You move into a lovely new office. Lots of light and open spaces. Beautiful. Modern. But no walls.
Agile kind of assumes you’ve got walls. Whiteboards. Sprint Plan. Product Backlog. Burn down Charts. Kanban boards. Cumulative Flow Diagrams. All prominently displayed to transform your office into an Informative Workspace.
So what do you do when there are no walls?
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Epics aren’t very good for driving the development team because Epics lack sufficient detail and will take too long to complete anyway. But Epics are, like their smaller relatives the user story, great as a place holder for a conversation.
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The most liberating day of my career was when I realised that, despite being responsible for the project I was running at the time, I actually controlled very little of what happened. That was the day I freed myself from the “fallacy of control”.
I can’t really control who does what. I can’t really control whether an individual does the work to an acceptable quality. I can’t control whether or not the product owner is going to change their mind about priorities. I can’t control whether the proposed technical solution turns out to be much harder than anticipated or just a dead end.
All I can really do is influence what happens in my programme/project. Spot issues quickly and react appropriately. Lean-Agile gives me the tools to do that.
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As I’ve said before the most common problem I’ve seen with software development teams is over commitment. If worse comes to worst you get to the end of the spring before realising the problem. But you don’t have to wait until the end of a sprint to take corrective action.
Taking Corrective Action mid-Sprint to address Over Commitment
What I didn’t mention is that more mature teams are likely to spot what is going on earlier.
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Mike Lowery – a fantastic Scrum coach – has written a post called It might look like rapids, but it’s still a waterfall. This is part of Mike’s series on Scrum coaching patterns (or team anti-patterns) and in this post he concentrates on the “The Cataract of Stealth”.
Mike starts by outlining how a sprint should look: “you should see a sort of tag team effect where 1 or 2 stories are in flight, as they get close to being finished the next stories are kicked off”. In contrast “The Cataract of Stealth” means the team start too many user stories at the same time thus risking finishing any of the user stories at the end of the sprint. Often this is caused by team imbalance, e.g.. too many developers for the number of testers.
The cataract of stealth is a real problem and I recommend people have a look at Mike’s post for more detail including his very sensible solutions. (It also has shades of the Overcommitment Bear Trap.)
I just want to add one thing. What Mike’s post highlighted for me was a (small) convergence of Scrum and Lean/Kanban thinking. The constraint on having “1 or 2 stories” in flight during a sprint is work in progress (WIP) constraint – a concept straight from Lean/Kanban.
You have to keep your feet on the ground when others want to put you on a pedestal. After a while on a pedestal, you stop hearing the truth. It’s filtered by the henchmen, and they read you so well, they know what you want to hear. You end up as the queen bee in the hive, with no relationship with the worker bees.
Bill Burns, CEO of Roche Pharmaceuticals
quoted in Goffee & Jones (2006), p. 43
One of my project managers recently mentioned that, despite being a programme manager, my own management style is quite "hands-on". In the sense of being on the ground with my team rather than in the technical sense although the two often come together. This approach has held me in good stead over the years.
Others, like Bill Burns quoted above, have realised dangers of being distant from the people doing the work and the corresponding benefits of being on the ground. I thought I’d take a quick look at some of these previous advocates of being on the ground:
I’ll wrap up by having a quick look at the Agile practices that help me be on the ground.
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Recently people at work have been asking my advice on how to run post implementation reviews of major programmes so I thought I’d write up my thoughts. I believe there are two types of post implementation review and I recommend doing both. The first type happens in Project Closure and the second happens after the project has finished, i.e. Post Project.
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Quality Management, in a project context, is concerned with having the right processes to ensure both quality product and a quality project. This article describes Traditional Quality Management, Agile versus Traditional Quality Management, Agile Product Quality, Agile Project Quality, Agile Product Quality, Agile Quality Assurance and Control, and Agile Quality Improvement.
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Estimates are an essential part of Agile Project Planning. Software estimation has always been problematic and people have proposed many different ways to do estimating. Different methods are on a spectrum from formal to informal and from supposedly objective to seemingly subjective. Different methods also get individuals estimate or groups. And some methods estimate size and derive effort while others estimate effort directly. Estimating in the Agile world has settled a certain approach which might be characterised as expert group estimation of size. this article covers Traditional Project Estimation, Agile versus Traditional Estimating, Estimating User Stories, Estimating Tasks, Contingency, and Agile Ballpark Estimates.
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Executing is one of the five project management process groups in the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) from the Project Management Institute (2004).
Project Execution is where you build the project deliverables and hand them over to your customer, i.e. where you build and deliver the software. This is where most of the project effort is invested. Agile Project Planning says what you intend to do, when, and Agile Monitoring & Control helps you stay on track but Agile Project Execution is where you do the business.
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