Monthly Archives: April 2008

Services We Provide

Posted on by
My boss (that would be me) tells me I must make some money in order to afford to spend time on this blog. So forgive a short post with advertising.

We provide Lean-Agile coaching. See here. Or contact us (contact info is at that site). From one day to 400 days. This is what we do; we’re good at it. We do many varieties of coaching.

We also provide Lean-Agile training. In fact, we just opened a new site, http://leanagiletraining.com/ We have been doing training for years, but this site is new. Not as pretty as we would like, but that will be improved iteratively. And more content to add to it.

Within training, we provide both public courses (see that site) and in-house courses (contact us). The public courses are being updated all the time (we have some scheduled that are not showing yet).

You may wish to subscribe to our training course newsletter (monthly)…see on the right-hand bar (Can we help you?) or see the mailing list page at leanagiletraining.com. The newsletter also includes 3 or 4 new ideas each month, which we hope you find useful even if the courses are not interesting at the moment.

…well, maybe not as good as a Super Bowl ad.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

 Subscribe in a reader

Up the creek. Without a paddle

Posted on by

My friend Mike Vizdos has a blog with cartoons called ImplementingScrum.com.

His latest cartoon is titled “Up the creek. Without a paddle.” See here. The idea is that, if you want a specific change to happen or even to stay, you have to keep paddling.

Very simple idea. Very true.

Agile (Lean, Scrum, XP, etc) is a change. A hard change, although also fun a lot too. If you do not keep paddling, then Agile will be viewed as “the flavor of the month”. And things will revert to the mean (probably not good Agile, would be my normal guess).

If you stop paddling, things will continue to change. But not in the direction of better and better Agile.

To me, it is a shame to see people stop paddling in the direction of their dreams. Doing one’s best is hard, but it is something to be proud of. Something to live for. It may not always be fun, but in a deeper sense, joyful. Every success you have is an example for every other person who feels partially defeated. And the customers around the world need the great stuff you can create. Real customers. Real people. Kids, grandparents, mothers, brothers, sisters, fathers.

(As an aside, let us admit that even customers are not perfect. Many can be pretty bad sometimes. But we still feed even the lesser ones despite their weaknesses. Let us not pray for justice, for who would escape whipping. Let us pray for more generosity than that. The wiser ones have told us: It is more blessed to give….)

So, I hope you will see the value of Agile (of Scrum, XP, of Lean, and related ideas). If you do (and of course it is your choice), prepare yourself for the relentless pursuit of perfection. Prepare for the long march (my phrase for it). Keep paddling.

And have fun doing it. We should enjoy even the struggle part, as it makes us better.

 Subscribe in a reader

What is the scope of impediments?

Posted on by

Last night at Agile-Carolinas we had Israel Gat, VP of Distributed System Management at BMC Software. He spoke on “Leading the Disruption”. He is giving this talk also in Austin, TX (and maybe elsewhere). If you get a chance, I urge you to go. Or just contact him.

After that meeting, I had several conversations. And then thought about them this morning. All that results in this post. Or at least, this question?

What is the scope that defines what might be an impediment?

By definition in Scrum, an impediment is anything that keeps the team from being more productivity. And I personally add that everything is imperfect, so by my definition everything is an impediment to some degree, and the trick is to identify the one or two biggest impediments today.

Scrum has also said that the scope is wide, including such diverse things as engineering practices and personal issues.

What I have not seen talked about much is the scope from an end-to-end Value Stream perspective. So, I would argue that anything that reduces the business value of what the Team produces (or the speed with which the value is realized) is an impediment.

So, as a simple case, imagine you have a Dev team in Charlotte and an “implementation” team in Chicago. (In this context, implementation means all those services around the software that make it actually useful in production.) The Dev team completes their work. The Implementation team is not ready (certainly not as ready as the runner to the right). So no business value can be realized.

I am suggesting this is an impediment. Perhaps the top one for that Dev team. And that Dev team (and their ScrumMaster) need to assure it is fixed (understanding that “a dead ScrumMaster is a useless ScrumMaster”). They probably can’t fix it themselves, but they can make many efforts to get others to fix it. Perhaps they need to enlist a manager’s help.

To me, this is similar to what Toyota found, ie, that to get the full benefits of Lean, they needed to aggressively train their partner firms upstream and downstream from them in the Lean ideas around flow, pull, JIT, etc, etc.

Does this make sense to you?

 Subscribe in a reader

The importance of Velocity

Posted on by
I had an interesting conversation about Agile metrics yesterday, and wanted to share one insight.

Why is velocity so important?

Well, first we should say, that in many ways it is not. Honestly. Velocity can be unmeasured, used badly, up, down, sideways, misunderstood. Whatever. As long as the team produces some business value (eg, software in production) that is seen as a positive multiple to what they cost, that is all the counts. Of course, we customers always want it sooner, but as long as the effort realized good business value, then it was not too late. The product helped that customer set; it probably helped society more generally.

Still, in most real situations is also really need velocity. Why?

First, for those new to Agile, the typical operational definition of “actual velocity” is the number of story points from the stories (features) completed in an iteration, based on the team’s (robust) definition of done. (Describing a robust definition of done is a good topic for another post.)

Three words.

  1. Defense: The team needs velocity because almost surely some manager is going to ask them to do the impossible and go a lot faster (eg, complete more story points in an iteration) than they can go. Velocity is what the team uses to help that manager accept the true.
  2. Challenge: While we do not crucify the team based on demand for magic, at the same time, the team needs to be challenged to make their velocity get faster. This means identifying impediments. And getting them fixed (maybe after management approval, maybe by someone else).
  3. Justification: “What was it you wanted” is the name of a Dylan song. People forget. Managers will lose interest in Agile if we don’t have some data to show them and to explain to them why Agile is important. Velocity is one of those key numbers. It helps explain why good teams, good Product Owners, good ScrumMasters, good coaches are needed. It helps keep Agile from being “the flavor of the month” (if you are persuasive in explaining the numbers).

What do you think? Helpful?

 Subscribe in a reader

What is a ScrumMaster worth? (2)

Posted on by

Based on comments, I made a few changes to the original post, here.

The specific numbers used in the post are not that important. The approach to logically identifying the value of a better ScrumMaster is. Take the approach, and fill in your own numbers. Help the right people think it through, using their own assumptions.

 Subscribe in a reader

Your Business Case for Agile

Posted on by


My friends at Innovel have a blog entry titled “Build Your Business Case for Adopting Lean Agile“. Take a look.

As you try to get a revolutionary idea adopted, remember that you must always be selling the idea (see John Adams to the right). (Note: You don’t even need 50% of your countrymen to agree, if you would succeed.) Your idea may be brilliant, may even be one of the best ideas ever to appear on this planet, yet you must still sell it.

To start anything in business, you need a business case. And given that everyone has a say and an opinion, in fact you need to have a good feel for all the benefits involved, so you can explain the WIIFM to anyone. (WIIFM = What’s In It For Me)

And given that change is happening all the time, you even need to keep your business case up-to-date, since Agile will always be challenged with some equivalent of “what have you done for me lately?” People change. People forget. Attention gets re-directed.

So, what is the case?

Well, coincidentally Israel Gat of BMC is giving a talk this week at Agile-Carolinas (and another at APLN-Richmond). “Leading the Disruption”. The idea that for BMC, Agile was so successful that it was disruptive, particularly for downstream processes. Such as sales and marketing. In a prior presentation he had shown hard data that to me proved that Agile had given them double the productivity for a large IT shop, compared to essentially waterfall (compared also to what they were doing before).

There are many people to whom we must make the case. Let’s assume for now, to a senior business manager (maybe the CEO?).

BMC so far has doubled productivity. Umm. Impressive. In fact, Scrum (the main flavor of Agile that BMC use) was built to increase productivity by 5x to 10x. And it has been proven to have done so with some teams (the community has data in various papers). We don’t (yet) have the broad based data to show whether “some” really equals many, most, likely, X%, for certain types of teams, etc. , etc. Based on the anecdotes I hear, most teams are clearly better even when not doing “most” of Agile. And teams that adopt Agile well are typically very much more productive.

Let’s look at this a different way. The multi-functional IT teams (including business people, etc) are producing: more, faster, cheaper, and better. All at the same time. As in, higher quality, more accurately what the business needs (not just what they said), faster time to market, etc. What’s not to like?

Another benefit senior managers like is visibility. They can tell whether an effort is on target or having problems. (More on this later.)

As Jeff Sutherland says, the ability to change directions quickly, and to focus this fire hose of productivity on a competitor’s new feature is very valuable.

As an aside: One thing not to like is people doing cowboy agile. That is, people saying they are doing agile, but who really are not. At the extreme, this means people whose definition of agile consists of “we don’t do documentation”. Cowboy agile makes your audience more skeptical of real agile.

OK. One more thing on this topic.

How do you prove this for yourself?

Take people to the Gemba; show them the team room, the team, the product owners of successful teams, the working software. (Gemba is a Japanesee word, famous in Lean, meaning “the place where the truth may be found.”)

Also, gather metrics from day one. I will talk about other metrics later. Today let’s talk about velocity. Gather velocity (the sum of the story points of Product Backlog items completed in an iteration). Show that it is reasonably consistent from sprint to sprint. Then show the velocity increasing. Remove some more impediments. Show it increasing more. Impressive. A blind man can see this stuff.

If the velocity increases by 50% and the business value of new stories is not diminishing, then clearly you’ve got something going on. All you have to prove is that Agile is a good investment compared to other investments. Not hard if you work at it.

Will every team succeed? No. (Actually even failure is a success with Agile…topic for another post.)

Can fairly good people generally show impressive progress? Yes!

 Subscribe in a reader

Developer Abuse

Posted on by

Here is another video that talks about why we do Agile. These two (this one and the one just posted) were the top two vote getters (from a perhaps somewhat biased large audience) at the Agile 2007 conference.

It’s a bit serious, I think.
Perhaps a bit overdrawn, but I do think developers have a better life with Agile.

My view is that in Agile, we are trying to make everyone’s life better: customers, managers, team members, business guys, end-users, our own families. One would hope, that after all those people are helped, that society more generally would be better.

 Subscribe in a reader

The Nokia Test (4): You know who the product owner is

Posted on by

In this series, we are going over each question in the Nokia Test.

The first section of the Nokia Test is a quick determination: are you doing incremental development? Then second section is: are you doing Scrum?

We are now up to the first question in the second section is: Do you know who your Product Owner is?

Clearly, it is not just “do you know his or her name?”

The Product Owner has these responsibilities in Scrum:

  • Defines the features of the product, decides each release date and content – gets product backlog ready
  • Is responsible for the profitability of the product (ROI)
  • Prioritizes features according to market value
  • Can change features and priority at next Sprint
  • Accepts or rejects work results

A few comments.

The Product Owner is the main voice of the business side into the Team. She is responsible to assure that the team understands everything the business can tell them about the effort (high level and low level).

The Product Owner is the main risk manager, since most risks are business risks, and must be managed as trade-offs against other things (values, risks, etc). At the same time, the team members are seen as business people also (they signed up to deliver business value), so in some ways managing risk is a collaboration. But when the final decision must be made, she must decide (at least, if it is decided within the team).

The Product Owner is part of the team. (This was debated for awhile in the Agile/Scrum community; the best advice now is to treat the PO as part of the team.)

The Product Owner also has outward facing responsibilities. Most of the team members work within the team, in most senses of that word. She is also responsible for understanding the customers (eg, end-users). This takes constant work, since the customers are always changing.

The Product Owner manages the stakeholders. The stakeholders are people outside the team who have a stake or a say in the product being created. Maybe the product is mainly for external customers, but operations must use it also. Maybe Legal or Compliance has some say, etc, etc. In large corporations, these stakeholders take a lot of work (or so it seems to be required). A key area in managing the stakeholders is getting down to one prioritized Product Backlog, at least the Product Backlog items for the next Sprint.

So, how much time does the Product Owner spend with the Team? There is no precise answer to this question; it depends and it varies. But the Product Owner should work with the Team at least as much as the Team wants. And the Team should want the PO as much as having her will improve the product (speed, accuracy, more value, better, cheaper, etc). It is seldom that one can learn too fast or too much.

The typical situation I find is this. The Product Owner person and the Team start out not used to working together. And not seeing a lot of value in working together much. But they learn about the value over time. Toward the end of the first effort, the PO will usually say “Wow, this takes a lot of my time to be with the team, but it pays such great benefits! It is well worth the effort.”

Perhaps this Nokia Test item should read: “The Product Owner and the Team collaborate well”

 Subscribe in a reader

Mura, Muri, Muda

Posted on by
These are Lean words. In Japanese. And I always get them confused, especially the first two, so I am doing this post partly to have a place to remind me what each word means. They are all in the negative.

Mura: unevenness of flow. Thus, the first thing to do is establish a reasonable pull, an even flow.

Muri: overburdening the system. (System being the overall thing you are talking about; generally not a computer system.) Thus, once you establish a production “pipe”, don’t try to force more through that pipe than it can handle. As a fluid dynamics person will tell you, if you overburden the pipe, it means even less liquid will travel through the pipe in a given time period.

Muda: waste. This is further defined by Type I and Type II muda. And by the classic 7 wastes. “Muda” is an ugly work in Japanese. Kind of like an earthy but dirty Anglo-Saxon word, I think.

The classic definition of Type I muda is necessary waste, ie, something that does not add value in the customer’s eyes, but we feel, as a business, that it is necessary. (Compliance with government regs might be an example.) I call this “waste we have not yet figured out how to live without” (maybe not true of all things in this category).

The classic definition of Type II muda is unnecessary waste. I’ll call this obvious waste (as soon as you put yourself in position to see it).

There is of course an inter-relationship between the three (mura, muri, muda).

In general, I find these ideas very similar to things we say in Agile, Scrum, XP, etc.

Jim Womack suggested that Lean thinkers practice those in that order, ie, focus on mura first. Then muri. Then muda. Perhaps this is good advice for Agile. (BTW, if you don’t know Jim Womack, get one of his books: Lean Thinking. Recommended.)

 Subscribe in a reader