Environment and the Desire to work

In the last 2-3 years in my career, I have been working mainly as an Agile coach in organizations that were transforming to some sort of agile delivery framework. This means that the default mindset of working on these organizations has been complex, multilevel, old and in general slow. As an example, it takes about 1 month, 9 people, 80 emails and a couple of form requests, to add a column on a table. As an agile coach, this is where I find inspiration to help and bring a change, improve something and someone's daily job routine.
But it has a toll on me. As an extrovert, I am running out of external energy to feed me and keep me positive. I like to do things. I like to see people working on exciting stuff, being innovative and motivated to come up with the best idea possible. I like to be pushed to my limits and test my creativity, my energy, my skills and eventually, keep me energized. None of these has been at the right dosage for me recently.
And then I heard of "Give camp". A friend of mine is part of this and mentioned it to me. It is practically a bunch of developers, project managers, UX designers, copywriters, coordinators, etc that volunteer a weekend to build digital solutions for non-profit organizations. I thought that is a very cool opportunity for geeks to shine and show how valuable they are! So I registered.

6 people built a website from scratch (Wordpress) over the weekend (Friday evening till Sunday afternoon)!! There were some tables and columns created, but didn't take nearly as long as I have been seeing lately. On top of that, we also had time to have a break and go visit a submarine that was right beside the venue. 2 developers, 2 product owners (from the non-profit organization), 1 project manager and then a part time copywriter and a part time designer. We worked, we laughed, we made friends, we discussed and we loved what we did! It was all for a good cause at the end. Go see it : http://www.lakewoodalive.com/

What this weekend reminded me, was the power of a small team that has the right access to the right tools and that works closely together. "Small animals move faster than big ones". This is so important when you think about delivering often and small batches. One of the core concepts of Agile delivery. Any other person added to that team, would have brought more delays than help. Any more process than a white board with stickies moving from ToDo to Done would have been adding delays and annoyance. There were a couple of times when we needed "specialists" like someone that understood well the hosting tricks or working on htaccess redirects. We asked them to drop by our desk for a while, help up, thank them and off they went. 2 Product owners were constantly being asked to prioritize the backlog and that helped keeping everyone on track and focused. At the end, they would take a look at what was done and give the ok to move the sticky to Done or not.

Why scale agile? It is so beautiful when it's small, fast, lean and valuable.
I came back to work on Monday and looked at my emails waiting for someone that waited for someone to approve someone to push a button. I didn't know these people. They were all remote, and they were called "resources assigned to my project". I do not believe that these people had bad intentions and wanted to delay our delivery. It is the extras added in the process, in the necessary steps to accomplish a task, in the number of people that had to be involved to accomplish that task, in the managers that had to be added for approvals, and so on and so on. It is the big silos created with a narrow focus and all the paper work that surrounds work intake and work delivered by them. It is lack of motivation that comes when working on slow moving and sometime bureaucratic environments.

Can we de-scale corporations to small groups? Like the planes that move together and make a lot of fun air-tricks or combat (same goal) but are all independent units with a clear purpose and able to deliver fast.

 

  

Measure me, Please!!

I was asked to run a training for a small group of new Product Owners. They were about to be part of a new project starting soon. The team and the Scrum Master have worked together before, but with other Product Owners. So they asked me to help these new Product Owners to understand some context on Agile, Scrum and what is the role of the Product Owner.
I have done this kind of training multiple times before so didn't need to do anything specific. I loved the fact that they came from a Lean mindset and some of the concepts that usually take time to discuss, went very smooth with them. Loved it!! I even asked them if I could shadow them for a day and see what they do. Their titles were "Manager of Continuous Improvement team", how cool is that!! (ok, there is something wrong with me).
Part of the training is also an exercise that I run with them where I take a real project and I walk them through Intake process and then building the Story Map together. This means that they start by explaining me the project, the goal, the benefits, etc. This project was about setting ways to track and measure people's activities in order to use it for their performance review.
All of a sudden, all the joy I had built up while discussing with them about the Lean mindset and Agile way of working,  was all shuttered  and broken into little tiny pieces. While they kept explaining to me how they wanted to measure 100% people usage, and how they wanted to measure if in a team of two people one of them did 40% of work and the other 60% of it, my mind was spinning on a different dimension. I so wanted to stop them and say "But guys, they are people, not machines! Why would you want to measure people like this? What kind of performance are you measuring like this? What kind of behavior do you expect to see after you do this? You even want to spent a lot of money and have this project to build a system that will measure this!..." I think I started boiling inside and was coming up with ways to get them to stop this monster project. So I asked if in a higher level, was this the most important project to invest? Maybe this team can be used to build something more useful to business needs. And they told me that even higher level managers prioritized this project to High and they want to see it done. I think my face was changing shape and color because at one point they stopped and they were looking at me with a confused look.

So I asked "Have you received any feedback from your end users on this product? We need them to be involved". And the answer made me drop my jaw "They asked for this! We prioritized this high because they have been asking us for a long time about this!"
Everything dear to me about people management, all Management 3.0 ideas, everything that Deming has said, all models about Trust, team work, team health...everything went for a moment down the drain! Then I had the opposite idea: Is this company to a level of operation where they have done all the things I had in mind and now they have found other revolutionary ways to work with people?!!

And then something came in my mind that helped me to get back to chill mode again.

CONTEXT!! Yes, Context is truly everything!
I had forgotten that the people that would be measured by this system were not knowledge workers. They were people that worked in shifts at a distribution center. Very manual work, with scheduled breaks and an agreement on the time they would take for a coffee/smoke break. Even their titles are the ones I have heard before from Amazon, such as "pickers", "shippers", "people on the floor", etc. So Taylor's theory still works for them. They go to "performance review" meetings without knowing how they were being measured. They all moved boxes from a trailer to the conveyer or vice-versa. They all get to work at the beginning of the shift and they all leave when the ear-piercing buzzer goes off. So they were asking their managers "What does it mean to be a good employee? How do you know who is a high performer and who is not? Why X is being told is a good employee when he takes a lot of coffee breaks?" And managers asked for help to create a system on how to give sense to what these people do, set up a way to measure the lead time for a certain process based on some parameters, and then make this visible to everyone so they know what do they need to do in order to get a bonus!

After this, I started collaborating with them on creating the Story map and other conversations related. At the end of the day I was still thinking the ethical side of what I did today, and at the end I think I did the right thing and helped some people that wanted to solve a good problem. I just had to move myself into a different environment from where I am usually used to work, consider different parameters and inputs, looking to solve a problem from a different dimension.

If you read this, and you are an Agile coach, I would love to hear your feedback.

Moving to Scrum of Scrums

It's about 10 months now that I have been working with a project team on a 1year and half long project. My role started as Project Manager, moved to Scrum Master and now I'm Coach/Agile guide.
As new to Agile, my team was pretty insecure 10 months ago on how will they get a handle of this huge project, AND do that in a new way, Agile, as part of the transformation the company is going through.
At the beginning, I started this project with 6 people.
2 months after there were 25 people involved (either core or external)
3 months after there were 45 people involved (either core or external)
5 months after we had a good understanding of the core team and externals.
There were about 30 people on the Core team and maybe another 30 as externals/SMEs/as-needed.

You can probably all jump and tell me how I should have started splitting this team right away into smaller teams. Yes, yes. I know.

I will tell you the 2 reasons I had  to continue with 1 big team for a little longer:
1- These teams did not know a lot about each-other's areas. Consider this a project like an app with multiple components, but all presented through 1 interface. It is something like what Spotify uses when they talk about their squads. But in this case these components were not talking in a "controlled" way to each other. Everyone knew well their component and a little bit about how their component connected with 1 or 2 other components. Looking at the big picture, nobody knew how all the pieces connected together and what was the ripple effect of a small change we would make on one component.By working together as 1 team, they got to learn a lot about each-other's areas, about the other components and understand better the effect of their changes. If you put this on the System thinking, we moved from a system where everything was complex, to a system where some components became complicated and some are still complex.

2. As new to agile, they all needed help with thinking, planning, reporting, understanding the meaning behind certain scrum ceremonies, etc. Doing most of the scrum ceremonies together, all of them got to hear from me the same message, at the same. Of course, I had to put more attention, time and coaching on the teams that were bigger and had to work on the bigger component. Nevertheless, after 7 -8 months working like this, they all got to a comfort place with what Scrum meant, how to run the ceremonies, what the Product Owner role was, what did I mean when I asked them "What do you really mean when you say - We are Agile?", etc. As part of this process, some people grew up naturally into some areas they didn't know they had the skills and strength to shine. For example, one of the Business Analyst showed a lot of skills that are required from a Scrum Master. Because we had multiple Product Owners, we had to pick one of them as Product Champion. He showed some really good leadership skills on handling not only his team (where he was playing the Product Owner role) but also coaching the other Product Owners of the other components. The Dev lead, grew as a technical coach for the developers we had to hire and for the new team of automation testers we started for the first time. The Project Manager went to a Scrum Master training and came back with a lot of energy to share.

So as per the pure spirit of the Agile development, this 1 project team grew empirically on knowledge about the product they are creating together AND on the process they are using while working together.

It was time to split them into smaller Scrum Teams.
I thought this would really easy, but I was wrong. Although the idea was taken as "Sounds great!" when I first presented to them during a Retrospective session, they were still hesitant to action on it. Project Manager was one of the members that put the foot on the break the hardest. She was feeling like she was loosing control of the project. How could she manage now these teams? How could she trust now these new Scrum Masters to do the job right? I know this because I found myself answering more than once questions like:  What will happen to X person that needs to go into all the other standups? How will we handle dependencies between these teams? How will we know when there are problems?
 So it took about 1 month and half to make this change official but we are now a project made out of  9 scrum teams with sizes from 3 to 14 people.

I need to break them again!!! 14 people is a big team and 3 people is a very small team. Yes, yes I know!

As a change agent, I have to pace changes I bring. It was a big deal to get here. I want them to focus now on getting better results within these smaller teams. I expect a better focus to their work, smaller iteration length on at least one of the teams and, a better focus and clear understanding on the dependencies between teams during the Scrum of Scrums sprint planning. Once I verify this hypothesis, we will decide what to do next.
The good thing is that now I have 9 Scrum Masters in training.  Pretty soon I will see a group of Scrum Masters discussing and solving issues between each-other, rather than look on my direction.

Kids as Products

I guess I am not the only person that is married to someone that comes from a different culture, and as such has different values in life. This is cool up to the point where you find yourself being played by the child, in our case a girl, pre-teenager. She comes to me and asks for something, I say No. She goes to daddy and asks for that same thing and hears Yes.
At her karate classes, I happened to meet her friend's grandpa', who happened to be a life coach. Often I spend the 1 hour karate class talking to him and, let's be honest, sometimes stealing some ideas from him. As an agile coach, anything people related is important to me so I have never enough good ideas to grab and use.
A week ago, he gave me this idea to have a meeting with my husband and decide on the Vision for our daughter. Once the Vision is defined and agreed, than when we get asked by her to do/buy/get/start  something, we can easily go back to the Vision and ask "Is this going to help her get one step closer to the Vision we agreed?" and if yes, then say Yes.
I just had a "Eureka!" moment. He considers my daughter like a product that we have to create!
I coach everyday my team to focus on the goal, what we want to achieve, how every story that we commit will bring us one step closer to the goal. I constantly remind my Product owners to go back to the Vision and make decision based on "Is this taking us one step closer to what we want to achieve?"
Now, I am not planning to take this literally and consider my daughter a product, with releases and versions and continuous delivery...nope! But having a Vision and using "Responding to change over following the plan" principle, I think it is a good way to align the efforts and decisions.
So we had a family meeting and we agreed to some basic and broad things. My daughter was present and she had a saying  about everything we put on the Vision. As a result we created also some personality attributes that she has to work on in order to achieve this Vision. For example,
Goal: Travel around the World and see a lot of places
Attribute required: Have an open mind and tolerance toward other cultures. Learn other languages.

As much as I wanted to put there "Goal: have PhD", I was pushed back :) Ok I get it. The idea is that we are not setting here specific goals. If she wants, she can open a bakery and make french bread rather than have PhD on Bio Chemistry. So we agreed that the number 1 goal is "Be Happy", whatever she decides to do.
Not sure where will go from here because now it needs some discipline to start using this, keep each-other accountable that all our decisions are helping to get one step closer to the Vision, etc, etc. But if nothing more, it was a good family meeting, good brunch at a nice restaurant, some good awareness of what the expectations for the future are and ....fun ... yeah, something like " if you want to have a private jet as a goal then  we can put PhD as well on the list ^-^"