InfoQ Interview with Mike Cottmeyer – Agile Adoption and Transformation

Last Updated on Friday, 6 January 2012 06:09 Written by Mike Cottmeyer Friday, 6 January 2012 06:09

This got published today… here is a link to the interview:

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Mike-Cottmeyer-Agile-Adoption-Transformation

Take a look and tell me what you think.  Here is just a little more about the talk:

Summary

Merry Christmas from LeadingAgile

Last Updated on Saturday, 17 December 2011 03:46 Written by Mike Cottmeyer Sunday, 25 December 2011 05:00

We just wanted to take a moment to wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas.  Hope you’re having a great day surrounded by the people you love!

- Mike, Dennis & Peter

Are You Intentional?

Last Updated on Saturday, 17 December 2011 06:45 Written by Mike Cottmeyer Saturday, 24 December 2011 05:00

Intentional. One of my favorite words as of late… and a theme I am constantly preaching to my clients. Mirriam-Webster defines intentional as being done by intention or design. Dictionary.com defines intentional as being done with intention or on purpose. Google suggests several synonyms for intentional including deliberate, willful, or purposeful. Intentionality implies we have thought things through, we have chosen a course of action, and we are willing to accept the consequences of those actions.

If we are going to succeed, we don’t want to succeed by accident. If we are going to fail, we don’t want to fail because we didn’t have a well thought-out plan of attack. Intentionality means that we have a clear line of sight between our activities and our outcomes. That’s not to say our intentions are always going to be right… our intentionality might not yield the outcomes we hoped for. If we are intentional though, we can understand what we did wrong, learn from it, and do something differently next time.

My oldest son is turning 16 in a few months. Zach is a great kid, but like any teenager he has his moments. One day he was giving me crap over something he didn’t think I was doing right. That day he felt compelled to share with me what he thought of a few decisions I had recently made. I told him that in no way did I think I was a perfect father, but also that I have always been very intentional with him. Almost every aspect of his life, good or bad, was as result of an intentional decision made by me or his Mom.

I think that made an impression on him, I could see it in his eyes. Wait a minute, Dad has a plan!?

Many folks come into work and lead their organizations they have always been lead. They do the things the way they have aways been done. They get the outcomes they always get because no one is intentional about changing things. No one is intentional about understanding the way we do things today, and understanding how a few intentional changes might make things better. Even introducing agile into an organization, we do things by the book. We fail by the book too… with no understanding of what might have gone wrong.

There are tons of things we can choose to do that will help us become great organizations. There are even more things we can choose to do that will almost certainly to lead to failure. Whichever path we choose to go down, intentionality makes all the difference. Decide a course of action, create shared understanding, and create a shared sense of purpose. Work together toward common goals. Succeed together because you had a plan to succeed…

… and what if that plan doesn’t work out the way you wanted?  Learn from your mistakes and be intentional about what you are going to try next.

The Problem with Precision

Last Updated on Saturday, 17 December 2011 03:02 Written by Mike Cottmeyer Thursday, 22 December 2011 05:00

I think engineers are interesting people… especially software engineers. Given what I do for a living, I get to work with a lot of software companies, and that means I get to spend time with a lot of software engineers. If you spend enough time, in enough software companies, with enough software engineers, some patterns start to emerge.

One of the patterns that I see quite a bit is that software engineers like things to be really precise. Being precise is a good quality for software engineers… it helps them build software that doesn’t break. Sometimes broken software kills people. The problem with being precise, is that it sometimes creates a tendency to want to know everything before we are willing to do anything.

Sometimes the level of precision necessary to build a system isn’t the same level of precision necessary to understand requirements, or to do a high-level design, or to estimate a project, or to know when a system is going to be done. Sometimes directionally correct is good enough. I realize that knowing the difference is a big deal and I’m not minimizing that.

I think though that recognizing this tendency is an important first step to making progress… and not letting that innate need for precision prevent us from taking those first critical steps forward. For many problems… understanding the requirements, or the design, or the estimate, or the date in a directionally correct way is good enough.

Once we get close enough, we can make trade-offs to the requirements, or the design, or the estimate, or even the date to make sure we can deliver what needs to be delivered. Precision isn’t always necessary to start… sometimes directionally correct is good enough.  Sometimes directionally correct is all we’ve got, and maybe even all we are ever going to have.

Kanban Isn’t the Answer to Bad Product Ownership

Last Updated on Saturday, 17 December 2011 03:27 Written by Mike Cottmeyer Tuesday, 20 December 2011 05:34

The Scrum Product Owner has a tough job. Translating business strategy into product strategy and ultimately into teeny-tiny user stories takes a ton of time and effort. Most Product Managers don’t have the time or inclination to be a good Product Owner and most Business Analysts, the people most likely to fill the gap, don’t actually own the product. I almost always recommend to my clients that a team of people work together to fill this role. I don’t really care about the whole ‘single wringable neck’ thing… all I want is well groomed prioritized product backlog, and I think there is more than one way we can get there.

Here is the deal… when teams can’t get well groomed product backlog, it is almost impossible to do Scrum. Teams spend too much time figuring out what to build during sprint planning and not enough time figuring out how to build it. Because teams don’t know how to build the stories, they never really consider if the stories were estimable, nor really discuss how they could swarm to get the stories done earlier in the sprint. This will often result in teams of people that don’t work as teams, daily standup meetings that suck, and missed commitment after missed commitment. Not fun.

Anyway… as Kanban gains popularity and mindshare, many folks think that going iteration-less is the answer. If we can’t get user stories that are small enough to deliver a handful of them in a sprint, and we are always missing our sprint commitments, the problem must be with the time-box itself.  If the time-box has no value… it’s unnecessary…. it’s waste and needs to be eliminated. Maybe what we need to do is just take these big chunks of undefined requirements, run them through a Kanban, and just forget about splitting stories and managing iteration boundaries and totally avoid the issue altogether.

I’m all for eliminating waste, but let me ask you this… how does an iteration-less approach better help us know when we are going to be done?

Like it or not, this whole done thing is going to keep being a thorn in our side.  It’s not going to go away anytime soon. I think people are hardwired to want to know what they are going to get for their money before they agree to spend it. Some of us desperately want this to change, and maybe it will change as business models change, but for now we have to deal with it. I know, I know… if our customers would get out of the way, just let us code, and stop asking what they are going to get for their money, life would be a whole lot simpler.  I get it… it’s just not reality.  At least not my reality.

Okay, back to Kanban… Kanban can answer the ‘what are going to get for our investment’ question just as well as Scrum can. Scrum answers the done question by having us know the size of our backlog and the rate at which the team can complete that backlog, in other words, our velocity. When we know both of these variables we know what we are going to get, when we are going to get it, and we have a way to communicate project status. Kanban doesn’t use velocity, but instead measures cycle time and standard deviation to help us figure out what we can deliver and when.

In Kanban, we still have a queue of necessary features, but rather than measure our velocity sprint to sprint, we measure how long different sized stories take to complete and how much variation we have in that number over time… that’s cycle time and standard deviation. When we know the size of all the items in the backlog, and the normal variation of all the items in the backlog, we can use that data figure out when we are going to be done and what we can deliver in any given timeframe.  That’s good… there lot’s of ways to answer the done question… we just need one of them.

So, we’ve gotten rid of the time-box, but have we actually solved our problem with predictable delivery?  For Kanban to be predictable, we need know the rate at which we deliver requirements, and reduce the variability between the requirements over time. Let’s ask this though… if we don’t know really understand what it takes to build the requirements in our backlog, are we going to know our rate of delivery?  What about our standard deviation? It’s going to be all over the place.  Unless we know something about what we are building and how we are going to build it our delivery process won’t be any more predictable that if we were using Scrum.

I’d suggest that in both Kanban AND Scrum… to increase flow and reduce variation… we break things down into smaller more similarly sized and well understood work items.  In short, the same things that break Scrum are the same thing that breaks Kanban. And therein lies the problem… If we have to answer that pesky done question… we have to break things up small enough that we can tease out the risk and uncertainty, make fine grained trade-offs, and all get on the same page about what we are going to build. Kanban can solve lot’s of problems… and I believe we don’t even yet fully recognize the importance of David Anderson’s contribution… but here is my belief…

Kanban isn’t the answer to poor Product Ownership.