All About Agile and Lean
In a Lean/Agile world teams should be cross-functional. Period.
Or maybe it’s not that easy? What does cross-functionality actually mean? And is it true that the more cross-functional, the better?
I wrote an article together with my brother Arne Roock adressing these questions. The article is published in the current edition of the “Agile Review” by it-agile. The article is available as PDF for download. (There is also a german version of the article).
Agile Teams sollen cross-funktional sein. Punkt. Oder ist es vielleicht doch nicht ganz so einfach? Was genau bedeuted Cross-Funktionalität eigentlich? Und gilt generell die Regel: Je cross-funktionaler, desto besser?
Zu diesen Fragen habe ich zusammen mit meinem Bruder Arne Roock einen Artikel verfasst, der in der aktuellen Ausgabe der “Agile Review” von it-agile erschienen ist. Es gibt den Artikel auch als PDF zum Herunterladen. (Es gibt auch eine englischsprachige Version des Artikels als PDF).
Nicht mehr ganz taufrisch ist das Buch “Tribal Leadership” von Dave Logan, John King und Halee Fischer-Wright. Trotzdem ist es immer noch sehr lesenswert für jeden, der sich für Team- und Unternehmensentwicklung interessiert.
Das Buch vertritt die These, dass für die Leistungsfähigkeit von Teams und Unternehmen die vorherrschende Kultur wichtig ist. Sie stellen ein 5-stufiges Modell der Kulturentwicklung in Teams/Unternehmen vor:
Laut den Autoren kann man bei der Kulturentwicklung Stufen nicht überspringen. Wenn man sich auf Stufe 2 befindet, kann man sich nicht einfach zu Stufe 5 weiterentwickeln, man muss den Weg über die Stufen 3 und 4 nehmen.
Das Buch zeigt Techniken, mit denen man (anhand der verwendeten Sprache) den Zustand von Teams/Unternehmen bewerten kann sowie Techniken, wie man die Kultur weiterentwickeln kann.
Das ganze ist übrigens nicht einfach ausgedacht, sondern mit Studien belegt und so finden sich in dem Buch immer wieder Fallbeispiele zu den einzelnen Stufen.
Von mir eine eindeutige Leseempfehlung für alle, die sich für Unternehmensentwicklung interessieren.
In january I blogged about the internal state of it-agile. Let’s have a look what changed during the 28 weeks since then.
Selbstorganisation in Teams ist durch Scrum und andere agile Verfahren heute quasi Stand der Kunst (ja, ich weiß, ess es vielfach in der konkreten Umsetzung noch hakt). Aber ist damit das Ende der Fahnenstange schon erreichen? Ich glaube nicht. Nun, um ehrlich zu sein, ich weiß sogar, dass das nicht der Fall ist (durch den Grad der Selbstorganisation, den wir bei it-agile aber auch einige andere Unternehmen erreicht haben).
Selbstorganisation über Teams hinaus und sogar im ganzen Unternehmen ist möglich. Ich habe Folien auf Slideshare hochgeladen, die zeigen, wie Selbstorganisation auf Unternehmensebene funktioniert: Folien
Die Folien stammen von einem halbtägigen Workshop, den ich bei einem Kunden zu dem Thema “Selbstorganisation im Unternehmen” durchgeführt habe. Wer so einen Workshop auch gerne bei sich im Unternehmen durchgeführt haben möchte, kann sich dazu gerne bei mir melden.
We had a discussion with some it-agile colleagues about risk management in complex domains and if there is a relevant difference to complicated domains. Here is my current understanding.
Classical risk management in software development comes from waterfall like approaches tailored for simple and complicated domains. In a nutshell you create a list of all risks at the beginning of the project. Every risk has a probability and a potential damage. Multiplying probability with damage yields a kind of “risk cost” which is then used to prioritize the risks. After that we define countermeasures or mitigations for the risks. Here is a short introduction to classical risk management.
In my experience the focus of classical risk management is on creating a plan that can be executed without big surprises. And second is focus is on avoiding the risk to ensure project success.
For this traditional approach it is crucial to anticipate cause-effect relations. That is possible in simple and complicated domains but not in complex domains. Therefore traditional risk management is of limited value in complex domains (yes, I tried it for some years).
Feedback driven approaches like Scrum have built in risk management for a lot of typical risks:
But we believe there is more to it. Let’s have a look at a story told by Don Reinertsen at the LSSC 2012 conference about fire fighting. Fire in forests behaves in a complex way. It is impossible to forecast what the fire will do in the near future. There is the influence of wind and rain and even the fire itself may create relevant wind.
The fire fighters do risk management in a when-then pattern. “When the fire crosses this boundary, then we will evacuate this town.” It is not possible to guarantee that the fire will cross this boundary. Therefore we make a plan to minimize damage not to avoid the damage completely.
We think that this pattern of risk management is applicable also for software/product development. We identify the risks that may cause critical damage and were we need to react really fast. For these risks we create a plan what to when the risks becomes reality.
This is exactly what one of my clients did when the global financial crisis started. “When sales drops below this point we will reduce costs here and use money from another business area to avoid layoffs.”
With such a plan the appropriate preparations can be done in advance (e.g. not signing long term contracts that bind a lot of money and put new investments on hold). And it creates a safe atmosphere for employees. They see that there is a plan and that this plan does not include layoffs.
Conclusion
In complex domains risk management ist more “when X will occur we will do Y” than “to avoid X we will do Y”. (That doesn’t imply that traditional approach had no place n complex domains. It is just less important.) But one thing stays the same: More important than risk lists are the collaborative discussions about risks with and within the team.
P.S.: I used the term “risk management” throughout this blogpost although I think it is misleading. Risks in complex domains can’t be managed. We only can prepare to be able to react accordingly. But by now I don’t have a better term. I love to see proposals in the blogpost comments.
P.P.S.: I like to thank my colleagues for the discussions about the topic, namely Arne Roock, Norbert Hölsken, Christian Dähn, Jens Coldewey, Sebastian Sanitz (and I hope that I didn’t forget anyone).
In Scrum workshops participants often come up with platform migration as a task not suitable for Scrum. Examples are the migration from Rails 2 to Rails 3 or from one EJB version to a new one.
For technological reasons it is often not feasible or even impossible to have both platforms in parallel in the system. And the new platform API has breaking changes. Therefore installing the new platform results in a completely broken system and the team would need several Sprints to have a potentially shippable product again. The consequence at first sight might be to adapt Scrum regarding shippable product increments or to use another approach.
Fair enough!
But: Sometimes we gather new insights when we make the probem worse. What would one do if we had to replace the programming language (e.g. migrating a COBOL system to Java)? You wouldn’t just install the Java compiler and try to compile the COBOL source files, would you?
You would rewrite the whole system step by step having potentially shippable code all the time. When this approach works for replacing the programming language it should work for an easier problem like replacing infrastructure as well. And it does.
Rewrite the system on the new platform/infrastructure feature by feature. Of course you make heavy use of copy&paste to reuse the existing code.
Is it worth it?
At first sight the incremental approach needs higher efforts. There has to be something on the plus side to make the approach attractive:
In march 2012 seven it-agile people (including me) formed the StartupMarch team. We decided to build a product to make online discussions more effective. In the end we had built http://www.discuss2decide.com and http://www.discumeter.com.
This blog post is about the “process” we used. We just started to build the product – without any discussion of the process to use – Scrum, Kanban, XP? We just didn’t talk about it. This is what emerged:
It was a great time. We had a lot of fun, we learned a lot and it felt very productive. Although we didn’t acquire millions of venture capital for our products, Discuss2Decide seems to have value for users. There are some regular users of the tool and most online discussions at it-agile are done with the tool today.
Will it travel?
Will the “process” travel to other contexts? I don’t know. I think there were two special ingredients that are uncommon and may have been crucial:
Mein Bruder Arne und ich haben zusammen einen Artikel mit dem Titel “Auf der Suche nach dem Qualitäter” im “Business Technology“-Magazin veröffentlicht, das in der Ausgabe 1.2012, Heft 8 ganz unter dem Titel “Qualität” erschienen ist.
In dem Artikel beschäftigen wir uns mit der Frage, was überhaupt Qualität ist und stellen die klassische Qualitätsdefinition (“Qualität ist die Übereinstimmung der Realisierung mit den Anforderungen.”) in Frage. Wir stellen die kundenorientierte Qualitätsdefinition (“Der Kunde definiert, was Qualität ist.”) dagegen und bringen diese mit agilen Verfahren wie Scrum und Kanban in Zusammenhang. Nicht zuletzt zeigen wir auf, wie die kundenorientierte Qualitätsdefinition in der Softwareentwicklung besondere Herausforderungen an die interne Qualität des Systems stellt.
Auf der JAX-Konferenz werden wir übrigens zum gleichen Thema zu sehen sein, allerdings in einem etwas ungewöhnlicherem Format (Schauspiel).
We founded it-agile seven years ago. This is a good reason to reflect on what we have achieved regarding management and organization within it-agile. Some of the things listed below were already in place seven years ago, others are just a few days old.
We believe that our employees are it-agile with the implication that the best employees would make the best it-agile. And we do not just aim for satisfied customers, we want to delight our customers. To express these believes we have a defined purpose:
“Create fulfilling jobs for our employees to delight customers.”
We achieve this purpose by:
Is it successful?
We have more employees, we have higher revenues and we have higher margins today than we had in the beginning. You never can be sure if the described principles created this growth or if it just was good luck. But I think we were and are successful.
Will it travel?
In general the described concepts shouldn’t be taken as a blueprint for another organization (although there are similarities with other companies like SemCo). I think we wouldn’t have been able to start with out current state even if we had known it. I think that we observed a kind of co-evolution during the last seven years. We made a small modification to the organization of the company. That enabled a small progress of company culture. This progress in company culture then enabled the next small modification of our company structure and rules. And so on…
Will it scale?
We started it-agile with 10 people. Now we are 35. In my point of view the things we did enhanced empowerment and autonomy which are important building blocks for our growth. The changes we made enabled growth. I think for further growth we have to intensify empowerment and autonomy even more.
The Future
Since there is no big boss at it-agile you never know what will happen next. There are some very interesting and challenging discussions in the moment.
BTW 1: We are hiring agile coaches and developers. (Notice; Sometimes people seem to think they wouldn’t match our expectations and therefore don’t apply for a job at it-agile. There is only one way to find out: Let’s talk!)
BTW 2: We offer consulting to managers who want to transform their company/business unit in an agile way towards more empowerment and autonomy.
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