Rational Scrum

It’s never a good time for training

Zacharias Beckman — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:21:17 +0000

As Jamin Arvig, President of WaterFilters.net learned the hard way, putting off training has a cost of its own: Lost employees. As Jarmin wrote in his A Worker Quit — Because I Didn’t Train Him To Succeed, if you don’t arm your employees to succeed they’ll eventually go elsewhere to look for career advancement. “[It] was just the tip of the iceberg. My other customer service and sales people were struggling and frustrated. They didn’t say it in exactly these words, but they basically felt like I hadn’t equipped them to succeed.” Training is simply one of the best investments a company can make — and carefully planned, effective training yields more dividends than just about any other.

Training is number one

Zacharias Beckman — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:30:11 +0000

As I’ve pointed out more than once, training your employees is one of the best things you can do to benefit your business and your team. Even so, fears about what happens if you train your staff and they leave to find a better job are prevalent — but consider the alternative: What happens if you don’t train them, and they stay? As Derek Christian found out, training is key to success: He successfully dropped attrition from 300% to zero in 2009, and used a strategic training and career counseling program to more than double his business’ size. The number-one reason people leave their jobs is that they don’t feel challenged, he says: “People, especially of this generation, want to learn new things.” (CNN Money Online).

First, care. Care intensely.

Zacharias Beckman — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 00:18:20 +0000

Excellent advice found on 43 folders: Before you sweat the logistics of focus: ﬁrst, care. Care intensely. We spend a great deal of time working on “engaging the team” or engaging ourselves when what we really need to do is find the willpower to focus on the foremost problem at hand. As Merlin points out, “Obsessing over the slipperiness of focus, bemoaning the volume of those devil ‘distractions,’ and constantly reassessing which shiny new ’system’ might make your life suddenly seem more sensible–these are all terriﬁcally useful warning ﬂares that you may be suffering from a deeper, more fundamental problem.”

Hiring for the culture

Zacharias Beckman — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 06:14:56 +0000

Hiring the right people means more than identifying good technical skills. A person’s resume can be outstanding, but it won’t matter one whit if personalities clash or new hires just don’t mesh with your culture. As Dan McCarthy writes in How to Hire for Cultural Fit, “It’s not what you know, but how you fit in the culture that results in accelerated performance.” He points out that first and foremost, you need to assess your own internal culture, decide whether your goals include changing that culture, and proceed accordingly. Everyone that joins the team changes the team dynamic: Are you hiring to sustain your culture, or looking to alter the team dynamic?

Common oversights in choosing methodology

Zacharias Beckman — Mon, 24 May 2010 01:47:01 +0000

Changing the way a business operates is a daunting task. It involves assessing and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the current organization, identifying solutions to the weaknesses without compromising the strengths and, ultimately, changing the way people work. Above all, people tend to be resistant to change — and this is the most common issue that arises when adopting a new methodology.

This translates into preparation, more than anything else: Preparing by understanding your options, preparing the organization for change, and preparing to measure your success.

Be thorough during evaluation

The most common oversight in preparing to adopt a new methodology is simply not evaluating all of the available options. It’s an easy pitfall to succumb to: There are so many processes, so many methodologies, so many choices, how can someone possibly make the right choice? Surely all of these published techniques are mature and “real,” does it even matter which methodology we choose? Yes. It matters a great deal. Each methodology has its strengths and weaknesses and very few methodologies can be applied to every development project.

The wide variety of methodologies is a reflection of the complexity of the software development industry. We have many choices in executing any strategic operation, whether a military incursion, a football game or planning for building a house. Likewise, the software industry has evolved a wide variety of processes, each one suitable for different scenarios. While it is certainly true that many methodologies can be successfully applied to many different projects we can’t make the assumption that any one methodology will work equally well in every situation. Adopting a heavy process in a project involving a small team and a short-term schedule is almost always a poor idea, as it leads to extending the project timeline to support unnecessary project artifacts. But less obvious is the impact of pairing a lightweight process with a medium-sized project. How many people is “too many” for an Extreme Programming (“XP”) project? At what point does the lack of formal project controls start to make the project unpredictable? Will the business stakeholders feel the project is not adequately managed? These questions, and many more, emphasize how important it is to prepare thoroughly before choosing a methodology.

Given the plethora of potential methodologies, it’s easy to just pick one and get started. The temptation to simply choose a well-regarded methodology, buy a well-reviewed book on the subject, and forge ahead can be strong. But this “textbook approach” can prove deadly. Without studying the methodology beforehand it’s easy to choose the wrong methodology — and even if a mistake of this magnitude becomes clear over time, it’s usually too late to change course. And much like reading instructions too quickly, it’s easy to realize too late that the process is wrong: Incorrectly implemented, or not the right fit for the situation.

Another pitfall to the “textbook approach:” It leads to following a process blindly and over-adopting, particularly with more comprehensive methodologies that have more to offer. The fallout from this: Teams come to think that comprehensive methodology is a “bad thing,” heavily weighted and full of red tape, unnecessary work and overhead. Using the textbook as an instruction manual makes it impossible to have a complete view of processes and artifacts offered by the methodology and, therefore, the value and appropriateness of each.

Prepare the team and the organization

Just as evaluating and selecting new methodology can be a mine field, so can the actual adoption process. A common oversight when preparing to adopt a new methodology is not planning for the upheaval it will cause: Training and learning curves, changes in operational behavior and metrics, and impact the schedules. Changing the way a business works means everyone has to relearn what they do on a daily basis. This means considering what it will take to implement the methodology within an organization as a whole, and achieving a level of investment in the effort by all the stakeholders.

Team members need to be trained, business units need to be integrated into the process, schedules adjusted to accommodate the new methodology and in most situations a significant learning curve will translate into a slow, steady adoption — as opposed to a sudden, rapid adoption. The former approach provides an opportunity for participants to learn the usefulness of different aspects of the methodology and to gauge its success. The latter approach — attempting to make a complete, rapid transition — often leads to failure during adoption. Too many interdependent processes that are not well-understood by the team leads to poor execution. This can lead to missteps during a pilot project, a time at which such mistakes are highly visible. Not having a steady, progressive and measurable improvement against existing techniques means criticism will come easily.

Measure your success

Creating positive, measurable metrics that demonstrate the benefit of a new methodology is critical. Part of the process is making sure training costs and the cost of adoption is tied directly to business goals. By coupling the business to the methodology, all stakeholders have a vested interested in success. Good metrics demonstrate that progress is being made — both providing a positive measure of success, and avoiding the need for a “big bang” success right out the gates. And, if you aren’t already tracking metrics and measuring success, this is an ideal time to find a management methodology that will.

Why Agile isn’t enough (and why it doesn’t work)

Zacharias Beckman — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 03:38:46 +0000

Agile methods are powerful tools when used properly — but as with all tools, they can be misused. The critics of agile methods are many and vocal, often looking at agile as a host of poorly thought-out and incomplete “shortcuts” that fail to get the job done. And with 90% of projects failing to meet objectives, the criticism is valid.

So is Agile just hype or is there something to it?

There are strengths to the agile way of thinking, and many of them bring useful perspectives to software and systems development that are new and even revolutionary. Here are some of the things that work — and, potentially, that radically change our old-world practices.

Whereas most legacy methods stem from industrial process — that is, assembling a product using a set of defined, predictable steps — the agile method is empirical. It recognizes that development is more like invention and research, more akin to scientific study, than assembly. This empirical nature is at the heart of the agile mantra: Deliver, measure, adjust and repeat. The strength of this approach often bears itself out in fantastically hyperproductive teams that deliver working product far more quickly than legacy methods, such as waterfall, could ever achieve.

Agile does this by cutting through complexity. Every agile-based methodology focuses on simplification of otherwise complicated problems. For example, XP and Scrum both emphasize development of near-term, complete deliverables. This means carving out tangible and reasonably independent pieces of work, focusing on that work, and then — at least as much as possible — moving on to other work. This approach requires that large, complex problems are broken down into manageable pieces and thought of on a micro-deliverable level. Likewise, this approach minimizes ceremony and eschews as much procedure as possible. Some agile methods go to extremes in this regard, focusing entirely on delivering work product and not at all on procedure. This translates into minimizing complexity on a large scale.

Closely related to eliminating complexity is agile’s focus on progress measurement. Most agile methods measure progress chiefly, if not exclusively, in terms of delivered work product. Most methods also are quite stringent in defining progress only when finished work is delivered, which means you can’t work for nine months on a single big feature. Instead, micro-deliverables target key features, deliver those features into the customer’s hands, then moving on to new features. This can be a huge strength because the customer gets working product in-hand to review early, and often. It involves the customer early in product evolution, leading to a host of benefits including better product targeting, prioritized development and improved quality.

These characteristics of agile methods combine to fundamentally change the way software and systems development is practiced. Agile also empowers individuals to become stellar performers. In fact, all forms of agile rely on this to some degree — with more lightweight agile methods being completely dependent on individual empowerment. The idea is that an empowered team will leap over constraints to get the job done, no matter how “out of the box” the thinking needs to be. It’s a refreshing concept and one that can indeed be supremely successful, but it does require the team to embrace the idea wholeheartedly.

Another benefit, at least in some situations, is the creation of self-organizing teams. Partly because of the light ceremony, the fast pace, and the penchant for empowerment and accountability, teams become self-organizing. This works when the team has the right make-up, as individuals step up to take on tasks best suited to individual skills. Self-organized, empowered teams become very powerful and very productive, provided that the team members are up to the job.

There is absolutely no doubt that agile methods make it possible to get things done quickly. That’s what it’s all about, after all. The real question to me is how much of this tradeoff is really desirable? How often do we want to eschew process and maturity in favor of getting things done quickly?

More importantly: Can we effectively merge the best attributes of Agility with the most valuable benefits of established processes and standards?

Why Agile doesn’t work

When an agile project fails, it generally does so spectacularly and predictably. The common failings of agile-based projects are just that… common. We see the same problems over and over again, and this has become the basis for many critiques of agile methodology. After all, if we keep seeing the same problems crop up again and again, isn’t this proof enough that the process is flawed? This becomes clear in hindsight, so why do we continue to see 90 percent of projects missing the mark?

The fact is, agile by itself is just one tool in the toolbox that should be applied with other implements of the trade. In my experience, the problem comes in most often because small- and mid-sized organizations experience brilliant success with agile and then assume it can work everywhere. They throw out the toolbox (or perhaps never buy one in the first place). Yes, agile can succeed. Yes, it can deliver fantastic productivity and stellar results. But not always — in fact, I will go so far as to say not often.

This isn’t because of agile’s limitations. Instead, it’s because of overconfidence by those putting it to use, and the mistakes an immature organization makes as it grows and applies it inappropriately.

Immature companies and teams are cutting their teeth, again and again, on the limitations of agile.

All agile methods make it easy to oversimplify complexity. In fact, agile’s strength of eliminating complexity might be better stated as “ignoring complexity.” There are appropriate situations for this but, more often than not, ignoring complexity leads to problems. Most business cases don’t call for undefined delivery dates or loosely changing requirements and partial deliveries. These are risks that most business models are incompatible with. If the risks aren’t something that your business can sustain, adopting a purely agile process is taking a huge gamble.

Likewise, focusing on the near-term is an agile attribute that introduces a lot of unknowns into the business-end of an equation. Few people will contend that agile is appropriate for mission critical efforts such as, say, launch vehicle development, as sometimes requirements need to be set in stone before anyone starts development. But what about situations where some degree of fuzziness is acceptable or even beneficial? Agile advocates compatibility with change, sidestepping change control procedures that would otherwise place tight controls over requirements. Requirements change carries with it a heavy burden, particularly when it comes to the cross-organizational impact to marketing, budget, quality management and the customer. However, cutting change control, requirements management, and configuration management from the process can lead to long-term disaster that the short-term perspective of most agile methods will overlook.

This theme of reducing structure and control has cut out many waterfall-origin processes. The danger often manifests as small-scale agile projects are successful, leading to wider-scale adoption of agile. But, as the projects grow in complexity and criticality, major missing components in the process become evident. For example, no agile methods today integrate comprehensive quality assurance procedures (in fact, thanks to some early mistakes, such as MIL-STD-498[#], most people think quality assurance is software testing — it’s not). Structured software testing often becomes an afterthought, and risk management programs tend to be regarded as “fuzzy disciplines.” Yet, these are the processes that successfully put man on the moon, that develop health care and financial services systems, and ensure that nuclear plant regulatory systems don’t fail after delivery. Of course, there is a cost to each of these processes, and every business needs to weigh the cost-benefit of adopting more process against cutting those processes. This needs to be an on-going evaluation, made as projects, organizations, and teams evolve — it’s not a decision that stands alone.

From a purely hands-on, management level, agile methods pose “people problems” as well. The strong emphasis on self-organization and empowerment can easily backfire. The former relies heavily on people that are capable of self-management and self-direction. Not everyone can live up to that expectation. The latter, delivering empowerment to the team and individual, can lead to a hero mentality and silo’d teams that refuse to play well with others. As projects grow in size, complexity, and dependency on other teams and resources, these characteristics become the drawback of an immature organization.

Almost all agile methods oversimplify valuable processes. In some situations, the project survives the oversimplification. Sometimes the business is tolerant of the fallout. In every case, agile methods expose the project to risks that stakeholders should be — and often are not — aware of.

What to do about it

We need to be cognizant that one solution does not fit all problems. While an agile method such as XP or Scrum may have led to success in one project, this doesn’t make it a foregone conclusion that it will do so again. Each project is different, and organizations evolve over time. Adopting one process to solve all problems is a sure recipe for failure. On the other hand, having a well-versed team that can draw on several methodologies, as appropriate for the job, is a recipe for success.

If your organization is looking for the one-size hammer to hit every nail, make sure it’s as configurable a hammer as possible. Don’t choose something that is either too lightweight, such as XP, because many projects will overreach the capabilities of such a lightweight process. Likewise, don’t try to implement a full-on waterfall style methodology either because, while definitely thorough and capable of getting the job done, it’s just overkill for many smaller projects. If you must choose a single process, pick one that’s efficient, borrows from both agile and waterfall, and is highly configurable, such as Rational Scrum or the Rational Unified Process. Both of these have the maturity to deliver large-scale projects, but also support starting small and adopting minimum ceremony.

A better awareness of what specific agile practices can and cannot accomplish is key. For example, Scrum is not a development methodology, and it cannot effectively deliver software or hardware projects unless it wraps itself around one. Yet today many organizations are employing Scrum as if it were a development methodology. I’ve even seen an organization of several hundred developers “force fed” Extreme Programming from the top down. The outcome of that particular operation: Mid-level management hid the fact that they didn’t use XP from top-level management after everyone realized what a mistake it was. Perhaps we’ll have to wait for mature standards in education and certification to evolve, but personally I’m not sitting idly by.

One of my personal pet peeves in the technology industry is a relative lack of standards and qualifications. Would you go to a doctor that didn’t have a medical degree? Would you hire an architect that didn’t have an appropriate engineering degree? Yet we hire software professionals (much less often hardware professionals) without adequate education, current qualifications, or meaningful certifications. For that matter, the proliferation of meaningless qualifications (such as Scrum Master certification) continues to weaken the industry. In the long run, we need better standards regarding education, accreditation and certification.

Understand agile methods for what they are. Keep in mind that lightweight process carries risk. Use the right tools in the right situation.

Coming full circle

If we add all of these things to agile methods, won’t we just end up using waterfall process all over again?

I don’t think so. Waterfall-based process, the original behemoth processes born out of industrial process, are widely recognized as inefficient. There are tremendous advantages to pressing forward with a merger between waterfall practices and agile practices. I hope the end result is a new generation of software and hardware development methodology — a generation that we’re just starting to see as processes such as Rational Scrum come to the fore. It’s time for development methodologies to evolve, and there’s no holding that back.

Fix your boss (or, reduce risk to quality using a matrix approach)

Zacharias Beckman — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 01:17:30 +0000

How do you ensure that one person doesn’t derail your entire project? Most of us have been there before, unfortunately. Maybe it’s a co-worker who doesn’t work well with the team. Maybe it’s your boss, who has to oversee every single decision even though he’s an overtasked bottleneck. Either problem poses a critical risk to your project: Delays, mistakes and rework because one person isn’t part of a streamlined process.

Probably the most difficult situation is the latter — a boss that’s too hands-on, or perhaps an external resource that is too busy, yet absolutely must approve every decision. The story usually goes something like this: He’s a great guy, pretty easy to get along with when it comes right down to it — but he’s also insufferably “hands-on.” He’s just got to review every critical decision, contributing, fine-tuning and tweaking until it’s just right. This micro-managing mentality is causing all kinds of bottlenecks: Decisions are held until the last moment, changes are made late in the game, and your entire department suffers — staying late to “catch up” after your boss delivers his final word on any given issue. But here’s the real kicker: He’s good at what he does, and even though it creates internal chaos the finished product is that much better for his input.

Consider the image to the right: A critical “quality spike” representing the single project resource that is overloaded. This resource does raise project quality, but the spike also represents a huge bottleneck to the project.

Your department has tried everything: Getting him involved earlier in the game (it doesn’t work, his schedule is booked and it always presses to the last moment); Involving other review sources so your boss’ input is minimized (that helped a bit, but the other sources don’t like it when your boss overrides their contribution); You tried publishing the “departmental cost” figures that show all this inefficiency (but the powers-that-be seem to feel this is “just the cost of doing business”).

This is not a simple problem. It gets right to the root of the dynamics created in working teams. How can the situation be improved, realizing positive gains in a habitually entrenched process that some recognize as painful, but overall is regarded as good enough?

There are really two issues that need to be dealt with here. One is obvious, one perhaps a little bit less so. Most strategies up until now have focused chiefly on the primary goal:

“How can we minimize the negative impact of a critical resource (our ‘hands-on boss,’ for example) that doesn’t work efficiently with your team?”

The problem with this approach is that it attacks an entrenched problem head-on, and often does so using a single head-on approach to solve the problem. When an attempt fails, that approach is discarded and another tried. The principle flaw here is that each attempt to solve the problem is, in and of itself, not effective enough to get the job done. A secondary flaw is that each separate attempt tends to get lost in the chaff of day-to-day operations. We all know there’s a problem, but nobody is really tasked with studying it, compiling the entire scope of the problem and its impact, and somehow bringing about a solution.

For example, when your department produced some figures on costs to the organization, those figures clearly showed that, through inefficiency, rework, and last-minute changes, your team suffered. You even went so far as to tie it to actuals, a dollar figure that represented all that overtime and rework — but, it was accepted as “the cost of doing business.” Since it didn’t work, it was discarded — but the fact is, it’s only part of the overall puzzle.

So the head-on solution won’t work. Let’s consider a more subtle approach to the problem:

“How can we make the critical resource less critical?”

This would achieve the same result, but it’s really an entirely different problem — one that can be attacked somewhat obliquely. Rather than focusing on how to change the way your boss works (aka “the critical resource”), try focusing on changing what your boss needs to work on.

The first step toward a solution is realizing that solving this problem is a project, just like any other. It needs a project lead and sponsor. It needs to be handled as an iterative project, and the team needs to recognize that incremental improvement toward an ideal is acceptable. You aren’t going to discover a single silver bullet that solves the whole problem — that’s just not the nature of human team dynamics.

Make it a project initiative

Once your “quality improvement project” is up and running it will snowball. Here are a few steps that will get the ball rolling:

Initiate the project. Don’t think of this as a “workplace problem” that needs to be fixed in the short term. Instead, create a project initiative around it and get some mindshare going. Someone is going to need to lead the project, even if it’s unofficial — that person will keep the forward momentum.
Focus on making many small improvements across the board. For example, in the case I described above, consider how involving other review sources did in fact help, but not always. That’s an incremental improvement, and it raised the quality of the project a little bit.

Now, consider the impact of this approach over time. If numerous improvements can be implemented, and each one raises project quality just a little bit, it has an inevitable outcome: Your boss is going to have less to worry about, and less to be involved in. This is shown visually in the second image — as the overall quality matrix delivers improvement across the project, the “critical spike” that represents your boss’ workload begins to shrink. This is a quality matrix at work.

The goal is simply this: Dilute the need for your boss to be involved in every decision, by raising the bar in as many places as possible. You will gain a “double whammy” by not only reducing the amount of work he needs to contribute to, but also by increasing his own efficiency since he’ll have less to worry about. The bottleneck will begin to dissipate.

Assemble your team

Get involvement from everyone that’s affected by the problem — your team, your peers, other departments that might be affected. Of course, part of the finesse in this kind of project is to make it clear exactly what problem you are solving without making the project sound subversive or offending the wrong people. Your boss may be a terrible bottleneck, but also remember how valuable he or she is — this isn’t about cutting him out of the picture, going around him, or changing policies you don’t like. It’s much better to focus on things like qualitative improvement, streamlining projects to avoid inefficiency, or developing lean principles. Make it positive, in other words.

Identify key risks

Your probably already know what the main pain points are. Your team experiences them all the time: Loss of productivity, overtime, last minute changes, introducing new errors, reworking something that could already be finished. These are the lesser symptoms of an endemic problem: What are the potential risks if the problem goes unaddressed? Certainly continued loss of efficiency, higher expenses to the company and lower employee satisfaction come to mind. Perhaps there’s even a trend of some team members transferring out of the department to find a better working environment. More dramatic effects can include missed product deadlines, problems with released products or lowered perception of the department’s attention to quality. All of these can have a real financial impact on the company.

Identify those risks that are most significant. Those should become the focal point for initial improvement. This is a “risk driven” model, where high risk is identified — in other words, the most painful or potentially painful result of the problem gets the most attention as early as possible. Generally it’s best to tackle a few things at a time. While the list of risks could be very long, if you try to solve every problem at once it’s going to be overwhelming.

Mitigate

Once you’ve identified the top few risks, pull together your project team and identify candidate solutions. You’re designing something new here, so it’s going to seem like brainstorming — which is exactly what it is:

Can more attention from outside experts improve the overall product, lowering your boss’ need to be involved?
Would the quality assurance organization be a helpful partner in achieving this?
Could changes in the project timeline better accommodate your boss’ hectic schedule? Perhaps driving for earlier involvement (or longer project schedules) would help.
Can the team multitask, effectively putting several critical paths into play so that if one gets stalled waiting for your boss, the others move forward?
Would better tracking systems and information management help solve the problem? Perhaps your boss would benefit from a system that brings more organization and immediate answers directly to him.
Perhaps greater visibility into the project timeline and reasonable deadlines would both improve responsiveness and provide some firm schedule guidance.
Information radiators (such as task boards, timelines and assignment lists) might help keep people up to speed on overall project status (and what has moved from “medium” to “high” priority).
A widely accessible system that assigns tasks and prioritizes those tasks would increase visibility of current goals as well as get everyone united about what needs attention first.

Every organization is going to discover different solutions that help its specific situation. It will likely take time to hit on the first few steps that move in a positive direction — but those are the ones you want to hang on to.

Include a quality improvement element

Organizations that have the benefit of a formal quality assurance and improvement group should try to leverage the group’s knowledge. Quality assurance is about auditing and measuring progress toward improvement. Most quality assurance groups tend to be very good at measuring improvement over time, and putting that knowledge to use will help in gathering metrics and identifying what’s working, and what isn’t.

Track your progress

Measure, act, measure again, and adjust. This is the heart of most agile development methodologies — and most scientific methods.

The most important thing to do is realize when improvement has taken place. That means tracking information — metrics — about your organization’s efficiency. This can seem pretty amorphous when dealing with a problem such as this. Remember that it comes down to improved efficiency of individuals. Some teams will have simple metrics that are easy enough to track, such as number of projects completed on a monthly or quarterly basis, or number of cases filed. When all else fails, the number of hours committed to rework is a great metric, because it tracks directly to risk identification and mitigation up front. That is, if you properly identify a risk and mitigate it early in the project, the amount of time spent in rework related to that risk goes down.

This is one reason it’s important to have everyone affected by the problem involved: It’s going to require everyone to look for these signs of improvement. It might even require tracking hours spent in rework. Fortunately, with the goal in sight (less time spent reworking and fewer overtime hours) it shouldn’t be too hard to commit people to some moderate tracking.

Gather metrics on what works and what doesn’t work. Emphasize incremental improvement as a desired outcome: Track the results of each effort, and keep the best practices. The important thing here is to demonstrate improvement over time, so that everyone sees each action as contributing to the solution, not as a failure in delivering the end result.

One of the most important goals in creating a project mentality is the positive group effect. Seeing each practice as part of a solution keeps it alive — as opposed to trying something and perceiving failure. As the team, department or company works together to deliver a solution it becomes a self-reinforcing effect. Even your boss might notice, and actively start to take part.

Quality versus quantity

Zacharias Beckman — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:17:20 +0000

Qualitative decisions often lose out to quantitative decisions. Every one of us lives this every day, quite often without realizing that we are doing it.

I don’t remember where I heard the story about a truck driver named John Barstow. Nearly every day of his life he would drive down Main Street making his delivery to a local store. His goal was actually on 4th Street, which was a one way street and he needed to go about half a block in the wrong direction, so he would pass 4th and turn right on 5th Street, go around the block, and pull up in front of his destination.

One of these many deliveries days, something unexpected happened on the way to his drop off. As he approached 3rd Street, his delivery truck blew a tire. He had to pull over and, upon climbing out of his truck and inspecting the damaged tire, realized he needed to call a tow truck. Being close to his destination he decided to proceed the remaining block and call for help from the store where he made his deliveries. He continued on, passing the one-way 4th Street and turning right on 5th, as usual. He was halfway down the 5th Street, getting ready to turn right and circle back on to 4th, before he realized he could have taken 4th Street this time.

He was on foot.

The quantitative decision — the habit of going around the block to avoid a one way street — won out over a qualitative choice, that of taking a shorter route. We get used to set patterns and “business as usual.”

The technology industry is among a small set of disciplines that takes the consequence of making quantitative decisions to an extreme. Software and hardware are both progressing at a remarkable pace that is, if anything, accelerating. We see this every day as new technologies develop and old technologies evolve. The open source community is driving this effect to an even more frantic extreme, as hundreds of contributors pour their effort into a single product. It is, and always will be, impossible to totally keep up with the pace of change and the challenges of an evolving world.

It’s not enough to define our process or methodology and let it settle in. Yes, we absolutely need to have a clearly defined and adopted set of processes and procedures to ensure a good product. And, those processes and procedures need to become a part of our daily lives so that we don’t take shortcuts and miss important steps. But at the same time, it’s important to never let it become too rote. Watch out for doing something just because that’s the way it’s supposed to be done. Challenge yourself to find out how things can be improved on a daily basis.

Whiteboard as a PM tool

Zacharias Beckman — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:54:02 +0000

Sometimes we forget that some of the best tools are the simplest ones. If you had to pick just one tool for project management what would it be? I think in my case a whiteboard comes out pretty near the top, if not the top. My point is, focus on the work at hand, not the tool that gets it done. Too often we can become distracted by the dazzling, whiz-bang features of the latest software, methodology, book or trend. Focus on what works, and get the job done.

No related posts.

Scrum is not an agile methodology

Zacharias Beckman — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:45:47 +0000

People have lost sight of the fact that Scrum is not a methodology. I see comments such as “Scrum is killing agile” and it drives home, with emphasis, that there’s a huge disconnect between understanding what an agile methodology is and what Scrum is (and I know I’m beating a dead horse, but it’s important — because Scrum is not a methodology!).

Let’s start at the beginning and reiterate this original statement from Schwaber and Beedle, the creators of Scrum:

Scrum is a management and control process that cuts through complexity to focus on building software that meets business needs. Scrum is superimposed on top of and wraps existing engineering practices, development methodologies, or standards.

Scrum is a process. One process, that must be taken and combined with other practices, methodologies and standards. A process does not, in and of itself, create a methodology and for this reason I say that “Scrum is not an agile methodology.” I might even go so far as to say “Scrum is not Agile,” but that’s misleading — because as a process, Scrum is compatible with and enhances agility, either taken as an “Agile methodology” or a general practice of being agile.

As Scrum has become more of a buzzword it runs into this dichotomy more often. I experience this frequently with my clients, where the dialogue goes something this this:

Me: “So, what methodologies do you follow?”

Client: “We use Scrum.”

At this point, I feel as if, say, I’d asked for a bowl of fruit and being given a bit of jam.

Me: “Yes, but that doesn’t answer my question since Scrum is a management process, not a methodology — do you use any development methodologies?”

This last is often poorly received. It’s at this point that I typically remind my client the reason I’m here is because they’re having trouble, and the reason is likely because of poor internal processes.

Methodology is a body of practices, procedures, and rules used by those who work in a discipline or engage in an inquiry. In the context of software and systems engineering, it specifically addresses how we manage the conceptualization, specification and delivery of the software. Scrum does not cover any of this. Scrum is just a management process that can be applied to pretty much any business situation.

A good methodology is going to provide a framework in which requirements capture and management is specified. Project parameters and management criteria, such as reporting structure, authority and responsibility, status management and progress management will be specified. Program assessment goals and objectives will be specified. Assessing organizational capability and planning growth or acquisition may be needed. How requirements are stated, what depth they must go to and what standards must be met, and how to manage change in requirements will be specified. Likewise, quality assurance processes will be set forth (for example, audits and controls will be put in place to ensure requirements meet agreed upon standards). Testing of the product will be standardized as well: What techniques will be used, what are the goals of the test program, and what will the output of the test program be? User acceptance standards should be specified and usability testing programs implemented. Transitional phase operations, often overlooked until “after we’re done,” need to be planned and prepared for — and then executed. Scheduling, resource planning and budget management are of course a key component of any well-run program. And through it all, meaningful measurement criteria must be established and communicated to stakeholders.

Scrum touches only the tip of the iceberg in regard to much of this. This is intentional: Since it’s designed to work compatibly with just about any methodology, Scrum explicitly avoids putting too many constraints in place. More than anything it’s intended to refine an existing methodology and process, improving its productivity through streamlining.

Of course, sometimes Scrum is all you need. A sufficiently senior team, comfortable with the problem domain, combined with a project of reasonable size and a business that’s willing to launch without a clear end-point can work. But more often than not, one of these four essential elements is missing. Perhaps the business isn’t comfortable with an undefined, vague end-point (they may want to know what the budget is, or have a hard launch date). Perhaps the team is new, hence the necessity for more structure and measurement. It’s a rare situation that we can dive into a project with no methodology, only the Scrum process, and come out the other side in a favorable position. Sometimes it will work, but it’s a gamble — and often a gamble that the business isn’t willing to bet on.

I’d like to stop hearing “we use Scrum” in response to the question “what’s your methodology?” It’s great to say, “Rational Unified Process with Scrum to streamline it” or perhaps “XP with a Scrum wrapper so we have better visibility,” but please don’t try to deliver software with “just Scrum.”