Bring in the Communication team!

I am recently assigned to work on a project that in reality is a program. It is so big that it has its own PMO, Change Management team and Org Chart. The team keeps growing to the point that 4 team rooms were not enough so we had to move to a new location and we have a team floor.
As a coach that joined team late in the project, one change I decided to make was to collocate IT, Business and Vendors. They were all sitting in different areas. Close to each-other, but not together. In my mind, a small change like this, would make a big impact on how the information will flow and how the collaboration will improve. So I suggested that when we move to the new place, we re-arrange the seats so we create these cross-functional and cross-vendor areas on the floor. It was taken in a positive way and I heard some PM and some Directors supporting this idea.
Due to the higher levels involved on this, I was not part of the move-plan. So patiently, I waited to see if my suggestion was considered. On the moving day, we moved to our desks and I noticed who the clear line was put between the Business side and the IT side. The line is actually right at the end of my desk. It is a narrow path for people to move and then there is a desk where someone from Business is sitting.

I decided to call this narrow path "Checkpoint Charlie"

Through some Lunch&Learn sessions I have been running, I created some connections with the Change Management team. They invited me to a meeting with them, and one of their concerns was that they didn't know the scale of the change this project is bring on the IT side. They had a good knowledge on how business was changing, what areas needed more training, etc. Nothing on IT.
So I asked them what was their plan, their next step. And they looked and me and said "We hope you can help us connect with IT. We are creating communication emails, internal websites and have weekly meeting to improve this".

I am not against having emails that go to everyone on the team and gives everyone some updates on what is going on around, ways to thank and support each-other, any baby's born, any events coming up...etc.
But I am against using these emails as the transportation vehicle of a message from Business to IT.

I told them about my idea of changing how we are sitting now. How we can organize the areas where Business and IT are sitting close together. They looked at me baffled. That was a decision made by PMO and executed diligently by an assistant admin. So diligently, that when I suggested the idea of teams being created by "Who do we need to make this work stream successful?" on an empty wall where everyone could write the names of the valuable people, she started screaming to people and telling them that SHE was the one to make that decision!

I asked the communication team what was their goal. They mentioned that the main thing was training and readiness, but communication was a big concern. Here we have a group of people (some of them contractors that are not cheap at all) that instead of helping with what brings value to the delivery, help with moving messages back and forth. All because the walls between Business and IT are still guarded by PMO.

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 ^-^"

Meeting Protocol and Context switching games

My team is going through a big integration stage and it is showing to be really complex situation. A lot of people are involved, they make plans and have meetings.
I am seeing a couple of problems:
- Meetings becoming a big waste of time
- Everyone multitasking

So we had a Lunch&Learn today and I played two games. One of them, The Meeting protocol, is something I came up with Gino Marckx, after his "Core protocols" session he had with the coaches last Friday. I put down here the plot and personas we came up with. It ended up really fun and they actually thought that Alignment Check was a good idea. Check-out did feel a bit rude for them (!) so they think they should rather say "I am ok now and got what I needed out of this meeting " not "I'm checking out". Also, when someone starts using phone or laptop during the meeting, they either say "I'm checking out" or someone will ask "Have you checked out?".
One thing was interesting during the acting. The guy that picked the Martin persona, did not get on the role at all. He continued being himself. So someone else jumped and asked: Can I act your role?. They agreed and I have to say that the second actor did a better job at the end.
According to some statistics about meetings, they have found that 55% of meeting is dominated by 2 people. This was really clear, Mary and Sam were constantly talking while Barb and Jane were more vocal during Alignment check. So Alignment check is a good technique to get the feedback from the quiet people during the meeting.

The other game was the Context Switching game.  We did not have much time for the Context switching so we played only the multiplication by 3 and Alphabet (skipped the multiplication by 5). I think even that was good enough to bring up the point and see the time spent between switching the tasks. It felt painful for the non participants to see how much the participants were trying to get back to where they left, so they started helping! Still, some parents with teenagers, think that listening music and doing home work, might not be bad. Maybe. At the end listening music does not request your envolvment/response/act on something. It's between texting and studying that the problem is. Let's see how this game will be received when they go home and play it with their teenagers. At least, parents are getting some learning out of it (and that's what I really care :) )

At the end, everyone enjoyed it and I heard one comment saying "This is the most fun I have had since I started this project"

MEETING PROTOCOL GAME

Plot:

Will ask for 4 people to volunteer and pick one piece of paper where there is a profile of the person they will act. Will give them some time to read their personas and answer any question, without revealing much of the plot

Facilitator will start the meeting with a quick check-in.

         -    “I am a bit tired but glad that holidays are almost here. How about you?”  

-  Give time to everyone to do a check-in quickly

Facilitator will continue with:

          -  We are having this meeting to come up with a solution about a team party for holidays. I have no ideas so far so I need your help.

Expected that at this point Susan will start talking.

Around minute 10, Facilitator to remind Mary to bring up the new idea about photo booth, by pushing a piece of paper to her: “Mary realizes that a positive event like the one she wants to have is a great opportunity for capturing 'fun times' with the team. So she adds an objective to her desired outcomes. Mary adds something like: I want a photo booth (or something similar) to allow people to take a souvenir of the party home. 

Facilitator keeps track of conversation and whenever notices that people are stuck/not aligning with resolution will do an alignment check by saying:

         -   On a scale from 1 to 10, how do you feel so far with the objectives you have for this meeting?

- Ask the person with the lowest score “How can we help you to get closer to 10?”

Meeting will be timeboxed to 20 minutes.

At the end of the exercise, Facilitator will point out the techniques used:

-          Check-in

-          Stating the meeting objective

-          Alignment check

More details: http://liveingreatness.com/additional-protocols/meet/

Personas  

Personas are created with two names, to cover cases when a female picks up the persona belonging to a male and vice versa.

 

Susan (or Sam)

She is extrovert by nature, always looking for ways to generate energy. She is usually the first to start a discussion and has strong opinions on how things should be done/ resolved. Sometimes, when people are proposing solutions that do not match her thinking, she might interrupt and point out what might be wrong with that thinking and what else can be done.

Susan needs to manage the budget, so she wants this party to cost as little as possible. She is adamant that there needs to be a party, though, even though to her it's just a must-do thing, she is not terribly passionate about it. But not having a party is not an option. 

 When people bring up ideas that will increase the cost for the party, she comes up with options that are more economic (like potluck, or order pizza).

Susan reaches her objectives when there is a party and she is confident that it can be done at a reasonable cost.

Susan’s objective for this meeting:

"I want a team event where everyone shows up and the party doesn't cost us too much."

Bill (or Barb)

He is quiet, smart and very detail oriented. He wants to have a perfect party, where everything is taken care off and there will be something for everyone. Bill is always keen on helping other people organize things, so he will likely end up volunteering to find a venue, order food, drinks, name it... but in order to do so, he wants to have everything carefully planned out.

For every idea that comes on the table, he asks details like what food to order to consider allergies, what drinks to have, from what time until when, will there be dress code, etc. 

Bill reaches his objectives when he has a clear plan with sufficient detail for him to walk away and organize the party, either alone or with help. 

Bill’s outcome for this meeting:

I want to come out of this meeting with a good understanding of the party plan and some action items where to begin with the party organization tasks.

Mary (or Martin)

She is an introvert by nature. She doesn't speak often, but when she does, her opinions are strong and show a ton of wisdom. She really cares about the team and feels that the event needs to be fun for everyone. She does not see value in a party for the sake of a party, she wants the team to walk away feeling they spend valuable time together and come out as a stronger team. 

After about 10 minutes, Mary realizes that a positive event like the one she wants to have is a great opportunity for capturing 'fun times' with the team. So she adds an objective to her desired outcomes. Mary adds something like: I want a photo booth or something like that to allow people to take a souvenir of the party home. 

Mary reaches her objectives when she feels there is a plan for an event where everyone can have fun and can take a souvenir back home. 

Mary's objective for the meeting is:

I want the event to allow us to really connect as a team and be fun for everyone. 

John (or Jane)

He is a social guy, he is interested in an event, but doesn't really have a strong opinion on what needs to happen. He supports everyone in getting their objectives and just wants to get this party organized so he can hangout with everyone in a non-work related setting. He realizes that all other participants need to buy in to make it happen. 

John reaches his objectives when all other meeting participants have reached theirs.

John's meeting objective is:

I want Susan, Bill and Mary to get what they want. 

 

Back at Agile Tour Toronto

Agile Tour Toronto 2012 is probably the first Agile conference I attended fully aware of my purpose to learn, share, steal ideas and use everything I could hear around.
One year after, I decided to attend as a speaker. I submitted two sessions and one of them got selected, the one where I would present solo. The idea I had submitted was not new and for some,  the concept of T shaped people was quite familiar. I had about 2 months to prepare the slides and refine the game I had in mind to play. The very fist slide I created for this presentation had this picture.

I find this photo very funny but also captures the message I wanted to pass to people that are "thrown" into Agile teams and feel like they lost their identity by becoming "just" a team member. And off course I was tweaking the deck till last minute, trying to make it better. I am pleased to report that the session went well and I got some really good feedback in the grade of "9 out of 10". Off course some criticism too, but nothing lower than "6 out of 10".
 What made a difference this time, was that I changed my participation from "Attending" to "Presenting". I also decided to help with reviews of the submissions, twitting about it, paired up on CoachClinic, etc. This year I wanted to make Agile Tour Toronto better experience. What I learned, in no particular order:

- It is pretty much a full time job to put together an event like that. Considering that the guys and girls doing the work are volunteers, Kudos to all of them for the extra time, effort and passion they put into making things happen!
- Gift bags have awesome chocolates! So good, I didn't want to share them with my family
- It's a great event to hang out with other Agilistas in Toronto. I feel now part of this "Agile family" where a number of familiar faces have found ways to stay connected and have a beer together once in a while.
- There is always something new to learn. Not just for beginners, but also for the experienced ones. The trick is to use it right away when you go back to work.
- There are quite a few technical people in Toronto and together they make a fine group of Software crafters
- Projectors of the hotel do not work with my laptop. I really appreciate the previous speaker in my room and also my colleague Gino Marckx for leaving his laptop back so I could use it for my presentation.
- A good keynote speaker sets the stage properly and pumps up the blood in the right way. Gojko did a really good job with his "Make impact" message.
- The number of people that want to participate on these events gets higher every year.
- Sponsors on booths are not all about selling. Some want to "buy" you
- There is always room for improvements
- There are about 5 Firkin pubs downtown Toronto and sometimes you might book your event on the wrong one (or they might forget that you booked)