"Selflessness gives one center.
Center creates order.
When there is order, there is little to do."

From the Tao of Leadership by John Heider, adapted from the teachings of Lao Tzu

Series: Agile Transformation Anti-patterns

I remember that day like it was yesterday. The click of the camera, the awful picture, the waiting for what seemed like hours and finally, that moment where I was handed, still hot off the lamination machine, freedom, emancipation, liberation – or as you may call it, a driver’s license! That was one of the most memorable moments of my life (don’t tell my wife). And it was hard-earned! All those days of repeatedly practicing K-turns, parallel parking, mastering the art of the 4-way stop and just generally surviving driving in New Jersey! All those skills that we can now exercise in our sleep (but really, really, shouldn’t) weren’t as intuitive or simple back then. It took a lot of practice and more importantly, coaching when we were learning.

Even though I knew that Driver’s Manual inside-out and received only one question wrong on the written exam (which I still don’t know the answer to, btw), I would never dream of getting behind the wheel of the car with just my learner’s permit and a vision to one day own that 1983 Honda Civic. I needed a coach sitting beside me, working with me and guiding me as I was driving. It was nearly impossible for most of us to go directly from passing the exam to the road test. I needed that guidance and practice in my own car.

Getting a driver’s license is the same learning model as becoming a doctor or an Agile practitioner:

• Training and reading build knowledge
• Applying that knowledge so that the desired outcome can be repeatedly achieved is skill
• Repeated application of that skill in different circumstances forms experience

This process, unfortunately, is lost on most sponsors who cause one of the biggest transformation anti-patterns: Coaching not necessary – the thought that one 2-day course or just reading some books will instantly create a set of Agile practitioners. It takes time, dedication, experimentation and most of all, coaching, from an experienced coach that is either in-house or external.

Would you trust a lifeguard who received her certification on the Internet based on an online exam and no practice? What about a surgeon who has never had any internships, residencies or any hands-on experience? Would you trust him to operate on you? I understand that a newly trained Agile practitioner isn’t going (usually) to kill anyone if they miss an iteration goal or their retrospective goes sour but the concept is still the same – getting results from an Agile transformation takes experienced practitioners. Training, no matter how good, will only build knowledge. Applying that knowledge so that the desired outcome can be repeatedly achieved is skill. Repeated application of that skill in different circumstances forms experience. One cannot go from knowledge to experience and one cannot build skills in the classroom. To achieve the desired results from a team, it takes time to nurture and grow them, and that includes coaching along the way.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not out to say that agile practitioners aren’t bright and can’t apply what they have learned in the class or book within their own environment. But consider your unique environment – your corporate culture and the quirks that are yours alone, your current environment, infrastructure, leaders and their leadership style, organizational structure, incentives, and so on. There are so many parts to the makeup of an organization that sometimes it isn’t obvious how to apply what they have learned. A 2-day course (or even a 10-day course) cannot cover all possibilities. And what about scaling? The more teams there are (esp. distributed teams) the more the challenges the newly trained practitioners face. It gets overwhelming, especially for new practitioners.

In addition, please don’t misinterpret my views about classroom time. I have been an instructor for years. I love teaching and I will be the first to point out that classes and books are an essential start. They add the knowledge which is required to start the journey. However, it will never build skills. Application of that knowledge in your own environment will do that. And the more complex the environment, the harder it is to apply that knowledge. Coaching from someone who has done it before and seen many of the pitfalls the team may be headed for will work with them to navigate the rocky terrain, teaching them within their own context and arming them with the tools to apply that knowledge to make wise decisions. In essence, the coach’s job is to work themselves out of a job. Repeated application of that skill in different circumstances forms an experienced practitioner who, by the way, is your next coach.

Don’t try and save the cost of some coaching and try and get everyone trained instead, thinking those will bring about results. Instead, consider picking a smaller subset of the whole who can be trained AND coached in their own environments, who, because of the coaching, would come up to speed faster, avoid common mistakes and would ultimately coach the next generation. Consider what you may consider an expense may actually be an investment, which will pay dividends for years.

Series: Agile Roles and Responsibilities Series

Many pundits preach that the agile organization will not have managers – that teams will self-manage and can carry out all responsibilities of traditional functional management. This includes HR responsibilities, major conflict disputes, etc. “The team is self-managing, which includes all management responsibilities,” or so I keep hearing. Call me a heretic, but I’ve never subscribed to the scalability of this model. For most large-scale (esp. global) organizations, this is not a reality. Not only are functional managers not going anywhere, but they are, in-fact, essential to an organization’s transformation to Agile practices. However, their roles will need to change. Whether they embrace or reject this change could mean the difference between success and failure going forward.

To highlight the differences, let’s lay out the major responsibilities of a traditional functional manager:

1. Handle HR functions (e.g., Hire and fire/lay off, harassment, physical violence, larger-scale verbal assaults, etc.)
2. Champion causes/break down barriers
3. Maintain standards (quality, technical, ethical ) across the different teams
4. Develop employees technical and other necessary skills
5. Create, manage and restructure cross-functional resources
6. Execute performance evaluations
7. Set up work processes (esp. for their team)
8. Break down and assign tasks
9. Project manage the team (usually with a gigantic Gantt chart and a weekly status meeting)
10. Be responsible for the team’s commitment and deliverables

(I’m sure I could have listed another 20 responsibilities but I tried to focus on the top 10. If you feel there are important responsibilities I didn’t cover and a through on whether an Agile manager will retain or relinquish them, please feel free to list them in the comments.)

So what in this list changes? That can be answered by the overarching mental model: The Agile management (as a whole)’s mission is: To do what needs to be done to create an innovative, flexible and continuously-improving environment that will allow teams and Product Owners to succeed. This means creating an organization that is capable of executing Product Backlog changes at any time (including at the 11th hour) as efficiently and with the highest quality possible.

To accomplish this, Agile Managers would still handle responsibilities 1 through 4 - traditional HR functions, develop employees, set up and maintain standards (optionally with the help of Agile technical leads) but will hand over the their project and process management responsibilities (given in steps 7-10) to the ScrumMasters (if practicing Scrum) and feature teams.

But why give up those traditional responsibilities of ownership, assignment and management of tasks? Several reasons come to mind (feel free to add to or contest these):

• Allows the team to own their commitment, and just as important, own it as a team
• Allows the team to focus on the greater iteration goals instead of just their individual tasks
• Empowers them to self-improving

Many managers are concerned this hand-off of responsibilities diminishes their role. I feel it is quite the opposite - that it focuses their role and elevates it to a more strategic level. Instead of being consumed by tasks that teams are perfectly capable of performing themselves (albeit, teams usually need help at first), Agile Managers will now work as a group to see which changes need to happen organizationally – those that we never saw before or saw but were too busy (or un-empowered) to do anything about. This change will let them focus on:

• Setting up and managing cross-functional teams
• Creating and managing needed infrastructure (e.g., testing platforms, continuous integration, etc.)*
• Break down organizational barriers, usually raised by ScrumMasters and teams through Daily Scrums and Retrospectives or similar events
• Create and manage technical standards across the organization (with the help of teams and technical leads)
• Creating, training and supporting change agents (e.g., ScrumMasters) within the organization

*Note: I don’t mean to imply that the managers code the infrastructure themselves (although, they are free to do so if they want). I just mean they will look at the largest gaps and create internal teams to work on them as needed.

Item 5 deals with the creation, allocation and evaluation as teams. The Agile Manager still own this responsibility but performs it very differently than they would have traditionally. They don’t design the organization by architecture, layer or component (e.g., the GUI team, OS team, driver team, database team, etc.) but rather by vertical features. Additionally, a set of Agile Line Managers should treat all resources reporting to them collectively as a pool of resources where teams can be “pulled” from, instead of individual resource ownership. This means that Agile Managers will collaboratively assemble the best teams for a group of features and not just have teams by virtue of reporting structure. (I will follow this up with a deeper post on this topic).

Last in the list is item 6, which, like item 4, is also a transformed activity owned by managers. Managers are still responsible to perform evaluations but they will do this based primarily on the team’s performance rather than an individual. It is also a great practice to do this as a team of managers, instead of individual evaluations. (We’ll debate the right performance measures as well as the idea of abolishing performance reviews on another post).

Finally, it is up to the managers as a whole to set the culture to continuously improve and continuously experiment to do so. An Agile manager’s motto should be “It’s OK to Fail”, as long as we do it fast and learn from it toward the right goal. They know that the phrase “I don’t know” is a much better phrase than an uncertain answer based in no data or reality given because one is expected.

The fact is that Managers make or block Agile transformations. There is a lot of talk of top-down leadership and bottom-up push but the managers connect these domains. They are the ones that can greatly accelerate or critically hinder a transformation. Which camp are your managers in?

One of the most misinterpreted and misapplied terms in our Industry is the term ‘empowered’. I hear it used over and over from organizations that are new to Agile concepts and have usually know just enough to be dangerous - and dangerous they become. Although I’ve seen this term misapplied in many different roles, it is usually my experience teams that are the biggest culprits, and that’s who I’ll focus on in this blog. Using it more like the term ‘anarchy’, the term ‘empowered’ misused as a reason to get away with everything from reprioritizing the Product Backlog to missing iteration goals. This behavior is one of the most disruptive forces in an Agile transformation.

I thought I’d shed some light on that term and where the term ‘empowered’ does and does not apply.

Let’s start with the definition of empowerment:

em•pow•er•ment [ɪmˈpaʊəmənt]
n
1. the giving or delegation of power or authority; authorization

When it is said that “teams are empowered”, they are given certain authorities where management approval is no longer necessary. This authority is over HOW they work, which includes (but isn’t limited to):

• Own the delivery of an integrated, high quality vertical slice
• Creating, owning and managing the Iteration Backlog – the list of tasks the team collectively needs to complete in the current iteration toward the iteration goals
• Owing their own work-processes – how members of the team work together within the team. This includes, but isn’t limited to, setting up their own meetings, rules of conduct, team norms, etc. – basically those processes that are needed to work effectively as a team
• Being able to create and own their architecture (this may be limited to architecture of a particular section for large-scale development)
• Own their technical practices – be able to practice paired programming, Test-Driven Development, Continuous Integration, Refactoring, etc. without Product Owners or managers telling them not to

However, there are bounds to that empowerment and teams that exceed those bounds are teetering on the edge of:

an•ar•chy ( n r-k )
n.
1. Absence of any form of political authority.

Empowerment turns into anarchy when we here statements like the following thrown around by team members - “We are empowered to...”

• “Change the features in the Product Backlog because we didn’t like what’s there”
• “Change the order of the Product Backlog because the high priority items are boring”
• “Not help our managers, other teams or other colleagues outside the team because we are empowered not to be interrupted” Aside: I actually knew of a team that enclosed themselves behind locked doors so they wouldn’t have to speak to anyone between iterations. I understand empowered not to accept scope creep but not letting anyone even ask a simple question is ridiculous.
• “Deliver nothing!” I knew of several teams that delivered 0, nothing, nada, zip, zilch, you get the picture, for multiple iterations because they told the Product Owners (who weren’t trained, btw) that “the teams were now empowered to choose their own work.” Ummm, no.

So what’s the line between genius and madness - between empowerment and anarchy? Two simple mental models that will act as your litmus test:

1. Product Owners are empowered to decide WHAT features the teams will work on and in which order
2. Teams are empowered to decide HOW they will work on delivering those features.

Two notes to keep in mind:

1. I don’t mean to imply that there is no collaboration but rather final authority on both sides. Teams are welcome and encouraged to give input on priorities but the final decision is the Product Owners and the teams are NOT empowered to override that priority. Product Owners, etc. are welcome to give input and best practices on task breakdown, max. number of hours per task, technical norms, technical practices, etc. but the final decision is up to the team.
2. When you have multiple teams, there may be organizational norms and best practices that the team may have no authority over. It is up to management and ScrumMasters to collectively determine on a case-by-case basis if those are helpful or barriers.

The whole point of these particular empowerments are to create the most innovative and effective organization. It also focuses the different roles to accomplish their goals efficiently. Be wise and watch out for words that are thrown around without making sense.

Series: Agile Roles and Responsibilities Series

Anyone who knows me knows that I love ScrumMasters.  My family had to get used to the idea of being second in line, but they’ll get over it.  Why the love affair? Simple.  They are the organization’s change agents!  Their #1 role is to continuously create positive changes.  (FYI, if you thought that the role of the ScrumMasters is to be a simple project manager or task-master, read this first: ScrumMasters are not Task Masters)

They create positive change by:

• Setting up, owning and upholding the process of Scrum
• Ensuring that the process is followed by all
• Identifying, escalating and having barriers broken (this doesn’t mean they necessarily do the breaking)
• Teaching the process of Scrum to all parties
• Working with Product Owners, managers and the development team (including architects, testers, etc.) to evolve the organization
• Leading a team to increase their productivity (velocity)
• Facilitate the roles within the organization to work efficiently, effectively and most importantly, together
• Being enablers, problem solvers, and more…

The amazing thing is that the ScrumMaster role doesn’t call for any managerial authority over the team, Product Owners or other managers.    They lead by influence, not by authority.

Although SMs are an essential part of the team, they are not wholly devoted to just their team.  This means although the SM belongs to the team, they are not just there for the team.  If the SM is doing their job correctly and efficiently, they are working 1/3 of their time with the team to deal with team issues, break barrier, 1/3 of their time hand-in-hand with POs and 1/3 of their time with Management.   So with all this, when do they have time to code?  In my humblest of opinions, they don’t .  The ScrumMaster is a full-time role – but before you jump all over me, that is a different post and discussion.

When a team is newly formed, this balance will be shifted more toward the team but over time, new teams will be comprised of members that have done this before and not need to take so much start-up equity from the SM.   So, what are SMs doing with each of these three roles?  Helping them meet their goals. Removing barriers when possible and escalating barriers when appropriate.  Installing, teaching, upholding, and most importantly, evolving the process of Scrum within the organization toward the very concrete goal of reducing defects and increasing velocity (in that order) for the organization collectively (starting with their team).  This means working with the POs to complete the release plan, working with teams on iteration planning, reviews and retrospectives and working with management on what they need to do: Transform the organization into an agile organization that can move to the beat of the Product Owner (Yet another post). 

This, however, does NOT mean that SMs project manage.  The teams and Product Owners need to do that themselves. The ScrumMasters are ensuring that the release and iteration plans are being set up and helping evolve the process, not doing that work for the team.

I could write a book on the topic so forgive me if this bite size morsel is leaving you in want.  I will be filling in many of the gaps in future posts.  As always, I look forward to your comments.

One question I am often asked is “Does testing add value?” Many people who ask this question are development or Q/A managers who are trying to figure out how testing fits within an agile environment. My simple answer is: “No, it does not.” 

Now, before you get all half-cocked, I am not saying we should ship a product that is hanging together by dental floss. I am definitely not saying let’s just throw in more and more features and leave less time and resources to maximizing quality. I mean quite the contrary.

When I say testing has no value, I mean the time it takes to test a product doesn't add value to the end customer. Value, by this definition is "something that takes the form, feature or function that the customer is willing to pay for." Customers don't want to pay for testing. They want to pay for a high-quality product. To illustrate, let’s look at two different ways to develop a product:

1. Big bang approach: Spend a lot of time building and ignoring defects along the way because they will be addressed in the 'Testing' phase. Defects pile up, get more and more complex and worse, get more and more buried. The engineers/developers then, need to go in and spend most of their time finding the defects before fixing them. This is a lot of time and cost that has to be built into the cost of the product. This doesn’t even take into consideration the inefficiencies of bouncing the defect between the Q/A group and development groups. Customers pay for this necessary step but it adds no value to them. A good amount of the cost and time of finding and fixing the defects could have been avoided.

2. Alternatively, a savvy organization will adopt practices to build integrity into the product and test as you go in small batches. In fact, they will develop requirements AS test cases. The developers build to those test cases, which are objectively measurable and testable as you go. In essence, the developers allow the testing to drive development, not the other way around. This, of course, is the philosophy of test-driven development. The idea here is to build small, high-quality slices of the product and then integrate it in as soon as possible. Part of this continuous integration involves testing the whole as you go. If defects appear, they will most likely be caused by the latest addition. If this latest piece is small, the defect can be found and resolved easily.

A further step would be to avoid creating as many defects as possible by using best practices and quality principles during development. One more tool would be to borrow the concept of a 'WIP Cap' from Lean. This means that if we reach a set number of open defects in our database during development (usually 5 or less), we all stop, fix them and move on. It is much more efficient to fix them now than later when the product is more complex.

The second approach exposes problems in hours and days, not months later when different components are completed independently and finally integrated. It will create a higher quality product with severely reduced time in the end and thus cost and time to market because teams don't have to find and fix all these hidden defects that were created by ignoring them along the way. This is more valuable to the customer because they are spending most of their money on creation of features, not on finding hidden defects. Of course, even this approach will not be a 100% bug-free but industry metrics have shown defects to drop as much as 80% in a development life-cycle.

So is testing valuable to the customer? Still no. Is it necessary? Absolutely. However, by using good quality practices to build integrity in, let testing drive development, integrate in small slices and test as you go, the time and effort to test will drastically reduce creating a much more efficient development group.

It is almost guaranteed that when I work with new organizations, one of the first questions that comes up is “How does the development organization work with the Q/A organization?” This question is a stinker. A seemingly simple question actually is pointing out much deeper organizational issues that go beyond testers to how we see all roles within an Agile environment.

That question usually indicates that most managers are trying to force-fit Agile methodologies into the old organizational structure. This is not just inefficient, it is detrimental. When thinking about moving to an Agile framework, an organization must consider what we are delivering and how. Practicing Agile means delivering small, vertical slices of the product every iteration. Vertical in this case means a slice that encompasses a feature from the customer-visible front-end to the back-end and everything in between. 

The key mental sound bite here is that a slice isn’t done until the customer sings (with joy and praise, that is). To be done with a vertical slice, it needs to be developed, integrated and the whole product (up to that point) tested. To say a slice is done, means it is usable by the customer and is as close to shippable condition as possible. (I will have future posts on how to use this model with mixed software and hardware development).

The most efficient way to accomplish this is to reform a team from component-based teams into vertical teams. A vertical team is made up of all resources I need to finish that vertical slice. This may mean a GUI developer, the business logic fellow, the database expert, the network security professional, etc. – whoever is needed to complete the feature in its entirety. This also means that a Q/A professional is a part of the team, working hand-in-hand to create a high-quality increment. Developing even a small chunk and then ‘throwing’ it over to a separate Q/A group will not yield the efficiencies that well-practiced Agile teams boast about.

With that said, keep in mind that the Q/A professional’s role changes within the team.  We don’t just want to put a tester with developers.  We don’t want to create a situation where developers throw completed items over a mini-wall to have tested.  Rather, the developers themselves will do as much of their own testing as possible.  The goal is to create a team that has powerful skills to deliver the highest quality product.  The Q/A professional will be responsible for ensuring all test cases for that iteration are defined, mentoring developers on building testing skills, including how to think about, write and execute test cases as well as helping the team automate as many test cases as possible.  Just as they teach the team how to test, the team will teach the tester how to do simple coding for the sake of test automation.

Last but certainly not least, an essential part of the vertical team is the Customer – or at least the best representation of the customer that we have internally, usually a Product Owner. Unlike someone who furnished a book of requirements, expects delivery many months later and wants no communication in-between, a Product owner works with the team(s) on requirements, is essential in breaking them down vertically and works side-by-side with the team during the iteration planning and reviews. Product Owners may not necessarily be co-located but will answer any questions asked by the team in a matter of hours, not days or weeks.

To be truly agile, you need to plan, think, build on a feature-by-feature basis. To accomplish this most efficiently and effectively, the team needs to be vertical – have all the resources that are necessary to complete the features within the team. This includes, developers, Q/A personnel, Product Owners, documentation, etc. Pets, however, are optional.

Series: Agile Roles and Responsibilities

It always bewilders me to think about the amount of teams out there who designate the ScrumMaster as a ‘Task Master’. In these teams, the ScrumMaster’s role is often seen as that of an administrator. This ScrumMaster schedules, plans and runs the meetings, including the Daily Scrum.    His job is to make sure all the perceived overheads of the iteration are completed so that the team can focus on their “real” job. “Come around and get our hours every day so we don’t have to input them,” the team may say. “And while you’re at it,” they may add, “be a dear and handle any interruptions that come our way, would you?” However, this is a mistaken notion.

ScrumMasters are called what they are for one very simple reason: They own the process of Scrum.  They have one of the most complex and difficult jobs in the development organization: To create and maintain the processes by which we work. In short, they need to be change agents. 

I don’t mean to imply that ScrumMasters don’t work within the team. On the contrary, they work intimately as a part of the team to help create and adapt processes within the team. However, they aren’t the ones that manage the team and the team’s meetings and events – the team itself does that. It is perfectly fine for the ScrumMaster to perform those activities when working with a newly formed team but with the understanding that those are owned by the team and will be transitioned to the team as soon as possible.

What, then, should the ScrumMaster be doing once those items are transitioned? Everything else that falls under the ‘own the process of Scrum’ category. This includes working with Product Owners just as intimately as the team, to help with release planning and tracking, bridging the gap between the Product Owner and the team. This also includes working with existing management to solve deeper organizational issues that is beyond each team. Finally, they are responsible for working with other ScrumMasters to maintain a coherent process across the organization. In the end, a well balanced ScrumMaster will work in equal parts with the team, the Product Owner and the organization. 

This may be a good time to mention that the role of the ScrumMaster is a full-time one, but that is another blog entry.

And a brave new one it is!  We at Agile Ethos would like to proudly announce the launch of our blog!  It is our outlet to share our knowledge, talk about our beliefs and just vent once in a while.  We are trainers and coaches who believe in what we do – transform organizations to have the highest quality, value to the customer, efficiency and by the way, be a great place to work!  And yes, it is possible!  We’ve seen it happen many times.

We hope to use this blog to share our experiences and insights on what it takes to transform an organization, including leadership, organizational structure, process, culture and technical skills.  Expect many blogs to share and test new and innovative ideas with you.  We hope you’ll comment one way or another.  Expect other blogs to share key learnings that every leader and change agent needs to know.  Expect some blogs to ask you questions and hopefully hear back a few answers and finally, expect a few to just keep you up to date with what’s going on with us lately. 

Our associates have decades of industry experience and have seen, heard and battled much in our professional lives.  Thought our experiences, we hope you will learn, grow and interact with us.   Feel free to post examples and pictures on topics that resonate with you or challenge us respectfully on those issues you don’t agree with so we can dialog about them.  Please let us know which topics would interest you and we’ll do our best to cover them.  Ask us questions you’d like us to answer and we will do our best to respond.  

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