Personal Communication and Decision Making

Individuals and interactions. Customer collaboration. I find it really hard to do that without meeting the other person. And if at all possible I prefer meeting them one on one. Or if that is not possible, I usually call using phone or voip. Why? Because it is so much more efficient than writing emails! ..or instant messages or anything else in writing.

I use such tools as JIRA, Lync and Flowdock quite a lot during my days. They are all great for asynchronous communication. And so is this blog post. But getting feedback for anything is a bit too slow to be really agile. Maybe one of the most frustrating features in instant messaging clients is to see that the other person is writing. Then you look at that and wait. If the other person has lot to say, you wait for a long time. But if you go and just have a quick chat it will all be done in no time. Simple and you get to do some nice human interaction also. I count it as a plus!

Well, you cannot always win. Sometimes the face to face conversations may not be pleasant. Sometimes you and the other person just disagree and there might be no getting past it. Or you need to give the other person some feedback that is not so easy to swallow. During those times I suggest just to focus on the facts. Don't get angry or frustrated, just deliver your message. Then you might want to let the other person to cool down before attempting anything mentally challenging. Because frustration simply blocks down our ability to think clearly.

Another interesting topic is the decision making. If I haven't totally misunderstood things, it's actually rather central topic in Agile. Empowering teams gives the teams (and individuals working there) power to make decisions. And thinking about it with some common sense, it does seem wise to do the decisions where the best knowledge is: in the teams. In Scrum the role of the Scrum Master is to remove impediments. A pending decision is an impediment. It's better to make a decision and move on than to waste time in pondering. So, Scrum Master can help facilitate decision making in order to keep team moving.

And I think the same principle applies when going "up in the food chain". Management should provide people with decisions. That's their job. Creating a better working environment through making decisions. Or empowering other people to make those decisions. But that's already a valid decision (and often a very good one.)

Finally I'd like to share this interesting link. Cult of Done. So simple yet so powerful! Starting things is easy. Anyone can do that. But what really counts is getting things Done! Finish starting and start finishing. Have working software as your only metric of progress. Done is the engine of more!

Successful Pre-Planning

Sometimes things just go smoothly! Today was one such day. Today was the Pre-Planning of our next Release. Everyone was well prepared. As I have previously written, we are currently experimenting with Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). We have Product Visions and Roadmaps. This is an area where we have especially put our efforts on lately and it really starts paying off!

We had a two hour session. First some general information about the schedule and then introduction to not yet so familiar concepts of Themes and Roadmaps. Then the Product Managers introduced their latest Roadmaps and explained the business drivers. It was nice to see the leap in the quality since the previous Release.

After the Roadmaps, the Product Owners shared their teams' draft Release Plans. Some of them were not yet very realistic or contained way too many things, but it was good to have visibility to this none the less. Seeing some draft gives a lot more possibilities for improvement than having nothing at all.

Hopefully this two hour event gave the whole company a better view on where we are and where we want to go next. As the coordinator and facilitator of the event I felt it hit the spot. But I have a tendency of being over-optimistic from time to time. ;)

On a side note, I finished reading Management 3.0 by Jurgen Appelo. Great book! I can already see myself trying this stuff in action.

Understanding the Whole

When a company is in the middle of an organizational change, it is sometimes difficult to understand your/others roles and the expectations. It's easy to stay with the comfortable old routines and do what you have always done. After all, you know what to do, you have done the same thing plenty of times before.

But here's the catch: what if things around you have changed? Things you know how to do might not deliver the value anymore the same way they used to. Or it can even be that the activity you keep on doing is creating a major pain for someone else in the organization.

Unfortunately I can't think of a good example where organs of living organisms were scrambled, but with organizations this can happen. And then it doesn't really work out well if the lungs still think they are fingers and forget to breath. It might have severe consequences even though they are still able to type like they used to. Like in the good old times.

Break the old habits! If you have been assigned to a new role, check what's really expected from you. Are you a muscle cell doing some heavy lifting or should you be concentrated on thinking about the future like the rest of the brain cells? How does your work affect the whole?

Knitting Processes Together

Interfacing is hard. Even if you take a simple example, (well, maybe not really that simple) a software development team and think about how the information flows from the original customer requirement to an implemented feature. Here I'm assuming that there is one Scrum Team developing one product.

First there is an interface between the customer and the Product Owner. The Product Owner interprets the requirements and maybe writes them down as a User Story in the Backlog. Then the Development Team starts working with the requirements and refine them with the Product Owner's assistance. Finally they implement a new piece of functionality. Something that is hopefully close to what the customer originally wanted.

Probably many have experienced cases where everything didn't go according to the customer's plans. Product or service did not meet the expectations. Fortunately this earlier mentioned development process can be improved by collaborating and working closely with the customer. But still, things tend to get a bit harder when you scale.

Depending on how you (or some others) choose to shape your organization, you might have a set of small start-ups where every team can do pretty much everything. But quite often your operations are modelled by separating different functions and processes. And I don't think it's always bad. I'm not really that into accounting, so I prefer someone else doing that for me. Or even thought I like interacting with customers, I'm perfectly fine with someone else closing the deals and me just providing some cool new functionality.

In addition to the different functional roles, there are processes applied in these functions. And these processes interact. In sales function there's the sales process and in R&D the software development process. One of the most common pitfalls in process oriented companies are the interfaces.

Even if you apply the idea of Continuous Improvement, you are usually just optimizing one process. And even if you have a state-of-the-art software development machinery it makes no difference if you cannot get the products to customers. Or if your sales or marketing cannot find your customers and make them aware of your superb new products.

The approach I have recently been involved with is the so called Value Chains. Instead of concentrating only on the individual processes, you take a helicopter view and think about the whole chain of actions from customer need to customer satisfaction. And then examine closely also the interfaces between the processes.

Of course this approach requires a healthy amount of collaboration between the functions. And maybe someone to pay attention to the whole. Quite often we tend to just stay in our little silos and see everyone outside as, well, outsiders. But get past that! Go to lunch with your buddies at sales or go have a cup of coffee with some people working in customer service. Or if you don't know anyone there yet, go and make some new friends!

Scaling Agile Peer Conference

Agile Finland arranged a nice peer to peer conference around Scaling Agile. Venue was Life Science Center in Keilaniemi, Espoo. First of all I have to say that facilities were excellent. Top floor sauna with a sea view.

Participants had been pre-selected and there were people from eight companies. All the participants were required to write an experience report about how they had scaled agile or transformed the organisation into a more agile form. The seats were arranged so that everyone could be in eye contact with all the others and discussion was very easy. 

The day was packed rather full. We started already at 8:30 in the morning and finished around 17 o'clock in the evening. As we agreed not to share too much about each others practices and processes publicly, I won't get into details. But some interesting topics/practices I dare to share were the 24 h hackathon, group Backlog and a team building event where people had to self-organize into teams. Also, a topic that was common to almost all the participants was the Product Management. That's the not-so-trivial interface between business and development. Maybe that's the unicorn of Agile. ;)

I'd like to mention a very interesting facilitation technique called Open Season. Everyone had four cards: green, yellow, red and blue. Green indicated that you want to start a new discussion thread. Yellow meant that you still want to add something to the current topic. Red meant that you need to speak right away and blue that this is boring and let's move on. Red and blue were never used, but otherwise the conversation worked very well! Actually you can find a rather elegant guide on how to arrange a peer conference from this blog entry. I think we followed it very closely.

My best take homes were definitely the new contacts. Hopefully we can grow even more agile together! Also it was nice to get to know how other companies have been scaling agile. And by the way, if you ever think of arranging a conference like this, think no more. Do it! It will be great.

Planning Releases

I believe I was just getting the hang of this Scrum thing and I thought I could do some decent Scrum Mastering. But now the things have changed slightly and I need to jump "over the fence". For a bit over a month I've been working as a Product Owner and a Release Train Engineer. I can see that it's actually a lot easier to identify missing Product Owner as an impediment than to actually be the Product Owner and try to live up to the requirements of the role. There just doesn't seem to be enough hours in the week to constantly keep the Backlog in order and think about all the details. But maybe that's exactly the point. No-one is able to know everything in the complex world of software development and that's why letting go and giving the team the space they need comes rather naturally.

But then something about planning Releases. In Scrum everything happens around the Scrum team. Team forecasts what they can achieve during a Sprint and that's it. Achieved velocity, "yesterday's weather", helps to forecast what can be expected in a longer run if the backlog has been refined into a decent degree. But there's usually no mentions about what to do when you have multiple teams, multiple products, a bit of legacy and all in all a more complex situation than just complex.

I think Scaled Agile Framework offers nice way to see this from a higher level. Scaling to the level beyond teams and Sprints, I see Releases as a good logical logical next step. Also it seems like a good idea to set some higher level goals (or Objectives) that can be then divided into Stories when the actual work starts. Of course there will be some uncertainty associated with these goals, but I think they should be treated more as commitments than just some initial guesses that will be reformulated right after the first Sprint. Still, I don't support big upfront planning or waterfall. I just think that a bigger enterprise can't live without ability to plan ahead for longer than just two weeks.

Anyway, the actual planning of the Release is a complex task on its own. As the Release Train Engineer I wanted to arrange a so called Pre-Planning where all the teams share their initial plans and everyone gets some indication about what is to be expected. Then there will be time to work the plans out until everyone (or at least most of people) are happy with them. Then we can have can simply agree that this is the plan that we try to implement. And if it needs to be amended along the way, so be it. But the train will take off and only the future will show what's going to happen. ;)

Scan Agile 2013

On November 11th I participated in the Scan Agile 2013. That's the biggest Agile conference in Scandinavia.

It was awesome! There were plenty of interesting presentations by different agile gurus. Brightest star was Dean Leffingwell who concentrated mostly on the Scaled Agile Framework (or shortly SAFe). Interestingly he was giving a lot of thought on XP practices. I had not realised they were such closely connected with the framework. I'm huge fan of both Scrum and SAFe and it was very inspiring to meet Mr. Leffingwell in person. As a matter of fact I was such a fanboy that I asked for his autograph. :)

(On the next day I participated in another session hosted by Nitor Creations where we sat around the same table. Discussion topic was Scaling Agile.)

There were four separate tracks and one could leap between the different tracks depending on personal preferences. The next talk I watched after Dean Leffingwell was by Arto Miekkavaara. He represented NeuroLeadershipGroup which is an organization founded by David Rock. I've been aware of the SCARF model for quite some time, but a little refreshment never hurts. 

Next I watched a presentation by Neil Killick. It was about the currently very popular NoEstimates. I have to admit that I didn't really understand everything about this. But the main deal seems to be that instead of estimating in non-dimensional Story Points that describe both the size and complexity, we aim to split the work into such pieces that are of same size. That way the number of stories becomes the measure of velocity. Interesting topic never the less.

Even if Leffingwell had the keynote, I think maybe the most inspiring presentation was given by Andrea Tomasini. Good stuff about the Anatomy of an Agile organization delivered with a great passion. Thank you Andrea, I really enjoyed your spicy speech!

Most of the other talks were about processes and frameworks, but Janne Sinivirta went deeper into the actual work. He educated the audience about Lean Architecture. Yes, I believe architecture is needed. (Maybe it's because I'm SAFe fanboy...)

As a conclusion I'd say Scan Agile is a conference worth participating and gathered a lot of familiar faces from different agile circles here in Finland. Again next year? If possible, yes!

In the near future I will keep on pushing the Agile transformation in our company. (Or maybe push is not the correct word. Coaching and collaborating on the issue would be closer to truth.) I will also need to try the role of a Product Owner. Kind of like a jump to the other side of the fence to see if the grass is greener there. Interesting times ahead!