Agile Process

Sprint Zero

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Starting a new project? A new product? Have a team transitioning to “Agile” (aka Scrum) and wanting to get ready?

Why not try a Sprint Zero? – Why not indeed.

Sprint Zero is a way to get everything ready to start work, to buy the tools you need, set up your databases, perhaps do some architecture review, tell the rest of the organization about what you are doing, maybe write some requirements, get some additional training, etc. etc.

Sprint Zero doesn’t need to happen in a time box, you can take all the time you need, after all, you haven’t become “agile” yet, Sprint Zero will make you Agile.

Good idea?

Please don’t.

Sprint Zero is a get-out-of-jail-free card that pushes really change down the road a little bit further.

The truth is: there is work to do.

Just start “sprinting”. Schedule an iteration to start tomorrow and get going. Do what you plan for the next week, then review and plan again.

Doing anything else delays the change and potentially reduces motivation.

If you want to call your first iteration Zero then fine; you can call it Zero, or One, or Two, or 57 or even -1 if you want, I don’t care. Give it a number and make sure the next iteration adds one to that number.

All those things I just listed – and more – that you need to do to “get started” are themselves work that needs doing. Why not write them on a card and schedule them like you would any other piece of work in an iteration?

If you haven’t worked out what those things are then No problem, try and schedule some real work. When you find you don’t have something (a database instance for example) simply write out a card, schedule it, do it. The things you need to do to “get ready” are actually things you need to do to build something you do want.

My big worry with Sprint Zero (apart from it injecting unnecessary delay and loss of change momentum) is that it makes work. You may think you need to do something in advance and you might be right. But, then again, you might be wrong. You might do something – like install a database – when you could quite easily postpone that work for a few weeks or even skip it entirely.

Similarly some say “How can we start work until we know what we need to do? – we need to gather requirements, write some stories….”

But again: determining what needs doing, requirements gathering, is itself work to be done.

If it is not clear what needs to be done on day-1 then the first thing to do is to do some work to find out what needs to be done. The initial work may well be requirements discover and story writing with only a little bit of product building.

Speculative, early, requirements gathering, may actually increase the amount of work to do because you capture all the things people think you need to do. Once you start to put the product together you may not need those things but once they are listed as part of the work to do – and especially if they have been promised to someone – then not doing them can be problematic.

Anyway, having written this blog I now wonder if I should have bothered. Now I look about a lot of other people have made similar points already. As I have been writing this post I thought I should find a definition of Sprint Zero, so I did a search. Interestingly, most of the articles that came up on page 1 of Google are also critical of Sprint Zero for similar reasons to myself. So maybe Sprint Zero is an idea whose time has already come and gone.

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When does a Start-Up need Agile?

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I started writing another piece on more economic and agile/software development but it got to long, so right now, an aside…

Back in 1968 Peter Drucker wrote:

“Large organizations cannot be versatile. A large organization is effective through its mass rather than through its agility.”

Last week I presented “Agile for Start-ups” here in London for the third time. Each time I’ve given this talk it has been largely rewritten – this time I think I’ve got it nailed. Part of the problem is I tend towards the view that “Start-Ups don’t need Agile”, or rather they do, but agile comes naturally and if it doesn’t then the start-up is finished. Its later when the company grows a bit that it needs Agile. And notice here, I’m differentiating between agile – the state of agility – and Agile as a recognised method.

New, energetic, start-ups are naturally agile, they don’t need an Agile method. As they grow there may well come a time when an Agile method, specific Agile tools, are useful in helping the start-up keep its agility. Am I splitting hairs?

For a small start-up agile should be a natural advantage. On day one, when there are two people in a room making the startup it isn’t a question of what process they are going to follow. At the very beginning a start-up lives or dies by two things: passion and a great idea. In the beginning it should be pure energy.

In many ways the ideas behind Agile are an effort to help companies maintain this natural agility as they grow. Big, established, companies who have lost any natural agility seem to resemble middle aged men trying to recapture a lost youth.

So when does a start-up need to get Agile? – a more formal way of keeping fit as it where.

Not all day-1 start-ups are pure passion, ideas and energy. Some need to find their thing. They need an approach to finding their reason for being. Agile can provide that structure.

And start-ups which are taking a Lean Start-Up approach also need a method. They may have passion and energy in the room but the lean startup market test driven approach demands discipline and iteration. Lean Start-Up demands you kill your children if nobody wants them.

When I look at Lean Start-Up I see an engineer’s solution to the problem of “What product should our company build to be successful?” The engineered solution is to try something, see what happens, learn from the result, maybe build on the try or perhaps change (pivot) and repeat.

In both these cases a start-up needs to be able to Iterate: Try something, see what happens, learn from it and go round the loop again.

You can generalise these two cases to one: Product Discovery through repeated experimentation.

That requires a discipline and it requires a method – even if the method is informal and subject to frequent change. It can be supplemented with traditional research and innovation approaches.

The next time a start-up can benefit from Agile (as in a method) is as it grows: as it becomes a “scale-up” rather than a start-up. This might be when you grow from two to three, or from 10 to 13, or even 100 to 130 but at some point the sheer energy driven nature of a start-up needs to give way to more structure.

This probably coincides with success – the company has grown and survived long enough to grow. Someone, be they customers or investors, is paying the company money. It is no longer enough to rely on chance.

The problem now is that introducing a more defined method risks damaging the culture and way the start-up is working – which is successful right now. So now the risk of change is very real, there is something to loose!

Just as the company can think about the future it needs to risk that future. But no change is also risky, with growth the processes and practices which brought initial success may not be sustainable in a larger setting.

This is the point where I’ve seen many companies go wrong. They go wrong because they decide to become a “proper company” and do things properly. Which probably means adding some project managers and trying to be like so many other companies. They give up their natural agility.

Innovation in process goes out the window and attempts to turn innovative work into planned projects are doomed. Show me the project plan with a date for “Innovation happens here” or “Joe gets great idea in morning shower” or “Sam bumps into really big contact.”

It is at this point that I think Agile methods really can help. But those approaches need to be introduced carefully working with the grain of the organization. Some eggs are bound to be broken but this shouldn’t be a scorched earth policy.

Start-ups and scale-ups need to approach their products and Agile introduction as they do their business growth: organically. Grow it carefully, don’t force feed it, don’t impose it – inspire the staff to change and let them take the initiative.

It is much easier to do this while the team is small. Changing the way one team of five works is far easier than changing the way four teams of eight work. Its also cheaper because once one team is working well it can grown and split – amoeba like – and later teams will be born with good habits.

Unfortunately companies, especially smaller ones, put a lot of faith in hiring more people to increase their output and thereby postpone the day when the team adopt a more productive and predictable style of working.

This might be because they believe new hires will have the same work ethic and productivity as the early hires: they probably won’t if only because they have more to learn (people, code, processes, domain) when they start.

Or it might be because the firm doesn’t want to loose productivity while they change: in my experience, when the change is done right short term productivity doesn’t fall much and quickly starts growing.

It might just be money saving: why pay for training and advice today? – yet such advice isn’t expensive in the scheme of things, certainly delaying a new hire by a couple of months should cover it.

Or it might just be the old “We haven’t got time to change” problem. Which always reminds me of a joke Nancy Van Schooenderwoert once told me:

“A police officer sees a boy with a bicycle walking along the road at 10am.
Police: Excuse me young sir, shouldn’t you be in school?
Boy: Yes officer, I’m rushing there right now.
Police: Wouldn’t it be faster to ride your bike down the hill?
Boy: Yes officer, but I don’t have the time to get on the bike.”

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Kanban paradox

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For a while now I’ve been seeing a paradox with Kanban. Specifically, Kanban compared to Scrum.

For a team new to Agile – although some regard this as heretical I place Kanban under the Agile umbrella, yes I know its more about Lean than Agile but of cause Agile is itself a Lean method, anyway…

For team, specifically a software team, looking to adopt a new process there is a choice:

  • Kanban has a very low barrier to entry, to get started Kanban essentially says “visualise your work and manage the result.” Starting Kanban can be as simple as putting up a board and tracking work items. In Kanban visualisation should drive improvement. Change can be incremental and gradual. Change is rooted in learning.
  • Scrum has a far higher barrier to entry: essentially Scrum says, “Adopt Sprints, designate a Product Owner, appoint a Scrum Master and build out a backlog.” Once these changes are done you can run with Scrum and then the Scrum Master and retrospectives will kick-in and drive further improvement.

Interestingly, neither method says explicitly “Improve your quality.” Yet I always believe a lot of the success of Agile methods is down to good old quality improvement: writing fewer bugs and having fewer bugs to fix means greater predictability and more time to deliver valuable software. But I digress.

It is easier to start with Kanban because it requires less up front change. However that does mean the improvements are slower coming.

Conversely, Scrum drops in, changes a lot and most teams see an immediate improvement. Scrum relies less on subsequent change.

Because Kanban relies more on ongoing change it is more difficult. It is easy to get stuck at the “we built a Kanban board so we are doing Kanban stage.” Change in Kanban requires one to see the need to change, understand what will fix a problem and then follow the change through. That often requires experience. Thus in teams adopting Kanban there is a greater need for a coach, a consultant, someone who has done it before.

Scrum on the other hand makes far more changes upfront and the recipe for improvement is more straight forward. And of cause there are a lot more books on Scrum, blogs on Scrum, Certified Scrum Masters and Scrum experience out there. So while it is harder to get started with Scrum (because more needs to change) there is less need for further change and you change does not require the same level of knowledge.

You see this specifically when you look at statistics. Watching the numbers should be important in both processes but with Kanban it is near essential. Anyone with real understanding of Kanban knows that queuing theory, lead times, possibly weighted lead times, and a bunch of other numbers need to be examined.

Scrum on the other hand doesn’t go much further than a burn-down chart. Yes, making more improvement with Scrum will also benefit from understanding lead times, queuing theory and the rest but you can quite happily use Scrum, and even improve Scrum, a fair bit without understanding these ideas.

So here is the paradox:

It is easier to start with Kanban than it is Scrum without expert knowledge, but it is harder to improve Kanban than Scrum without expert knowledge.

In many ways I prefer Kanban but I find this need for expert knowledge troubling. I suppose I shouldn’t, I’m a consultant, I am that expert, people hire me to help improve their Kanban processes so it does make more work for me.

In the longer run, the Kanban approach is more likely to lead to a genuine all inclusive culture of improvement and is less likely to get stuck in a sub-optimal position – yes Scrum fixes things, but is it the best fix possible?

Looked at like this gives me a new perspective on Xanpan.

I wanted Xanpan to be two things:

  • An understandable description of actually following an Agile process, specifically a Kanban/XP hybrid processes
  • An example of how, and why, teams should create their own processes.

The same paradox is here: Xanpan should be easy to start but allow you to improve; creating your own process requires a bit more knowledge that only really comes with experience.

To step back a minute and ask another question: What amount of change can a team handle to start with?

I find that I advocate more initial change than I used to. Because I’m fearful of creating a learned dependency I really want teams to learn to change and improve themselves. But… once a team has decided to change I want to seize the opportunity and install a bunch of changes while enthusiasm is there.

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Utilisation and non-core team members

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“But we have specialists outside the team, we have to beg… borrow… steal people… we can never get them when we want them, we have to wait, we can’t get them enough.”

It doesn’t matter how much I pontificate about dedicated, stable, consistent teams I hear this again and again. Does nobody listen to me? Does nobody read Xanpan or Continuous Digital?

And I wonder: how much management time is spent arguing over who (which individuals) is doing what this week?

Isn’t that kind of piecemeal resourcing micro-management?

Or is it just making work for “managers” to do?

Is there no better use of management time than arguing about who is doing what? How can the individuals concerned “step up to the plate” and take responsibility if they are pulled this way and that? How can they really “buy in” to work when they don’t know what they doing next week?

Still, there is another answer to the problem: “How do you manage staffing when people need to work on multiple work streams at once?”

Usually this is because some individuals have specialist skills or because a team cannot justify having a full time, 100%, dedicated specialist.

Before I give you the answer lets remind ourselves why the traditional solution can make things worse:

  • When a resource (people or anything else) is scarce queues are used to allocate the scarce resources and queues create delays
  • Queues create delays in getting the work done – and are bad for morale
  • Queues are an alternative cost: in this case the price comes from the cost-of-delay
  • Queues disrupt schedules and predictability
  • In the delay people try to do something useful but the useful thing is lower value, and may cause more work for others, it can even create conflict when the specialist becomes available

The solution, and it is a generic solution that can be applied whenever some scarce resource (people, beds, runways):

Have more of the scarce resource than is necessary.

So that sounds obvious I guess?

What you want is for there be enough of the scarce resource so that the queues do not form. As an opening gambit have 25% resource more than you expect to need, do not plan to use the scarce resource more than 75% of the available time.

Suppose for example you have several teams, each of who needs a UX designer 1-day a week. At first sight one designer could service five teams but if you did that there would still be queues.

Why?

Because of variability.

Some weeks Team-1 would need a day-and-a-half of the designer, sure some week they would need the designer less than a day but any variability would cause a ripple – or “bullwhip effect”. The disruption caused by variation would ripple out over time.

You need to balance several factors here:

  • Utilisation
  • Variability
  • Wait time
  • Predictability

Even if demand and capacity are perfectly matched then variability will increase wait time which will in turn reduce predictability. If variability and utilisation are high then there will be queues and predicability will be low.

  • If you want 100% utilisation then you have to accept queues (delay) and a loss of predicability: ever landed at Heathrow airport? The airport runs at over 96% utilisation, there isn’t capacity to absorb variability so queues form in the air.
  • If you want to minimise wait time with highly variable work you need low utilisation: why do fire departments have all those fire engines and fire fighters sitting around doing nothing most days?

Running a business, especially a service business, at 100% utilisation is crazy – unless your customers are happy with delays and no predicability.

One of the reasons budget airlines always use the same type of plane and one class of seating is to limit variation. Only as they have gained experience have they added extras.

Anyone who tries to run software development at 100% is going to suffer late delivery and will fail to meet end dates.

How do I know this?

Because I know a little about queuing theory. Queuing theory is a theory in the same way that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is theory, i.e. it is not a theory, its proven. In both cases mathematics. If you want to know more I recommend Factory Physics.

So, what utilisation can you have?

Well, that is a complicated question. There are a number of parameters to consider and the maths is very complicated. So complicated in fact that mathematicians usually turn to simulation. You don’t need to run a simulation because you can observe the real world, you can experiment for yourself. (Kanban methods allow you to see the queues forming.)

That said: 76% (max).

Or rather: in the simplest queuing theory models queues start to form (and predictability suffers) once utilisation is above 76%.

Given that your environment is probably a lot more complicated then the simplest models you probably need to keep utilisation well below 76% if you want short lead times and predictability.

As a very broad rule of thumb: if you are sharing someone don’t commit more then three-quarters of their time.

And given that, a dedicated specialist doesn’t look so expensive after all. Back to where I came in.

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