My favourite coaching tools: The record, typeup and playback

Caveats:
I feel you can use this tool with anyone - no matter how open/closed you/they are. You can use it for yourself even. However I do realise that it is possible some thing(s) might come up/be mentioned that require a much more safe environment and a much more experienced+educated counsellor to really deal with appropriately. Try to avoid those things.

Required:
Quiet room
Pen and paper
Knowledge of Johari Window (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johari_window)

Optional, but HIGHLY desirable:
A sensible/sensitive enough recording device (that you have previously tested) is preferable but this exercise can still be extremely fruitful without

Step 0: Record the date, start time and coachee name on the paper - remember to record the end time as well. Make sure your own mind and body are comfortable and restful - you too will be fully engaged in this session for it to go well!

Step 1: Make sure your coachee is focussed and engaged and happy to be recorded. If the coachee is happy, start the recorder, else put the recorder away. Prepare for much note taking.

Step 2: Ask the coachee to pick the start date. Usually in a work environment I ask for the date to be when they met for interviews or their first day at work. Take brief note of the date and try to understand the coachee's body language.

Step 3: Ask them to try to cover as much ground as they can in 15-20 minutes - their timelined biography of what they did, what they learned, what they felt, how their career progressed. Usually the coachee is really good at timeboxing the story they're telling, not that it matters too much. What's important is capturing what is remembered and very important - how it is remembered. Make notes, and make notes of questions that you might want to raise to get more of the story and emotion surfaced.

Step 4: Ask the questions and record the answers - look especially for areas which you believe might be important in the person's work life that were not mentioned (obviously this depends on how well you know the person by this stage). Avoid questions that are beyond the scope of the relationship you have with the coachee at this stage

Step 5: Wrap up and explain what happens next, make sure the coachee is comfortable and thinks enough was said (you can paraphrase the timeline). Turn off the recorder and take a note of the time! End the session.

Step 6: Get some headphones, play the recording back to yourself slightly slower speed, and type everything that was said. You don't have to analyse it, but you need to make sure it is an accurate type-up of exactly what the coachee said - beware of the shortcuts you would and DID take mentally during the interview. Type what the coachee said, and how they said it - if they giggled, or hummmed, or errrrrrred, or paused... make sure to catch their words, not your translations. Initially you think this will take a long time, and it does, but you do get better at it, and your typing does improve a great deal! This is because your WIP memory expands a great deal it is exercised more thoroughly and intensively.

* As an aside it is interesting and educational for you/yourself to also take a note of what you thought you heard, and what was actually said!

Step 7: Read through the type-up and make notes for yourself about what you see that the coachee does not - this feeds into the Johari Window rooms. I've found spiritual and leadership potential, I've found root causes of huge levels of frustration and anxiety at work, trust issues and lots lots more.

Step 8: Have another session with the coachee. Ensure they are safe and engaged. Provide the type-up document, and the audio file back to the coachee. Ask the coachee to read through the document and if there is anything missing, add to it.

Step 9: Now you can give the coachee some work to do and this is where you need to be a little creative sometimes. You've now uncovered some things - either content, emotion or personality - in this person's [life] story at work over this period, that they're not aware of - and it might be good to educate the coachee about Johari Window at this stage.

Often there is enough in the type-up for the person to really think about, and together you can plan some coaching goals and work to achieve them to improve an aspect even at this stage.

Often there is more, deeper work that can be undertaken by the coachee on their journey if they become more aware of it. However you, as coach, in this session, are not allowed to give direction. You are allowed to design 1-2 "filters" though to help the coachee sort and categorise things, which might make them more aware of things about themselves they are currently blind to.

I used different filters for coachees to apply successfully in the past:
- Mad / Sad / Glad
- What Went Well (WWW) / What Did Not Go Well (WWW) / What I Learned (WIL) / What Puzzles Me (???)
 - I lead / I followed
 - Drop / Keep / Improve
 - Motivations: Health / Mental / Spiritual
 - Recognised for / not recognised for

And I am sure there are many more. With the categorisation done, allow the coachee to reflect back to you what it means. Sometimes they have many questions, sometimes they don't understand what they have just done, sometimes they do not profess to having learned anything new or worthwhile from the time invested.

But often they do, sometimes they even see the things you see. Sometimes they see things you did not (the rose-tinted spectacles take a long time and much practice and reflection to become clear!).

Whatever they outcome is though, the coachee now has material and some idea(s) about what coaching goals to prioritise and work towards with your help.

Step 10: Make some notes for yourself about how the session went, the type-up, what you learned at the various stages, and what the outcomes were. How did the coachee's body language reflect different things as they were saying them, and did this concur when you asked the questions? This is also about continuous self improvement, in order to help others on their journeys much more effectively.

See also my post on Peter Drucker's "manager's letter" which can also collect incredibly powerful insights into the work experience of a coachee.

What is to be done for the single biggest blocker to an agile transition?

I've been interviewing a number of candidates for a role in my team of Agile Coaches these past few months. One of the topics we like to discuss with candidates is that of "serious resistance".

I've reflected on the topic a great deal over the years, as well as read several books and articles, discussed here and there at various conferences, trainings and war story sharings. It is not an easy topic, and its clear that many "new process/practice" people run into it constantly.

Through all this, 2 approaches dominate:
1. Back off, and attempt to influence via the resisters influencers
2. Fire/promote

AKA:
1. Do nothing
2. Do something radical (AKA change your organisation, or change your organisation)

Both sound lose-lose to me.

Today I had a slightly different thought - what if the pressure/focus was turned instead to the resister's line manager? What if the line management was forced to accept the accountability that comes with the management position and actually conduct coaching/mentoring 1-1 sessions with the resister? What if the line manager's job was on the line instead? That seems to me to have far bigger and quicker impact potential...possibly at the actual root cause of the problem!

:O

Thankyou for reading!

Scaling Software Agility Presentation by Dean Leffingwell

This is a followup to one of my previous book recommendations - Scaling Software Agility by Dean Leffingwell

You can access a summary basically of the major themes Dean focusses on for Scaling of Agile: Scaling Software Agility (pdf)

Scaling Software Agility by Dean Leffingwell

Dean is the former founder and CEO of Requisite Inc, responsible for the Requirements Gathering and Analysis Tool: Requisite Pro. It seems like his vast experience from startup to merging with IBM has touched on a number of key software development issues and he is now consulting very successfully and writing good books!

I picked up Scaling Software Agility at a book store/stall at SPA 2008 as it seemed to have a couple of new things to say, or at least say them in new ways - and I was very pleased with my choice!

I believe there is something for everyone in this book - wether you are new to agile or an experienced practitioner. The book touches on a number of topics and leads you from brief "beginner" chapters through to more interesting ones that are very relevant in today's software development arena - the scaling of agility.

Things that stand out in my memory of this book are the application of valuable software quality and management metrics, and the many strategies that Dean suggests can be used to counter the arguments typical organisational "police" will use to counter the attempt to "go [more] agile" and potentially inadvertently lead to "acceptable failure" or worse, "death march".

Usually corporations do not react to the infiltration of agile practices as they are kept within [small] team perimeters, thereby "flying under the radar". If you have a requirement to scale agile, then by definition you clearly have more people and teams that you are concerned about. There is more visibility and attention from the people who might strategically oppose the changes they do not understand, and/or department(s) or programme(s) it is being attempted in - key strategic people that you never previously even knew existed, nor what their concerns were, are now watching your every move.

http://www.amazon.co.uk: http://www.amazon.com:

Why I recommend Scaling Software Agility:

Reason 1: Part 1 covers the essentials of Agile, Waterfall, XP, RUP, Scrum, Lean Software, DSDM, FDD in 85 pages!

Reason 2: Part 2 follows with more depth about the 7 Agile Practices that work: Agile Component Team, Agile Planning and Tracking, Iterations, Small Frequent Releases, Agile Testing, Continuous Integration, Retrospectives.

Reason 3: The 7 practices Leffingwell recommends for Scaling Agile:
- "Intentional Architecture": Approaches on how to tackle large software systems with Agile Architecture
- "Scalable Lean Requirements": Three simple topics that avoid analysis-paralysis failure mode: vision, roadmap and just-in-time (JIT) elaboration
- "Systems of Systems and the Agile Release Train": how to plan, and deliver, complex software components with interdependencies
- "Managing Highly Distributed Development": It is very difficult, and is a problem all successful software programmes face. Sooner or later the team is too big to fit in 1 room, on 1 floor, of 1 building, of 1 city, of 1 country. Inevitably practices have to be developed that can assist software that is developed by many different people, in different locations
- "Impact on Customers and Operations": How marketing, or product owners, or programme owners, will be convinced that Agile is a good thing for them
- "Changing the Organisation": How to address the arguments and fallacies that the corporate immune system is going to throw around as things become more agile
- "Measuring Business Performance": Real, usable, useful management metrics that can be used to control and manage large scale [agile] software development efforts

Thankyou for reading my recommendations!

Ethical Office Politics

I have been meaning to read this article for about a month now, and finally got the time this morning! Adrian, the author of the article, covers quite a few topics throughout the piece and I found it an insightful and well thought out argument.
Ethical Office Politics

I think he does a good job of most of the issues I have studied, heard about, thought about and/or experienced.

Best Practice Applied In Wrong Context - Example 1

A friend of mine was ranting the other day. He had just done an iteration retrospective with his development team wherein they took a look at their quality metrics and discovered that "quality" had actually dropped off even though his team had spent more time than ever before on the client's official Quality Process.

I discussed this further with him and we agreed that quality is a mostly subjective concept when it comes to software ... we agreed that it can't be objectively meaasured ... we agreed that it can't be artificially injected "to meet the required metric" ... we agreed that it is something that Software Quality Assurers infer based on monitoring the various metric trends that make sense in the particular environment/context that the software is being developed in/for.

So with all this agreeance I asked him to explain further.

This story is probably a symptom of why I think there is so much cynism in the software industry. Read on if you dare!

It turns out that the client has a well worked out, well defined Quality Process that they are extremely happy with. This Process is guaranteed to prevent massive loss of life/income/spiralling out of control costs/etc etc - you can imagine why a large company invests huge amounts of time and money in creating a bullet proof Quality Process: manage risk, whatever that risk is.

Okay ... so why is my friend ranting? His team followed the process, passed a bunch of procedural milestones apparently and everyone was happy. Yet when he and his team look at the metrics they defined for how they measure quality, they noticed that the number of issues had risen, that some important tests had not been run early enough in the iteration to find issues that they could then respond to before the end of iteration. There were known open issues, and the were issues that had been addressed, but had not been signed off. There was waste accumulating that had not been a problem before.

How did this happen? The people whose responsibility it was to run the tests, to provide the early feedback had been too busy ensuring the team met the Quality Process requirements - they had been documenting, and reviewing and getting documentation reviewed and spending a large amount of time away from the product they were responsible for delivering. They were going on a tangent from users' needs.

And it showed.

There is no happy ending here - key client representatives (project stakeholders, but not users) have to ensure that their organisation's process is followed. Even if they know, and everyone else knows, that the process is not adding value, and that indeed, as above, the process is actually diminishing value. And it appears often that several times a group of client representatives need to experience failure and pain before they will attempt to address a badly formulated, or in the example above, placed, process. Sometimes, regrettably, these lessons are learned during retrenchment phases.

Yuck!

Some Peter Drucker Management/Leadership/Society Ideas

I stumbled on this 5 Things William Cohen Has Learned from Peter Drucker CIO "taster" article a couple of days ago and realised that now is the time when people are going to start talking less and less about what Peter Drucker used to say and what he used to stand for.

From my perspective, his name has appeared in almost every management text book (about 25) I studied during my BCommerce. I even bought 1 of his books from a bookstore once purely because I recognised his name and just knew the sales price was a bargain!

I really hope some truly controversial "new ideas" person starts challenging the status quo once more - it seems like there is a great deal of regurgitation of management thought process going on.

4 Ideas I took away from quotations of his that gave me much to think about:
1. During the early 80's he argued that CEO compensation should not be more than 20 times what the bottom earner in the company was earning.
Imagine what the world would be like if this thought had held...just imagine... all the people ... living for today ... living in peace ... sharing all the world. *sigh*

2. The most useless thing to do, is do something that should not be done at all, efficiently.

Efficiency takes time and money - it costs A LOT! The absolute waste that goes into doing something that should not be done at all, and then making the process more efficient - awful! I guess this is one of my influencers for always trying to find the fundamentals of what I am doing and why.

3. "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."

Actually this quotation has been driven home repeatedly throughout my limited exposure. I am unsure if my current thoughts are more influenced by study or by experience: There are a huge number of managers (title) without leadership skills, and there are a huge number of leaders (personality) without management skills. When you find yourself in the rare (in my humble opinion) circumstance that there are layers of management with leadership skills all around you, magic is very likely to occur, not only during times of crisis, but also during times inbetween.

4. "The best way to predict the future is to create it."

Strange that one of Peter Drucker's core concepts was Management By Objectives (MBO). Or perhaps it is once again a case of Best Practice being formulated and applied without customisation to the circumstance/environment, and without empowering people to do the right thing as they are being measured on the wrong thing. Regardless - about this quotation - imagine a company culture where everyone is an opportunity seeker. When combined with radical and forward looking MBO, things get interesting, but most companies seem to base current MBO plans on past experience/objectives/successes/failures which is all data driven decision making and does not allow for much innovation and active workforce participation.

Like all people who get used as sources of education and inspiration he had/has many proponents and many opponents. You can read more briefly about him on Wikipedia - Peter Drucker and on the Drucker Institute which houses many interesting articles.

Anyway - I hope you read the CIO "taster" article and perhaps some of the ideas spark your further interest! (let me know if they do!)

As for book recommendations - I can't find the 1st/2nd year text I purchased years ago, but I did look around and find these good looking "professional" sources that I will be buying in the near future:

amazon.co.uk

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amazon.com

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Simple Fast Feedback For 1-1 Sessions In Professional Environment

Last year in early October our company went on its annual training camp. This is quite an event in the year as we (the people who work here) get to decide what we would like to train on, and as the different opinion groups form to propose to our management, if the groups are big enough, we're actually able to afford professional trainers out of our combined training budgets also!

My first training camp (I've been with Zuhlke Engineering since 21 May 2007) was actually in Marrakech in the Kingdom of Morocco. Some say the choice in location was because it was cheaper to fly all of us to there, stay in a good hotel with decent food, and hire their conference facility for the week, than do anything remotely similar in the UK or on the European continent. And I can believe this!!

Our camp was divided into 2 parts - soft skills (presented by a really excellent pair of facillitators (married husband and wife team!!) from Top Banana), and erlang (presented by our resident expert Ben Nortier)!

This blog entry is about just one topic Top Banana taught us - "Simple and effective 1-on-1 Professional/Personal Feedback". It is a darn difficult thing to give a colleague feedback, and it is a darn difficult thing to receive feedback from a colleague. Really.

Basically the "scene" is set with just 2 questions, and relies on sufficient trust to be effective. Sufficient is subjective but if (in my experience) one takes a deep breath and relaxes, and never begins a sentence with "You" (rather aim for "I") that is actually enough. This kind of relies on most humans actually not wanting to hurt (physically or emotionally) others. (reminds me of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you")

The 2 questions are:
1. What do I do that helps you in your work?
2. What do I do that hinders you in your work?

After that generally floodgates open if people are extremely comfortable discussing issues, and if not, at least both sides part the session having either aired a problem or discovered at least 1 thing they did not know about themselves previously that they need to digest and possibly later revisit or forget ... until the next 1-1 feedback session :)

It is that simple!

After the trip where each of us actually did these feedback sessions with everyone else, I have actually initiated this with all the people I work closely with, and as time allows I do it with my other colleagues in the office, whom I interact with significantly less. Of course this lesser interaction means that understanding relationships take a lot longer timewise to form, and the chances of problem-causing miscommunications exponentially rise!

Some lessons that I have learned that are VERY interesting:
1. I have blind spots that others definitely see and adjust themselves to!
2. Different people, depending on my conscious mindset or context adjustment I make mentally before I see/talk to them, give me COMPLETELY conflicting feedback!
3. Some feedback that I receive that I consciously do try to think about and incorporate in my behaviour/style goes COMPLETELY out of the window when pressured situations arise!
4. Realisation that I need to detect earlier when I am feeling "pressured", take a deep breath, a walk maybe, and realise life is not that serious! :)

Anyone can do this, but the first time definitely requires dynamic facillitation to help get over the uncomfortableness that generally exists amongst work colleagues, to explain and prepare the people involved for the new, prepare them to listen in order to change, and accept a challenging proposal - be honest.

"Seek first to understand, then be understood" was one of the strongest messages I took away from Marrakech ... which reminds me of the funniest insult I've heard in a long time (outside of a South African context where verbal insults are an art form in parts of the country) - this was between 2 food sellers in the Marrekech [fast] food market: "... AND YOUR MAMMA WORKS IN McDONALDS!!"

Feedback welcome!

Mastering The Art of War

I have just finished a rather quick and easy to read book about some of the subtleties of life, people, strategy, change and organisation. A good start to a blog to changes and challenges and embracing all of life!

Mastering The Art of War touts itself (or its authors - Liu Ji and Zhuge Liang, or its translator Thomas Cleary does) as exploring some of the wisdoms of two books of ancient Chinese origin: Sun Tzu's The Art of War (a book about strategy) and I Ching - (the Book of Changes containing 360 insights to help people deal with change - 1 for each day of the lunar year). I have not read either yet, but now am more than ever looking forward to the time and place!

One of the extracts from Mastering the Art of War I keep thinking about (especially in terms of "things no one taught me at school!")

Mastering The Art Of War Is Full Of Personal Wisdom Anecdotes

"Hard though it may be to know people, there are ways:

1. Question them concerning right and wrong, to observe their ideas
2. Exhaust all their arguments, to see how they change
3. Consult with them about strategy, to see how perceptive they are
4. Announce that there is trouble, to see how brave they are
5. Get them drunk, to observe their nature
6. Present them with the prospect of gain, to see how modest they are
7. Give them a task to do within a specified time, to see how trustworthy they are"

Why I recommend Mastering The Art of War:

Reason 1: It is really short, condensed, well written and edited, and reads very quickly
Reason 2: It has been 2 weeks since I finished it, and I am still thinking back to some of the wisdom from some of the pages, hence I am "forced" to blog about this book now (when I really don't have time!)
Reason 3: There are many pearls and interesting historical stories of China's history and ancient ways of life - such as the one I extracted above.

This one seems to be the most popular amazon.co.uk seller for I Ching (ranked 28632 today) . According to Mastering The Art of War, the I Ching is not supposed to be used for divination purposes at all - a rule that was once strictly adhered to in ancient times when it was decreed forbidden to do so!

These 2 are also highly recommended on the respective .co.uk and .com Amazon sites! But there are many options clearly in this space so pick one that makes best sense to you!

Thankyou for reading!

Insight into industry leading companies Strategic Human Resource Management

Go through this quiz and rate yourself/your company as well as you can (ignore for the time being what this quiz is supposedly about!) CIO Ones To Watch Quiz. When you get to the results (only takes a handful of minutes) see how your company is doing against what the reported industry leaders are doing today.

Scrum and Organisational Patterns

Jeff Sutherland has posted an excellent short entry linking some sources together about how 33 Organisational Patterns of Agile Software Delivery that James Coplien and Neil Harrison formulated actually underlie Scrum. Read Jeff's post for further details: Agility and Organisational Patterns.

Thankyou for reading my blog!

Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development by James O. Coplien and Neil B. Harrison

Covering a very wide spectrum of software team related issues from distributed remote team participation to architecture, to project control and team building.

This great book is highly relevant and useful in my team lead and architect roles yesterday, today, and I am 100% sure tomorrow also!

James Coplien is quite an interesting guy. I've read a bunch of his essays in the past which have been quite enlightening. You can find them on "Cope's" web site.

Why I recommend Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development:

Reason 1: It is based on a great deal of research which looks to be scientifically thought out, hypotheses were created, samples statistically selected and information collected and then analysed carefully. So its fairly safe to refer to it and the cases/patterns mentioned that worked or failed.
Reason 2: In my studies of Organisation Behaviour, Industrial Psychology, Business Management and Human Resource Management, there were a number of consistent themes that were delved into deeply in this book, which has a great deal of real world emphasis and quick illumination, whereas the theory texts are more verbose and not as readily applied.
Reason 3: It is also consistent with my past experiences of organisation behaviours that were dysfunctional as well as those cases where organisations were extremely functional.
Reason 4: Like the Gang of Four's Design Patterns, this book now somehow "lives" in the back of my mind (knowledge was deeply absorbed and incorporated into my thinking without conscious study) so that when I encounter situations I can either more clearly identify what's going wrong, and what possible patterns could be applied, in which possible sequences, in order to address the problem(s), or simply refer to this reference book and delve deeper into the issues and solutions effectively and efficiently.
Reason 5: People I have already referred it to have come back to me and been as astonished by it.

Thankyou for supporting!