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Enabling Agility

Archive for category agile

Everyone Has a Voice in Retrospectives

Mar 1

Posted by David Bland in agile, retrospectives | View Comments

It can be difficult to get team members to be vocal in retrospectives. I’m always wary of the stronger personalities controlling the conversation, and I’ve found that going around the room calling people out by name can have mixed results. After reading a recent article on effective retrospective formats, I decided to write my experience with finding every voice.

Step 1 – Red & Green. Distribute 2 colors of post-its and a sharpie to each team member. Explain how we are going to use the next 10min to write independently. I recommend starting simple with red & green, and also having a legend on the whiteboard to help people remember which is which. You’d be surprised how quickly they forget! Use the green post-its to write down what helped the team during the iteration, and the red post-its for what hindered them.
scrumology retrospective
Step 2 – Every Voice. Go around the room and allocate 3-5min for each team member to stand up and discuss their post-its. Have the team members listen while the post-its are stuck up on the whiteboard 1-by-1. It’ll look a bit unorganized at first, but after the 2nd or 3rd person you should begin to recognize common threads throughout the conversations.
scrumology retrospective
Step 3 – Group Organization. Have the entire team come up to the board and categorize the post-its into themes. This is important because it is a group exercise, rather than having the facilitator do it by himself.
scrumology retrospective
After the team comes to a general consensus, have them sit down and talk about the groupings. It should be easy to visually recognize the trouble areas, as they are most likely in red post-it clusters. I recommend starting the conversation with those and ending with the green collections. Be certain to call out action items as needed throughout the discussion.

Feel free to customize this format as you see fit. You can spice it up with an egg timer to denote the end of the writing exercise, or add new colors for ideas that do not fall into the helped or hindered buckets. Be aware that the less vocal team members may write very little at first.

In the end, it isn’t important that you stick to a script, but instead ensure that each and every voice is heard.

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It’s an Agile Sabotage

Feb 25

Posted by David Bland in agile, enterprise | View Comments

agile sabotage
Agile adoptions in the Enterprise are difficult and complicated, perhaps that is why I often read stories on Top Down vs. Bottom Up techniques. I feel as though we focus too much on these and overlook the Middle, which can lead to disaster.

Middle management is arguably the toughest obstacle in any large scale Agile adoption effort. This is most apparent in situations where they’ve repeatedly fired people below them to make ends meet. An environment like this does not exactly foster job security and yet middle management becomes adept at navigating the murky waters of office politics. Anything new and disruptive in nature such as Agile, is generally not received well.

Top down Agile adoption is the way to go, you must have executive buy-in!

In a top down approach, one would assume that mandates from above would be followed within reason. However those in middle management can seriously hinder an Agile adoption by sheer incompetence or worse, sabotage. Unless your top down approach has eyes from above keeping tabs on things at the day-to-day level, there is a good change middle management will screw it up.

Grass roots Agile is the most rewarding, and you’ll be a beacon of success for the rest of the company!

With grass roots Agile, one would assume that your successes would be recognized by the executives as you deliver value early and often. However more often than not, those success stories are reported up the chain by middle management, not by the worker bees themselves. Middle management can craft the message as they see fit when sitting down to update their superiors. I’ve witnessed people take credit for work they did not even begin to understand and massage the communication to further secure their job. It happens every day.

Middle management can make or break your Agile transformation.

I recommend that anyone stepping into the Enterprise do their homework on middle management. While your Agile efforts may have a three pronged attack on the top, middle and bottom of the organization, I suggest burning significant calories on the middle. Spend one-on-one time with them and try to understand their background by asking them how they achieved their status within the organization. Gather insight into their personality, and their thoughts on new techniques or ideas. When on site during the transformation, make it a point to be involved with their day-to-day activities to address any fears they may have.

In conclusion, don’t get too wrapped up in Top vs Bottom and overlook the Middle. Your Agile transformation may just fail as a result.

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Sizing Up the Enterprise

Jan 24

Posted by David Bland in agile, enterprise, scrum | View Comments

As teams begin to estimate User Stories, they may explore different approaches such as T-Shirt sizes and Fibonacci sequences that stop at 8 or go much higher.

This freedom to choose a relative sizing style allows a team to adopt what fits well within their work environment.

While this flexible approach is quite useful at the grass roots team level, it does pose an interesting challenge in the Enterprise setting where Agile teams roll up into an Agile PMO.

How do those in charge of the overall strategic planning, make informed cross team decisions with Product Backlogs of such varying size criteria? How can they identify the features that involve the least complexity, effort and doubt coupled with a high return on investment?

scrumology.net agile pmo sizing

Before we go into my suggestions on how to address this, let’s explore a common fallacy that is being evangelized in the Enterprise today.

Mandating Story Points to Ideal Days Solves Cross Team Sizing Inconsistencies

“1 Story Point = 1 Ideal Day (6 hour work day)”

Seems quick and easy doesn’t it? Mandate that all of your Agile teams conform to this and your problem is solved!

By doing this, however, you’ve inadvertently stripped the Story Point of its original intent while roadblocking your team from personalizing (and humanizing) the process. You risk dismissing the conversations about complexity, effort and doubt while focusing on the mythical 6hr work day.

Another unintended side effect of tying Story Points to actual hours is that it isn’t long before people make the dangerous link between Story Points and Budget.

So what is the silver bullet to this issue? As is the case with all things Agile, there is no silver bullet! Solving this issue depends on the nature of the Agile teams and their relation to the business within the Enterprise.

Are these teams separate business units within the organization, or do they all contribute to the same product?

If the teams each have their own role within the organization and are only loosely tied to the same business goals, my suggestion is to let them be for the most part. Sizing, and especially Velocity, does not translate well across teams or up the organization. It will be an apples to oranges comparison, and you should keep your eye on delivering business value. As long as your teams are collaborating by sharing their Release Plans, does it really matter if they use a T-Shirt size or a Fibonacci scale as a means to an end?

If the teams do happen to roll up into an overall product, then I suggest that sizing occur from a single Product Backlog before decomposing them into each Team Backlog. With this approach, you can have the overall strategic conversations early. I would much rather have representatives from each team weigh in on a single Product Backlog, than try to make sense of it from the bottom up. This also brings a consistency to the sizing while allowing each team to have flexibility at the Sprint Planning level.

To summarize, tread carefully when trying to apply consistency across Agile teams within the Enterprise. It may not make sense to mandate sizing techniques, especially if it causes more harm than good.

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