Story of Agile and the Band-Aid

I have stepped into my 12th year of  practicing Agile methods. Started with XP before embracing Scrum, Lean, Kanban.  I nearly thought we found some solution, but looks like we still have some more things to do.  Even now, organizations are looking at Agile as a silver bullet without fixing the root causes.

 

Here is the issue, the  issue is Agile was born mostly to banish the problems coming out of the Waterfall model. If you don’t believe me, have a look at the manifesto (screen shot on the left),  everything on the right side is all about the waterfall way of working.  Whether it is the overreliance on Tools, Processes or documentation.   Everything on the left hand side is supposed to be the Agile way of working.  There is nothing wrong with it,  but it is applying the band aid on the issues coming from the right hand side.  It looks like there was too much focus on solving the problems coming out of waterfall rather than the focusing on software delivery. I see that Agile ended up becoming just a band aid.

 

Why Agile is just a band  Aid ?

Couple of years ago, when every one was overwhelmed with the project failures applying the waterfall model, people wanted to get rid of this problem. Instead of fixing the problem, people started applying the band aids against the bruises, and the problem stayed back.   In the above analogy, the waterfall was more like a bruise, and it was not the real problem. 

As we know, the band aid would reduce the bleeding and provide some short term relief.  However band aid won’t stop the accidents from happening again. 

What is the real problem ?

I see that the issues that was bothering the business and development community couple of years ago was much bigger than just the waterfall.  The issues were org structure, leadership styles, complexity of the problems, etc. Waterfall was just a tip of the iceberg.  Even now, half of the Agile projects are going through a lot of struggles, and it has been proven repeatedly that  Organizational culture and communication issues are the key reasons for failed Agile projects. (See other issues in the screen shot below)

Once again, we need to remember that Agile is not going to fix the company philosophy, Agile is not going to improve the communications.  Agile, Lean and Kanban are all the band aids. The cultural issues and organizational philosophy issues, communication issues are like the accidents that keep happening and causing scratches again and again.
Unless we fix those issues, no matter what methodology we follow, the projects end up with failures and teams continue to stress out.  

You can keep applying the band aid but how long ?

It is important for delivery experts to focus more on fixing the accidents rather than keep applying the band aids.

Agile and Happiness

All of us are doing what we are doing to achieve one thing, that is the happiness.  I read this inspiring article a while ago “Searching for happiness: What makes life meaningful” ?

We dream of  living in a villa with swimming pool and  Jacuzzi. We want to live next to a river surrounded by picturesque mountains. Why do we need these things ?  Its because, imagining having these amenities gives us a sense of happiness.  We think that one day by acquiring them we would be in a “permanent” state called “happiness”.    Is this really possible ?

Personally, I feel that happiness is a journey and a state of mind. There is no permanent state called “happiness”, and a person gets happiness by conquering challenges. No challenge and no happiness.  So, happiness is an ongoing exercise of chasing challenges, conquering and experiencing it. I get happiness when I spend time with loved ones or some one writes some good words about an article. I get happiness when I clear the challenging  “driving test” or complete a presentation in front of “challenging” audience. 

Now, let us look at how Agile and Happiness are related…  

I see a lot of organizations craving for Agility, and it reminds me of human beings craving for happiness.  The organizations invest a lot of  money to become “Agile". This is akin to the the waterfall era where organizations used to crave for CMM certifications. During the waterfall era, the companies thought having CMM 5 certification would enable them to reach kind of “Nirvana” or a “final state” of excellence.  Anyways, now it is history that it was proven wrong.

With the popularity of Agile, the companies are now craving for the Nirvana called “Agile”.  When 4 Agilists from 4 different companies get together, they would always discuss if their company is “Agile” or not.  They talk about Flickr doing 10 deployments a day, compare it to their own and beat themselves up .  There is a perception that if a company is able to do “10” deployments per day or do a Continuous  Integration then they are an “Agile” company.  This is very similar to human beings assuming that they would be in a state of “permanent” happiness when they acquire house and Jacuzzi, living next to the river. Is this really true that there is a final state called “Agile” ?    

I personally think that,  being “agile” is truly what makes a company as “Agile”.  Just like how happiness is a journey and there is no “permanent” state called happiness, being “agile” is a journey and there is no final/permanent state called “Agile”.

As long as the company is going through a journey of continuous improvement and moving in the right direction, they are “Agile”.

Customer experience is as important as Quality

Toyota has become a synonym for quality, profitability and discipline.  You ask anyone for advice about purchasing car, they say go with Toyota. Because of its good reputation, it seems to have a good resale value, as well. However, today I heard an interesting story from a friend about a very bad experience dealing with Toyota salesman. He vowed he won’t go back to Toyota again.

Here is the story, one of my friends interested in buying the Toyota car called one of the Toyota dealers. The sales-person promised him a host of things, and after a great deal of negotiations for 3 hours the salesperson turns around and says, sorry he cannot give anything he promised. The reason he quotes it seems that he wants to help, but his manager does not want. The promises salesperson has made would cause a loss to the dealership  !!!  Very interesting reply isn’t it ?

My friend obviously thinks the Toyota sales guy wasted 3 hours of his time, and salesperson could have checked with his manager before promising anything.

Probably, this is a rare instance with a Toyota salesperson, but it has created a bad experience about the Toyota product. 

While I patiently listened to his story, one thing I realized was “A company could build a fascinating product applying a lean process or Agile method with a precision quality. However, In the end, if the end customer is not treated properly with respect and ethically, no matter how great the product is it won’t succeed.”

I visited Toyota website to see their promise to customers. You won’t believe this, their promise has everything except a customer satisfaction (see the screen shot below). 

 

I can build a innovative, quality and a safety product but if I treat my customers unethically or leave them dissatisfied will they come back ?

I can now see why Steve Jobs insisted on owning and running the Apple retail stores instead of giving a free hand to anybody and every body.  Probably, he knew that  building a customer loving product is not sufficient but leaving the end customer with a fascinating experience is important, as well.

For smaller items like Phones or clothes, the dealers and salesperson could impact consumer experience. However, if we are ordering a large goods like a TV or Refrigerator the shipping company or the courier service could influence the consumer behavior, as well.

If the courier boys do any damage during shipping and installing the items, “or”  they behave impolitely with the end customers, the impact will be more on the “actual brand” of the product rather than the shipping company.   

I have noticed that, while we share our experiences with our friends and families we always remember the product rather than the shipping company name. For example, we always say, while I ordered “XYZ” model TV, I had a terrible experience !!

After the above mentioned experience with the Toyota salesperson my friend is now saying, I had a terrible experience with Toyota !!

Do you have any such experiences where the salesperson left you with a bad feeling, and what was your response in terms of purchasing decision ?

Social Contract is not a place to resolve conflicts

I am sure all of us have participated in creation of team social contracts at one time or the other.  After reviewing so many Agile projects since the last several years, I have seen a unique correlation between what goes in the social contracts with the team dynamics.

Social contracts as we know are created by the team and they manage it.  The items that enter the social contracts should help the team to create a positive and happy environment to work.  Social contacts shouldn’t be used to resolve the conflicts in the team. 

If the social contracts have items like “Don’t yell at your colleagues”  or  “Don’t throw rubbish on the floor”,   I feel that there is some sense of urgency to see what’s happening in the team !!

Let us take the simple example of  “Don’t throw rubbish on the floor”.  Most of us will try to keep the working area clean. Even by any chance, we spill something immediately we  make it point to clean it.   Most of these issues related to cleaning and Hygiene  are resolved or “should” be resolved through one on one discussions.   If the team is unable to resolve it collaboratively and are relying on social contract to fix them, then there is a bigger issue to worry about.

Let me conclude this by asking: How does your social contract look ?  Why did each of those items land in there ?  What was going on in your team’s mind ?

Design Testing : Improve software testing quality through this innovative way

Design Testing,  is one of the concepts that I have come up with to improve the quality of software testing.  Since the inspiration behind this thought was Design Thinking, I have kept the name Design Testing.

Design Testing,  was created due to the frustration in the way testing is currently handled in the software industry. Test cases and discussions with product owners are the source of testing for testers.  However, most of the test cases are created based on hypothetical test scenarios and documents.  I believe that testing quality can be improved if the testers get to see the real world customers and their use of product. 

If you want to learn more about this technique, read the rest of the article here            Photo courtesy: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/worldbank/

Design Thinking + Scrum + Lean Start up = Make customer happy

Do you want to build repeatedly build products that customers love ?   Do you want to know some of the Scrum’s weakness and find ways to strengthen it before it is too late ?

Recently I have proposed new ideas around building innovative products that customers love by suitably using the right mix of tools from Scrum, Design Thinking and Lean Startup concept.

If you are interested in learning this secret recipe, check out the recently published Cutter article here

Photocredit:https://secure.flickr.com/photos/waynewhuang/with/6753802533/

Is Agile good enough for innovation?

Recently I shared my views about  Agile and its role in Innovation.  There is a myth that just by embracing Agile or Lean, one could build innovative products.  Based on my personal experience working in several research projects and being part of innovation team, I have found that we need much more than Agile.  We need  a good support from Leadership, Conscious effort to have diverse thinking team and right tools.

I covered this topic today with lovely Melbournians at The Apartment.   The slides are available here.  

Some of the screen shots of the slides below:

2 monkeys paid unequally – Impact of unequal pay

See the reaction of the monkeys when they are paid unequally ?  

Watch this video by clicking    this link

From a TED talk by Frans de Waal, a primatologist, ethologist, and professor of primate behavior at Emory University.

#PM Flash Blog – What does project management mean to me ?

As part of #PMFlashblog, I am excited to share a pragmatic view of state of Project Management in the IT industry. This article is about “What does project management mean to me ?”

The tasks related to Project Management (PM) haven’t changed much since the last two decades. I have been in the industry since the last 17 years and seen both Agile and Waterfall era. I see that at a broader level most of the PMs effort is spent towards staffing projects, invoicing and reporting. However, a key observation has been that PMs are no more the center of attraction in Agile projects!

I am sure you would have heard about the Iron Triangle. Most of the projects I have across have some constraints of Scope, Resource or Schedule. Most of the time the Scope keeps increasing but the cost, budget and Schedule remain the same. During these situations, we agilists keep saying this is the wrong way of doing things and we need freedom, flexibility and sustainability. Guess what, this is when stakeholders and business people introduce Project Managers to “get things done”

For me, the Project Management is all about delivering what the customer wants in challenging environments. I have consciously tried avoiding the typical Agile terms like “Business value” or the “Customer value”. The reason being many a times the stakeholders or the business people themselves have tremendous constraints and demands from the investors that they ignore the real “value”. During these constraining situations, they want someone to “Get things done” rather than talk about “Values and Principles”.

Project management is all about “Getting things done” in complex and constrained environment, and whoever has the ability ends up becoming a project or a program manager. Since the PM work involves handling difficult stakeholders leading to a lot of stress,and this role is not for faint hearted. As the PMs need to be strong willed, and their focus is on “Get things done”, they end up becoming the bad cops all the time.

During the waterfall era, Project Managers were the final authority in deciding the fate of the project. Whether estimating projects, staffing or handling budgets. They always used to steal the thunder. With the popularity of Scrum, the center of gravity around projects has moved out of PMs. In Scrum projects, theoretically the PM tasks are split between the team and the Scrum Master, but the ground reality is, most of it is still managed by the Scrum Masters.

During early days of Agile, there were debates challenging the role of a PM in Agile projects, however, now it has become a reality that PMs are needed to handle the “admin” tasks. The prime reason being, they know how to “get things done” in any situation. Large companies implementing complex Agile projects still have dedicated project managers, but they don’t interfere much with day to day running of projects.

Here are the common things I have observed with all the project managers. I am sure if you visit this list and compare with your PMs, you might find most of them.

1. Experienced: They typically have a lot more industry experience as compared to rest of the team members

2. Delegators: They are very good at delegating the tasks to the team

3. C2 Style leadership: Command and control leadership style. It is very rare to see a PM who is like a servant leader.

4. They like meetings. At the drop of a hat, they schedule meetings and they have this uncanny ability to keep eyes open during post lunch meetings.

5. They are good at reporting. They can create very good power point templates, and spreadsheet reports. You just hand over them the data, and they know how to massage it before sharing it with their leaders.

6. Process neutral: Even though all the PMs still have a lot of affinity towards Waterfall brethren, they can adjust to any new process without losing waterfall thinking.

7. Crystal ball: All of them have some sort of crystal balls using which they get to hear all the gossips and rumors before you do.

Irrespective of whether PMs are the center of attraction or not, they know how to “get things done”.

#PMFlashBlog coming soon….

For the first time,  more than 70 bloggers across the globe are coming together to share their experiences around Project management.  The title of the blog is going to be “What does project management mean to me”

All the bloggers will publish their blogs on 25th Sept at 0100 Hrs GMT.  I am proud to be one of the bloggers as well.

As one could see from the following infographics, courtesy HennyPortman,  we have bloggers from Australia, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, France, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, UK and the USA 

 

Change the mindset of these 4 Practices

  Over a period of time,  Agile practices is taking its own shape unfortunately not for the better but for the worse.  Practices are given embraced forgetting the principles behind them. Especially over the key practices like  Retros, Daily stand up, Iteration planning meeting and estimation.  
What are those myths, misconceptions and what mistakes people are doing ?   These are covered in detail in the recently published  Techwell article.  The transcript of the article is shared below….
There are two popular mindsets team members have about retrospectives that I want to address: retrospectives are done only at the end of a sprint or a project and they are done to identify “what didn’t go so well.”
In reality, I have found that retrospectives support an “inspect-and-adapt” approach and are needed for continuous improvement. Agile teams are able to get together at any time and reflect on what’s going on in the project and how to work better. Having a “do-only-at-the-end” mindset dilutes the real intention behind retrospectives.
Read rest of this article here

Some of the recent stories on Techwell
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• Lessons to Learn from AOL's Recent Firing Debacle
• Why Radical Innovation Is Dependent on People—Not Process
• How Waste Impacts Software Delivery

Feel free to check out rest of my TECHWELL articles here

It works on my system !

I am sure many of us are familiar with this message “It works on my system”.   I recently got the same answer not from a developer but from the customer service team of the popular loyalty card.   As a card member, I couldn’t login to my account and reached out the customer care team through their Twitter help service.

There you go, I got the most popular answer  “we've been unable to replicate your problem here“.  

How do you deal with that response as a customer ?   What does that response reflect on their IT competitiveness ?   You report a defect to one of your developers and you hear this response back, how do you feel ?

A quiz on Self Organizing team

You come across a team which has the following characteristics

1. All the resources necessary (budget, time, people, tools, etc) to do their job. They can estimate and set the deadlines for their own delivery
2. No conflict at all in the team
3. Team feels very happy and relaxed all the time
4. They have no delivery commitments as they set their own delivery dates
5. Each team member assigns their own task

I know this is like a dream team. Do you think they are a self organizing team ?  If not, why not ?    Is there a test to check if a team is self organizing or not ? 

Photo courtesy:Mike Baird 

Net Promoter Scores - Do they work ?

    

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is as popular as engagement surveys.   There are several people who vouch for the benefits of  NPS. This is such a simple system that when I heard about NPS for the first time, I felt, this cannot be so simple !  There might be something I am missing.  The reality was, it is a simple system.   

The Ultimate Question 2.0 covers a great deal about the subject with tons of benefit. 

Interestingly we have few naysayers doubting the benefits of NPS as well.  Check this presentation out, where the authors seem to have data to prove the benefits of NPS wrong.

Another research paper here  has finding which says  “Contrary to Reichheld’s assertions, the results indicate that recommend intention alone will not suffice as a single predictor of customers’ future loyalty behavior. Use of a multiple indicator instead of a single predictor model performs better in predicting customer recommendations and retention.”

I hear that most successful companies like Apple, LEGO, Facebook, eBay, etc are using NPS.  I am sure there would be arguments – counter arguments on both sides for NPS. 

I am more inclined to believe the naysayers. We live in a complex world, and there could be multiple things impacting the loyalty, customer behavior, satisfaction etc.  It is not correct  to see a liner “Cause and effect” between the NPS score and the revenue generation(other benefits). This is like the Peltzman effect where “wearing a seatbelt induces people to drive less safely”  causing accidents, which goes totally against the linear “cause and effect” thinking.

Why do good people become bad bosses ?

I am sure all of us have come across  bad bosses at some point of time or the other.  But in reality, they are not really bad people at heart. The pressure and the stress pushes them to snap at people and ending up with “bad boss” title.   Here is a must watch video by the famous author  Annie McKee about this subject.

    A few take aways from this video
    1.  Bad bosses are good people under pressure

    2. People really like to change, unlike the popular assumption that people resist change

    3. People will change provided they are properly supported

    4. Don’t allow bad bosses to hurt your self esteem, dignity and confidence. Put your foot down to protect yourself

    5. Mindfulness is the key to success

Scattered meeting day syndrome

I have observed that the most un-productive day would be to have scattered meetings all throughout the day.  

For example:

• 9- 9.30 AM   First meeting
  10 – 12  Second meeting
  <Lunch break>
  2 – 2.30 another meeting
  3 – 4  last meeting of the day

After the first meeting, one would rush to get a cafe to prepare for the second one. By the time you grasp the second one, bell rings for lunch break. The day continues with meetings with a break of every half an hour, and end up with a pile of “real work” by 4 PM, causing too much stress. This leads to too many meeting syndrome. 

This is exactly what the Agilists dislike.In fact I have heard people calling Scrum has too many meetings !!   As per various researches, the task switching could cost nearly 40% productivity loss.

Solution

Personally I found that blocking a chunk of a day provides me the well deserved and dedicated focus.  Not sure if others have seen this happening ?   Have you experienced this ?  How do you deal with this scattered meeting syndrome  ?

Image courtesy : http://blog.officeformac.com/a-new-outlook-on-calendaring/

Can a process fix the broken trust ?

The last weekend, I approached concierge of our apartment complex to get permission to use the functional hall. The concierge pulled out a print out and asked me to sign it.  I have used the functional hall many times before and haven’t seen this new process of signing a form. 

The new form had things like  “The furniture if broken has to be replaced by the tenant”, “ Ensure to throw the trash in the bin”, “No smoking allowed in the functional hall”  and stuff like that. These rules makes sense but was curious why now ?   

I asked the concierge about the rationale of this process, and it seems the previous week some users of the functional hall created a bit of raucous. To avoid those issues in the future, they have brought this new process into place.

I had an aha moment when I heard this.  Is this not the same way our organizations and countries work by creating new rules and processes reacting to a problem ?    In the case of our apartment, Initially the body corporate  trusted the tenants and gave the freedom to use the functional hall but some where in between the trust was broken.  I am wondering now,  does this new process build the broken trust in any way ?   Does this process stop any such problems from happening again ?   Is this the right way to handle such issues or is there a better way ?

Is Your organization ready to embrace Design Thinking ?

With the popularity of "design thinking," companies are encouraging their designers to be in the field interacting with end users. Like any other new methodology or process adoption, design thinking requires a fair bit of change in the mindset of designers along with some new skills.

One cannot change the process without changing the mindset of people nor giving them the appropriate tools to succeed.

One needs to analyze the skills and training needed to succeed with the new process.

Do you want to learn what these skills are and the necessary tools, read rest of the article  here 

    

Photo Courtesy: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/jakecaptive/

Lean and Agile Project Management using Scrum – Upcoming Course in Melbourne

 

There is an upcoming Lean and Agile Project Management Using Scrum Course in Melbourne CBD  on 30th Aug.  I highly recommend this course both for novice and advanced practitioners.

Get further details here.

Quick overview of the course below:

Scrum and Agile have been around for years, but organisations are still struggling to realise the potential benefits of using them. Much of this stems from the myriad of tools, frameworks, practices, methodologies and processes in the market that all claim to make your teams more efficient which, in turn, will lead to an Agile organisation.

The truth is that none of these things will achieve that. The only thing that will create a more effective, adaptive, proactive, productive, happy organisation is a genuine desire from the people of influence in that organisation to want better. A desire to remove tired old processes and procedures that do not exist because they are effective but because they have always existed. To optimise the whole, not the individual parts. To care.

Managers and executives need to jump on the continuous improvement train and start to create a more effective world of work for their employees.

Psychological impact of public criticism – AOL Story

 

A lot of people have heard of AOL, but until last week they may not have known much about Tim Armstrong, the company’s CEO. Recently during an internal team meeting of nearly 1,000 employees, Armstrong fired one his employees, Abel Lenz. This incident sent ripples all over the business world.

Some people believe that Abel was fired for taking pictures; others believe it is his association with the failing Patch project. Irrespective of the cause, this incident raises several questions: Is firing an employee in public the right thing to do? What are the repercussions of doing so in regards to the rest of the employees? What is the CEO’s role in the failure of a product?

This kind of firing,  impacts not only the psychological safety net of employees but impacts the employees morale, company’s bottom-line as well.

Read the complete the article on Techwell here…  I have shared many psychological research to show the impacts. In this article I have also covered different leadership styles impacting the employees.

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