It’s Monday morning and what do I find? The 10 centimetres of railing that used to be covered in black-and-yellow sticky tape has been replaced by a metal casing like the rest of the stairwell railing.

Now’s that’s what I call a happy ending. T-H-A-N-K Y-O-U to the powers that be who made it possible. Who knows? May be they even care about quality – enough to get the job ‘done’. Continuous improvement in action. Marvellous

Once upon a time

My manager said to me, ‘The team thinks you’re doing a good job.’ After a short pause he declared, ‘And I agree with them.’ Then a longer pause. I suspected I was in trouble, but I wasn’t sure what for. He continued. ‘The thing is, I’m just not sure what it is you actually do.’

From Dawn to Dusk to Present Day

I’m reading a book described as an ‘intimate portrait’ of the current President of France called L’Aube, le Soir ou la Nuit (Dawn, Evening or the Night) by Yasmina Reza. I was surprised to learn that Sarkozy and I have something in common.

In a conversation with Yasmina about young people today, Sarkozy says, ‘Ce qui est un problème c’est quand ils deviennent indépendants et pas gentils, gentils c’est le plus important.’ (‘The problem with young people is that when they grow up they forget about kindness. Being kind is what matters most.’)

‘It’s nice to be nice’

That was the gist of the answer I gave my manager all those years ago when he quizzed me about why the team was convinced I was doing a good job. I remember glossing over how I did what I did because my manager graduated from the school of stick-and-carrot management (using the Command and Control Management method). He wouldn’t have understood about consideration for others. I knew this because he had previously expressed concerns about my apparently ‘weaker’ style of management.

Although I couldn’t openly admit to my manager that I worked on the principle of Putting People First back then, the team knew and that was plenty good enough for me.

Agile is all about values

Putting People First is also about Communication, Simplicity, Feedback, Courage and Respect. Most people I talk to about becoming agile almost always identify respect as the key value from which the others spring.

What’s less well-known is that respect wasn’t in the first version of the published Agile Values. Some say that respect was omitted because it was a given. Surely people know the importance of being respectful towards one another? But even assuming they know about respect, can we trust that they will always behave in a respectful way? Do you? Towards everyone? After all, everyone is valuable.

In a conversation with Pascal about the values at the SPA conference last month, we both agreed that there is a sixth value: Trust. I’ve seen trust, when combined with respect, empowers teams to grow beyond all previous prejudices and perceived limitations. Trust from a manager or team lead is crucial. Trust among team members is equally vital.

What did you do this week to improve the way you work? How can you show you trust your team more?

London, 6 April 2008, 13.20. Everything is covered in snow. On my way home last night, I ask the taxi driver, ‘Do you believe it’s going to snow tomorrow?’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. It’s happened once before, so it can certainly happen again,’ he replies.

I can tell Richard is a no-nonsense kind of guy. He doesn’t seem the least bit worried about the uncertainty of the weather. He goes on to tell me he’s already evaluated all his options come rain, snow or shine. He’s a man unfazed by uncertainty.

And so I find myself faced with more questions than when I first started my journey home:

1. Dealing with uncertainty is something we Brits excel at. If we’re used to the unpredictability of the British weather and have learned to cope with it, why can’t we do the same with the uncertainty of projects instead of pretending that plans can be done upfront or that things shouldn’t change? That way, we’ll be leveraging all the knowledge, experience and wisdom we have when it comes to coping with changeable weather. It’s what we Brits have had to live with all our lives. We’re lucky that we get so much practice. Learn more about Real Options here.
2. It’s happened once before, so it can certainly happen again. It only takes something to happen once for things to change forever. It makes the impossible suddenly possible and, more importantly, acceptable. What’s the one thing you can try doing this week to change the way you work for the better?

Dear Reader, I’m pleased to announce that the case of the troublesome staircase has finally been resolved. The staircase was re-opened sometime between late January and February, albeit wrapped up in black-and-yellow sticky tape. Susie from London Transport never got back to me, but at least travellers could resume their new year’s resolution of getting healthy by using the staircase once again.

If the staircase were a software application, then the sticky tape would be a testament to a poor design and even worse engineering as somebody somewhere probably decided that Test-Driven Development would be a) too much hardwork; b) not worth the while; c) TDD, what’s that then? or d) all of the above.
I felt relieved then disappointed when I first saw the staircase covered in snaky yellow-and-black sticky tape. I figured back then that that was as good as it was going to get. That the tape was there to stay.

The tape was going to be testament to rubbishy British design and engineering everytime I used the staircase. ‘At least you can use the stairs now!’ I hear the optimists among you valiantly volunteer. And you would have been right.

So you can imagine my surprise today when I discovered the black-and-yellow tape had been replaced by a ‘proper’ solution: the tape has been replaced with metal casings that run along the length of the rail of the entire staircase. Well, almost.

It seems the team responsible for implementing the proper solution struggled with the use of their measuring tape which means that there’s still around 10 centimentres of the railing covered in black-and-yellow sticky tape in one corner. I wonder what else that team is responsible for putting right. And what about the architects and implementers of the staircase design – what do they do now? Do they know about their design failure? Is this really a happy ending?

Why Agile?

Being an Agile consultant-coach means I’m constantly challenged by what I do, how I do it and, most importantly, why I do it. It never ceases to amaze me how much I learn about myself and others by striving to be agile. Fortunately, that’s one of the things that gives most meaning to the work I do.

Agile Everything

I recently presented at SPA and shocked the audience when I alluded to my experience of having been on an Agile death march project.

‘Surely that’s not possible?’ replied the first gasp from the audience.

‘Isn’t that blasphemy?’ resonated a second gasp around the room.

‘I’m intrigued by your negative Agile experience,’ said an Agile coach with a gleeful smile, pen poised, ready to mark me down on my Agile competency.

Why wouldn’t Agile death marches exist? After all, Agile is just another methodology. It’s simply another way of getting people to work together. You can’t immunise your project from failure just because you say you’re doing Agile. Now that would really be make believe. I call it play pretend.

Growing Old Gracefully

Q: What could possibly be tougher than growing old?
A: Trying to be agile when everyone else believes they are but aren’t.

Earlier this month, I spent a lovely Spring evening with a bunch of young Agile enthusiasts at QCon London and was asked, ‘What would be your top 3 life tips?’ I surprised myself with the following response.

1. Be true to your passion. Do what you love. I didn’t believe this was possible or sustainable when I was younger. I now know it is. Depending on your point-of-view, to do otherwise would either be a pity or a waste.
2. Being better than the rest is easy when everyone else is striving for mediocrity. If you want to stand out from your peers, you only need to be mediocre++. Is that all you really want to achieve?
3. Use your gut instinct to help make informed decisions. Having only ever had a career in IT, over the years I had learnt to value my logical brain over my creativity side. Experience has taught me that tapping into my creativity creates opportunities I never thought possible.

One life. Live it well.

The only real currency we have is time. Invest wisely.

I’m fairly certain there’s no better way of spending four Spring days in Bedfordshire, England than at the Software Practice Advancement (SPA) conference. I left feeling re-energised with plenty of food for thought on what continuous improvement (Kaizen) really means.

What worked well: The Highlights

• Playing the Snow White and Seven Dwarves Game with 16 grownups, described by participants as ‘curious, fun with excellent materials’ and got lots of feedback on how to improve the game.
• Co-presenting a Real Options session with Chris Matts and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe and explored alternative ways of how to think about Real Options. I think we were over-ambitious in our refactoring of the session – fortunately, the SPA audience remained enthusiastic and receptive to innovation!
• Co-creating a Teamwork Techniques BoF (Birds of a Feather) with Pascal and Charles Weir. It was a great example of collaborative working and learning through doing. The session was successful because it leveraged the experience and knowledge of all the participants which enhanced the quality of learning, usefulness of materials and the amount of fun had by all. The techniques covered included Creative Thinking process, Edward de Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats, Chris Avery’s Responsibility Model and Burndown charts.
• Attended an excellent session on Awesome Acceptance Testing by Joe Walnes and Dan North. The thoughtful delivery made a usually dry (but very important) topic interesting, entertaining, educational and enabling.
• Attended John Nolan’s session on Getting to ‘No’ on how to say ‘No’ in a constructive way.

Ideas for making SPA even better

• More sessions like Joe and Dan’s with a well-defined purpose, tangible and pragmatic advice and entertaining presenters
• More genuinely-interactive learning like the Teamwork Techniques BoF
• Form quartets based on at least common interest to make them more meaningful rather than dividing people into random groups of 4
• More opportunities for active conference attendee participation
• More emphasis on accelerated learning and personal development in terms of session structure and content because the best software is developed by teams of effective individuals

Thank You!

• To Pascal and Vera for their enthusiasm, feedback, support and being great idea factories.
• To David Peterson, Maria Bortes and Dyan Corutiu for participating in the rehearsal session and providing constructive feedback that helped us use the cards more.
• To Chris Cooper-Bland for co-presenting and assembling the final presentation and believing in dwarfish appeal.

And a big T-H-A-N-K Y-O-U as usual to Jim for bringing Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to life as cards and making the game real.

With Spring almost in the air, Agilistas around Europe are getting ready to attend the annual SPA 2008* residential conference from March 16 – 19 in Bedfordshire, UK.

In the Land of Agile Fairytales

Are you baffled yet fascinated by the behaviour of those around you? Have you ever wondered why they do what they do? If you answered ‘Yes’ to at least one of the questions above, then come join Chris Cooper-Bland and me at SPA on a mini-adventure of self-discovery with help from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

This is your chance to learn more about yourself to give you a better chance of understanding others. Think Kaizen Meets Agile Fairytales.

This is the second themed session in the Agile Fairytale series, beginning with a game of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves Game to help you identify the characters who interest, trouble, confound and/or confuse you most at work.

Once you’ve developed new or more in-depth insights into your own character, you will be able to choose from one of four techniques to help improve your personal effectiveness. See here for more details on the session.

I’ll also be helping out with Chris Matts’s session on Real Options. He reckons learning about Real Options will change the way you make decisions forever. Come along to see if he’s right or wrong.

After the mailman arrived yesterday morning, I found myself struggling to open my front door. Some of you probably had the same problem.

In my case, I couldn’t open my front door not because there was a gargantuan pile of love post but because I wasn’t at home. I was on an important mission. I was in Brussels meeting a completely new bunch of Agilistas to do work. Serious work.

Mission Impossible

Our goal was to be sure we delivered to our customers what they wanted. We already had a huge backlog of requirements. We had lots to do but no way of evaluating effectively the value of the requirements to our different customers with potentially conflicting priorities.

Each of us in the group had at least three roles. We were:

• A member of the delivery team
• A type of customer
• An individual who wanted to work with and learn from other Agilistas.

The Crew

The individuals present were a great bunch. They were my favourite kind of Agilistas – demonstrably open, friendly, inclusive and enthusiastic. Most important of all, they were Active Doers not Snoozers.

Together, we turned Mission Impossible to Mission Possible. Yes, there was going to be a lot of work ahead of us, but deep down we also knew it would be a great source of fun. Satisfaction was guaranteed so long as we ensured what we did M-A-T-T-E-R-E-D. To our customers and, by association, to us.

What We Did Next

We began by establishing a common understanding, the foundation to any effective, well-functioning group: our values.

1. We began by identifying and prioritising the values of the group using a brainstorming-clustering exercise.
2. Next we identified our customers and grouped them by type.
3. Then, voting using finger poker, we rated the importance of each of our group’s values from each customer’s perspective.
4. Then we reflected and evaluated what the numbers told us. In my experience, this is the most insightful step in the process. On this occasion, everyone learnt something new about the correlation between our values and our customers. This step is usually a useful indicator of the value and quality of data we get from the exercise.
5. Finally we re-prioritised our group’s values in the order of priority to our customers. This is because we all believed customer-value is what matters most.

The Magic Behind the Wisdom of Crowds

Thanks to the Wisdom of Crowds theory, we were able to derive and distil the values that reflected the essence of eleven independent, thinking individuals, each with different perspectives and motivations.

In the time it takes to make a roast dinner, the eleven of us established a common understanding with a common currency: four key values to guide us in what we do based on what’s most important to our customers and what’s most important to us. Of course this is only one way of deriving a value currency. What you end up with that determines whether or not you and your team are doing work that really M-A-T-T-E-R-S.

‘It’s not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.’

– Louise Bourgeois

I went to see the Bourgeois exhibition at Tate Modern last weekend. I couldn’t help but reminisce as I stood marvelling at the gigantic metal spiders like I did exactly ten years ago. Back then, the Dotcom boom had just begun and most business people knew we were onto something big. When the bubble burst, I managed to survive five iterations of staff reduction. All we got from management was radio silence.

The Power of 3

It was around that time that I read about a particular social experiment. A group of researchers had enlisted two types of people to test: those who considered themselves optimists and others who considered themselves pessimists.

It was an experiment of two rounds. The first was made up of groups of three, consisting of two optimists and one pessimist. Each group then spent 15 minutes talking to one another.

The point of the experiment was to determine which would be the dominant mindset at the end of the timed period given two different types of influence. Not surprisingly, the majority of groups found themselves feeling more optimistic after the first round.

In the second round, the makeup of the groups changed to one optimist and two pessimists. Again, each group spent 15 minutes talking to one another. What do you think was the outcome?

Participants by and large said they felt more optimistic after the round. What does that outcome tell us about sharing? How can we apply that outcome to stressful situations? When was the last time you talked things over instead of bottled it up?

It was nice to catch up with many of my ex-colleagues from SpringSource (formerly known as Interface21) at the launch of Spring Exchange in London this week.

Since 2006 the company has grown by what feels like an order of magnitude. The collaborative nature of SpringSource’s product development teams with the user community has ensured that Spring adoption continues at the rate hot potatoes sell on a cold winter’s day.

I still remember the day Rod Johnson told me about his new company based on open source. Back then, Java open source combined with a business model were a rarity. The key problem was sustainability. For the product developers and most importantly for the product.

Having used a prototype of Spring back in the days when EJB was an emerging technology, Spring for me is a strong example of quality software through collaboration (with both open source and commercial partners) and constant innovation. It represents what a team of brilliant minds can achieve along with the wisdom of the open source crowd.

The next BIG technical conference in London will be QCon in March where you’ll get another chance to meet the Spring team. Maybe I’ll see you there.