Agile Principles 104

After trial and error, doing and studying, reflecting and more reflecting from my experiences of teaching the agile principles as described in Agile Principles 101, Agile Principles 102 and Agile Principles 103, a flash of insight came to me after running some facilitated workshops with clients.

One of the reasons I love to teach is because I get to meet so many inspiring people! Another reason is that I learn so much more, and so much quicker as well!  So teaching the agile principles to 1000's has also helped me learn them, and learn about them in so many ways I could never have appreciated the first time I read them!

Anyway, back to this story! I had been facilitating collaborative sessions with different people in different workshops for a few years. One of the great things that work well in collaboration sessions with any number of people, is breaking up the big group of people to work in sub-teams. Depending on the objective, carefully selecting sizes between pairs/triples/quads/pents/6's produce good results, or better results.

I came across the excellent Training From the Back of the Room and The Ten Minute Trainer by Sharon Bowman who puts these kinds of insights across extremely well!

        

In these books and in her training sessions, I learned the new teaching paradigm - "the person doing the most talking is doing the most learning". 

Talking causes us to formulate abstract experiences in our memory into concrete communication efforts - which means we need to more fully understand those vague things we think we know. It also allows us to get validation and/or corrective feedback from others we share with.

For this learning objective, sub-teams of 4 work best. 

The even number causes much more thought, talking and strong consensus by all sub-team members on any range of logical points discussed, as well as greater emotional impact than other sizes.  These sub-teams cause everyone in the entire session to fully engage in the topic because everyone has a voice and much more likely to be heard. It's true! (and it's common sense...) :-)

I mentioned this approach to one of the younger agile coaches I was working with at the time, and he tried it in his next training session. He came back with positive results. In the glow of the successful moment - he also mentioned this approach to a few other agile coaches...and now it is spreading organically. Nice! :-)

I explained this approach to another 1 of my long-term agile collaborators and he has been using it ever since. Chris C convinced me to blog this approach so that everyone gets the benefit. And now I have. Enjoy!

The method

• Timebox the whole module to 30 minutes
• Ask the trainees to self-organise into balanced groups of 4 - they need to discuss and figure out what balance means to them. Sometimes it is gender, age or role based, or combinations of all these and more. Balance is always good thing to discuss and dive deeply into.
• Ask them to self organise the writing of the 12 agile principles down on large super sticky post-its, in a 3 minute timebox. They need to coordinate and work fast together.
• Ask the teams to rank the agile principles from the most important (at the top) to least important (at the bottom) in single list, in a 5 minute timebox.
• Ask each team to number each post-it with eg a black pen so that we can know later what the ordering was.
• 1 person from each group then volunteers to give the entire group a 30 second pitch timebox about why they chose the order they did - highlighting the decision making as well as perhaps any contention in the team.

Agile Principles Explored By Team

Post Mortem 1: Much deeper understanding of what is important and why to the organisation and how that is reflected in the ordering of the agile principles that cover people, process, technology, customers, market, culture and pretty much every other "lever" an organisation has

• Optional, fold-in
• Get each group to pair with another group and then combine their orders into 1 consensus ordering of the 12
• Repeat until all groups' 12 principles are folded into 1 single consensus list and the big group is whole again. Any odd number group waits until the next round when there will be even number groups again.
• Update the post-its with their "global" ranking

Now, ask them to return to their original sub-teams in front of their own post-its. Take all the post-its off the wall to reset the next round of ranking.

• Ask the team to now rank the agile principles from the easiest (at the top) to the most difficult (at the bottom) to achieve in their environment, in a 5 minute timebox.
• Again number them, this time in a different colour pen eg green
• Again ask for a group's volunteer to tell all the others what their ordering is, and why, in a 30 second pitch timebox.

Teams Come Up With Different Agile Principles Priority Orders Based On Their Context and Interpretation

Post Mortem 2: Much deeper understanding of the art of the possible in the organisation as people disagree from their own experience and perspective what is easy and what is difficult. This can be a heated conversation when senior managers are involved but, in terms of creating that shared understanding of reality, invaluable to bring on and manage the friction!

• Optional, fold-in
• Precisely as before, "pair" the groups and get them to create a single consensus list of easy to difficult
• This one will probably require much more time as people generally have totally different perceptions, but this is also the beauty of transparency and shared understanding.

The Final Post Mortem

Deeper ownership, accountability and understanding throughout the aligned trainees - win! Also, the opportunity to use this output to create the initial backlog to become more agile - i.e. transformation begins with everyone on the same starting block/page. Ie, win, win, win!

Many people - myself included - had horrible experiences and/or horrible feedback from our time in school or post-school education. As a result, some became uncomfortable at voicing their opinion or knowledge in front of others. Groups - especially large ones - intimidate most. 

This approach helps everyone to connect with fewer people and share+receive a lot more as a direct result. Hence the learning that happens actually is deeper and hence more useful and usable for trainees. The optional fold-ins suggested, though they take a little longer, cause deep alignment amongst attendees. And you can use this approach for many other topics, and not just for training modules - workshops too!

Definitely this is a great approach, if not the best approach, to teaching and making the agile principles much more "sticky" in the learners' hearts and minds.

For my full collection of hard ground, hard sought, and deeply dug pearls on agile mindset f0undations - please read What Is Agile? Thankyou!

Agile In A Nutshell Part 3

Okay... I don't know if you noticed... but it is really really hard to really curate an agile in a nutshell post that is quick to read, grasp and move forward. This is partly why I avoided much agile postings over the past decade - it's a very very long piece of string (or rope to hang oneself with)!

:)

The previous 2 attempts at this (Agile In A Nutshell and Agile In A Nutshell Part 2) I like and I teach fluidly. But I also add the following nugget when I am teaching.

Where did these agile manifesto, the 12 agile principles, and especially those 10,000 odd agile practices (half of them technical/technology focused like pair programming; and half of them people/organisation/management/process focused like standup meetings) come from?

Well it's clear where the agile manifesto was written and by whom in 2001 - 17 world-recognised software engineering consultants, coaches, managers and all importantly - practitioners.

And it's clear as well where the agile principles were written and by whom in 2004 - the same experts that formulated the agile manifesto.

But what about those 10,000 agile practices?

The agile practices have been observed by team members, team managers, coaches, consultants, and other observant people ... of high performance teams. These observers have then documented them online, or in books, and have presented them at conferences as well as internally. 

This means that we're still discovering practices all over the shop/place that help organisations become quicker and nimbler.

In my opinion, the smartest organisations are recognising their own unique practices that are giving them competitive advantages, and keeping them secret. The even smarter organisations are making their unique practices transparent and world-wide accessible because they realise others may contribute small tweaks that give even better performance - ala open source.

They also recognise that thinking is really hard to replicate and their organisation as a whole organism is thinking differently and hence behaving differently. Behaviours are easy to observe and replicate, but does not mean you will get the benefit.

Countless stories abound how GM documented all the things Toyota was doing in their factory in Japan and tried to replicate in the US - but failed. And we see that quite a lot industries - competitors hire people from the other organisation (or the same consultancy!) and then try to copy what worked elsewhere - and it usually fails expensively, spectacularly, and hurts a lot of employees, shareholders and stakeholders.

The simplest way to deeply understand this is a story about a piano made by a world famous piano maker. A wood furniture carpentry company decided to move into the piano manufacturing business as they had the same required tools, they could buy the same materials, and they thought they had the same skills required. So they bought a piano and dismantled it, making notes and designs about how to assemble. Then they assembled it back. But once it was back in "1 piece" there was a problem. It did not sound like it had. So they tried to manufacture a new one from their instructions. And they succeeded in making a pretty good replica of a real piano, but once again there was the problem - it did not sound right. So they got out of the piano making business (wisely). They lacked the "secret sauce" of being musically minded and aware how all the complexity of sound generation, amplification, transmission integrated with the different moving complicated parts of a piano.

And that's also what agile is - the practices help - in the same way that knowing what the keys of a piano are what notes. But playing a piece of beautiful music on a piano is differently from knowing things about music and piano operations. Yes the analogy does stretch to "practice is required, and feedback" to get them right.

But more importantly it is the secret sauce - it is the agile mindset that causes these agile practices to evolve into something unique for the organisation and its context. Some practices are individual targeted (like disciplined arrive on time to meetings), some are pair targeted (like pair programming to create, quality assure, reflect, learn, and make better realtime), some are team targeted (like whole team planning game), some are larger organisation targeted (like town hall meetings), some are senior management targeted (like go-and-see/use-your-legs reporting walks). And on and on :)

It is much more important to be agile than to do agile!

For more and deeper thoughts about agile check What Is Agile For You What Is Agile For Us. Thankyou!

Agile Principles 103

So I was frustrated with both my previous 2 methods as described in Agile Principles 101 and Agile Principles 102.


Suddenly! I found myself with a group of complete agile newbies and I realised I had the opportunity to experiment with a 3rd method to try and help them understand these really concise pearls of modern management wisdom - the agile principles. By this stage in my career and experience I had convinced myself that the agile principles were just as relevant for software as for any other knowledge work taking place with large numbers of unknowns and lack of certainty. The plan-do-study-adjust collaboratively is remarkably effective in all conditions and circumstances where we're doing something new (more than 10% different from previous experience)!

My third approach involved the learners reading them, leaving them on screen, and then asking targeted questions. I was hoping that by causing all the learners to think and reflect on their own situation, using the principles as some kind of wise "flashlight", they would have flashes of insight!

Questions that I asked:

• Which agile principles were they achieving in their work 100%?
• And why?
• Which agile principles were they not achieving in their work 100%?
• Why?
• Which principles were they achieving between 0-50%?
• Why?
• Which principles were they achieving between 50-100%?
• Why?
• Would you be agile if you followed 11 principles 100%?
• Why or why not?
• Of those that were not 100% in practice, which 1 putting fully into practice would bring the most benefit?
• Why?
• Which would bring the second most benefit?
• Why?
• Which would bring the third most?
• Why?
• And which would bring the least benefit?
• Why?

Typical answers that I received

A lot of concerned faces, puzzled frowns and a handful of the class beginning to figure this stuff out. Reviewing these responses made me cringe - I am sure often my look of disbelief crept past my ability to control my responses. Reader beware!

Which agile principles achieving 100% and why?

• Retrospectives (the last one) - because "our Scrum Master makes us".
• Delivery of working software - because "that's what we're here to do". (note, no mention of trying to deliver quicker - with an emphasis on the shorter timescale)

Which agile principles not achieving 100% and why? 

• Business people and developers did work closely, but not everyday - because "the business people were too involved or important for the business to operate without them".
• Sustainable development - because "our company encourages a good work-life balance, and we only come in for the weekend once per month, or work late nights 1-2 nights per week".
• We do welcome changing requirements but not near the deadline - because "then we would never finish".

Which principles achieving 0-50% and why?

• Technical excellence, best designs, and simplicity - because "we don't have time to improve".
• Build projects around motivated people and support them - because "we hire professionals and they have to adapt to our ways of working".
• We think we do satisfy our customers of our business - because "we don't know them and are not allowed to talk to them" or "knowing - that's someone else's job"

Which principles achieving 50-100% and why?

• Communication is good, we do face-to-face whenever people are close - but not if they are on a different floor, different building up the street, in another town, a different country or timezone - because "travel is expensive and wastes a lot of time" and "we need email trails for audit/regulatory purposes" or "we need emails for our monthly, quarterly or annual appraisals".
• We like software showcases, but we have a lot of reporting on the side/top of that - because "governance is required" or "regulatory" or "comfort factor for senior managers" or "good publicity for the good work we're doing"

Would you be agile if you were only achieving 11 agile principles out of the 12 - why or why not?

"Yes! Because that's pretty good, it's like 91-92%!" - note, no mention of which one is not being achieved! Just a simple, naive response to the a multi-choice answer sheet. No deeper thinking evidenced.

and

"No! Because there would not be 12 principles if following 11 made an organisation quicker and nimbler!" - note, although this answer is better than the "Yes", this is still insufficient/a bit naive as the principles are a set of cause-and-effects that together create the synthesis required to be quicker and nimbler. It takes deep thought and putting into practice for some time to fully "feel" agile.

Which principles should be our top 3 to put into practice ASAP, and why? 

The only typical responses I got from this question were that there were no patterns. Every organisation has a different context, with different problems (and size of same problems), prioritised differently and solutioned differently. This is expected. Asking the "Why" for each did cause good conversations between the trainees and really helped people clarify their assumptions and perspectives. So too was the conversations around benefit, and benefit to whom. Good stuff!

Which principle would bring the least benefit and why? 

Again, a total myriad of responses - the only pattern being that everyone fell for this "trick question".

Yes, like most agile things, with teams being in unique contexts, "it depends" is always the right answer. But that helps no one quickly!

Once the trainees had convinced themselves of 1 least beneficial principle, I always constructed a causal model that showed they had picked the most beneficial principle to them. Why this complete opposite approach? I was trying to highlight all the other ways of thinking about things, and highlight that they needed to learn more than their default model in order to achieve agile for their organisation and for themselves.

Benefits of this teaching/learning approach

Was better, slightly, than the previous two attempts.
There was some good discussion going on.

Consequence of this teaching/learning approach

The causal model for the 1 principle they believed would bring them least benefit seemed to cause hostility. Just because Copernicus had a model that proved the planets went around the Sun, did not win the hearts and minds of those who believed the Sun and the planets went around the Earth, especially not those with their own thinking and being models based on the incorrect one!

Several folks dis-engaged from this - I suspect because it is such abstract stuff and it is hard to think about abstract things with people who have different contexts entirely. It's hard enough to make sense of things with people who are on the same page with you let alone from different teams/streams of work!

Post mortem

This teaching/learning method also did not work as I had hoped. Despite many nods, smiles and hope-filled looks that seemed promising, nothing happened after the training session.

I did not see changes in thinking patterns, problems stated, solutions proposed or behaviours. There was no increase in flow of value nor deepening of team trust, no sighting of a high-performance shift or team. No one was picking up the seeds or threads and putting any of the collective wisdom onto the agenda and getting faster.

I had to keep researching, thinking, reflecting and trying different things as no one is really talking or writing about this stuff - how to reach critical mass across the whole world! To see what I have tried, tested and concluded so far, read further: What Is Agile For You, What Is Agile For Us. Thankyou!