‘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.

How to improve your software delivery process

When it comes to improving the way we deliver software projects, it’s rarely technology that’s the real problem. Nor is it inevitably a skills issue. Instead, the greatest challenge with building software is this: How do you spot the problem when you can’t see the process?

That’s where The Bottleneck Game comes in. The Bottleneck Game simulates a production line at the Hats and Boats Company where its workers are paid a fair wage (by chocolate of course!) to produce pairs of hats and boats. For each pair of hat and boat produced by the team, the team gets paid a bonus (in the form of chocolate of course!). You don’t get fairer than that as jobs go.

The game teaches us about the Theory of Constraints (TOC). According to the Theory of Constraints, every system has one key constraint which determines the throughput of value. This constraint is called the ‘bottleneck’. The theory states that we can improve a system’s throughput by applying the Five Focusing Steps on the bottleneck. Any effort spent on any constraint other than the bottleneck will have little impact or even have an adverse effect on the existing system.

The Five Focusing Steps

Step 0: Make the goal of the system explicit – Make clear the goal you want to achieve.

Step 1: Find the bottleneck – You can spot a bottleneck because it’s usually a stressed out resource, with work piling up upstream to it and resources sitting idle downstream from it. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Do something with the bottleneck to improve the system as a whole.

Step 2: Exploit the bottleneck – Begin by ensuring the bottleneck resource is 100% utilised, focused on delivering value and working at a sustainable pace. Make sure there’s always work with high value available for the bottleneck to work on.  After all, Time is Money. As you’ve already paid for the bottleneck resource, this step requires no extra investment nor increases your operating expense.

Step 3: Subordinate everything to the bottleneck – This means the rest of the system must subordinate decisions to help out the bottleneck. Since the bottleneck is the most important part of the system, get the rest of the system to work at the pace of the bottleneck to help deliver the maximum value possible. Like the Exploit step, this step comes at little or no extra cost since you’ve already paid for the existing resources to deliver value. By definition, a non-bottleneck resource will always have slack, so you can also get the non-bottleneck resources to share some of the workload of the bottleneck.

Step 4: Elevate – You elevate by investing on training and tools for the bottleneck and other team members. You can also increase the number of the type of bottleneck resources. Since all these actions incur extra cost, you should apply Elevations only when you can’t find any more Exploits or Subordinations (which come at no extra cost in comparison). The Five Focusing Steps focuses on maximising the value of your existing investment before incurring further cost.

Step 5: Rinse and repeat – Once the bottleneck’s situation is improved and it’s no longer the primary constraint, the secondary contraint that determines the throughput of the system gets a promotion! It becomes the new bottleneck and you get the chance to apply the Five Focusing Steps all over again. Practice makes perfect!

It all sounds like hardwork and so much fun…

That’s because it is with The Bottleneck Game! Look at the intense expression on each player’s face. In spite of all the tricky origami involved, everyone who plays with us is always keen to stay after the game to talk some more about how to apply the Five Focusing Steps to their work.

Pascal and I will be running The Bottleneck Game at Agile 2009 in Chicago on 26 August. Restrictions* apply!

* There’s a maximum of 60 places in the session, so join us early to get a good seat!

‘Everything is changeable. Only change is eternal.‘ – Truism

The Problem With Me

The thing I hate most about myself is that I don’t want to change. Truth be told, I resist change a lot more often than I’d like to admit. In my cool and contemplative moments, when I’m not preoccupied with resisting change, I’ve been able to identify the following reasons of why I resist:

• Fear of the Unknown – ‘Only fools rush in. Who knows what lies ahead?’
• Fear of consequences – ‘What if it all goes wrong? What happens then?’
• Fear of waste – ‘If things don’t work out, I’ll have wasted all that time and effort that I could have spent on something else.’
• Lack of confidence in my own ability – ‘Can I really achieve what I set out to do?’
• Fear of ridicule – ‘This might make me look like a right fool in front of others.’

That’s a lot of fear to deal with. Nonetheless, let’s imagine I manage to remain calm and collected. From my tight ball of nerves, self-doubt and indigestion, a simple thought emerges, like a pure drop of water from the French Alps. The root cause of all my fears is my fear of F-A-I-L-U-R-E.

Try and Do Your Best

The fact is, Resistance and Flow both require energy. Unlike Resistance which shuts down the thinking you and limits your options, Flow enables you to keep an open mind. Flow helps you focus on the present. Flow keeps you moving. Before you know it, you embrace and thrive on change instead of cloying into a tight ball of nerves, self-doubt and indigestion going nowhere.

Catch Yourself Doing Things Wrong to Do Them Right

I’ve learnt to manage the Resisting Me. Whenever something becomes difficult, ‘DING!’ goes the bell in my head, clear as a drop of water from the French Alps, and I ask myself: ‘Am I resisting? Why am I resisting? What can I do to flow?’

• Fear of the Unknown translates into ‘Let’s hear out your idea.‘
• Fear of consequences becomes ‘What are the risks and issues?‘
• Fear of waste translates into ‘If things don’t work out, I’ll have learnt something valuable.‘
• Lack of confidence in my own ability becomes ‘What does the situation remind me of? What did I do to make it work the last time around?‘
• Fear of ridicule translates into ‘She who dares grows.‘

Of course all of this only matters if you choose your attitude today. And the one you take to work tomorrow.

If you were to ask me, ‘What’s the best way to get the most out of a conference?’ I would reply, ‘To present a session – it’s a great opportunity to consolidate, reflect on and share your experiences! Plus you’ll amplify your learning by getting feedback from a live audience.’ In my experience, presenting (and, better still, co-presenting) is more fun than you can ever imagine.

If you were to ask me, ‘If I could only go to one Agile conference this year, which should it be?’ I would reply, ‘XP Days Benelux of course! It’s a conference organised by Agilistas for Agilistas. And we mean it.’

At XP Days Benelux, we create better conferences year on year by putting the Agile Values and Practices into practice.

• Communication: The first step in participating is to submit a session proposal. It’s the best way of getting the most out of a conference!
• Simplicity: We encourage folks to submit their proposal as early as possible – even (and especially) if it’s in draft form. A great way to know if an idea is any good is to sound it out on an audience.
• Feedback: We ask all submitters to provide feedback on proposals using The Perfection Game. The best proposals are the result of iterative and collaborative thinking. And, of course, great sessions help create a great conference!
• Courage: Every presenter takes a chance when they submit a session. With so much to gain, what’s there to lose?
• Respect: At XP Days Benelux, we provide an open and friendly environment where we can have fun and learn from one another.

Why not submit a session proposal today?

Hurry! The closing date for proposal submissions for XPDays Benelux 2009 is 1 August 2009. Find out more about past XP Days Benelux conferences here.

‘A crisis is too good an opportunity to waste‘
– Anon.

Meet the Purple Cow

‘Something remarkable is worth talking about. Worth noticing. Exceptional. New. Interesting. It’s a Purple Cow. Boring stuff is invisible. It’s a brown cow.’ (Seth)

Are you seeing purple?

When it comes to changing for the better, there’s no time like the present.  According to Seth Godin, the key to succeeding in an age with infinite choices, impossible-to-tell-before-you-buy quality and grossly limited time is to be remarkable. To be purple.

The 4-step guide to breeding Purple Cows

1. Come up with a remarkable idea: Invent a Purple Cow!
2. Milk the cow for everything it’s worth.
3. Have a Purple Cow succession strategy: Create an environment conducive to nurturing Purple Calves.
4. Rinse and repeat.

Advertising alone is not enough

• Be innovative – Stop advertising and start innovating!
• Appeal to early adopters – They’re the sneezers who’ll propel your idea or product among the slower adoption groups in Moore’s idea diffusion curve.
• Invest in talent and put in the hardwork – The Purple Cow requires talent and a lot of hardwork. A Purple Cow isn’t a quickfix.
• Differentiate your customers – Target and reward the sneezers. Focus on the sneezers.
• Measure, measure, measure – from your products to interactions. Respond to the feedback by adapting and changing for the better.

How now Purple Cow?

Here’s Seth’s takeaway in a nutshell. It’s got Agility built-in.

• Trust: Be authentic in what you say and do.
• Iterate: Iterate over the things you do.
• Incremental Change: Develop new ideas and implement them incrementally.
• Courage: Encourage new ideas and embrace change. Instead of saying, ‘That sounds like a good idea, but…’, try ‘Why not?’

Things to remember during your stay on Animal Farm

• Boring is risky and, according to Seth, always leads to failure.
• ‘The Purple Cow is so rare because people are afraid.’ (Seth)
• Wake up and smell the cheese! What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

‘Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog‘

– Haruki Murakami

Experience that counts

If you were to ask me: ‘How long have you been running?’ My reply would be: ‘I first started running four years ago. Since then I’ve run three races, two 5ks and one 10k, both for Cancer Research, raising around £1500 in total.’ If you were to ask me how much experience I have in running, my reply would be: ‘One month.’

That’s because I consider elapsed time and actual experience in doing something to be two different things. The figure of one month is the actual amount of learning and training I actually did if I were to condense all the time and effort spread over the four years.

Take for instance someone who says they’ve got over twenty years of experience in software delivery. What I would want to know is if it’s twenty years of concentrated learning and experience or if it’s the same year repeated twenty times. It’s important to distinguish between the two because they differ tremendously in value.

Running for your life

Since I’m aiming to run this year’s Cancer Research 10k in 55 minutes or less (a new personal best), I’ve decided to take things more seriously. I’ve been asking fellow runners for advice, reading runner magazines and have even undergone gait analysis (this involves running on a treadmill in a sports shop in full view of passersby looking bemused while sipping their lattés).

And, thanks to my newfound surge of seriousness, I stumble on Murakmi’s novel about his experience as a runner and writer.

What I talk about when I talk about running

In his novel about writing, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami identifies the top three qualities of a novelist (which, conveniently, also applies to a runner or anyone with a goal) as:

1. Talent
2. Focus
3. Endurance

Shooting Stars

The top quality has to be be talent. You’ve got to have a bit of this to succeed. Murakami acknowledges that talent is more of a prerequisite than a talent. That’s a brutal fact. Talent is a slippery thing. Firstly, you can’t control the amount of talent you’re endowed with. Secondly, assuming you’ve got some, it comes and goes as it wishes, instead of being summonable like willpower (and willpower itself can only be honed through practice and discipline).

Focus, focus, focus!

Murakami describes focus as ‘the ability to concentrate all your limited powers on whatever’s critical at the moment’. Without focus, it’s impossible to achieve anything of value. But it’s not all doom and gloom. The good news is that focus can compensate for erratice or even a lack of talent.

Hasten slowly, steady does it

Murakami compares endurance with breathing, ‘If concentration is the process of just holding your breath, endurance is the art of slowly, quietly breathing at the same time you’re storing air in your lungs’.

You get what you put in

The really good news is that unlike talent, both focus and endurance are disciplines and therefore can be acquired and improved with lots of practice. Apply a regular stimulus to step up your training level, then rinse and repeat. Last but not least, remember to be patient. It’s with this regime that Murakami guarantees results in our endeavours.

As usual, I get a second opinion. ‘How do you get so fit?’ I ask Brad, the gym instructor. ‘Two things. Diet and a lot of effort’. Sounds simple. And it’s anything but easy.

(During training for a 10k near you)

Brad the Instructor: Look around you!
P.: ARRRRGGGHHH!
Brad: Joining a gym doesn’t make you fit by default.
P.: ARRRRGGGHHH!
Brad: Neither does working as an instructor.
P.: ARRRRGGGHHH!
Brad: Remember team: a healthy mind demands a healthy body!

According to Brad, there’s no need for drugs, state-of-the-art equipment or colour co-ordinated lycra gym kit to get the job done. Brad believes that healthy people are a result of will, discipline and perseverance. So why not take part in a 5k or 10k run near you?

One good deed a day

Fancy dabbling in a bit of wealth re-distribution? Or may be just some Plain-Old-Sustainable-Philanthropy? Here’s your chance! We’re hoping to raise £1,000 plus I’m training for a new personal best of 10k in 55 minutes. Sponsor Pascal and me for the Cancer Research 10K at Hampton Court on 27 September 2009.

Happy exercising! And Thank You!

This week begins with another Agile First: the first ever Mini XP Day Benelux conference. The one-day conference is a second chance to attend 9 of the session favourites from XP Days Benelux 2008 based on last year’s participant and conference organiser feedback.

What Went Well

• 48 participants attended the first ever Mini XP Day Benelux conference!
• As organisers, we improved our effectiveness by using kanban boards to organise ourselves prior to the conference and on the day
• The cheery and funny Rob Westgeest and Marc Evers were entertaining as conference hosts
• Elewijt, the conference venue, was spacious, airy and well-equipped
• Working smoothly as a triad to co-present The Business Value to a home crowd with Vera and Pascal
• Trialling a number of improvements on The Business Value Game based on player feedback from the many previous sessions we’ve run
• ‘Working with Resistance’, with Olivier Costa and his sensei Frank Vanhoeck, a beginner’s Aikido session
• Catching up with Beneluxian Agilistas such as Johan Peeters and Xavier Quesada
• Meeting new Beneluxian Agilistas such as Jef Cumps and Kris Philippaerts
• The thoughtful giveaways selected by Vera
• Belgian food is D-E-L-I-C-I-O-U-S!
• Being present at an organisers’ dinner meeting and conference retrospective in person
• Running 9k in hilly Tervuren forest without stopping once!

What Went Wrong

• I didn’t meet as many participants as I would have liked – one day is so short!
• Long queue for buffet lunch
• Ran out of some buffet choices for last ones in

Puzzles

• If you already work well as a team, why use Agile?
• Who learns more: the one who talks more or the one who listens more?
• Why weren’t topics posted for the Open Space track?

Lessons (Re-)Learnt

• When I resist, flow instead
• Exercise is equally important for the mind and the body
• A good teacher accompanies their student to discover the answers together instead of just giving them their opinion
• Talk less, listen more
• Challenge everything, most of all, myself
• 2009 is the year of cartoons in Belgium!
• XP Days Benelux 2009 (to be held this November in Belgium) is going to be F-A-B if the past conferences are anything to go by. I hope to see you there!

A Note about Pigeon Fanciers

‘Duivenbond’ means ‘Pigeon Club’ in Dutch. Duiven Bond is a place where local pigeon fanciers gather to race their pigeons. Many Belgian towns have one of these. As far as I understand, pigeon racing is fraught with three major challenges:

1. Race-pigeon-doping (because some folks bet vast sums of money on races)
2. Anxiety among owners as they  crouch in the pigeon’s cage awaiting the return of their pigeon
3. For the competing pigeon, the threat of being turned into pigeon pie if they lose the race.

What have you learned today?