Yesterday, Gerry Kirk and I kicked off a 4 day Agile Assessment with a presentation aimed at taking some of the uncertainty out of Agile and providing context for the transition/assessment.  See slides below.

The values and agile project life cycle slides were not show; instead, Gerry did a live diagram construction (see photo below). This approach worked well and we got lot’s of great questions.

One of the questions was about Agile contracting.  There is a good presentation I commented on in a recent post.

This fall, I had an opportunity to hear J.B. Rainsberger give an interesting, entertaining and educational talk – Introduction to Agile via Theory of Constraints.  (The same talk was given at Agile Tour Toronto, but my notes are based on an earlier talk at a client site.)

If we think about our software group as the system under study (photo – top left), then the primary measure of productivity is running tested features. (i.e. in production). The key question is how can we maximize our throughput while holding steady or minimizing inventory and operating expense. The theory of constraints is largely about the hunt for the bottleneck in the system. In J.B.’s opinion, learning is the biggest bottleneck. (I usually say communication is the bottleneck but this seems roughly equivalent).

How do we subordinate learning as a bottleneck? Some practices (photo – right) that help are working in pairs, sitting together, using estimates as budgets.

I can’t remember where this fit in, but J.B. had a great example of managing scope that he referred to as dimensional planning (photo – bottom right).  It involved looking at different versions of a car that could be delivered: Lada, Toyota, Lexus. The point is to do a quality job with whatever you do, but you may not do all the features to get a top of the line solution.

A big part of the talk was about using queuing theory to explain TDD, BDD (photo – left). J.B. has a write-up that covers part of the talk on his website. It is a nice explanation although it does stretch a bit thin from my understanding of queuing theory.

BTW, one of the best parts of the talk is watching J.B. at work with his tablet laptop which he uses like a gigantic whiteboard.  It’s a way more dynamic than slideware.

I was really excited to see the presentations from the Munich Scrum Gathering posted on the ScrumAlliance site since I was not able to attend due to a date conflict with Agile Tour Toronto. It took some time to go through all of them so I thought I would post some of the ones I found interesting here to encourage you to check them out and maybe some others. A big thank-you to the Scrum Alliance and authors for posting them.

Ideas from Other Fields

Making Change Happen – Peter Stevens

Peter Stevens has a visually pleasing presentation – Making Change Happen – that summarizes organizational adoption challenges and includes key ideas from one of my favourite books – Fearless Change. The diagram at the left illustrates that there are often factions in an organization pulling in different directions with different agendas – not just your favourite (Scrum or Agile). Check this out if you are involved in organizational change.

Social Objects in Software Development – Dave Harvey

Scrum talks about self-organizing teams. How do you get there? One idea is that we need to think about social networks. These form around social objects, so this is a good place to start. Social objects reinforce our identity and sustain our tribal identity. Consider the photo showing other dimensions of people’s lives. Not only can networks form around this, but it also primes our behaviour to think about others as … people. The presentation is done in zen style and I would totally love to hear Dave in person.

Self-Organizing & Subtle Control: Friends or Enemies? – Mike Cohn

Mike talked about self-organization not happening in a vacuum. It is management’s responsibility to guide the evolution of behaviours (rather than specify what how everyone needs work). He then went on to talk about Containers, Differences and Exchanges as a way of making indirect changes to a team. There is also a discussion of Philip Anderson’s 7 levers for influencing team evolution. Worth checking out if you are interested in coaching teams.

Stories from Scrum in Practice

Agile at Telefonica R&D Gemma_Hornos & Monica Izquierd

Although the presentation is about large scale enterprise adoption of Scrum, there are lots of interesting bits of information that apply in general. One example is image is about styles of growth of Scrum within an organization – I really like the viral/mosquito! Lot’s of other great visuals as well.

Practical Roadmap to Great Scrum – Jeff Sutherland

Jeff shares some of his key understandings of doing Scrum well. Want to double productivity? –> Focus on DONE. Want to double again? –> Focus on READY. Self-organization is identified as the 3rd way to double performance. The presentation also talks about large scale adoption and CMMI. Lot’s of good bits of info packed in here.

10 Contract Forms For Your Next Agile Project – Peter Stevens

Peter has a great analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of different types of contracts from both the vendor and the supplier perspectives. Phased development (see photo at left) is one that balances the interests of bother parties and encourages cooperative behaviours. If you need to set up a contract, check out this presentation.

Kicking Scrumbut – Rowan Bunning

Rowan takes a fun and informative look at some common failure modes that organization exhibit when adopting partial Scrum (AKA Scrumbut). Of course all the failure modes are matched with advice on what to do to resolve the problem. Even if you are an experienced coach or Scrum practitioner, you will be sure enjoy and learn from a different perspective.

Finally, the last in my series of visual notes from Agile 2009. Not my best, but I wanted to share my thoughts about the session.

Lyssa Adkins and Tobias Mayer gave a practical and experiential session at the end of Agile 2009. Lyssa has written more about this on her blog. The original name for the session was Human-Centred coaching.

One useful trick (unrelated to the topic) is to raise one’s hand and wait for everyone else to raise their hands as a soft and effective way to get people’s attention.

Powerful Questions

• Are open rather than closed
• Draw out hidden information
• Lead people to new perspectives
• Driven by curiousity
• Give people time to respond

To get good at them you can write some new ones on cards every week and use them where they make sense. The book Co-Active Coaching has a section that discusses powerful questions. It is partly related to the NLP practice of using the Meta-Model to ask questions to reveal hidden assumptions.

Powerful requests

Some tips are written in light blue above.  This is similar to the core protocol Ask for Help.

Joseph Pelrine gave a really interesting session on “Coaching Self-Organizing Teams” at Agile 2009.  (Mark Levison wrote about the pre-cursor to this session last year.)

There were a number demonstrations:

1. The first was of self-assembly (orange) and illustrated through people getting into an elevator.  They have no common goal and there is no change in behaviour.
2. Another was of people who were given the simple instructions (brown) of don’t bump, stay at the same speed and converge to the centre.  This demonstrated the idea of the team as a complex adaptive system where simple rules can lead to emergent behaviour.
3. Another was to ask people to clap there hands and then see how long it takes before everyone synchronizes.

He then went on to share some interesting ideas such as Core Group Theory – where the purpose of a company is to satisfy a core group of people.  To influence and organization, you need to know who they are.

Then things got really interesting.  Joseph likened self-organizing teams like making vegetable soup – the trick is to get the temperature right.

Checkout the heat gauge below.  As you can see there is a green zone where things are really cooking.  But beware the danger of too much heat (burning) and the cooling down phase where bad things can happen.  Gelled state is stable but there is not much innovation.  It is stable, but heat is needed to get cooking again.

What are the ways we can apply heat?

Stove #1 is about performance planning for individuals where challenge needs to be balanced against skill.  For a given skill level there is a range of challenge that can lead to a state of flow. With this model, there are two ways to climb in proficiency:

1. People can surf the top line and take on challenges beyond our capability.  Think of a snowboarder pushing boundaries of what they can do.
2. People can follow the bottom line and develop skills before taking on new challenges. This reminds me very much of Deliberate Practice – a key to Craftsmanship.

The next simulation was to have a group of people sit in a circle and pretend they are a development team.  The people on the outside interrupted them to ask questions.  Even when the team resisted, they felt pressured.

Stove #2 is to use the ABIDE model by David Snowden. (The pre-requisite is the have a context and a container.)  We need to think about how to stimulate the social network.  Here are some hooks:

• Attractor – Pride, money, quality, charisma
• Boundaries – Team boundaries e.g. traditional Dev/QA
• Identities – Role, responsibility
• Diversity – Gender, age, skills, personality
• Environment – Team room, desks, computers

We can make changes to any of these to get a shift in team dynamics.

Like this?  Joseph has some online talks on InfoQ:

• Coaching Self-Organizing Teams speaks to self-organization and the cooking metaphor.
• Dealing With the Organizational Challenges of Agile Adoption is about models for understanding conflict when adopting Agile.