The Mango Tree

I found out that I like the “gardening” metaphor a lot (see also my latest article).

Last Friday I met a colleague during a coffee break.

We were sharing some views about what had happened during the week, when he said: ”You know, this transformation we are all undergoing is like a mango tree. Everybody seems to want mangos, but no one seems to care about how juicy they are and to know how to get juicy mangos”.

Nice way to put it: don’t you think so?

Then we started building upon this metaphor and having fun taking it to the extremes.

And I think that, what we got out of it at the end, was really good way to explain what does it take to get a team or an organization become Agile or more generally to make a change successfully happen.

So what will a good gardener do in order to get the juicy fruits she wants to harvest in her garden?

1.    Decide what fruits or vegetables you would like to collect

The first step is definitely to define what kind of garden you would like to build and what fruits or vegetables you expect to get. Then you can go and buy the corresponding seeds to plant: of course you need to plant mango trees if you want to get mangos. On the other hand you will never get mangos out of onion seeds (for instance have look at this article from Lyssa Adkins to check out what to seed to get a high performing team)

2.    Work a good piece of land

Quality of seeds is essential to get juicy fruits, but so is quality of land. So make sure to have the right environment for the plant to grow strong. Plants growing nearby can also affect the taste of fruits and vegetables: for instance if you grow lettuce close to artichokes, it will probably get bitter. A good gardener knows that, same as she knows how air pollution can also be very detrimental.

3.    Start growing small plants

So how do you think you can verify whether you bought the right seeds and you worked the land properly? Will talking about how the plant should look like help? Most probably not.

Instead a good gardener would start planting some seeds and grow some small plants. She would water the plant; she would ensure it gets enough sun (but not too much); she would fertilize it and protect it, so that it grows strong and can produce the first fruits.

4.   Taste the fruits and decide what to do

Finally she will happily pick the first fruits and taste them to check if they are sweet and juicy enough. Sometimes you will not even need to wait until the fruits are mature. It won’t be hard to see quite early if you’re getting the right fruits in the first place: you will pretty easily tell a mango and a pineapple apart. If you’re getting the right fruits with the expected quality, you can keep growing the same tree and maybe plant more of the same. Otherwise you can even remove the plant or adjust your gardening, trying a different type of fertilizer or dose the water differently. Until you get the wonderful garden you were looking for.

Does this remind you anything? Right, it looks like the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle from W.E. Deming.

BTW, gardening follows just an empirical approach, the same as Lean and Agile. 

Both gardeners and agilists don’t spend time talking about how things should be done in the best way, but they start doing things, just enough just in time, and most important they learn by actually doing, one experiment at a time.

So, what about your Agile transformation?

Are you actually planting seeds and tasting the first fruits?
Or are you just talking about how a good mango tree should look like, maybe even without having ever seen one?

The snowball

This week I host another article from Mauro Bagnato. Today he shares some reflections about his experience with enterprise Agile transformation and provides a concrete example of a management practice about leading self-organizing teams.

After almost three years working as Agile Coach, one of my personal take away is that the Agile transformation is like a rolling snowball.

Once you really walk this way, your mindset will gradually but inevitably change till the moment when it’ll be impossible to get back to your old way of thinking, just like a snowball getting bigger and bigger while rolling downhill.

A clear example of what I’m saying happened weeks ago.
After a complete re-organization, the management team decided to let people self-organize to form twelve brand new teams…and the snowball was thrown! The team setup was a great whole day event (if you’re interested have a look at my previous post).

Everyone had the chance to choose the team to work with, but we all knew that this was just the starting point.

How to select the Scrum Masters and the Product Owners? 

How to group the teams to form four development units? 

How to assign a manager to each unit? 

Those questions and many many others were on the table and needed a fast answer.

”Why not letting teams decide again by themselves?” said one of the managers.

"Did I get it right?": I thought.
The snowball was getting bigger and was still rolling…

So…after having given people all the support and information they needed to make a conscious decision, teams were asked to select their Scrum Masters and Product Owners and to give their preferences among the list of managers.

How did it go? I would say that the whole experiment was a complete success!

I’ve got this feeling not because I’m 100% sure that we found the best setup possible, but because of how much we learned out of this journey.

And now? The snowball keeps moving and we’ll see what happens!

Product Backlog Gardening, with love!

Wikipedia (btw, the most successful example of an emergent product from a self-organizing team) provides the following definition:

Gardening is the practice of growing and cultivating plants. It involves an active participation and tends to be labor intensive, which differentiates it from farming or forestry.

I cannot find a better metaphor to describe the continuous work that a proficient Product Owner needs to do with the Product backlog.

1. First step is actually to plant a seed. That’s the purpose of defining the Product Vision together with the customer, answering the questions: What do we want to accomplish? And why? All gardeners know that quality of the seed is essential and of course you need to plant cherries if you want to get cherries and you cannot get roses if you plant onions.
2. After you plant the seed, you need to water and fertilize it. Then the first small sprout will come out of eliciting a set of SMART (Simple, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Traceable) requirements, focusing on customer needs, on the problems to solve or better on the problems worth solving.
3. The tender small plant now needs a good environment to strengthen and grow. Gather all needed people in a User Story workshop and collaboratively write down as much as stories as possible. You as a Product Owner, exactly like a good gardener, do not have to do all the work yourself: you need proper tools and a fertile land. So use the best land, i.e. the power of the diverse brains around you. Present your Goal for the next Release Cycle and the related Requirements. Make use of creativity techniques to elicit as many User Stories from the Team as possible. Try to identify top MMFs and break them down into User Stories, or cluster User Stories into MMFs.
4. Good User Stories should be INVEST
• Independent: Stories are easiest to work with if they are independent.
• Negotiable... and Negotiated: A good story is negotiable. It is not an explicit contract for features; rather, details will be co-created by Product Owner, programmers and testers during development.
• Valuable: A story needs to be valuable to the customer. Think of your Product as a multi-layer cake: a story is supposed to give the customer the essence of the whole cake, and the best way is to slice vertically through the layers. Developers often have an inclination to work on only one layer at a time (and get it "right"); but a full database layer (for example) has little value to the customer if there's no User Interface.
• Estimable: A good story can be estimated. We don't need an exact estimate, but just enough to help the customer rank and schedule the story's implementation. Being estimable is partly a function of being negotiated, as it's hard to estimate a story we don't understand. It is also a function of size: bigger stories are harder to estimate. Finally, it's a function of the team: what's easy to estimate will vary depending on the team's experience.
• Small: Good stories tend to be small, such that the team can do 6-10 stories in a Sprint as thumb rule. Above this size, it will be too hard to know what's in the story's scope, it will delay the feedback loop and increase the project risk.
• Testable: A good story is testable. Writing a story carries an implicit promise: "I understand what I want well enough that I could write a test for it." Teams are made more productive, by writing customer tests, in terms of Acceptance Criteria, before implementing a story.

INVEST is not only an acronym, but means the Product Owner needs to invest time, energy, skills and, why not , love, to make the plant flourish like all passionate gardeners do. And you cannot achieve it on your own: you can have a say on the "INV" part, but you will never get the "EST" without your team. Remember: Gardening involves an active participation and tends to be labor intensive, which differentiates it from farming or forestry.

5. A good Product Backlog is of manageable size, more granular on the top and more general towards the bottom, so that you do just enough, just in time work. Continuously trim useless leaves to give more space and lymph to the buds going to bear fruit soon: the User Stories being developed in the coming iteration and transformed in a potentially shippable product increment. Nevertheless continue watering and fertilizing the plant, looking a bit ahead to set the stage for later buds and fruits.
6. If you want to collect many fruits after each Sprint and thus maximize the Return on Investment, you might need to split User Stories in smaller chunks. But beware: splitting by architecture or by implementation details is a common mistake. It creates smaller stories, but fails several of the other INVEST criteria and then does not bear fruit. There is no too small story, unless it fails delivering value to customer. You can find a suggestion of possible good patterns to follow when splitting stories and still keep them INVEST here. An awesome and useful mindmap guiding you through the different patterns can be found here.

GIGO theory

One of the biggest causes of poor Product quality is a poor Product backlog, exactly like a sick plant cannot bear juicy fruits: GIGO theory applies J

So are you constantly gardening your Product Backlog with love?

Or are you expecting to harvest without hard work and passion?

I’m sorry to say that you will only collect invaluable fruits, my friend!

Self-organized team setup: how to cook it!

Today I have the pleasure to host an article from my friend Mauro Bagnato. It's an interesting post around self-organization and what it takes to make it happen and working functionally to achieve a compelling goal. 

What does self-organized team setup mean?

Put a hundred people together in the same room, ask them to form twelve teams and wait till the magic happens!

Sounds quite easy, fun and fast, right?

So…why don’t we try it tomorrow morning in our organization?

Unfortunately it does not happen that way; you need to mix together the right ingredients in the right quantity and with the right timing.

If you want, here is my recipe: 

1. Start with a massive quantity of the Lean discipline Respect People: trust them, let them decide and truly believe that, given the goal, they will find the best way to get there. 
2. Keep on shaking the whole organization (starting from the leadership team) to be sure that this fundamental ingredient is very well spread and understood by everyone.
3. Now mix with a purpose, a goal that WE, as a collective, strive to achieve. Take it very carefully, because only a common and inspiring goal may overcome the inevitable selfish choices that may occur during the team setup: we’re not here to build only one marvelous team, we’re not here to fulfill only our personal aspirations, but we are here to work TOGETHER to build a brand new organization setup that will take all of us close to our goal. That’s our mantra!
4. Don’t forget just a pinch of organization constraints: a very few rules the teams have to respect while forming.
5. Now blend everything together in a whole day event where the initial chaos, due to a hundred people moving, chatting and laughing, will turn step by step into twelve groups of people (the future teams) ready to cope with all the challenges they will face.
6. Don’t forget that good ingredients are not enough to have a perfect flavor. You need the right cooking time and procedures as well: in our case coaching and communication. Involving the whole organization during the preparation, keeping everyone informed, letting everyone understand what we’re doing (and above all why we’re doing it that way), challenging the current way of thinking are definitely what we need for a perfect flavor.

And now enjoy!

Change is optional: survival is not mandatory

As many of you can have guessed, the title I chose for this post is inspired by a quote from W.E. Deming.

When I got to know Deming for the first time, many of his lessons came as a revelation to me: they were kind of resonating with my personal thoughts and reflections, but still they cleared out many clouds.

One of those I prefer is: 

“…most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to proportions something like this: 94% belong to the system, 6% are attributable to special causes.” 

I think that this simple sentence can trigger several reflections about how to make things happen and especially how changes can have a chance to happen and possibly stick.

Below are mine, from my personal survival handbook J.

1. Look at the system

An organization, even a single team, is a complex network of people, who are complex beings. If you really want to leverage on all potentials to affect it, you must look at it as a whole system. 

Try to sketch the possible options you have ahead, possible impediments and way to overcome them to reach your goal: you might realize that you need to take many steps, in order to get any progress. 

Prefer actions who affect the environment around or the process to do things, instead of addressing directly a specific problem: they will have a more lasting impact. And, whatever level you want to affect, consider acting also one level up.

“It does not happen all at once. There is no instant pudding.”-W.E. Deming

2. Involve people

Try to understand your team or organization very well. Learn about the invisible networks, the inner relationships among people, who is friend of whom, who is most sensitive to certain subjects and who counts more or is more influential on certain subjects, whether he has a formal power or only a de-facto leadership. Talk to people, with a preference for informal chats (coffee machines are a perfect place sometimes).

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world” – J. Le Carré

Create an alliance: find initiators to support you and involve them in creating a shared strategy for the change. 

Chase innovators eager to try new things out first and learn from people actually doing the work. 

Find also sponsors to support you in difficult situations and leaders who can help with crossing the chasm and reach out the majority.

“The greatest waste … is failure to use the abilities of people…to learn about their frustrations and about the contributions that they are eager to make”- W.E. Deming

Strive for ways how to collect as much feedback as possible, especially from skeptics, but do not spend time in convincing cynics and possible saboteurs.

3. Communicate properly

You cannot just plan your change at your PC, create a slide ware and then ask to deploy it to the whole organization.

How many times have you tried to do that way? How many times did it work?

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”- A. Einstein

Instead explain the “why” for the change; make people aware of what it might mean and relate the change to their daily problems.

Have people desire the change (what’s in it for me?), support them with the change, provide the necessary knowledge and give them time to learn. 

Offer role models, lead yourself by example and help people with mentoring and coaching on how to change.

“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” – A. de Saint-Exupery

4. Reward behaviors not outcomes

When you make a change or learn something new, usually your performances at the stuff affected by the change are getting a bit worse, especially at the beginning. So give room for experiments and possible failures, so that people are not afraid to try new things.

Celebrate short-term wins and success stories; make them visible and share the results with information radiators. 

Publicly reward those who are learning more or sharing more with others, so that the change can go viral. Express appreciation for the right behaviors so that the desire for change is continuously reinforced.

“The most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable” – W.E. Deming

5. Use an empirical step-wise approach

Before taking any step, try to guess which effect it will have in relation to your goal.

Make a hypothesis and try to validate it as quick as possible with minimum viable actions and fast feedback.

However changes in a complex environment are never a linear process you can plan upfront, set goals and KPIs, deploy it to the organization and track the progress. That’s why sometimes you must simply try things out. That is sometimes absolutely not bad, stated that you try to fail fast and reflect on what you learned to find a different path.

Of course using an empirical process control implies that you can observe your system to be able to inspect and adapt. Therefore enable full transparency; make relevant information visible as much as possible from everybody to everybody to be able to really understand what’s going on and act accordingly. Otherwise your change will degenerate into chaos.

“It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best.” – W.E. Deming

How much time and effort are you spending really nurturing your system?

How much are you learning from people actually doing the work?

Are you really making changes happen or just increasing the entropy of your system into chaos?

And if don’t mind about change and how to make changes effectively, skip the whole article and just consider that: 

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” – W.E. Deming

The myth of “Scrum of Scrums”

There are a lot of myths about Scrum and Agile in general.

The most commonly found both by googling and in reality are:

• Agile Teams do not plan
• There’s no documentation in Agile development
• Agile development is not predictable
• Agile Teams do whatever they want
• BTW, Agile Teams do not work hard, but just play around
• Agile is only for small companies developing web applications

Ever heard anyone saying that?

I bet you have.

However having the discussion about scaling Agile (and Scrum in particular) got more and more attention, yet another myth emerged:

• When you scale Scrum to more teams, you handle dependencies and coordination among teams with Scrum of Scrums

I think there’s hardly anything more dangerous and harming for both Scrum and large companies willing to adopt Agile SW development.

Actually dependencies are handled in Scrum by actually eliminating or at least minimizing them. That is done in many dimensions and here are 5 key things you cannot miss:

1. First of all development teams must be cross-functional, meaning that they have all needed competencies to transform a product backlog item in a potentially shippable product increment. This is complemented by adopting a collective code ownership, where anybody is allowed to touch any line of code needed to deliver a product increment at the end of the sprint: otherwise you constrain your team with a lot of dependencies from outside
2. Backlog items shall be in the form of end-to-end User Stories, cutting the system through all layers from front-end to the back-end to produce a potentially shippable piece of function: a component based development produces instead a hell of dependencies
3. User Stories shall be INVEST, where the I stands Independent, so that they are easier to work
4. In a scaled Scrum approach the Product Owner Team develops a unique Product Backlog to feed all development teams and ensure that they are as much independent as possible so that they can move fast with little need to coordinate with each other
5. Scrum teams plan together so that residual dependencies are detected as early as possible

If all that is implemented and being impossible to foresee everything in advance, you will use the Scrum of Scrum as a mechanism to manage coordination needs which pop up during the sprint.

It’s not a meeting of Scrum Masters to report some kind of status, but a possibility for a person who got a problem to rise up her hand and get fast help and support from other teams.

BTW, if you think about, the acronym is SOS.

So it is not meant as the umpteenth coordination structure, but more as an emergency procedure to adopt when some team has put or is going to put something on some other team’s feet.

Otherwise, if any possible effort to minimize or at least reduce dependencies in advance is not taken, you will put so much overhead on your teams, that will basically kill their velocity and productivity.

On the other hand, if you’re not able to implement real Scrum with only one team, how can you succeed in scaling it?

You’d better run your projects in a traditional way!

An Agile Conference in the Heart of Europe

Last week I went to Agile Prague 2013 conference.

The conference was great and again I would like to share with you the most interesting take-aways I brought home from the sessions I attended.

1. The first one is from Scott Barber’s keynote.

He had a point that, regardless the fact that we talk about SW engineering, we are not very much learning from other more “classic” engineering fields. For instance in SW industry many still doubt about the value vs. cost of testing and there’s a spread tendency of considering SW development like manufacturing instead of R&D. That’s different in Classic Engineering, which is by the way a far more mature industry:

- No one questions the value of testing: how could you put a bridge in production without producing a prototype and testing it thoroughly?

- The Team is both responsible and legally accountable for quality/safety

- “Go Live” decisions are (relatively) easy

So we would be well served to study “other” fields of Engineering, consider real R&D practices for new software development and forget titles, but be responsible and accountable as a Team.

2. The second great insight was from Kevlin Henney’s keynote.

He started from the consideration that you’d better concentrate on what you can complete, because you learn by finishing things (as btw we are all taught by the Lean SW principle “Deliver as fast as possible”). So he introduced a theory from 1990, called Worse Is Better, of why software would be more likely to succeed if it was developed with minimal invention.

And yet we have not learnt this lesson in 2013!

The theory claims that it is far better to have an under-featured product that is rock solid, fast, and small than one that covers what an expert would consider the complete requirements.

This is all at the heart of Agile SW development, in contrast with the classical “The right thing” design philosophy and the failing ambition to define everything from the beginning. Ralph Jonson said: “Architecture is the decisions that you wish you could get right early in a project, but that you are not necessarily more likely to get them right than any other”. An empirical process control is what works best in SW development: properly gaining control of the design process tends to feel like one is losing control of the design process.

3. David Hussman in his provocative talk “Renaissance, Reformation and NonBan” urged the need for a Renaissance and Reformation of Agile back to its original spirit and practices from what sometimes now became only yet another process. We should learn again from masters like Ward Cunningham, Alan Cooper or Jeff Patton. What’s old is new again and very much necessary: storytelling, pairing, test driven. We need for instance better discussions, not better documents. What other reforms are needed today? He proposed NonBan: the least amount of process adopted by very skilled persons with the most real and measurable value. Interesting perspective, isn’t it?

4. Finally I found inspiring Andrea Provaglio talking about Dreams. He presented an organizational model based on 3 pillars: Dream, Order and Action. The Dream is about intent or vision, Order is about rules, functions and procedures, while Action is about production and skills. He mapped very nicely this model into Scrum: the Dream is the Product backlog, the Order are the Scrum ceremonies, while the Action is the Sprint, where a Dream-bit (a User Story) is actually transformed in a potentially shippable product increment. As counterpart of Dreams there are Needs, stuff that we need to do, like defects to fix. They fall into the backlog as well and it would be interesting to measure the Dreambits/Needs ration in our Product Backlog.

I gave my contribution to the Conference by delivering a session called “12 ingredients for a successful Agile transformation” which had quite a big audience and which is based on a series of posts I published on this blog (see Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3).

You can find all presentations stored at this link.

Videos from all sessions will be soon available at this link.

If you like to get info on the progress, follow @Agileprague on Twitter.

After my presentation I got an interesting question: "Do you think that signatories of the Agile Manifesto had foreseen that all in 2001?"
I answered: " I do not know if they had envisioned this when signing the Agile Manifesto, but I challenge anyone to demonstrate me that you can really implement Agile values and principles without all that is needed to transform the paradigma of an organization".

Does anyone feel like accepting the challenge? :)
What's your opinion?