‘Be the change you want to see.‘ – Gandhi

Agile as a Party

I like to think of Agile as a party. And like any good party, everyone gets invited. It’s then up to you whether or not you show up. And when. If you do, it’s then up to you how much time and effort you want to put in. As to whether you’re a party animal or a party pooper, the choice is entirely up to you.

The key is to include everyone on the invite. Agile, to me, is about inclusion. It’s about making-change-for-the-better an option for everyone. It’s the kind of option that has no expiry date.

Party On!

The folks who have the most fun at such a party are those who have an open mind. Folks who’ll give things a go, including that dodgy looking punch that looks too funky a blue to be made from 100% natural ingredients. Or may be you do the Macarena because it reminds you of your first year at university.

And that’s the thing I like most about Agile. I never know upfront what I’ll get personally out of a day’s coaching or consulting. The only thing I can be certain of, right from the start, is that it’s going to be a lot of fun. That’s the thought that gets me started. It’s also the one that keeps me going.

Take today for instance. I’m on the last day of an Agile Healthcheck engagement with a team who’s Agile Enablement journey began almost exactly a year ago. The team invited me back to help take them to the next level of applying the Agile Values and Practices. We began by identifying a handful of goals, back at the start of September, such as ‘Increase team customer satisfaction’ and ‘Increase team velocity’ and defined acceptance criteria for each goal so we would know when we were done.

A month on, I’m back for a Show & Tell of the Team Improvement kind, to see how many of the acceptance criteria the team has met in 4 weeks (two iterations’ worth) of concerted effort on Continuous Improvement.

A lot has happened. Judging from the smiling faces that greet me, the team’s proud of what they’ve achieved. And so they should be. It’s a humbling moment to find oneself among people who rise to the challenge of becoming better. People who strive to improve despite the alternative, namely, this-is-what-we’ve-always-done-and-that’s-the-only-reason-we-continue-to-do-it attitude otherwise known as Mediocrity.

Learning the Unexpected

So what did I learn today? It turns out today’s Gandhi’s birthday. And how did I get to hear about it? During the ‘Information’ part of the Temperature Reading exercise. It’s exactly this sort of serendipity that makes me smile as I look up at the team’s new poster with intriguing smileys hand-drawn by each of the team member which reads:

• Everyone has value.
• You can only change yourself.
   

Agile 2009 has been an educational and uplifting conference for me. See for yourself!

My Top Favourite Sessions

Here are my top five favourites out of the dozen sessions I attended:

1. Mapping the Agile Enablement Battlefield by George Schiltz and Giora Morein – A thought-provoking session on strategic thinking demonstrating The Mapping the Battlefield approach for identifying and dealing with influencers as part of Agile Enablement at an organizational level.

2. “Flirting” With Your Customers by Jenni Dow and Ole Jepsen – A fun, yet serious session introducing an 8-step model for creating rapport with your customer through effective communication.

3. Facilitation Patterns and Antipatterns by Steve “Doc” List – An experiential session that reminds us of the importance of self-awareness, empathy and moderation if we are to play the role of facilitator effectively. (Session summary)

4. How to Develop Your Leadership Power Daily: An Agile Approach to Growth by Christopher Avery – An introduction to The Responsibility Model as a personal responsibility and way of improving individual effectiveness.

5. The Bottleneck Game by Pascal Van Cauwenberghe and me – a simulation of a production line at The Hats and Boats Company where we learned to apply the Five Focusing Steps from the Theory of Constraints.

Each of these sessions have three things in common: they are well-presented, thought-provoking and valuable for individual development and Agile team development.

The Perfection Game on Agile 2009

What I Liked About the Conference

• Day 1: The Ice Breaker Evening Event – The activities at the event, such as Giant Chess and Jenga, multiple wii game stations and an open space area,  gave attendees a great reason to mingle and network.
• The Can-Do attitude of the conference helpers and presenters was a good example of collaboration in action.
• Day 4: Dinner Banquet – The quality of the dinner was superb for a meal served to a table of 8 let along for 1,400 diners.
• Day 4 Keynote “The Dawning of the Age of Experience” by Jared M. Spool – An entertaining and educational talk on the importance and relevance of user-centred design in our lives.
• Participants were exceptionally forthcoming with their session feedback which should help improve future runnings of the sessions.
• Watching Ola Ellnestam and Gerard Meszaros in the finals at Programming with the Stars reminded me of what software craftsmanship looks like in action!
• Discovering that The Business Value Game doesn’t make learning business value modelling sufficiently explicit.  
• Getting better acquainted with old friends and making new friends.
• The city of Chicago provided numerous opportunities for promenades to relax the mind and re-charge the body after a day crammed with learning.

What Would Make the Conference Perfect

• Find a way for attendees to familiarise themselves with the programme quickly and easily (it took me at least an hour per day to decide on a session shortlist).
• Find a way of reminding attendees which sessions they attended to fuel meaningful conversations during the breaks.
• Create opportunities for the different types of attendees to cross-stage mingle instead of enforcing silos by primary interest.
• Kick off the conference with a facilitated ice breaker exercise to encourage mingling from the start.
  Intersperse the conference with ice breaker exercises to encourage more mingling throughout the conference.
• Introduce One-Minute-Presentations by session presenters at the start of every day (or every morning and every afternoon) so that attendees have more information on which to base their session choice.

What about Agile 2010?

As Agile Adoption becomes increasingly widespread, Agile 2010 will be instrumental in enabling face-to-face knowledge sharing around the world.  Agile 2009 proved to be such a hit that I’m already looking forward to next year’s conference in Nashville, Tennessee, home of country music. I hope this means there’ll be lots and lots of dancing. Best get practicing!

Meanwhile, Thank You! and Goodbye for now.

To illustrate the The Five Focusing Steps from the Theory of Constraints, Pascal and I co-presented The Bottleneck Game at Agile 2009. We had a lot of fun as usual and, in return, we’ve received lots of useful feedback to improve the way we run the session going forward.

Find out more about The Five Focusing Steps here.

What I Liked About the Session

• It was great to have the likes of Henrik Kniberg play the game and give us feedback.
• It was useful to have the opportunity to run the session as two parallel simulations.
• The two parallel simulations heightened the sense of urgency/stress (just like work!) because the two teams tried to compete with one another.

What Would Make the Session Perfect

• Limit the number of consultant players per simulation so players can all focus more.
• Use the microphones as presenters so that everyone can hear us!
• Run the second half of the session so we can apply the Theory of Constraints to our workplace (although this would require an additional 90 minutes!) and come up with a process improvement plan.

Feedback from bloggers on the session

• Patrick Kua shares his Lessons Learnt

It was good to hear Christopher Avery re-cap on The Responsibility Model in his session How to Development Your Leadership Power Daily: An Agile Approach to Growth at Agile 2009.

According to Christopher, Responsibility has long been considered as a character trait. Or, depending on your view of the world, a character flaw.

Redefining Responsibility

Newsflash: Responsibility is neither a character trait nor flaw. Christopher describes Responsibility as the way you respond to a problem. Responsibility is completely subjective. It’s also a feeling. This is why Responsibility is so difficult to talk about.

There are six progressive phases in the Responsibility Model:

1. Denial - ‘Problem? What problem? There’s no problem.’
2. Blame – ‘I don’t have a problem working with you. You seem to have a problem with me. That makes it your problem. ‘
3. Justify – ‘I guess it’s possible that I’ve become insensitive to other people’s feelings and needs. I can’t help it though. After all, I’ve been doing this job for a long time. It’s who I am.’
4. Shame – ‘What have I done? I’m going to look such an idiot in front of the people at work. How am I going to live it down? Why should they help me after the way I’ve behaved?’
5. Obligation – ‘Tell me what you think I should do. I have no choice but to do it (even though I don’t want to). I’ll do whatever you say. It’s only a job after all (no one can expect to do a job they love).’
6. Responsibility – ‘I can wait for them to change but that could take forever. No, it’s up to me. I want to fix the problem. So how am I going to be a better colleague? I know! I’ll listen more. And be more considerate towards others. It’s a start.’

What I Liked About the Session

• It was interesting to see the audience’s reaction to The Responsibility Model since the model was new to the majority of them. I remember feeling uplifted when I first came across it; the algorithm makes the notion of Responsibility explicit as a repeatable process.

What Would Make the Session Perfect

• It would have been very useful to experience the model as an exercise to internalise it.
• I would have liked to hear more about the latest research Christopher’s been doing related to the model.

Afternoon Timeslot 1:

• 14:00 – 15:30 – Learning: the best approaches for your brain with Mark Levison, Linda Rising because understanding how our mind works frees us up to grow.
• 14:00 – 15:30 - “Flirting” With Your Customers with Jenni Dow and Ole Jepsen because I want to understand how the concept of flirting can be used to improve communication at work.
• 14:00 – 15:30 - The Prisoner’s Dilemma: Applying Game Theory to Agile Contracting with Simon Bennett because I want to learn how to use Game theory to create compelling contracts.
• 14:00 – 15:30 – Skills for Agile Designers with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock because I want to learn how Agile Practices can increase the value of UX design.
• 14:00 – 15:30 – Coaching Success: Getting People to Take Responsibility & Demonstrate Ownership with Christopher Avery, Ashley Johnson because I want to learn The Challenge Game to help myself and others grow.

Afternoon Timeslot 2:

• 16:00 – 17:30 – The Business Value Game: How to build and use a Business Value Model with Portia Tung and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe because we creating the highest business value possible is why we do Agile.
• 16:45 – 17:30 – Scrum and CMMI: from Good to Great – are you ready-ready to be done-done with Carsten Jakobsen because it’s important to understand how to leverage the strength of both tools.
• 16:00 – 16:45 – Bob and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (The Biologist’s Tale of Risk and Uncertainty) with Julian Everett because it’s always handy to know multiple techniques for dealing with risk and uncertainty.

Today marks yet another Agile First – It’s the first time Pascal and I are presenting two of our all time favourite Agile games in the United States on the same day:

• 09:00 – 10: 30 (Grand Ballroom A) - We play The Bottleneck Game, a simulation of  a production line at The Hats and Boats Company where you’ll experience and apply the five focusing steps from the Theory of Constraints and learn about how it correlates with Agile, Lean and Real Options. Maximum 60 participants.
• 16:00 – 17:30  (Plaza Ballroom B) – We go for gold with The Business Value Game, a jam-packed game where you come to grips with release planning and the role of the Agile customer by playing sales people competing for resources to deliver the highest possible business value for your organisation. Maximum 50 participants.

Bonus! Henrik Kniberg, author of Scrum and XP in the Trenches, has volunteered to help facilitate The Business Value Game (having played it for the first time with us at Agile 2008) so that we can scale it up to 50 participants like we did at XPDay France earlier this year!

We’ve played these games on numerous occasions with our clients and Agilists in Europe, so we ’re intrigued by how the participants at Agile 2009 will fare compared with our European counterparts! Come to the sessions early to avoid disappointment as places are limited. We look forward to seeing you there!

Where can I find out more?

You can download the games (including full instructions!) from www.agilecoach.net and play them for free with your colleagues and even family and friends. Warning: Having fun can be hardwork!

 All the games on www.agilecoach.net are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 license.

Reviewing my plan for Day 2

As Tuesday’s conference day is fast approaching, I’ve reviewed my Real Options for the day.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to plan 1-day ahead which seems to give me a healthy balance of focus on the present day of the conference and enough information just-in-time for making well-informed choices at a sustainble pace. Sustainable pace is key at Agile 200X conferences because of the gargantuan amounts of information around!

Day 3 at Agile 2009

As usual, the sessions with emboldened titles are the ones I’ll be attending!

Morning Timeslot 1:

• 09:00 – 09:45 – Agile @ Yahoo! from the Trenches with Mun-Wai Chung and Brian Drummond because experience reports provide useful insights into an individual’s journey through Agile adoption as a part of team.
• 09:00 – 10:30 – Activity Theory for Manifesting Agile with Robert Biddle because I’m intrigued by cultural-historical activity theory, a psychological framework for understand collaborative behaviour.
• 09:00 – 10:30 – Narrative Acceptance Tests – A Behaviour Driven Approach with Antony Marcano and Andy Palmer because acceptance tests help define ‘Done’ and success.
• 09:00 – 10:30 – The Elephant in the Room: Using Brain Science to Enhance Working Relationships with Sharon Buckmaster, Diana Larsen because I want to understand how the male and female mind works and the impact it has on our relationships at work.
• 09:00 – 10:30 – The Bottleneck Game where Pascal and I’ll be co-presenting a simulation on The Theory of Constraints’ Five Focusing Steps because experiential learning provides learning that sticks!

Morning Timeslot 2:

• 11:00 – 12:30 – Telling Your Stories: Why Stories are important for your team  with Johanna Hunt and Rachel Davies because storytelling is a vital vehicle to improve our understanding of ourselves and those around us. If you love stories, check out Agile Fairytales - they help teams grow!
• 11:00 – 12:30 – You say tomato, I say Pomodoro with Renzo Borgatti because it’s a second chance to learn about personal effectiveness using timeboxing and other Agile techniques such as planning.
• 11:00 – 12:30 – Emergent Design & Evolutionary Architecture with Neal Ford because it will enable me to explain why Big Design Up Front in comparison with iterative and incremental design more effectively.
• 11:00 – 12:30 -  Help me to see… corporate culture with Alan Cyment, Tobias Mayer because I want to improve my collaboration skills by playing the Dialogue game.
• 11:00 – 12:30 – Multi-team sprint planning – how to do all the teams together with Henrik Kniberg because Henrik’s a great speaker who always provides value as a hands-on Agile practitioner!
• 11:00 – 12:30 – The Agile PMP: Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks with Mike Cottmeyer because I want to better understand the responsibilities of Agile Project Management.

‘Change happens. It cannot be controlled. It can only be influenced.’

One of the key criteria for successful Agile Adoption is to make it grow and endure throughout an organisation. To overcome this challenge, George Schlitz and Giora Morein show us how to navigate organisational relationships using an approach called Mapping the Agile Enablement Battlefield presented at Agile 2009.

Storytime: The Story of Jorj the CSM Pig

Once upon a time, there was a friendly and happy pig called Jorj. Jorj the CSM Pig was part of a great team of pigs. Together, they delivered a successful project.

Shortly afterwards, a curious thing happened. Jorj and his team were reduced to bacon.

The moral of the story, according to Giora and George, is that organisational change is difficult. In Jorj’s case, it was very difficult indeed. It’s perfectly possible to be successful at project delivery yet fail in the overall Change effort.

Put your Strategic Thinking Cap on

For Agile to endure in an organisation, it needs to be part of an organisational change programme.

Agile Adoption fails at an organisational level when we:

• Focus on delivering while ignoring the importance of organisational change
• View organisational change as a distraction
• Insulate ourselves from change beyond the team
• Too much practice – not enough principles being applied

According to Giora and George, the key to the kind of Agile that endures is:

• Develop a strategy – Find out where and when to exert influence.
• Understand that Change is War (in that it requires a strategic approach).

The Objective: Agile Team Leads (aka Scrum Masters) need to be Change Agents. As Change Agents, their objective is to identify how to invest some effort and resources on the Change effort.

The Approach: Using a ‘Mapping the Battlefield’ approach, team leads can visually represent a system of influencers by identifying influencer types, such as ‘Ally’, ‘Supporter’, ‘Neutral’, ‘Threat’ and ‘Enemy’.

There are 3 Influence Strengths:

• Undetermined influence
• Strong influence
• Weak influence.

Identifying the System of Influencers

Day 1: Establish the Perimeter – Create an alternative view of the organisational diagram in terms of influencer types.

• Identify known influencers surrounding the team – Start with the closest people to the team
• Identfy positive and negative influencers – Assess based on direct interaction as well as hearsay
• Update your map as new information arrives.

Day 2: Assess the direct influencers

• Focus on direct influencers (those who interact directly with your team)
• Add in more influencers as you identify them.

Day 3: Assess indirect influencers

• Indirect influencers that influence your direct influencers
• Influence your perimeter by influencing others
• Start with second-degree supervisors.

Day 4: Continue information gathering and analysis

• Rinse and repeat.

Putting the Action Plan into Action

The Response Strategy is to focus on the proximity and strength of the influencers.

Priority 1 – Enagage with the strongest direct threats.
Priority 2 – Enagage with the strongest indirect threats.
Priority 3 – Enagage with the weak direct threats.

My Takeaway

The ‘Mapping the Battlefield’ approach is about information gathering and analysis and strategic thinking. It can be used as an effective thinking tool so long as we live the Agile Values and behave responsibly. As always, the most useful thing to do is look within yourself and change for the better first because true leadership is by example.

The key to reliable delivery, according to Mary Poppendieck, is understanding that Workflow is Orthogonal to Schedule. This is my experience report of the session at Agile 2009.

The Secret of Success: The Story of the Empire State Building Project

The goal of the Empire State Building project was to 1) create the tallest building in the world; 2) bring in revenue by opening the building to the public within a year.

The secret of the project team’s success was Focus on Flow, in this case, getting the right materials to the right people in the right place.

Key Sucess Factors

1. Teamwork of owner, architect and builders working as one team – consulting and involving experts early.
2. Hire deeply experienced builders (then delivering to a fixed price contract).
3. Focus on the key constraint: material flow.
4. Decoupling – creating ompletely independent schedules allowed swift response to impediments/surprises.
5. Cash Flow Thinking: each day of delay cost $10,000 ($120,000 today), making speed well worth it.
6. Design to meet constraints – the schedule was not derived from the building design, the building was designed based on constraints (such as building in the middle of New York, the laws of physics, zoning ordinances).

How to Achieve Reliable delivery

1. Establish high level system goals. Create high level system design based on the goals. Understand what the the business really needs.
2. Involve those who understand the details early in the design process. There is no substitute for experience.
3. Apply teamwork based on respect and trust. Managing by solely by contract-based thinking increases costs 30% – 60%.
4. Reduce complexity with wise decoupling  (eg reduce architectural and schedule dependencies; provide alternate options for ‘Critical Path’ items).
5. Understand and manage the biggest constraint – know what that constraint is and how to deal with it.

Tips for Leveraging Workflow and Scheduling Together

1. Level the workload because it provides greater control over the schedule and increases a schedule’s predictability.
2. Create the schedule with people with knowledge and experience.
3. Optimise throughput, not utilisation because lower utilisation delivers higher performance.
4. Ensure slack is built in because it allows for team to respond to feedback and cope with normal variation.
5. Limit work to capacity.
6. Timebox don’t scopebox.

Well-known for our penchant for fun and games, Pascal and I will making an appearance at Agile 2009 to play two of the most popular games in our ensemble: ‘The Bottleneck Game’ and ‘The Business Value Game’.

Learning about the Theory of Constraints with The Bottleneck Game

Pascal and I kick off next Wednesday with The Bottleneck Game to demonstrate the five focusing steps from the Theory of Constraints and how it correlates with Agile, Lean and Real Options.

It’s a favourite among our set of learning games which demonstrates, time after time, the relevance of the Theory of Constraints not just to projects or our work, but the way we see the world around us. After playing the game with us, you’ll acquire the necessary techniques and hands-on application to share with colleagues and friends.

Join us to learn:

• About Agile, Lean and Real Options techniques
• How to understand processes, a crucial step in business analysis
• How to use the Theory of Constraints, the Five Focusing Steps and Throughput Accounting to improve processes
• How to explain all of the above to your teams and customers
• How to create a shared “big picture” vision of a value stream for people and teams who work in functional silos
• How to get teams to collaborate to reach a common goal.

Arrive early to the session because there’ll only be enough room for 60 game enthusiasts!

Surely it doesn’t get much more exciting than this… or does it?

‘Show me the money!’ with The Business Value Game

… Yes it does! Pascal and I trialled The Business Value Game for the first time in public at Agile 2008 in Toronto. We’re back this year and in Chicago with a bigger and better version based on the valuable feedback we’ve had from playing with our numerous client teams, conference goers and fellow Agilistas around the world.

Join us next Wednesday afternoon and:

• Experience the issues facing the Customer/Product Owner
• Experience the link between program, project and story prioritisation
• Discover the right level at which to estimate Business Value
• Learn “good enough” business value estimation techniques to start delivering higher value today.

We’ll be running a total of 6 parallel teams for 50 people. Come early to get a seat at the table!

Request for Help!

We’re looking for a helper to help co-facilitate The Business Value Game. The only pre-requisites are 1) You’ve played the game before and you understand how it works; 2) You want to play it again in the large with 60 people! Contact us if you’re available and interested to help out.