some reading and came back and said I’d do it.

And this was how many of us started in Agile, people taking the leap and then figuring it out. Funny thing, during this time there were no coaches.

Instead, we were forced to work with each other to figure out what our ‘Agile’ was going to look like. And here’s the thing, there is no ONE way to do Agile. You did what worked and if it worked then you were Agile enough and kept changing when needed.

Coaching came later and with it the industry that we have now. Lost in all of the talk involving frameworks has been the concept that each organization is different and what Agile will become for them needs to adjust or adapt to the organization and not vice versa.

Instead, Agile Transformations rely almost entirely on the implementation of specific frameworks and then telling the organization they have to adapt to what the framework expects. The frameworks assume that your organization perfectly fits into their framework and no company I’ve worked for yet has that been the case. 

You have to apply the framework based upon the intended outcomes the framework seeks and not implement it ‘out of the box’ in my experience.

Don’t get me wrong I’ve been involved with many organizations where we have implemented something out of the box and it’s not that we can’t deliver value, but the inherent imbalance of where the organization is at and what the framework expects keeps us from reaching higher levels of matutity.

Another reality not talked about much, is that is possible to be successful in managing a transformation on your own. Two of the most successful Agile organizations I’ve worked in (not as a coach) were led by the people in the organization, we just started and got to work asking a simple question – Is what we are doing Agile? If not what needs to change? 

Was it easy? No, but what change is? Could we have used some help? Sure, but we couldn’t afford a multi-million dollar transformation led by coaches.

It was these experiences in mind that I helped create the Agile Learning Journey, a complete package of E-learning content, developed based upon my years of experience in working in Agile. 

Agile Learning Journey provides coaching for your leadership down to the teams that will be working in Agile but does so in a way that points you lays a foundation of knowledge that would have been helpful all those years ago when I started working in Agile.

In addition to the reach experience you will find in our learning modules, we also provide you with boot camp training material, templates, and a myriad of other support elements to help you launch your Transformation successfully.

We can help you move to an Agile operating model at a fraction of the cost of bringing on full-time coaches, who often have little of that real-world experience I’ve developed over the years.

This is an important distinction because coaches who haven’t been involved in working in Agile will in the end tell you how the framework is supposed to work, but have little real experience making it work. 

This is where my experience brings life to our product. I’ve worked through the challenges of how to align change to action for people and organizations.

If you are interested in learning more please visit us at agileprocoaching.com or connect with me directly at michael@agileprocoaching.com. 

TAP2 Change - Building an Agile Organization via the Pillars of Transparency, Accountability and Predictability

I’ve been involved with Agile for almost 15 years in all manner of roles and organizations. Some of the Agile efforts I’ve been involved with could be counted as a success, some not so much. 

The organizations that I’ve been involved with, which had successful transformations, had a few key behaviors they exhibited, which included:

1.     A willingness to be vulnerable regarding what wasn’t right about how the organization. These organizations weren't afraid to discuss what wasn't working and make decisions about what needed to be done at the Leadership level.

2.     Active engagement from the organization’s leadership and a willingness to experiment and fail along the way towards mature and effective agile processes.

3.     An ability to provide people and teams the space to become self-organizing and empowered to define how best to work within in the context of being Agile.

As I've moved through the Agile experience I've identified a way to approach an 'Agile Transformation' from a different perspective. Too often our focus is only on the frameworks that have grown up to support the implementation of Agile, such as Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, xP and a myriad of others. These frameworks focus on how teams operate and are concerned mostly about the flow of work to teams. This is only part of the equation.

Based upon my experiences I've created a framework that is holistically focused on changing the entire organization not just the software development capability.

I call the approach TAP2 Change

TAP2 Change focuses on developing three key pillars necessary for a successful Agile transformation:

1.     Transparency

2.     Accountability

3.     Predictability

Transparency –

This pillar is about defining many of the missing pieces of most Agile Transformations, most importantly identifying why the organization wants to move too Agile.

Agile shines a light on all of your organization’s inefficiencies and asks one simple question – What you are going to do about it? 

Something we don’t tell organizations trying to be Agile is that Agile doesn’t fix anything, it’s not a framework, or a process, so it can't 'deliver' anything for you. What it is, is a mindset which asks you to challenge your current belief structures held within your organization and then start the process of re-envisioning your organization.

Transparency starts at the top where we challenge Leadership to:

1.     Define a clear vision and strategy conveying to the organization why you want to do this and what you expect to have as an outcome as you transition to Agile. Tell people the important part of change - ‘What’s In It For Me’

2.     Reassess how they view their value streams or develop them if they don’t exist. This will challenge long-held beliefs about what is valuable to the organization and will result in a brand new way of thinking about your business.

3.     Redefine your products and capabilities within the context of your value streams. This again will challenge beliefs about where your organizational value resides. 

4.     Engage people from all levels of the organization as you build out your Agile Transformation strategy, ivory tower approaches need not apply. Agile is a ground game that needs input from everyone in the organization so it doesn’t appear that this is being something done to them but with them.

5.     Completely change the way you look at how you finance your software development projects, moving from Project to Team-based funding.

Your Transparency Pillar will be the most difficult and will take the most time because if you can’t be transparent about what outcomes you are seeking and the ways that your organization must change to get them, then you will not realize the full value of going Agile.

Instead, you’ll be like the myriad of organizations who reach the state of Doing Agile and never move past this state or worse regress when leadership declares they are Agile and stops supporting it.

Accountability –

Accountability is an important element in any Agile Transformation however much of our efforts in rolling out Agile to the organization avoid organizational and team accountability.

When we talk about Accountability we are talking about several elements:

1.     Organizational Accountability – Leadership is accountable for defining an Agile Transformation strategy and roadmap and ensuring that they both communicate and regularly update the organization on how they are doing. Leadership is also accountable for ensuring that they support the change and don’t simply fund the initiative and forget about their part in this significant culture change that they must lead.

2.     Team Accountability – As Product Development teams begin operating in whatever framework that they will be using, they are accountable to the organization to engage positively and seek to continually grow in the maturity and capability of that framework. Too often Leadership views Agile as a way for software development teams to not be accountable for their work and show progress in delivering on important features and functionality. This is not the case, but how we view accountability is not about hitting fixed dates and scope but rather being accountable with respect to our Transparency so that Leadership is informed with facts about how we are progressing and can then more clearly understand the issues with attempting to create features in a highly complex environment.

Leadership is accountable to teams to be engaged in assessing what value we they are delivering and making fact based decisions on what is needed not what was wanted.

Predictability –

Predictability is ultimately what Leaders are looking for, they have to make commitments to customers and shareholders with respect to value that they expect to deliver. Not all organizations have the luxury to continually develop and deliver new features and enhancements such as Amazon or Google can, the reasons are many but they are real.

This pillar however, just as with the Accountability Pillar, is not about a team marching towards a fixed date/fixed scope effort. Rather Predictability is about understanding the capacity of individual teams and the entire organization and identifying the minimal amount of work that will deliver the most value in the shortest time.

We view Predictability not within the context of scope but with cadence, be it story points, # of stories, or whatever metric you use to identify how much work can be completed within a specified amount of time.

To ignore our need to show progress, even if the progress shows that we are hitting challenges, provides important fast feedback to Leadership so that they can make informed decisions and manage expectations of customers earlier than waterfall would ever allow.

You can build out one or more of the Pillars, but it is the strength of all three that will provide you with a strong foundation for building a successful Agile Transformation.

To learn more about our process you can reach me at michael@soundagile.com or go to www.soundagile.com

Also - Coming Soon - Look for my book - TAP2 Change Building an Agile Organization via the Pillars of Transparency, Accountability, and Predictability.

Moving from Project to Team based Funding in Agile

When we move to Agile we typically form our teams and then happily keep our waterfall project based funding structure in place.

We do this for a few reasons:

1. We think it’s the only way to show the cost of the work that we are asking to be delivered.
2. Projects are easily understood from an operational standpoint as they have a defined start and end date which is tightly aligned with the cost of the project.
3. It’s the way we’ve always done it.

As part of our project based funding model we have an annual project funding request process, where we  spend weeks/months identifying the things that we think are important (note I’m not using the word valuable here) so that we can obtain funding.  Things move above or below the approval line and when the dust settles we have a book of work that is committed to, with freshly minted project plans and a cadre of project managers to manage the money we just gave to these projects.

An annual project funding request process also means that we ask for what we need and then everything else we may or may not need.  We ask for a Ferrari when perhaps all we need is a good dependable family sedan.

There is power in money, who has it and who controls it typically drives what gets funded and what doesn’t.  It’s not uncommon for Sr. Leadership to commit to work even though their team doesn’t have any experience in the product solely to get the money to keep their teams funded and employed.

If you see a lot of potential waste here then you are correct.  We see waste just in the amount of people and money needed to manage our project money.  If a money market fund had as much overhead associated with it, I and everyone else would leave because that overhead just cuts into profitability. 

Next let’s more waste related to developing the stuff we didn’t need and may not actually use.  All of this extra stuff we develop has an expense associated with it and this is a long term expense.  We have it built into our architecture negatively impacting our systems scalability, performance and security.  We have to test it every time we build new stuff.  Bet you didn’t take that into account when you did your Cost/Benefit analysis for the project.

When we move to Agile we have an ability to really simplify our IT funding function.  It’s really quite simple – it’s the cost of your team. 

In most organizations this cost typically hovers around ~$40k per sprint or over ~2 million annually.  So as a financial manager trying to manage things like cash flow, depreciation and the like, this makes financial reporting much simpler.  Each team becomes a fixed line item cost on my balance sheet and operating statements.  I don’t have to worry about cost overruns from project funding since the team is a fixed cost.  Product Owners ensure our teams work on the most valuable things in a consistent manner and at the end of the year we should/can be able to gauge the value of that work to some accuracy.

So here’s a challenge that we face, how do we actually assess value?  How do we value things like reducing technical debt to make applications technically better?  How do we value writing an input validation security framework that makes our application safer for the user and ourselves?  How do we value things that our customers aren’t asking for, but in the end benefit from?  That is the core element of software development, there is significant value in the things that the customer never sees yet we place little effort or priority in delivering these elements.  Instead we focus on the visual functionality and throw quality and architecture down the drain in favor of meeting project timelines.

If you get the fact that you have a fixed development cost it actually should foster better conversations regarding what is really valuable for the entire organization to be working on.  Not your pet projects, not the projects you agree to only to get funding to keep your people employed, that’s not how real value and efficiency happens and it’s time we stop thinking that it does.

Agile highlights very quickly that an organizations planning and funding functions are broken. It also typically becomes clear that we don’t have a real grasp on what our real value streams are and finding them often means removing political barriers that have built up over years.  Agile requires that we redefine what value is and organize our delivery across these streams over organizational silos.

The traditional PMO also goes under a dramatic shift, moving from managing projects and funding to ensuring that programs align to the organizations value streams, are well understood and organizational impediments are removed for the teams.

So if you are looking to move your organization to Agile you must understand that your funding and planning functions must change to align to a new mindset and paradigm.  Funding is easy in Agile, really it is (remember it’s the cost of your team), uncovering your value streams and maximizing the work that flows to your teams that delivers that value, now that’s harder (but not impossible).

Launching SoundAgile Consulting

I've been involved with Agile with many different organizations now for over 12 years. In these years I've primarily been involved with being a contributing individual over a being an Agile coach.

The business of Agile has grown to a significant size and has now become a product that is sold to businesses who want to move their organization to Agile.  The very people who started Agile off as a movement have splintered off into several factions, each having their own opinion or approach in how to help organizations adopt Agile as a capability within their organization.  We now have Scrum, SAFe, DAD and LeSS to name a few in our acronym vocabulary.

Agile can indeed bring about valuable changes to an organizations ability to deliver software product more quickly.  These areas of Agile are fairly thought out, User Stories, Continuous Integration, Automation and Scrum.  You can move your development teams to a faster pace with some focus on specific team and development techniques that require some time to learn with some level of ease.

What Agile is struggling with is at the organizational level.  The Agile manifesto is specifically focused on building software better with a goal of delivering high value and quality software to our organizations.  A noble cause for sure and one that was sorely needed, given the changes in our software capabilities over the past 20 years.

Sr. Leadership however hasn't changed much, still managing in a large up front analysis budgeting process which creates a painful friction between fast moving product delivery teams and slow moving hierarchical management structures .

For those organizations who are being sold Agile as a product that will deliver 'x' benefits know this about what is occurring.  These organizations are finding people who have done 'some' to 'no' real Agile, meaning they haven't actually worked on an Agile team. Getting people who have the 'right' certifications doesn't provide those people with the ability to coach teams in the reality of Agile, only the theory of Agile and their current frameworks.

They are also focused only on the product development area of your business, letting you believe that you will receive huge benefits from moving to Agile without the corresponding changes necessary throughout your entire organization to support a fast paced product delivery teams.

Agile is not a small change management effort, rather it is a multi-year impact to your organization, that if done well will lead you to great success.  If done poorly will provide you with significant pain without any corresponding benefits.

I've spent many years thinking about what I might offer from an Agile consulting perspective and I've come to the conclusion that any Agile 'consulting' work that I would want to engage in must include both Sr. Leadership down and the team level.

Another thing I have concluded is that successful organizations that want to become Agile, must do so with a much smaller footprint of coaching.  You don't need full-time coaches for a long period of time.  In relying on full time coaches you are asking them to be your organizational Agile cop over owning the change within your organization.  The most successful Agile organizations I've worked in never had an Agile coach. Let me repeat that, never had an Agile a coach.  Instead they owned the move to Agile from the top down.  They provided the opportunity for teams to be empowered and fail and were not afraid to change organizational processes when they became impediments to improving Agilty.

SoundAgile will provide two levels of support and coaching for your organization.

1. Team Level - Coaching and training will be accomplished through a combination of online training videos, 1:1 coaching and targeted onsite sessions for specific techniques such as Discovery/User Story Mapping, User Story Writing and Behavior Driven Development.
2. Management Level - This will cover every management level in your organization, especially focusing in on your most impacted people, your technology managers.  Coaching and training will again be accomplished utilizing videos, 1:1 coaching and probably most importantly, targeted 1-2 day sessions that will continue for a multi-year time period. These sessions will provide for a longer term inspect and adapt change management process.

I'm really excited to be launching SoundAgile and am looking forward to working with people and organizations as they engage and encounter this thing called Agile.

SoundAgile will be live within the next two weeks.  I look forward to working with people who are motivated to move to Agile and make it work for them and their organizations.

Management and Agile - To Succeed or Not to Succeed

As more and more larger organizations look to Agile as a means of delivering software to their customers the one thing that keeps coming back to me is that for any of this to work there has to be transparency and acceptance that a move to Agile will change your organization, not understanding this will court almost inevitable failure. Agile in itself is an aspirational desire to change the way that we deliver software, one that does away with the project processes that evolved over the years from Waterfall.  I know that waterfall feels sound and safe with all of its up front business analysis, project planning, Steering Committees and that all important Change Management process, but in reality it really is more of a facade than foundation.

Having managed work and projects in both worlds I have seen how it all works.  Recently I was told (in an Agile organization) that Project Managers are responsible for delivery and it was at that point that my thoughts crystallized around my own journey, Project Managers don't deliver, Teams do.

At it's heart Agile is about everyone doing their part to make our product delivery better, whatever that looks like for your organization in that moment in time.  Agile by itself is not prescriptive, the Scrum/Lean techniques and processes that have evolved from our Agile journey may be a bit more prescriptive and become more so when we add things like Scrum certifications to people's palmares.  We need remember that one of the key reasons that the manifesto came into being was an intense desire to find better ways to deliver software, which means the journey has no end and certifications and such are merely ways for us to have a shared language.  Let me repeat, once you commence on your Agile 'journey' it doesn't have an end, you will always be evaluating what you can do better.

So back to the question at hand, to succeed or not to succeed in Agile, what needs to happen?

1. Trust - First and foremost we need to begin to build trust between Sr. Management and our Product Delivery teams.  If we have a history of delivering late, with fewer features and cost overruns it is really hard for that same management team to flip the switch once you say you are Agile and trust the very teams who haven't delivered in the past.  Trust is a two-way street and the great thing about Agile is that once you begin to master the techniques and methods that successful teams utilize trust is almost a by-product of that.
   1. Commitments - In Waterfall we are making a 'commitment' to deliver a set of value/features in a specified period of time based upon a business requirements document as guidance for what the business/customer is asking for.  When we make a commitment farther out into the future we become less and less accurate with our plans, it is the nature of the unknown unknowns in life.  Things change, they always do, so to expect that our business and software development teams, in today's ever-changing world, can predict 9-12 months in the future exactly what they are going to deliver is simply living in delusion.  Manage reality or it will manage you.  Commitments in Agile are much shorter in time, basically every 2 weeks.  These commitments however are based upon the Vision that YOU management need to provide.  You say you can't plan for the future every two weeks I would argue you can't plan much further out.  By planning and committing in shorter delivery increments, management get an opportunity to change direction without causing massive pain from already planned out work.  We need to be able to change direction or refocus efforts on the things that are most valuable to our business, not what we made big plans for last year that we thought we needed.  Locking in feature development that doesn't meet customer needs, simply wastes money and loses market share.  When teams make and keep their commitments to you, they gain confidence and you gain trust.
      1.  Context - In most waterfall projects we end up asking for absolutely everything we think we might need, when in reality sometimes 70% of what we asked for (or even less) is more than enough to meet the needs we were trying to address.  Focus on the most Valuable things your customer wants and move on to the next highest value work, not diminishing returns on things customers may not value as much as we might.  Teams want to work on what brings the most value to the organization, development teams when provided the transparency of why we need to do something can do amazing things.
   2. Self Organizing Teams - This one really causes I think the most concern for management.  You in essence are saying that the teams that you currently manage are better able to make decisions about how to delivery our products.  Guess what, they are.  These are people who work in the trenches every single day, know every single issue, impediment, risk, etc... associated with your current product delivery processes.  And every one of them has probably said something to the effect of, 'If I was in charge I'd to do X to fix this'.  I've been a Sr. Manager for many years and have built several high performing teams and one of the best things I can do for them is to provide guidance and vision for what I'm looking for and letting them solve the issues that deliver the solution.  I'm a smart guy but I don't have all of the answers and if you are the type of manager who believes that in order to be 'respected' you have to be the one to manage how Agile will change your product delivery processes you will fail personally and the organization will suffer as a whole.  Teams of people can solve major problems much more easily than one person can, so let them have the ability to self organize and empower them with making the necessary changes to improve your product delivery.
      1. Context - With great power comes great responsibility.  By ceding some level of daily control to your teams you are also doing so with the expectation that they deliver on what they commit to..  If they don't then they must provide a game plan based upon the Retrospective on how they will solve their inability to hit their commitments.
2. Investment - Agile won't come without an investment cost associated with it.  If like many large organizations you have a mess of legacy code mixed with attempts at migrating to newer technology stacks, business requirements and rules imbedded in code with tribal knowledge scattered through the organization.  Agile requires speed in your product development processes which translates into several investment areas:
   1. Automation - When we say automate we mean across the entire spectrum of the organization, if it can be automated you should probably evaluate whether it can/should be.  More specifically we want to automate:
      1. Unit Tests - Developers should be writing unit tests for everything they build, preferably using XP techniques such as TDD (Test Driven Development).  These are not really hard processes but if you are starting from scratch there is both discipline and framework that needs to be built-in order to get to a mature state for test automation.  Unit tests need to be executed with every build, because with that comes fast feedback if something broke, fix it early and you increase speed and profitability.
      2. Integration Tests - Probably one of the harder areas to get high levels of automation in, primarily because the organization hasn't invested in the appropriate product like test environments.  Be prepared in your Agile journey to spend heavily on getting the right environments in place and highly available.  Testing the performance of your system right before you deliver is a recipe for disaster and delays (remember time is money).
      3. Functional Tests - These are the tests management is probably most familiar with and may even have reviewed at one point or another.  These are typically the manual tests that QA will execute at the end of your waterfall project, where we are not baking in Quality but testing out defects.  Building high levels of automated testing at the functional level gets to what I call, Progressive Regression.  Instead of running a final full regression at the end of a 6-9 month project, why not do it every single night?  You will need to again invest in physical environments but also in people training as many in the QA world are not equipped to handle the new role of a Software Engineer in Test.
         1. Word of Caution - Don't rely only on Test Automation in your functional testing efforts, you still need real people with hands on testing capabilities because at the end of the day automated testing cannot always tell you when something is bad from an experience or product flow perspective.
      4. Deployments - One of the hardest things that teams fail at is planning for deployments to their environments.  Making your deployment process as frictionless as possible is a high value target for your organization.  Many organizations don't have a fully functional DevOps org and many in this field are still struggling to figure out how to operate in an Agile world.  Let them figure it out and provide them with the tools that will support automation of critical deployment processes and hold them accountable to doing it.  To many times we purchase tools and then never make the time to actually use them, invest and utilize, that is the key to your ROI.
      5. None of the above work comes without an investment in both hardware and people.  Current requirements processes will change substantially as you move to an Agile cadence.  People will struggle to find their way, some level of productivity reduction is expected in the beginning of an Agile transformation. You as a Leader need to set a clear vision of why the organization needs to change, make it clear that the teams have accountability to deliver the work that they commit to and that you as a leader have accountability to provide them with space to learn, fail and finally improve.  Successful Agile includes failure because without it we aren't really learning from our mistakes, rather hiding the truth.  Agile done right makes everything visible, especially who is accountable for what.
3. Patience - Nothing great was ever built-in a day or a week.  Odds are good that this will take more time than you thought it would, but also make it clear to the organization that an Agile death march is not something that you are taking on either.  Agile is about accountability and commitment, use these values to your benefit and identify those that simply can't or won't work in an Agile environment.

From a management perspective you need to understand your role in the success of any Agile transformation, it must also change the way you look at and manage your business.

Agile isn't Easy

Over the years I have seen many teams and organizations who start on their journey towards Agile product delivery make the mistake of thinking that Agile is easy, promotes freely changing direction and worse will fix all of your issues and make everything better quickly and easily.  The truth couldn't be further from the reality. There is no such thing as a perfect software development delivery process.  Unlike production lines for things such as automobiles where you have the same pieces going to together each and every time and each piece has a specific functionality, tolerance and timing, software development is the exact opposite.

Software development is about meeting changing needs across the dynamic nature of business  For example - You wouldn't see an automobile company add anew feature to a car on their assembly line over a 2-4 week time period.  They need time to design the entire process and ensure that the production line is capable of accepting the new change.

Traditional software development tends to align a bit more to the automobile example and in fact there are times where this type of rigid, pragmatic approach to product delivery is actually the correct process (Agile isn't for everyone nor for every situation).

However for those that are going to move to Agile you need understand that the type of discipline that you might use in the automobile example actually needs to exist in your Agile processes, seriously you ask? Yes - You need to be able to deliver high quality, well-tested and fully functional pieces of software every two weeks. Now are you seeing how difficult Agile can be?

If you think Agile is easy, then you are already on the path to failure and unmet expectations.

It is very common for teams who are moving to Agile to take their interpretation of the Agile Manifesto to the unhealthy extremes, for example:

• Working Software Over Comprehensive Documentation

Many teams I've worked with take this to mean NO documentation and that couldn't be further from the truth.  We value working software over the need for documentation but I've never believed that you can have long-term success with your product without delivering some levels of documentation.  Without documentation your software knowledge becomes tribal and when your tribe leaves the team or your organization, well so does their knowledge.

There are way for teams to build documentation as part of their daily Sprint development work.  Using the combination of user stories and Behavior Driven Development (BDD) acceptance criteria as the foundational elements of your work you are creating your documentation as part of the work needed to deliver quickly.  The great value in BDD is that the acceptance criteria is written in English syntax and then translated into test automation.

This process of writing stories with BDD is supported by Gojko Adzics book, Specification by Example and allows us to deliver light weight documentation during our sprints.  I often see teams adding a story to a future sprint to handle their 'documentation' requirements of their previous work but I haven't seen this work long-term.  Functional development, dealing with bugs, etc... will ultimately push these stories down into the backlog, never to be seen again.

The process described above is not easy, but it can be done and the teams that can get to this level of capability will succeed in driving value to your organization every two weeks.

One of the things that I consistently tell organizations moving to Agile is that it will highlight every current weakness of your product/software delivery methods.  Agile is a game changer, it requires a mind shift in how you look at your product, the work that supports it and how you see the visualize the value your product delivers.  If you are a leader who is going to be uncomfortable finding out truths about your organizations inefficient manner of product delivery then you need to think twice about moving to Agile.

Do you have TITL (To Important to Lose) people in your organization?  If you do, then you need to really look at how they influence any changes in your organization.  Do you need to get their approval, gain their support, etc....?  If so you will find more often than not that Agile will scare the hell out of them.  Successful Agile teams/organizations understand that self organizing teams take away the need for many of the day-to-day management decisions our middle management layer makes.  Agile speed comes when you remove the friction of management layers and provide teams with a clear vision of what you want them to deliver.

You must be prepared for the resistance that you will face from your product delivery teams, not everyone wants to go to Agile  We become comfortable with what we know and do in our daily work life and in that comfort comes stasis.  If you are not prepared to lose people, especially your TITL people, then you need to question if Agile is really for you.

I know it sounds heartless, but I've been working for over 30 years and one of the first things I learned right out of college was that technology was disruptive and if you weren't on board with how it changes how you work you would be left behind. At one company I worked for many years ago, I saw Regional sales managers who had been with the company for over 30 years and when we rolled out a sales force tracking/marketing tool (which I led) there were several who refused to even turn on the computer, they were all let go within months.  As employees we have the obligation to continue to grow and learn and continue to make ourselves valuable to our organization and if we don't, then you as a leader have an obligation to make tough decisions that ensure that the organization is continuing to grow and not stagnate with old processes.  It's not personal it's business.

As you move to Agile you also need to understand the investment that needs to be made in your technology stack.  Many organizations have decades old technology stacks which have been shoe horned into the future and though you get by you won't be able to become Agile until you have a strong Continuous Integration framework, high levels of Unit, Integration and Functional test automation.  Getting to this will take time (and using the stories and BDD disciplines mentioned above will help you get there).  You simply can't go fast if you don't have the technology backbone that supports it.

Agile isn't easy by any stretch of the imagination, it requires thoughtful introspection, focus on continuous improvement, disciplined delivery and a tenacity for value and quality that is never satisfied.

Delivery Management vs Project Management

In Agile we have evolved from a 'project' oriented mindset to a product one. That is not to say that we don't undertake a something that looks like a project to build or enhance our products.  However in Product Management we are more focused on the ongoing nature of how our product will unfold, in shorter durations and without the end in site.

I believe successful Agile Project Managers need to focus on Delivery Management over Project Management.

What is the difference?

1. Delivery Management - Is the management of work in an iterative fashion that focuses on delivering product that delights our customers.  It is not focused on Time, Scope and Budget, but rather on customer experience, high quality code and low defects. Delivery management focused on long-term value and benefits over planned short-term objectives.
2. Project Management - is the application of processes, methods, knowledge, skills and experience to achieve the project objectives. A project is a unique, transient endeavour, undertaken to achieve planned objectives, which could be defined in terms of outputs, outcomes or benefits.

Having been a project manager in a waterfall/PMI world before my move to Agile some of the mental challenges I faced included:

1. Lack of a plan - One of the first things I did as I was moving to Agile was to track the amount of 'change' that happened in one of my waterfall projects.  I created a Project Change Request for everything that was not originally identified in the Business Requirements and Technical Design Documents, assumptions that changed, scope, etc... This process drove my team absolutely crazy because as with all waterfall teams, we fear change requests, they are bad news to management.  However what this effort did was provide visibility to the type of change that happens in every single software development project (and these changes were never socialized outside of the team so they had nothing to worry about).
   1. Realization - 
      1. My project plans provided no real ability to know if a project was going to be successful, they looked good but didn't tell the real story of what was happening with the project team and what they were developing.
      2. Agile provided me with much more visibility to the real issues that a project team faced and that my project plan was really just a place holder for future Sprints.  I only needed to know that the Sprints were planned and then communicate what the team was committing to.  Once I had that information THEN I could hold them accountable.
2. Story Points over Time bases estimates - I had a really hard time initially wrapping my head around Story points over time and spent many an hour mentally putting the points back into hours.
   1. Realization -
      1. I finally stopped thinking in time once my team started 'delivering' consistent points and work for every sprint.  At that point all I ended up needing to know was the story points of work begin committed to.  The point here is as a Project Manager you need to instill good estimation behaviors with your team and hold them accountable, that IS your job.
      2. Velocity is the primary data point you want to focus on, consistent velocity = consistent delivery.  It's not your job to determine the What for the product but it is your job to ensure that what they commit to does get Delivered (though if you work to be a valued member of the team, you should definitely be able to provide input).
3. Status Reporting - Ah the bane of our existence as project managers and something that I had to deal with recently, the dreaded status report.  Honestly I hadn't been a project manager for many years and as a Manager I never needed one with Agile teams.  All I needed was a dashboard (Jira or Rally are the ones I'm most experienced with) to observe a teams backlog, Velocity and Progress towards a Roadmap they were working on.
   1. Realization - The status report will not every go away but I think you need to ensure that your reporting is consistent with the rest of your Agile processes.  Tools such as Jira and Rally provide you with abilities to manage Roadmaps, teams, budgets, etc... Everything is still there but your reporting needs to take advantage of the data elements within Agile, don't translate your Agile into a waterfall type status report.  This will only ensure that Sr. Management stays disconnected from Agile and the entire organization needs to be plugged into Agile and walk the walk.

If you are a traditional PMI type project manager and are moving to Agile here are some things you should consider:

1. You are not responsible for the success of a project/ delivery - Yeah I know it sounds wrong, but in Agile it is the TEAM that is responsible for delivery.  You need to plug into your team, get to know what they do, the challenges that they face, become a sounding board for ideas, get your hands dirty, learn how to test, etc...Becoming a valued member of the team is what moved me out of Project Management and into Quality Assurance. 9
2. Be an Agile advocate - Embrace agile so that you do more than go through the motions. Read, learn, join a meet up group, do more than just the minimum.  As a Project Manager you can help your organization get better at Being Agile, you have the connections and understanding of the organization that many in the technical side may not.
3. Don't be Defensive- As you will learn, Retrospectives should be frank and open conversations about what is working and more importantly not working in your processes.  Encourage your team to openly talk about issues, but protect them so that they can continue to work effectively as a team, remember attack the problem not the person.  For example at Disney where I both QA Manager and individual contributor my duties as QA Manager were getting in the way of my ability to test and give good feedback to the team.  They rightly called me out in a retrospective as being the issue for them not moving as fast as they could.  I was not defensive but understanding, that is what you want in Agile, because they were absolutely correct, I was the problem at that point.

So as you look at what you manage in traditional project management, understand that it is not the Project that you are delivering but a Product and Products have much longer life spans than projects.

You need to keep your teams focused in consistent and disciplined delivery that brings real value to your organization. If you are working on something that doesn't have value you should be questioning and challenging your team as to why.

Agile isn't easy, though I think it is often thought of as easy.  No Agile is very disciplined and when you undertake Agile it will highlight every inefficiency and poor process that exists in your organization today.  You simply cannot go fast until you address these issues.  As a Project Manager you can help drive this change.

You Know You Aren't Agile If

Thought I'd start off the new year and take a page from Jeff Foxworthy and use is famous tag line for Agile. Though intended to bring some humor to the question it really is something that every organization typically asks themselves. Please add more :)

You know your not Agile if:

• Your Product Owner drops by once in awhile to yell at the team for not giving them what they wanted
• Your Product Owner is entirely responsible for writing User Stories
• Your Development and QA teams are separate groups
• Your teams treat missed commitments like a Hollywood marriage
• Your team writes user stories in the current Sprint
• A daily Scrum looks like a bunch of stoners standing around
• Your product backlog changes more than Kim Kardashian changes her cloths.
• You think MVP was Kevin Durant last year
• You think BDD is something you do in the privacy of your own home

We spend a lot of time talking about what Agile looks like, should be etc... but at the end of the day Agile is about addressing the issues that keep you from being great and dealing with them in a manner which focuses on the what not the who.

There is no finger pointing in Agile (just like there is no crying in baseball).

Finding out what stops you from succeeding is a fundamental element of achieving greatness at anything.

You know your not Agile if you are asking yourself if you are or not.

GSD or Feeling Good about the Wrong Things

Over the past couple of years I have heard the term GSD used quite a bit as a means to describe high-performing individuals (note I did not say team). I have to admit that this is not an acronym that I was very familiar with, primarily GSD referred to my designation in college as someone who didn't want to join a fraternity, the politically correct term would be Gosh Darn Independent (And this is probably a great way to define who I have been throughout my career).

Before embarking on this post I did some quick google searches and came up with some thoughts on GSD:

1. The Urban Dictionary definition:
   1. GSD is brought about through severe bout of procrastination, not getting work done on a regular basis, therefore needing to set aside long amounts of time to disappear and get shit done.
2. What Spinks Thinks - http://whatspinksthinks.com/2013/11/04/get-shit-done-the-worst-startup-culture-ever/

The term, as it is used now is, Get Shit Done, which does sound great at first pass.  However when you start working with GSD as part of building a defined delivery process you start to see some very ugly things drop out of it:

• Heros - Those great people who came in and saved the day and got some serious shit done under intense pressure.  Never mind that the day they were saving maybe shouldn't have happened in the first place or even worse, the situation requiring them to save the day via GSD was of their own making, convienently lost in the thrill of GSD.
• Lack of Defined work - Who cares what I am doing so long as at the end of the day I can show you how much shit I got done.
• Lack of Plans - See above.

The problem as I see it with GSD is that we aren't asking ourselves a basic question - Are we doing the right shit at the right time?

Yes getting 'shit' done is good and getting it in done makes us feel good, however if there is no real process behind your way of getting shit done then you will be destined for unpredictable delivery of the work that brings your organization the most value.

I find in my experience that GSD is more about individual glory over a team (see my blog on Teams Deliver) which I find troubling on so many levels.

Organizations spend lot's of money having their technology teams deliver features that they believe bring value to the business and even though there may be many ways of delivering this value, ie Agile, Waterfall, Lean, I have yet to see GSD making its way into main stream product and project management lexicon.

Continuing my educational tour of the world of GSD I found a posting from two guys named Daniel Epstein and Pascal Finnette who appear to be individuals who provide support, coaching and services to technology entrepreneurs specifically regarding GSD:

1. GYSHIDO - A movement started a few years ago dedicated to The Art of Getting Your Shit Done.  They identified that their most intrinsic value as employees was that they got shit done, but in looking at their code of honor I see elements of good process, so is it possible thatGSD has some value?  Too soon to tell.  But here is their code of honor:
   1. Relentless focus - Focus on the 10% of your activities which drive most of the value. Relentlessly.
   2. Boring consistency - Do the right things over and over again. Consistency forms habits. Habits make hard things effortless.
   3. No Bullshit - Don't bullshit yourself or others. Apply brutal honesty and transparency to everything you do.
   4. No Meetings - Meetings come in only two forms: Standing or social. If it's social, it's over breakfast, lunch, coffee, dinner or drinks. If not - don't sit down.
   5. Follow up - Don't let others wait for your part of the job. Ever.
   6. Don't be an Asshole

As I read through their ethics I believe (I haven't talked with these guys) that their process could align with the agile type world.  Why?

• Many of the elements of what they believe is good GDS is what I consider good behavior of Agile teams:
  • Focus on the work that delivers the most value - Agile, 2 week sprints, deliver production ready features continually.
  • Consistency - Keep your Scrum Teams together, let them improve in estimation, execution, test automation, boring?  maybe, get shit done fast?  yes
  • No Bullshit - Retrospectives ask us to be brutally honest when things are working and fix what doesn't work.  Attack the problem not the person (see number 6 - Don't be an Asshole)
  • Follow-up - In Agile I always talk about how we need to think of minutes over hours when resolving issues that are blocking us from completing our work.

Agile teams focus on identifying the valuable 'thing' that we need to deliver and then develop lightweight plans to deliver it incrementally. I suspect that GSD has its roots in waterfall SDLC where a project would roll happily along, green week after week, oblivious or ignorant to how the project was actually unfolding.  Decisions made by the team that never surfaced had large impacts on scope and viability of the project.

GSD I believe emanates from the need for a project team to 'pull a rabbit' out of the hat in order to deliver the project 'on-time'.  My years as a waterfall PM saw this time and time again.  We fool ourselves into thinking that we can predict a large project from beginning to end all up front, you can't, period.

So when you are rewarded in a GSD organization they are ultimately is saying that the organization values chaos over effective planning and delivery.

Agile Transformation - Coaching needs and requirements

Having been involved in Agile for over 10 years, and for most of these years I have  helped organizations switch to Agile, I have (I believe) a great grasp of what needs to happen when your organization decides to 'Go Agile'. Yes the larger the organization the more that the organizational change element is brought in to the mix, and for this post I want to focus on the elements of Agile coaching as it relates to these larger transformation efforts, which with SAFe is a hot area of growth for Agile consulting.

With the large Agile transformations I've been involved with I have identified what I believe are the three main types of coaches you are likely to come across in an Agile transformation:

1. Those that have had experience in the trenches, who have led Scrum teams, built the products that are delivered to the business.
2. Those that have primarily been involved with Agile 'transformations' at the management level.
3. Those that have taken the necessary courses to 'become' Agile and may have been  a Project Manager in another life. (I'm not denigrating PM's as I was a PM who first experienced Agile from this perspective, I'm rather saying that there are coaches who haven't actually been involved with Agile, but have gone out and obtained Agile certifications, making them 'look' like people who have the right 'credentials' when people who don't know Agile are looking to hire coaches)

Let's talk about what each one brings to the table and what you need to look for when bringing on a coach to support your specific Agile transformation.

1. Coaches from the Trenches
   1. Key Benefits- These individuals bring a wealth of experience with how to operationalize Agile. They get it, they believe in it and they now what works, how to make course corrections when something isn't working AND they have huge levels of creditability with technical teams.  They talk the talk and can walk the walk.
   2. Key Weaknesses - If there is one the weakness with this type of coach is that in larger scaled Agile transformations, there are very specific processes and formats that get rolled out to the entire organization so that everyone is doing the same thing.  Sounds right doesn't it?  This individual will want to work out what works for their team and not always align to the Transformation processes, causing frustration between the coach and the group leading the transformation.
   3. Things to think about - Agile is not like making cars where every production line making car X has to be doing the same thing so that you maximize the speed of the process and build in your quality and productivity INTO the process.  Agile isn't like that, rather Agile is a framework that should allow for each Scrum team the flexibility to determine WHAT works for them without being prescriptive.
      1. My Input When I am helping an organization move to Agile I like 'sprinkle' the framework and tenants of Agile to the teams and then let the teams iterate on the process that works for them.  I give them the things I look for to determine how they are doing, such as stable velocity, good backlog and effective and accurate estimation (which of course feeds the stable velocity).  The 'from the Trenches' individual is one who will succeed very will in this type of environment and not very well in an extremely structured Agile process.
2. Coaches who were Managers - These individuals have typically seen their organization have success with Agile and have made the decision to move into an Agile career.
   1. Key Benefits - As with the from the Trenches coach, this individual does 'get it' and has an ability to gain creditability with upper management and can convey the higher level benefits to them.  This individual talks the talk of management and understands how to get in the head of management to help them understand their responsibilities in helping a transformation succeed.
   2. Key Weaknesses - So far I see way more of these individuals as coaches than I do the in the trenches coaches.  This can cause issues because they can sometimes tend to take a more hands off approach in working with their teams and don't have the experience nor creditability to work with the technical teams in a direct manner.  They simply don't have the technical and Agile chops to help the team grow and aren't as adept and making course corrections to the process.  Here you are seeing the effects of Top down driven Agile over bottom up (which I'm more a proponent of).
   3. Things to Think about - Consider having these types of coaches run more of the program level coaching, working more closely with upper management to help them mature in their thinking and protect the teams as they figure out how to be successful in their Agile processes.
3. Certification Coaches - As I indicated these are the people who have been involved with software development for many years, perhaps in the project management career path and have taken Certified Scrum Master classes and maybe Certified Product Owner.  Though they understand 'software development' they don't, IMHO, understand Product Development and all that this implies in an Agile world.
   1. Key Benefits - Of the three types of coaches, these individuals probably offer the least from a benefits perspective if expected to lead an Agile transformation effort.  These types of individuals understand the basics of Agile and run teams from that perspective.  Not having worked in the trenches they haven't yet had the opportunity to deal with real world Agile and the challenges it presents.  This is not to say that these individuals don't have the skills, knowledge or capabilities to be great coaches but what I am saying is that if you have a large number of coaches fall into this group then your PD teams will be at a disadvantage and this individual will struggle to gain creditability with their Scrum teams and your Agile adoption will fail.
   2. Key Weaknessess - As stated above, these coaches tend to not yet have the creditability or depth of knowledge to be as effective as coaching types 1 and 2, they will need to be partnered with more experienced coaches to enable them to be successful and grown their Agile skills.
   3. Things to Think about - Look for people who can demonstrate servant leadership in their past experience, this is a key behavior of successful PM's, Tech Leads and Managers.  I believe my success in Agile is primarily due to the fact that I am a servant leader by nature.

When you go looking for coaches consider your organizations size, current development maturity and honest assessment of the problems you face with your current Product Delivery processes.  And I do mean HONEST, if you can't take honesty then Agile is not for you.  The Continuous Improvement element of Agile demands honesty and if you are an organization that doesn't want to hear that you PD teams have issues then you will continue to have a less efficient model of delivering value to your customers (and isn't that what ALL of this is really about?)

These will provide you insight into what you will need to move towards Agile.

Also try to avoid labeling your coaches when they come in such as that one is our BDD expert, that one is our blah blah expert. This will tend to keep other coaches from participating and sharing their skills for a specific area and ensure that you processes for that specific area of expertise will suffer ( I speak from experience on this one ).

Agile Planning - I have a need a need for speed

Working at Disney a number of years ago was in so many ways transformative for me (not sure why I left) because it provided me with an opportunity to work with an organization that needed to get better at delivering software for our partners and we ended up choosing Agile as our path. Disney was the place where I had the opportunity to help build an Agile process from Requirements to Delivery and what we discovered was that we needed to develop an effective planning process that allowed us to build a solid backlog of work before we just started coding.  I here that so often in organizations that are just starting to adopt Agile.  I think a statement I heard recently is descriptive of organizations that just start coding - Shoot and Point.

Disney is a largely creative driven organization (Not surprising) and because of this we typically had a disconnect between our creative (UX) groups and the Product Delivery teams.  The UX team primarily worked independently of the PD teams and as was the case when I arrived, UX would deliver a creative design that didn't align to our technical capabilities.  This is a common issue in today's web development environment.

Our first 'Release' Planing went very poorly and after a round of retrospectives we came up with a format that at first pass you would say wasn't Agile (trust me we used that phrase a lot in the early days of our becoming Agile).  But in the end this first step of Discovery ended up being what I believe is the most critical element of being able to go fast in Agile.

The basic process that we ended up with was as follows:

• Pre-Discovery - Sr level PD, PO, UX, Marketing and other Stakeholders would review a specific new feature that was being considered. The group would utilize several tools such as Mind Mapping to understand the scope, parameters and potential dependencies at a high level.  If the feature work was approved then we went to the next phase.
• Discovery - Depending uponthe the size of the potential project Scrum teams and extended stakeholders would meet to go through a low-level review for that feature development.  For many of our larger efforts it was not uncommon for us to sequester the teams into a room to work through the entire effort, UX to QA to Delivery.
  • Process
    • Kick off - Have your PM or PO along with the key stakeholder(s) of the effort describe WHY this feature is so important.  We learned in our process development that it helped our PD teams to have an understanding as to why this feature was important to the organization.  It helped them feel connected to the value that was being delivered and not simply code jockeys running a race.
    • Competitive Review - Another great exercise was to have the entire team go out and find competitive features that we either did or didn't like and describe why.  This helped the next phase of our Discovery process as we worked to define what our feature sets would ultimately look like
    • UX and Story Development - This was the primary scope of our Agile workshops.  Typically led by the UX lead for the project we would begin developing low-fi wireframes and discuss the issues, constraints and code complexity that the low-fi would entail.  We discovered in this process that we could work through the types of issues that come much later in a typical product delivery effort.
      • Outcomes -
        • UX ended up with designs that they could utilize to develop prototypes that would be used in User testing prior to any significant development work being completed.  This allowed changes to UX to be found at the very beginning of the PD process rather than at the end when refactoring consumes a much larger amount of time and leads to lower quality of code.
        • PD ended up with a solid design at the beginning of the PD process which led to high quality code and higher levels test automation.
        • QA ended upon with an ability to write higher quality acceptance criteria which lead to high quality in the delivery and higher levels of test automation (sensing a theme here?)
        • User Story development was done during the Discovery phase and with it I was able to have a fairly accurate model to predict the number of stories at the beginning of the Discovery phase (typically between 100-120 higher level Epics, we strove for stories to be between 21-34 points in this phase as PD would start fairly quickly after the discovery phase 2-3 weeks) and how many that would translate into for a full project (typically 350 - 400).  This provided me with input as to how many BDD acceptance criteria would come out of this as we used a marker to determine when a story should be broken down - More than 7 variables in the BDD would be an indication that it's time to think about breaking down the story and more than 14 tests in a single test scenario would also trigger the conversation of whether to add a scenario to a story or create a new story.
          • Benefit - Keeping your BDD test automation in small increments makes it much easier to understand what broke, who probably broke it and what is needed to fix it.

I know this doesn't 'Sound' Agile (like the name of my company), but in my experience doing this small amount of work up front does provide teams the base to go really fast once the PD process begins.

I have used this process now for many years and when we do it right it's like writing a symphony, all of the moving pieces make beautiful music.  When it isn't done right, then all you get is noise.

This process probably does work for larger and more complex organizations over small organizations, but really would you start building a house with no blueprints and no idea of what you wanted?  If you had builders just show up and you told them I need a house to live in and I need it fast you will get that, but I doubt it will be anything that you want. And in reality it wouldn't be done fast as they probably wouldn't have the right materials scheduled to arrive at the right time.  I have my roofing supplies but the foundation company can't some for a month, see what I am getting at?

Slow down a bit, understand what you want, how to get it and then go fast to get it.

Agile - The Ugly Truth

If you are an organization that is considering moving to Agile, especially a larger one, there is an Ugly Truth that Agile consulting firms don't want you to know: You don't need coaches to come in full-time to help you on your journey......

Sure you can spend a ton of money on people who will come in and tell you how you should be doing standup, scrum, retrospectives, etc....Try to get everyone to do the same thing across your organization.  The Truth? In successful Agile organizations everyone can be different, that's ok.  Yes you want some consistency but doing things by rote doesn't get you where you want to go.

In the coaching world we talk about organizations Doing Agile who never get to Being Agile.  What's the difference??  Everything.

Yes the basics of Agile include things such as standup, retros, sprint planning and release planning, but those are the basics that can make you feel like you are Agile, but that's about it.

Agile IS transformative process and one that if you as an organization buy into, will receive great value from in the form of valued delivered in a more consistent manner.

I remember years ago when I was managing a technical project that required that I purchase some hardware and though I had found a better deal with a different vendor, my boss told me to buy the IBM hardware (at a much higher price) with the advice - 'You don't get fired for buying IBM'.

I think that many large organizations fall into this mindset and when trying to move to Agile  They fall into the mistaken belief that if you hire one of the large Agile coaching groups or hire Agile consultants, that you will ensure success or at the very least not get fired because you hired 'Agile professionals'.

Yes you do need people who can provide support in the important areas that Agile truly needs to have in order to bring the value you desire from it:

1. Automation - Develop, implement and improve your test automation frameworks.  This includes unit, integration and functional areas.  You MUST make this investment and you need to get to high levels of automation, because without it you cannot go fast, time for testing will hold you back.
2. Planning and Estimation - An area that is very much overlooked when moving your product development teams to Agile is the need for these teams to form a strong working relationship and learn how to plan in estimate in Agile.  The notion, especially for larger organizations, that you don't need to do some level of up front planning is a sure way to fail and fast.
3. Organizational change - Probably more than anything you need to understand that your organization will change, significantly in many ways, when you move to Agile.  You need to prepare your managers to let go and let their teams own their deliverables (trust me if you give this to people they will own it).  You as an organization need to understand that your management group will change, you will need fewer managers (sorry folks that is a reality).  Though in reality many of your current managers were placed in these roles as more as a retention means over a true management track that the organization has defined.  These people need to move into your Tech Lead roles, they run their scrum teams, own the technical and architectural elements of their product code.  Managers will oversee several Scrum Teams and will be focused on larger concepts such as technical roadmaps, cross organizational planning and staff development.

So the Ugly Truth is that you don't need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on coaches who will tell your teams what to do.  Instead hire people who have been on the ground, who can help your teams learn the skills they need such as TDD, BDD, User Story Mapping and Estimating.

Start small and grow the process into the organization.  You need to get your processes working on a small-scale and then move outwards into the organization.  The people who are successful in your pilot groups become your sales people for the next groups.  Trust me, I listen to the people who actually do the work more than I ever do people who try to provide me basic information that I can find anywhere online.

The Myth of Rockstars - Teams Deliver Not Individuals

Over the years I've had the opportunity to work with numerous software development teams in both large and small organizations many of whom have a singular focus of hiring technical rock stars. Though it sounds like something we should all aspire to, I think that we often lose sight of how great a team is when everyone works together over the individual rock star mentality

Point in case the 2014 Chicago Bulls.  They yet again lost their rock star (Derrick Rose) due to injury and the team could have just thrown in the towel, but they didn't.  They weren't considered 'rock stars' by how people in the NBA view talent , but they had something that rock stars don't always have, commitment to the team.  A selfless focus on what they had to do to win a game in the NBA and for several months they had the best record in the NBA from January through March.

Another Bulls analogy would be the championship Bulls of the 1990's.  Until Coach Jackson was able to get Michael Jordan to work as a team member and not be the rock star that he obviously was, the Bulls didn't win a championship.  Only when Michael began to work within the team structure were the Bulls able to win six championships.

The point here is that rock stars often can't/don't deliver for a team, rather they achieve greatness within the context of themselves.  Many technical rock stars are singularly focused on achieving technical dominance based upon this mythical rock star status we give to them.  This leads all to often to these individuals climbing into leadership roles for which they have no real skills to succeed with.

Teams that deliver understand that we all must sacrifice something of ourselves for the betterment of the team.  Rock stars don't see it that way and those that never see it that way are destined to be winners to themselves and not to a greater good.

Sports unfortunately is often the best analogy to teams and in Agile our Scrum concepts come from a team formation from Rugby, so perhaps the sports analogies are appropriate in most cases when talking about technical teams that deliver.

Agile is all about delivery, and fast.  But with speed comes the need for discipline, multiple disciplines in a Scrum team.  Everyone, and I mean everyone, has to pitch in.  If you are a Java developer and you have legacy C++ code, guess what??  You need to learn from C++ so that when time is tight and the delivery important you can step in and help out.  That's teamwork, no rock star needed, just a willingness to put yourself out for your team.  If you are a developer and there needs to be testing in order to close out the Sprint, guess what?? You need to test.  It's amazing what you will learn when you test your own code from another perspective.

When I'm hiring I look for people who have had broad level of experiences.  People who have done just one thing but are considered a Rock Star for it, aren't really my interest.  Great products and high quality come from those with well rounded backgrounds, who see the edges as places that we need to explore.

Great teams have that, broad level's of experience.

So when you are thinking about building a team remember that an organization, any part of it, is a sum of the total parts, not just the rock stars.

Security and Compliance in Agile

It's been awhile since I last posted anything but that's because I've been knee-deep in helping a Security and Compliance team move from a traditional waterfall approach to an Agile approach to developing and managing their work. Talk to any development group in a large organization, especially one that is Agile, and say the words Governance or Compliance (or worse Audit) and you will get a collective shudder and the sound of everyone running for the door.

The truth is this: Every organization has to protect their customers and their brand.  We do this in many different ways, but one thing that we don't do well typically is ensuring that our Product Development teams actually know what these groups do and the value that they can bring in knowledge to developers.  We often view developers as people who know everything, hell they can code to make features come to life so they must also know about secure coding practices and the like (guess what, they don't)

Security Governance and Compliance shouldn't be considered necessary evils, rather they should be considered insurance policies that we take out every time we push code to production.  You wouldn't think about driving a car without insurance because if you do hit someone and injure them, it will cost you a boat load of money.  Yes the odds may be small but taking that risk is one that most people won't take.  We should look at our Security and Governance in the same light, in fact an even brighter light because very few drivers are out there actually trying to hit you to hurt you, whereas hackers are doing just that to your site day in and day out.

With the speed at which hackers and attackers are figuring out new ways to breach our security protocols Security and Compliance teams need to work in a much faster pace.  Think incremental improvements over gold plating a solution.

In Agile teams are focused on delivering value to the business every two weeks and as they go through their process of iterative design and development we also focus on technical excellence.  Product Development teams need to be able to get fast feedback on security questions so that they can incorporate Security changes before development begins.  As a Product Owner you have to understand that the velocity of your team to deliver value MUST include time for them to refactor code and implement ever better secure code, it's simply not up for negotiation if you want a high quality secure product that your customers engage in.

The teams that I'm working with have been willing to engage and somewhat leery in moving to Agile and we are tackling how to handle a team that doesn't deliver code and whose work doesn't necessarily fit into a strict 2 week timeframe.  Additionally these teams aren't used to thinking in short increments so breaking down their work doesn't come naturally, but they are finding ways to do it and they seem to like the visibility and transparency Agile provides.

For Story estimation I developed a quick and easy way for them to estimate their work, taking into account that we don't have true Scrum teams but loosely aligned people working on distinctly disparate tracks of work, it looks like this:

1. 13 points - One person working one Story for the entire sprint.  This would typically fall into the same category as a Research spike.
2. 8 points - One person working one story for half of the sprint
3. 1-5 points - One person working one story for 1, 2, 3 or 4 days.

Some of the team has started to use this and we are starting to see what our potential team velocity might be.  This will help us next year when we do our Roadmap planning.

Additionally since we are using Rally, I've created six-week release windows that teams can align their work to and then assign the iteration that they will complete the work.  With both the Release and Iteration views I can see what the team is planning and what they are executing.

Perhaps the biggest challenge that we need to address next is how do we build a plan for work that may span 1-3 years in duration.  The team has commented several times that moving to Agile is hard since they are used to doing everything in a Waterfall method yet the reality is that whether we are doing Agile or Waterfall as a Program Manager I would expect them to identify high level milestones, understand and describe how the project will unfold.  None of this can't be done in Agile.

The notion that Agile isn't about planning has always amused me since I know that in Agile if you are doing it right it is all about PLANNING.  One thing that differentiates Agile from Waterfall from a Project Management perspective is that we don't have a change management process.  I think we have believed that laying out a project in a Gantt chart with tons of up front planning that really results in Change Requests was effective.  Instead identify the key milestones that make up the project, commit to those and then understand that we'll change along the way but the key business value that we are delivering shouldn't.  If it does then you aren't working on the right stuff.

To those Information Security Management groups who think that they can't be 'Agile', think again.

Scaling Governance in Agile

Large organizations who move towards and Agile delivery model may struggle with how to scale any governance model.

I think if you polled most Agilists about governance in general, you would tend to get a shutter and an ugly stare.  Indeed we want to address technical excellence during our sprints but what we often fail to understand is that software engineers are not omniscient when it comes to all of the areas of technical acumen related to performance, security and other compliance type efforts.

As an organization grows and becomes more and more global it finds itself dealing with many different governing bodies that each have different requirements for how we deal with data protection, which in turn relates to how we develop our software.

Having run PCI compliance for a large organization I know first hand that providing specific information to developers with respect to what to look for just in a code review is an important first step.

Governance is needed for most organizations as a first defense when something happens with respect to security/privacy.  Organizations need processes in place to provide evidence to governing bodies, courts and legal inquires regarding how we protect our product our customers information.

Governance can include both standards and artifacts.  For example PCI compliance requires that we provide evidence of compliance with respect to their 13 security requirements.   From a software development standpoint these include such activities as code reviews that are focused on security, software development cycle, evidence of secure development and test practices in addition other efforts such as  Penetration testing and other monitoring capabilities.

In Agile we need to think of this in a light weight manner.  At one organization we implemented a set of standardized stories, non-functional, that were to be included into a teams feature development sprints.  For teams that are working on several sprint efforts before going into production this can work very well as the team is addressing this as part of the planning and estimation.  When the code is delivered to production the completed and accepted user stories (which have context as to what was completed) serve as the artifact for the PCI compliance (or other) auditors.

The engineers liked this because they were creating artifacts as they developed and from an organization standpoint we gained confidence in the fact that our code was being developed against high quality standards.

For Governance activities that relate to more ongoing product sustainment efforts the same standards need to apply however the manner in which we apply them within each sprint may be different that new product type efforts.  Automated testing and monitoring form a larger basis of maintaining the standard levels that we established in earlier cycles.

Recently I heard a statistic that said 90% of attacks can be mitigated by the basic block and tackle work that teams can do on a regular basis.

Governance doesn't have to be a bad name in the Agile space, we need to view it as part of our technical excellence efforts that form the basis of high performing Agile teams.

I think Governance is an area in Agile that is ripe for development especially at scale.

Agile Testing

I was saddened to see that a meetup group that I managed for over two years was coming to an end because there wasn't anyone who wanted to take on the leadership role.  When I started at a Northern Virginia startup as QA Manager I was tasked with taking on the leadership role of the DC Agile Software Testers (DCAST) meetup. When I took over we had 25 people and when I left the group two years later  we had grown to a robust 450 and had developed a reputation as a place where QA professionals could meet to learn how they could be successful in an Agile environment.

I've always said that QA is the last to come around when organizations move towards Agile.  Early on in my career in Agile the QA leaders would tell me 'yeah you guys develop however you want and when you are done, then we'll test'.    The notion that QA couldn't test anything until everything was done (though in reality it never was) was strong.  The feeling of power in finding defects that were typically not defects but mis-interpretations of requirements was palpable.  The force was strong with us then. (cue the light saber sound).

With DCAST I saw quickly that the people who were coming didn't understand how they could engage in the process and more importantly they didn't understand how they could deliver 'quality' without having the entire feature delivered for testing.  Iterative testing just didn't compute.

There are many things that QA teams need to understand in order to be successful in Agile.  Some of the key elements include:

1. Automation - For QA this needs to be a key focus of development.  Automation builds what I call 'progressive regression'.  Instead of thinking of regression as the final end to end activity, look at it as a growing entity.  With waterfall development and more manual focused testing, you get an opportunity to perform a full regression test potentially just once at the very end of the development cycle.   This leaves little time to deal with defects that arise from your testing.  With automation and continuous integration you are effectively performing a regression test of your developed features every night.
2. Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) - The two-pronged effort to quickly develop and manage your test automation suite utilizes example based test development like BDD as your test acceptance framework.  What BDD does is ensure that the entire team is reviewing the acceptance tests that will ultimately be developed as part of the automation suite.  This process ensures highly contextual user stories that clearly define the behavior of the feature and keeps everyone focused on exactly what needs to be developed (nothing more nothing less)
3. Parallel Teamwork - With the use of BDD, QA can develop their automation code while feature development is in flight.  If the teams are working from the same story specifications then when the code is checked in the automation should be able to run with few errors.  This is a key process to develop in order for teams to deliver quickly.  By not having parallel efforts, teams will typically fall into the cadence of having automation developed in the next sprint.  Once you go down this road you will typically see automation efforts begin to fall further behind as QA will start manually testing in order to 'stay on top of testing'.
4. Sprint Management - QA teams need to work with their team to ensure that work is being delivered throughout the entire sprint.  A common problem teams face in Agile is that we fall into the 'mini-waterfall' process where developers deliver the features in the last day or two of the sprint.  This leaves very little time for QA to perform ad-hoc and manual break testing along with fixing any automation breaks that have occurred once the code is checked in.
5. Zero Defect Policy - This is key.  Teams need to develop a working agreement that enforces a zero defect policy for new feature work in a Sprint.  This means that the team does not receive credit for any stories that can't be closed out with zero defects.  This focus ensures that the entire team is focused on delivering quality.
6. Quality is EVERYONE'S responsibility - There is no such thing as 'toss it over to QA' in an Agile world.  Hey Developers, you have to help test if you deliver something late.   Don't let your software engineers tell you that they don't test.  All great developers have to be good testers ( you know TDD kind of focuses on writing tests).  The entire team is responsible for quality not just your test engineers.   Note - QA Managers this concept in no way removes the need for your existent, rather like Engineering Managers your role changes.  You should actually have time to be strategic and plan out future testing platforms and approaches for your team.

I'm glad to have led DCAST as it provided me an opportunity to help QA professionals grow their understanding of the activities and process all good Agile teams exhibit.