Are we there yet?

Perhaps we are there!

Mike Cohn takes note of the limitations of the one small colocated team theory of doing software projects, the theoretical underpinning of agile, and the advance of agile methods into the space of larger projects and projects with practical resource limitations:

The early agile literature was adamant about two things: stick with small teams and put everyone in one room.

However, in the years since the Agile Manifesto, the increasing popularity of agile and the dramatic improvements it brings has pushed it onto larger and larger projects.

Additionally, having an entire team--especially on a large project--in one room, or even one building is a luxury no longer enjoyed by many projects.

Mike Cohn
Scaling Agile to work with a distributed team

I for one am glad to see the mainstream agile community get to this place. After all, the community has 15 years of experience behind it:

• Mid-90's early SCUM and XP projects led by a small cadre of thought leaders
• 2001 at Snowbird, UT: Agile--the name--and subsequently the agile manifesto
• 2003-2005: a spate of books by the Snowbird 17 explaining it all
• 2010: my book: "Project Management the Agile way; making it work in the enterprise"
• 2011: here we are!

Mike summarizes his thoughts on scaling and distributed teams in a pdf download of his presentation this past April, 2011 to a user group. To those of us who have looked at the issues and practiced agile in such environments, Mike's points are pretty well known.

His scaling advice more or less comes down to the SCRUM of SCRUMS approach (Mike is mostly a SCRUM advocate/expert),

He has several ideas on distributed teams:
He has a nice pro-con comparison on things like (for the non-colocated team) 'the long telephone call', and offers advice like: make it two calls, the first to set the agenda for the second and set up expectations. That's probably good advice. 

And, like Alistair Cockburn, he says: add documentation back  to compensate for the osmosis of communication in small colocated team rooms.

Also, very telling, about distributed teams: beware that discipline and culture do not port well over time zones (zones are more important than distance: after all, Miami and Montreal are in the same time zone), and across national cultures (where yes may mean no, etc)

So, a lot of advice tid-bits in the presentation; worth a read

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9-11-11

The Pentagon, Washington D.C.

Ten years later: 9/11/11

Photo

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Kaplan on strategy

Robert Kaplan and David Norton are best known for inventing the balanced scorecard (and, to some degree, inventing the cottage industry that goes around it and sustains it some 19 years after the original paper in the Harvard Business Review in 1992).

If you're looking for a way to organize a business scorecard, this tool is as good as any.

But of course it also links to strategy.  In an interview, Kaplan said this:

Strategy is a hypothesis. It’s your belief that if you do some things, then some expected results will happen. But it’s only a hypothesis!

And, Kaplan (and Norton) posit five principles for working strategy:

1. Accept that strategy is the job of senior executives. It’s their job to mobilize the organization. They need to understand that managing strategy is managing change and they may need to be the change agent.
   
2. Translate the strategy so that it can be understood. Translating strategy into objectives and, most importantly, into measures is important because measures now become the common language of your strategy.
   
3. Align the organization. This is the most important part of what we do. Here, we create a description of the strategy, convert it to maps and measures and then align every part of the organization to that strategy.
   
4. Make strategy everyone’s job. The strategy is formulated at the top and executed at the bottom, and if people at the bottom don’t understand the strategy, they’re not going to be able to execute it.
   
5. Embed the strategy into what you manage, essentially into your governance, so that your budgeting, human resource, training programs, goals, and incentives are all tied to the strategy.

Frankly, I like the last one best.  It has the best chance of over optimization at the local level if the goals and incentives are pointed to the right objectives.  The four points are good, to be sure, but they smack of a 'chief strategy officer' that is off enforcing strategy everywhere. It's my experience that such activity only lasts as long as the CSO energy level can be maintained waging strategy on everyone.  And, that's not forever, so the best success will come if strategy is part of everyone's management objectives. 

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Leaders and followers

Generals move pins on a map, ... but the front line soldiers have to get the job done

General Eisenhower

Sponsors, stakeholders,and in many situations project managers move the pins. Cost account and work package leaders, and, in the agile domain, team leaders are among the front liners that get the job done.

Leadership is always one of those things on the talking agenda about small team dynamics, and, of course, small teams practicing agile methods.  In a recent discussion, I got this explanation:

Leadership and leaders in small team situations:

1) PROACTIVE 
2) APPRECIATIVE WHENEVER NEEDED. 
3) ABILITY TO KEEP COOL IN TOUGH SITUATIONS AND THINK OUT OF BOX 
4) KEEP THE TEAM BONDED TOGETHER 
5) BUILD A TEAM THAT IS MOTIVATED AND [SIC] TRUST and SUPPORT EACH OTHER 
6) MAKES TEAM MEMBERS BELIEVE THAT NOT ONLY HIGH INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTION BUT COLLABORATION WILL BE AWARDED. 
7) TRANSPARENCY WITH TEAM MEMBERS. 

"Ability to keep cool..." .... I like that one, and also "Makes the team members believe ..."

Although the person who wrote the points (above) was not thinking in terms of the traditional "4-E's" of leadership, it's pretty easy to see how they fit:

• Envision: be proactive; look ahead; be confident of the objective
• Enable: keep the team bonded; we're not really going anywhere if we don't go together
• Energize: and motivate with trust
• Empower: with transparency.  Make it obvious and above board, not Machiavellian

Of course one of the ideas in current thinking and theory is the 'self organizing team' and 'rotational leadership'. To the former, I say: works sometimes. The latter, I say: almost never works as envisioned.

In the military, although bureaucratic at the headquarters level, small teams are very agile in the sense of "planning is everything; plans are nothing" (Eisenhower), but there's no nonsense about who's in charge. There can be to question or argument about command authority.

On the other hand, both schemes (rotation and fixed command) somewhat deny the obvious: there are natural leaders and there are natural followers. Leader/followers don't change roles easily, and a team really doesn't work until these dominance stresses work their way through.

In the end, Mother Nature will have her way.

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Machiavelli in the project office?

Our friends at Eight to Late had a posting last month on 'actor network theory', or ANT for an acronym. ANT is to my eye and ear a variant of use cases; I'm sure there are differences, but the essential matter of mapping every person and every system as an actor seems to be common among the two ideas.

Actually, however, I'll leave ANT to you to follow-up on. One of the early ANT papers is quoted in Eight to Late, although it's a little dated, having been written in the old timer's era of 2001 about things that happened in the 20th century.  Obviously, no mention Agile.  Nevertheless, late 20th century is also the time when use cases were getting good play, so even though they are not mentioned, one can see the thought synergy.

My interest is in a quote in that reference paper picked up in ETL's post:

They (project managers) either take a Machiavellian view or promote superficial agreement and high sounding concepts while secretly working to their own goals, or they insist on all players subscribing to detailed design specifications expressed in the language of some dominant discourse.

Good grief! So PM's are either cunning and duplicitous, or we torture sponsors and stakeholders into agreeing to words, specifications, and documents they couldn't understand even if they read them.

My experience is that few of us are Machiavellian, but the other charge is too often true. On an ERP engagement I was struck by the futility of the methodology of our engagement partner to get stakeholders to 'sign off on' all the project design documents, as if they could read them (they were in English, but barely so), and more importantly thread them together into a narrative that made business sense.

After all, they (stakeholders/sponsors) were the guardians of the business value; we were the guardians of the earnable value. Our job--not theirs--was to make the translation from our domain to theirs--not the other way 'round. And, that was not the only project where I observed this ineffective sign-off practice. I never understood the value of a signature on a document that I knew was perfunctory and unrepresentative of what it was supposed to stand for.

So, whereas I don't buy the whole quotation (above), I certainly buy half of it! At least agile poses a more effective practice vis a vis the customer/user, even if the close proximity of the customer/user is problematic in many instances.

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The virtual team thing

As part of the Agile Project Management course I teach for PMI's eSeminarWorld, I get to talk to students about virtual teams and teamwork since that's how the course is constructed. (disclaimer: I didn't develop the course; I'm an instructor when they need me)

One of the discussions is about what's different about virtual teams; the answers are the one's you'd expect, leading with time zones and 'no co-located stand-up meetings'. But the one I like, though it comes up less often, is 'no body language'.

Having sat on endless conference calls, and participated in a mind numbing number of online chats, I can sympathize that there's a lot left out. But we know that from a lot of experience; we didn't need agile to tell us that body language counts for a lot, by some estimates more than 50%. Agile only reinforces the idea that it's hard to substitute for what Alistair Cockburn calls communication by osmosis--that absorption of information from the unspoken, the casually spoken, and the mere presence in the room, if you will.

On the other hand, reality intrudes: often there's no practical way to get body language in the picture. Yes, that is a shameful segue to video teleconferencing, including Skype and other pc-based video. But I can tell you (as if you need telling) that even with a good camera, video is not an osmosis channel. Nevertheless, better than a straight teleconference most of the time.

Of course, there's the wiki board, and the threaded discussions. They are a possibility also, and I've tried those too. They add value, to be sure, but in the end, there's just nothing like being in the same room!

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Filter bubbles et al

So we learned recently that the newest threat to our freedom and liberty is internet filter bubbles. Eli Pariser is pushing this idea (and his book "The Filter Bubble: what the internet may is hiding from you") and you can see his engaging talk on TED.

Now, of course, since his TED talk, there's a whole cottage industry around filter bubbles. Just do a web search on the filter bubble, and a somewhat unfiltered response is returned. A certain irony, there, to be sure.

And there's a counterpoint from academic Paul Resnick who argues that it's not that there is filtering on web searches, including social sites like Facebook--indeed, there is, and has been for a long time--but that the filtering is often done clumsily and ineffectively.

As a project manager, author, blogger, and instructor, I use the web a lot for search.  I use multiple engines to include google, bing, and blekko; and all of these return different stuff.  I also search google scholar, and the archives of many different sites, like slideshare.net, dau.mil, Harvard Business Review, and my local university library online.  So, I may be in a bubble, but I don't see a conspiracy here.

On the other hand, I'm sure there's something to Pariser's theme, more so than book sales.  So, to anyone who relies on just one search engine: you are in a bubble!

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