No unified theory of agile (Agile mindset cont.)

1 Comment / Agile / By / March 30, 2022 /

Continuing my quest of “The Agile Mindset” I’ve been searching for a metaphor to put all the different ideas on agile into order. To cut to the chase: there isn’t one.

As much as I would love to boil “agile” down to one thing, or even a handful of key concepts and I don’t think there will ever be a single unified theory of agile. As I said before with the elephant example, everyone sees something different. Depending on where you are standing, the problems you face today, your own history and area of knowledge, and your own world view you are going to see and emphasise different aspects of “The Agile Mindset.” And you know what? that is a good thing!

First I tried thinking of Agile as the layers of an onion. The outside skin is the word “agile” – there is a valid reason for saying the agile mindset is there in the dictionary definition of the word agile: able to move, think and understand quickly, be nimble and subtle in movements, alert and observant when looking at whats happening and sharp when thinking. But that is only the outside layer, it is very general.

The agile manifesto would be the second layer. While the manifesto is specific to software it doesn’t require too much thought to generalise it to other domains. Actually, it is a bit too easy and there are more attempts to generalise it than there are people who have attempted to generalise it. Plus, as I’ve written before, the manifesto is over 20 years old, those who cling to it sound like Supreme Court Justices trying to read meaning into a document written in a different age.

And what are the next layers, and in what order? Does last responsible moment come above or below cost of delay? Is test driven more important than time-boxing? Are work-in-progress limits a version of time-boxing or an alternative to time-boxing?

And what is at the centre? For me it is learning but I can imagine people who will say it is People – perhaps manifested through Weinberg’s “Its always a people problem” quote – I’ve written about that one too, the People Problem Problem. Personally I think McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y could be a candidate, which raises the question of agile’s fellow travellers – beyond budgeting, system thinking, Lean, and Mintzberg’s theory of emergent strategy.

I wondered if agile could be thought of as a brick wall, with each idea forming a brick, and then the whole being more than the sum of the parts. But that falls down (sorry for the pun!) on the layering problem. Which ideas are foundations and which decorative?

Similarly, I toyed with The House of Agile with different ideas represented by different rooms but that metaphor quickly runs into problems too.

In a way this makes the search fo One Agile Mindset even more desirable – the search for a grand unified theory of everything if you like. There must be something out there that combines all of this!

Ye the search for the unifying theory also highlights how damn difficult this is. Intellectually it is hard to accept that “the agile mindset” is a bunch of different ideas which different people interpret differently.

But you know what? Accepting that agile is diverse is itself agile – agile is not one idea, it is many, accepting that and valuing those different ideas mean embracing diversity and that itself is agile. Agile is what you want it to be because through those diverse we find alternative ways of viewing and learning. Agile doesn’t stand still, agile is punk, at its best agile is democracy.

Unfortunately that makes it hard to explain.

Subscribe to my blog newsletter and download Continuous Digital for free

User Stories by Example tutorials now Free

Leave a Comment / Agile / By / March 15, 2022 / , ,

My User Stories by Example tutorial series is now free.

There are five tutorials which include video lectures, worked examples with on real user stories and exercises covering user stories basics, acceptance criteria, story splitting, story refactoring and more.

The series is based on my Little Book of Requirements and User Stories – the audio files for the book are there too but you will have to pay for them. If you are an Audible subscriber you can get the book there as part of you subscription. Print book, eBook and audio book are all available at Amazon.

Subscribe and download Continuous Digital for free

The Agile Elephant and the agile mindset

Leave a Comment / Agile / By / March 10, 2022 / ,
African Elephant

Confession: I’ve been avoiding the words “agile mindset” for some time because I don’t know what it is. And, completely by coincidence, I’ve recently had a couple of encounters that have caused me to think again. So let me explain…

I repeatedly find myself wrestling with the question “What is agile?” The question came up recently in a new form when I was invited to give a talk on “The Agile Mindset.” I appealed for help on LinkedIn. I got some great answers and the diversity of answers confirmed what I though: it is hard to describe “the agile mindset” in a short or generally agreed form.

The first problem is that to explain “the Agile mindset” one first has to agree what agile is, and is not. I have my own view but I know there is a diversity of opinion so I find it useful to describe “Agile” with the story of the blind men examining an elephant: one feels the leg and says “This is a mighty tree”, another feels the tusk and says “It is a strong sword”, another the trunk and says “It is a strong snake” and so on. Each interprets the part they encounter as the whole yet the whole, to one who has never seen an elephant, can be hard to comprehend.

Illustration from the Natural History Museum, London

The same is true for agile.

The literalist looks in the dictionary and says “Agile is about being fast, reactive and responding to the outside”, the engineer looks at agile and says “It is about doing quality work so we may deliver more”, the Scum aficionado says “It is about high performing teams and alignment”, the Lean thinker says “It is about reducing work in progress and simplifying workflows” and the management consultant says “It is about delivering more with less.”

All are right, none is wrong. And while that is a problem in describing what agile is it is also a strength. Agile is multi-faceted and offers “something for everyone.” While different people emphasis different things it also means the whole is more than the sum of the parts. If you can harness high performing teams, with engineering quality, low WIP and reactive processes then you can deliver the fabled faster, better, cheaper.

But that also makes it hard.

It also goes some way to explaining why “Agile Coaches” never agree: each has their own interpretation of how to put those pieces together to make the whole – to change metaphor, everyone approaches the jigsaw differently.

And again that is right because every jigsaw, every application of agile, exists in a unique context and must be faced on its own terms – to quote Tolstoy: “All happy families are the same, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own unique way.” (And long time readers might notice I just contradicted myself.)

And one important reason why the jigsaw is always different is: in completing the last jigsaw, and since completing it, you, and everyone else as learned, the bodies may be the same but the people – and their minds – are different.

Ultimately, I still claim “Agile” is learning, specifically organizational learning: the thesis I laid out in my first book over 10 years ago Changing Software Development.

Hence I say: The only thing you can do wrong in agile is work the same as you did three months ago. To be agile one should always be learning and changing as a result of that learning.

I should explain that some more in another post, and I’ll have more to say about the agile mindset soon.

Subscribe to my blog newsletter and download Continuous Digital for free

The difficulties of cascading OKRs

Leave a Comment / Agile / By / February 8, 2022 / ,

I almost despair when I hear people advocate cascading OKRs: the idea that someone, some team, some central planning department, can set OKRs which then flow down the organization with each “lower” group implementing some small part of some “higher” ask. What could be more waterfall like?

I admit, when I started working with OKRs I kind-of-expected to be shown the OKRs of the “above” before my team wrote theirs. But when I thought about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I realised if you did do it that way then it is decided unAgile. How can a team be really autonomous, self-organising and self-managing if they have goals handed down to them?

There was a point when I was wracked with self-doubt: am I interpretting OKRs differently to the rest of the world? How do I reconcile agile and cascading OKRs? What am I missing? – but, when you look around, I am not the only one. In fact, if you read, watch and listen to OKR commentators the majority agree with me: the teams delivering OKRs need the latitude to set their own OKRs.

Reconciling OKRs with agile is far from the biggest problem. In fact there are, at least, two bigger problems, one concerns team motivation. Can a team ever be motivated to do something they have no say in? Perhaps some can, I can’t and I know others who don’t. At the very least team members need to be asked.

Motivation becomes especially problematic if you want OKRs to be stretching. If you set someone a stretching goal and ask them to hit it without involving them then don’t be surprised if they shrug their shoulders.

Still, we haven’t got to the biggest problem.

The biggest problem with OKRs is not the metaphysical issues of motivation and whether one is truly agile or not. The biggest difficulty is simply: cascading OKRs are not practical.

First think about the timetable.

If every team is waiting for the team above them to issue OKRs before they set their own then you have a delay built into the system. And the more levels of hierarchy you have the greater the delay is going to be.

For example, suppose you have an executive team, and middle management team and several delivery teams. Then each cycle the exec team need to set some OKRs, once they have set their the middle management can set theirs, and then the delivery teams can set theirs. At each cascade point there needs to be communication, and each point creates the possibility of misunderstanding and mistakes.

Setting OKRs isn’t instantaneous, I think you need about a week to have a think, reflect overnight, iterate once or twice but, if you are well practices, and don’t hit any delays, you might do it in two days. Either way it is going to take at least a week, and possibly three, to get all three layers set. And if anyone runs late then it has a knock on effect.

I’ve heard it said that the Key Results of higher levels become the objectives of the next layer down. The key results of this layer the become the objectives of the one below them. But that assume that the OKRs themselves are a series of “items to do” and that each objective is made up of several pieces which are themselves things to do.

Sure, it sometimes happens that way. I may even have been guilty of interpreting them that way sometimes. But these days I see Key Results not as small pieces of work which, lego style, build into a bigger objective but as Acceptance Criteria: the parameters which the outcome needs to satisfy.

Now to some degree acceptance criteria can be translated into work items to do, and vice versa, but not always. Consider this:

Objective: Improve overnight batch processing to save 10% of work processing costs
Key result #1: Shorten batch processing time by 1 hour so staff do not need to wait for run to complete in the morning
Key result #2: Reduce false positive alerts by 100 per day so that staff waste less time

Now these key results could be packaged as individual work to do but perhaps they are the same piece or work. Perhaps a database upgrade could address both issues in one go. Which path you take is a design decision.

Seeing key results as acceptance criteria changes them from work to do into bounding conditions.

In Succeeding with OKRs in Agile I advise against having domino key results: don’t set key results so that failing to hit one makes others impossible to hit. So, for example, if the DB upgrade had been added to that previous example as key result #1 then the team would have been committed to doing it. And if the upgrade had failed then the other key results would have been lost. Leaving it out gives the team the decision on how to proceed: the people doing the work decide the best way of meeting the objective.

That advice is given within teams but it also applies between teams. If, the Middle Management team require three lesser teams to deliver work to build their own objective then, if any one team fail the middle management team will not only miss one key result but will therefore miss their objective.

Done like this the OKRs become fragile and a dependency nightmare. That will have two effects, first more time will be needed when setting OKRs to identify and mitigate the dependencies, then more time will be needed to manage the dependencies. Progress will only occur at the speed of the slowest.

Second, these problems will encourage people to play it safe and not set stretching and ambitious OKRs. Predictability and safety will be prioritised.

Now if we take the alternative approach and each team sets its OKRs independently then the time lag is removed, teams set OKRs in parallel and if someone is late it doesn’t matter. Dependencies may still exist but they have not been baked into the OKRs so teams can put effort into removing dependencies (reducing coupling and increasing cohesion) rather than putting that energy into managing the dependencies.

So, while we might argue about whether OKRs should, or should not, cascade down; and while we might argue about the psychological effects of being given an OKR by another, simply remember: cascading OKRs mean setting OKRs is going to be more complicated and take longer.

Photo by Alexander Hipp on Unsplash

Subscribe to my blog newsletter and download Continuous Digital for free

Class war in the modern workplace

2 Comments / Agile / By / February 1, 2022 /

Writing about “The knowledge worker” in The Age of Discontinuity (1968) Peter Drucker offers this insight: the knowledge worker sees themselves as a skilled professional, or “white collar” to use an old term. To this end programmers, marketeers and conference producers see themselves as akin to doctors and lawyers.

But, Drucker says, these professionals are still employees and are seen by their employers as “workers” more akin to the “blue collar” factory employees of years gone by. I’ve long found it ironic that many contractors like to see themselves as entrepreneurs and small businesses while their clients may well see them more as casual day-labourers who can be hired and disposed of with little thought.

Quote from Peter Drucker book
Age of Discontinuity “The

Look at it like this: once upon a time the majority of employees would be working on the factory floor, their hands would get dirty. The work of the manger was to optimise both the work they were doing and the way the work was done, employees were probably not encouraged to think too much.

Today is the age of mass knowledge work – at least in developed western countries. The majority of employees type at keyboards and spend all day talking to others about ideas. Their hands stay clean.

Look at the qualifications people hold: in the past blue-collar workers might have a skill, many were “unskilled” or “semi skilled. Workers “trade” might be learned via an apprenticeship which involved observing and doing the work. Today we live in the age of mass knowledge work, the bulk of the workforce are not factory workers or dock labourers but educated analysts, programmers, accountants and such.

Modern blue-collar workers are overwhelmingly degree educated and do expect to have a say in their work – both what is done and how it is done.

When I visit clients I sometimes see – or rather hear – this explicitly when managerial types talk about “the factory floor” or “engine room” when they mean the offices where IT staff work. You see it too when teams are treated as “feature factories” and measured on how many “user stories” or “story points” they complete and how fast the burn-down chart burns down.

There is a mismatch in the way workers view themselves and the way the managers view the workers. This mismatch in views becomes a misunderstanding and can escalate into conflict.

Workers advocate replacing management with “self managing teams” and managers look to replace programmers with with automatic programming, “programming through pictures” or lately “lo code” solutions. Rather than resolving the conflict it becomes an existential fight. Sometimes it can even look like a modern class struggle between workers and employers.

There are no silver bullets to this conflict. Both sides needs to respect one another and we need to find a new understanding of roles.

One of my favourite takes on this dilemma comes from Tim O’Reilly. In an essay entitled “Managing the Bots That Are Managing the Business” (2016) he suggests that the true workers of today are the machines: it is the factory robots that assemble cars, take our online orders and increasingly do all the “heavy lifting”. The managers of these machines are the people who instruct the machine what to do and how to do it. Most obviously programmers but also the many who work use digital technology to instruct a machine, e.g. a marketeer who schedules tweets, or customer service agent who scripts the chat-bot.

Either way you look at it the fact is that modern blue collar workers need more of the skills and knowledge traditionally reserved for managers: they need to understand the profit and loss, plus they need to understand business goals and strategy and appreciate the consequences of their actions. And it means the white-collar managers of the managers need to respect the knowledge workers as peers rather than hired help, they need to be explain business goals, strategy and be open about the business.

It sometimes feels as if the “class war” of the early twentieth century is still with us. Only now it is not blue collar workers fighting white collar but white collar workers fighting between themselves.

Subscribe to my blog newsletter and download Continuous Digital for free

Focus is not divisable so limit you OKRs

Leave a Comment / Agile / By / January 24, 2022 / ,

From time to time I hear about teams who have 8, 9, 10 or more OKRs in a quarter. That is just plain wrong. In Succeeding with OKRs in Agile I suggest 3 Objectives per quarters each with 3 key results. When I hear the cries of pain and people twist my arm I compromise on 4 objectives and about 4 key results.

Now those numbers are MAXIMUMs, I’d really like fewer, and I’ve heard of teams which have just 1 – yes ONE – objective per quarter. I’m itching to try that with a team.

Sometimes people respond and say: “Arhh, but we have a big team, I agree with 3 being the right number for a team of six but we have a team of 16 so surely we could have more objectives?”

But actually, when you have a bigger team you have a bigger problem and hence even more reason to limit the number of OKRs.

Part of the power of OKRs is that they create and maintain Focus. Having agreed and stated outcomes to work towards gives individuals something to focus, it gives team members – and particularly product owners – a reason to say No when more work appears. It keeps the team honest when looking at what needs doing and deciding how to spent their time.

New options to learn about OKRs and Agile

Focus is not divisible – devide your focus and you no longer have focus. When you have a bigger team you have more need for focus rather than less. One could even argue that that as the team grows the number of OKRs should reduce not increase.

Bigger teams, because there are more people, struggle more with focus than small teams. On a small team the lack of capacity forces trade-offs and brings people face-to-face with limited capacity. On a big team its easy to think one or two people can go and do something different, or even for individuals to hide.

By the way, this applies equally if you extend the OKR cycle: setting OKRs every six months rather than every three should be a reason to reduce the number of OKRs rather than increase them.

Once upon a time I worked with a team that had real focus problems: teams members found little overlap in their work. Consequently there were seven or eight OKRs each month. That was itself information, when you looked at the OKRs they were disjoint, the team was not focusing because it had three – or four – very different work streams and the people on the team had different skills.

The solution was to split the team into three mini-teams each with their own OKRs. One could argue that the full team got more OKRs but what happened was that each mini-team could now focus and work towards their goal with focus, with less distraction and greater purpose.

This keeps things simple – the Rule of Three! – and keep things focused.

Subscribe to my blog newsletter and download Continuous Digital for free

Photo by David Travis on Unsplash
Learn how to combine OKRs and Agile

OKRs workshop, tutorials and free stuff

Leave a Comment / Agile / By / January 24, 2022 / ,

Two opportunities to learn more about OKRs. Both based on Succeeding with OKRs in Agile.

Implementing OKRs in Agile

24 February: 1-day online workshop, hosted by iLean in Belgium and open to all.

Combining OKR and Agile

Online tutorial series – this is a mix free and paid for material.

You can buy the tutorials individually or as a bundle. Subscribing to the bundle is much cheaper and gives access to new tutorials as I add them. My plan is to add one new tutorial each month.

Use the code blogreader to get 20% the paid elements.

Practical tips or mindset change?

Leave a Comment / Agile / By / January 14, 2022 / , ,

How many books on your bookshelves have a number in the title? Specifically a list of X things. Such books sell, blog posts of a similar ilk get read.

“50 specific ways to improve your programs”

“97 things every dog walker should know”

“10 practical things every Scrum Master should know”

“51 tips to improve your requirements”

Small, specific nuggets of information, best presented as a list and advertised as such. No grand unifying thesis, just “75 things”. The closest I have ever come to this was “Little Book of Requirements and User Stories” which was my best seller and would have sold more if I had called it “16 tips to improve your User Stories.”

However, most of my books aren’t like that. Most of my books contain a big idea – at least one big idea. The whole book sets out to explain that. Business Patterns does say “38 Business strategy patterns” but really the books big idea was “Apply pattern thinking to business strategy”. In retrospect it would have sold better if I had called the book “38 Business strategy patterns” and put the pattern thinking stuff as an appendix.

Regular readers might notice that my blogs follow a similar pattern: mostly long thoughtful pieces which try to build an argument, few practical posts thrown in once in a while. Despite knowing I should write more short practical pieces (to boost readership) I keep failing.

Why?

Two reasons.

Sometimes those “short practical tips” seem so trivial, or so obvious, that I just assume everyone does it that way and everyone sees what I see. They are so small and so “obvious” I don’t see them.

But more because I see value in those long pieces. I see them as “philosophy” pieces, they are about how to see the world, how to comprehend what is going on, sense-making. Quite often I will wrestle with balancing forces, how one force pushed you one way while another pushes you another. The right course of action is about balancing those forces and what is “right” may be different at different times. (Thats a pattern thing.)

It might be better if I called those “Mindset” pieces. They are about preparing the mind to see the world in a particular way. Conditioning you for agile, perhaps.

To me those Mindset pieces are more important because they shape the way you respond. In the complex world in which we live few decisions and few courses of action can actually be boiled down to a simple “If this Then do That”. Instead, the thousands of small decisions you make each day are informed by your mindset (philosophy) of how the world works and what will happen if you make decision X instead of decision Y.

Especially for those working in management, it is your mental view of the world that shapes your decisions and relationships. I’m sure somewhere out there is a “50 practical tips for better management decisions” book but in truth there are so many variables, unknowns and ambiguities that you can’t boil the world down like that.

Thats why, while everyone is short of time and wants “10 practical tips” to fix a problem right now it is more important to spend time really challenging your own thinking. Change can only really become permanent when people change their actions and decisions without thinking each time, when people can make decision #563 today congruently to everything else not because they read it in book but because that is the way their mind works.

Our constant search for “quick answers” can mislead us, we might get a quick answer but we aren’t necessarily building our long term capability.

In Succeeding with OKRs in Agile, I tried hard to write a hands-on-practical tips book. I failed but in failing I did better than I would have done without trying. I very deliberately kept the opening chapters short and quickly moved into “practical tips” (mainly about writing OKRs). Almost all the mindset philosophy was pushed later in the book. So far sales suggest I got it right.

So, even as I strive this year to write more “10 practical tips” blog posts I expect I’ll have more philosophy as I put the world to rights!

Subscribe and download Continuous Digital for free

Team Retrospective cards are back, and better than before

Leave a Comment / Agile / By / January 11, 2022 / ,
Team Retrospective cards

Team Retrospective cards are back on sale

Agile Stationary have given retrospective cards a new home and are handling all the sales and logistics. That means everything should be slicker and export to anywhere in the world should be hassle free.

Agile Stationary gave the cards another print run and in the process enlarged the cards slightly. So while they can still fit in your pocket they are a bit easier to handle.

To mark the occasion Agile Stationary are offering a 20% discount to blog readers, use the code TEAMRETRO20.

Subscribe to my blog newsletter and download

Continuous Digital for free