‘You have to be an optimist to be an Agile Coach.’

A good Agile coach helps teams and individuals become agile through care, consideration and collaboration. What they do works because good Agile coaches believe people can change for the better. It’s about putting people first.

WARNING: It feels like magic to those who don’t care enough to work out what they need to do and get it done.

‘The team remains agile after the coach is gone.’

This is my ultimate acceptance test for effective Agile coaching. True Agile Enablement endures.

Whose line is it anyway?

I come across a number of Agile coaches who talk a lot about Agile. Agile is hard because it’s the doing that accompanies the saying that makes a person agile. Nine out of ten coaches I meet are those who live by the mantra of Do-As-I-Say-Not-As-I-Do.

Most important of all, their kind of Agile doesn’t stick. Teams may think they’re agile for the duration of such a coach being onsite, but when the coach is gone, teams are left to make-do and make-believe a fuzzy, undisciplined and/or enforced form of Agile (originally adopted to appease a forceful coach) all on their own.

Give me an example

I recently met Rupert, a charming and personable Agile coach who prides himself on being a doer. He told me that because he was having difficulties with the testers in his client organisation, he had written a code of conduct for the testers so they can work with the rest of the team. A few weeks before that he’d been preoccupied with composing a code of conduct for the business analysts. ‘And these are the rules for developers to follow,’ says Rupert as he proudly points to a flipchart among the numerous flipcharts of commandments that now cover the team wallspace. Eat your heart out Laura Ashley. Forget floral, swallow those words.

Words, words, words

What about Rupert’s team, I found myself wondering with mild anxiety. In my experience, a team has to come up with its own guidelines or manifesto through a collaborative effort. It’s part of the initiation process towards becoming a team. What happens next is the enforcement of the manifesto which should come easily – so long as it originated from the team. Otherwise, the manifesto is yet another group of words with no more meaning than a company’s mission statement, created by a small clique in a galaxy far, far away from the people who deliver business value.

Sock Shop

When coaching, I compare Agile with a pair of socks. The notion of a good pair of socks is likely to vary from person to person. Some prefer pink and others blue while the chaussettes conoisseurs among us might wear Santa socks 365 days of the year. Nonetheless, one thing is certain: we all have a common understanding of what makes a good pair of socks. For instance, most of us would agree that a good pair of socks keeps both our feet warm and dry. Once we understand the purpose of something, it’s easy to distinguish genuine function from fancy form.

Genuine Agile has collaboration built-in to make it last. If you’re living the Agile Values, trust your instinct when it’s telling you your Agile coach is wrong.

Why Exoftware?

So that on a beautiful summer’s day I find myself cycling along the low road on one of the Aran Islands to spend time with the most diverse, smart, nice and fun bunch of Agilistas I know.

I like Christmas. A lot. I’ve come to appreciate Christmas like I do weddings. I feel the same way towards Agile. All three operate on a manifesto of sorts that people can choose to either respect and adhere to or flout and play-pretend.

Everyone just wants to have a good time. And why not? In my experience, practicing Agile is a bit like driving. When you tell people you use Agile to deliver projects, you’re signalling intent, one of collaboration instead of conflict. After signalling comes fulfilment, made real through behaviour and action.

It’s like driving to the shops and indicating you want to turn left and then actually turning left. Unfortunately, many of the Agile drivers I meet signal left and then turn right. These are the same people who wonder why their passenger-team doesn’t believe or trust them to drive safely. Unskilled drivers are a menace to themselves and everyone else on the road.

Agile, like Christmas, creates a culture of shared reality. By having a common and worthwhile goal, one that produces genuine value for instance, people will figure out difficult (impossible) problems like they’ve always done: through co-ordination, cooperation and convergence.

Agile is the ultimate endurance test because it demands openness, stamina, consistency and constancy. What would your project be like if everyone tried their best to get along with one another, do the right thing and do things right? It would be like Christmas. Everyday. For Everyman. How civilised.

Make 2008 matter. Instead of letting others make mincemeat out of you. Thanks for reading. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Yesterday, I participated in the last daily standup with my latest distributed project team in 2007. Special thanks to Pete, Jeff, Smitha, Barry, Owen, Simon, Manoj, Nat, Tom, Tamas, Grant and of course, Ivan! Their greatest achievement was helping to maintain the joy-pain equilibrium that, for me, gave the project meaning. It’s people who deliver projects, but it takes real teams to deliver quality sofware. Most important of all, they helped make learning possible.

‘No egos’ – that’s an observation from the project retrospective we had back in November that sticks in my mind most. How many teams can say that I wonder? This doesn’t mean we were cold-hearted, dull automatons. Not at all. Because we had a shared understanding of what collaboration really means, we raised impediments (even if that meant sometimes we had to face more obstacles than achievements). And we pulled together to resolve them. Everyone just mucked in. You have to acknowledge a problem before you can fix it.

Over time, we came up with our own team manifesto by defining:

• What an ‘open environment‘ means to us
• What a ‘team‘ means to us
• What ‘quality software development‘ means to us.

While the manifesto is an achievement in itself, it clearly demonstrates that the best ideas come from each individual thinking as an individual as well as working as part of a team.

For me, the best day of the project was the team gathering – a day where we began brainstorming ideas that contributed to our manifesto ultimately and the day when we played the XP Game. Team Tarka vs Old Peculiar. The pictures tell the real story: so this is what a no-egos team looks like. Seeing is believing. It’s up to all of us to demand better of ourselves.

It began with MBWA…

I first came across the acronym MBWA (Managing By Wandering Around a concept revived by Tom Peters) during the DOTCOM boom. I’d just started working as a Java developer. Managing By Walking Around is about wandering the ‘shop’ floor and observing how your workers do their job. It’s about getting and staying in touch with the people doing ‘work-that-matters‘* (also from Tom Peters). It’s about learning about impediments so that, as a manager, you can help remove them. It all makes sense.

As far as I can tell, it’s equivalent to Toyota’s Genchi Genbutsu (Go and see for yourself). Unfortunately, the particular implementation of MBWA I was exposed to seemed more like a constitutional, post-lunch walkabout by a manager who didn’t care much about talking to all the people, let alone hear about our progress or concerns.

I suppose that experience made me begin to doubt management. That and the fact that pay increases seemed to be negotiated down the pub instead of being based on performance during work hours.

Call me old-fashioned – it’s simply not right.

Then one day, the time came for me to transition from developer to management. I’d read a lot about Agile and recognised the importance of delivering business value. Like all managers, I was faced with two thorny problems: 1) business value was difficult to quantify, so the movers and shakers sent out an edict of: ‘Do as I say’ using MosCoW rules; 2) developers weren’t enamoured with poorly defined requirements – it’s hard to derive satisfaction from delivering a never-ending ‘something’.

Still, I beat the ‘Deliver-Maximum-Business-Value’ drum, because that’s what leaders do, right?

Business Value = Job + Salary -> Survival + Nice Holidays. For the department. For the developers. And for me.

The Next Killer App: MBPPF!

Delivering business value alone is not enough. Not for me. Doing work-that-matters on its own isn’t enough either. Success means making the most of your options. Maximise your people’s potential and watch your options grow.**

What motivates me most is what I call MBPPF*** (Managing By Putting People First). The MBPPF model is simple, but not easy. It looks familiar because all of its constituent parts are taken from existing models. Good ideas are, more often than not, composites of existing ideas refreshed. If you have to have wheels, round ones work best in my experience.

What does Putting People First mean?

1. Start with a main goal – To deliver value to your customers: Identify what people want (preferably things that would enhance their lives in some way). Something for which there is a demand is easier to sell. This means you can focus 100% on differentiation and quality.
2. Do enough upfront business analysis: Brainstorm how best to fulfil this want (taking into consideration the product’s context such as time and place). Know why people need it, when they need it by, how long they need it for and what else they can use it for.
3. Build a team that cares: Put together a bunch of competent people who want to fulfil this want, as a team of creative, thinking individuals. Show you care by consulting, involving, informing and empowering your team.
4. Everyone does work-that-matters: This is a great motivation for many people. It leads to the elimination of waste and can be leveraged to put best practices in place. When you do something that matters, most people naturally want to get better at it. Now that’s a real bonus.

Sample practices of MBPPF!

• Put people-interest ahead of everything else (and watch the decision-making machine produce the optimal solution).
• Spend time with people because they matter most.
• Hire people better than yourself.
• Know when you need help then ask for it. I’m constantly amazed by what I get back in return.

The rest is based on what works best when you apply the principle of Putting People First. Try it. You might like it.

Useful Footnotes

*Work-that-matters: Have you noticed how many organisations are encouraging their staff to get involved with planting trees and painting classrooms these days.

**I like to maximise mine with Real Options.

***MBPPF: The Disclaimer: Just as any successful diet/fitness regime requires willpower, MBPPF requires people willing to get involved, people who will muck in as pigs instead of play chicken.

It’s that time of the year again: gratuitous displays of a jovial fat man in a red suit scaling miniature gingerbread houses and base jumping off slippery rooftops. If the advertisement boards are correct, it’s also time for seasonal teeth whitening. O! And, of course, the hordes of plastic trees in the shopping arcades. (Better a plastic tree than a tree on death row in the living room.)

Ho! Ho! Ho! Spot the problem

UK tradition has it that shopkeepers save up to pay for decorations to attract more custom during the Christmas period. In return, they get to worry about not only having their in-store goods stolen, but their pricey Christmas baubles being taken too. The plastic card boasting of CCTV monitoring is an example of trust broken. It tells us, loud and clear, that we are a thievery nation.

Where did all the trust go?

It reminds me of when managers give their teams approximate (fictitious) deadlines to work towards instead of actual ones. One date for the development team, another for the customer. Presumably it’s because they think that developers are lazy and won’t work hard without unrealistic deadlines. Such behaviour helps us identify the chicken managers from the pig managers. By keeping the actual deadline to themselves, such managers are witholding information. By withholding information, they are limiting the team’s options to work optimally towards successful delivery. By putting in a false constraint, a manager is actively guaranteeing their project will fail. By doing so, they’re also limiting their chances of personal success. If you are committed to a team, witholding information is illogical.

Teams know when they’re being controlled. Unlike collaboration, the command-and-control style of management can reduce or even eliminate trust. Without trust, there can be no loyalty and commitment. Without loyalty and commitment, you can forget about performance. Chicken managers often confuse collaboration with coercion. You have to put trust in to get trust out.

Question: What do Tom Peters and Steven Levitt have in common?
Answer: They make a living out of having and using a rare and precious thing that has made them kings. Their magic is no secret: it’s common sense.

Tom Peters Says

Tom Peters is a classic great speaker. He’s charming, inspirational and a brilliant performer. It was interesting to hear him speak about excellence in the enterprise 25 years on from when ‘In Search of Excellence’ was first published. According to the title of his talk, he’s ‘Still in Search of Excellence’ – an observation that’s at once disconcerting as well as hopeful. Disconcerting because, from experience, we haven’t solved the problem yet (in spite of the number of man years spent in this pursuit); hopeful because it gives us something to do. Problems are good. It’s often the solutions that make things go from bad to worse. I’m constantly reminded that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’

Tom began by assuring the audience that we were all leaders – weren’t we? He then went on to say: ‘We all know we’re phonies and because we’re afraid to expose our weaknesses we don’t ask the interesting questions. It’s our job as leaders to ask interesting questions.’

Tom described the essence of enterprise as:

• Cause – worthy of commitment
• Space – for encouragement and initiative
• Decency – respect and humane
• Service
• Excellence
• Servant Leadership

He then hollered a typical management mantra to the crowd like some punk rock star: ‘Park your brain at the door dude and row the slave ship!’ then lowering his voice, he continued: ‘But we have computers to row the slave ship.’

According to Tom, our only chance to succeed in globalisation is to leverage the creative and intellectual skills of our teams. Starbucks is a good example of a human function being replaced by a machine. Since coffee making is done by a machine, what Starbucks buys is individuality in their staff. When asked why Starbucks staff are constantly smiling, one manager said as a matter-of-fact: ‘We hire people who smile.’

Tom, like Levitt, fully acknowledges that he has nothing profound to say. Instead, what he does has been described as ‘blinding flashes of the obvious’. So here’s the latest newsflash: ‘Put your people before your customers,’ says Tom Peters. What will you do?

‘Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.’

– The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins

Dawkins’s examination of the biology of selfishness and altruism has led him to assert that “we are born selfish”. The manifestations and consequences of his assertion in terms of people and software development are what I have coined (the art of) Selfish Programming.

Together we can thwart it and may be even turn it into ‘environmentally-friendly’ energy. Welcome.