In response to my recent post on Agile Metrics, a reader asked, “Why did you leave out Velocity?”

Even though it’s not perfect, velocity is the best way we have to understand the capacity of teams. It’s the best way we have to bring some reality to planning for releases.  Watching velocity over time and looking at patterns in burn downs can alert coaches and managers that something is going on, and they need to investigate.

Velocity is important. But as a metric for gauging how your agile adoption is going, it’s opens a door to danger.

Here’s why.

Velocity is easy to manipulate.  Want velocity to go up?  Fudge the definition of done and you finish more stories.  Change the scale and complete more points (what once was a 2 point story is now a 5 point story).

Velocity is easy to misuse.  Managers who don’t see organizations as systems can use it to compare teams or punish teams. Neither of which is helpful.

Velocity—as an agile adoption metric—puts the focus in the wrong place. Focus on velocity implies that if velocity isn’t improving there is something wrong with the team. In some cases, that might be true. But I don’t want people to look by default. When velocity isn’t improving or is erratic, it’s often due to factors that aren’t in the team’s direct control.  There might be a problem with the way the work is flowing into the team. Or the team maybe interrupted every hour with production support calls (or what ever). Or the team may not have the tools they need to do their work.  That’s something for the team and team coach to work on or raise up as an impediment (where mangers can work on it at the system level).

For assessing the progress of an agile adoption, I choose metrics that emphasize system performance to help managers make the shift from “work harder” thinking to “optimize the whole system” thinking. Managers after all, are responsible for creating the environment (structures, policies) and enabling conditions for teams be successful. To do that, they need a way to asses how the system is functioning.  Because I presume that the point isn’t being “agile” but delivering valuable software.

For more about using velocity as a measure, see my post Working Hard or Hardly Working.

“How can we tell how far along we are with our agile adoption?”

I heard this question again the other day.

Usually, the person who asks the question starts to answer it:

Number of teams using agile

Number of people trained in agile

Number of projects using agile

Number of certified coaches.

Metrics like these won’t tell you what you need to know. More likely, they will lead you astray. How? Let me tell you a story.

Years ago, I worked for a company that was “installing” a Big Methodology from a Big Company.  (The fact that they thought they were “installing” a methodology was probably the first warning sign.)

Every one in the department attended Big Methodology training. (This practice is sometimes called “Sheep Dip” training).

The VP mandated that all projects would use the Big Methodology.

The Installation Team audited to ensure that project managers and teams were complying and producing the required “work products” in accordance with the Required Work Products grid in the back of the very large Big Methodology binder.

Of course, there was some grumbling (from the people the Installation Team referred to as “Change Resisters.”)  Eventually, people did comply. Every one went to training. Projects managers filled out the required templates, and checked the appropriate boxes.  The metrics looked grand!

The VP declared, “Big Methodology is now business as usual!”

At the time, I scoffed at that statement. It was clear to me that people were not using Big Methodology, and that the promised benefits were nowhere in sight. The only things that had really changed were some check boxes and some names (documents became “work products” or “job aids,”).

But, now, I realize that the VP’s statement was TRUE!

We had Big Methodology, and things went on as they had–business as usual! Well, maybe a little worse because people were spending time producing the many documents specified on the Required Work Products grid.

The metrics the VP tracked were easy to count. But they only revealed surface compliance. They didn’t say anything about whether the organization was achieving the improvements promised by Big Methodology and hoped for by the VP.

So when you think about assessing how far along you are in your agile transformation, consider what you are trying to achieve.

I often suggest that managers track three metrics to understand how well their organization is functioning, and whether they are trending in the right direction.

The ratio of fixing work to feature work. How much time are people spending developing valuable new features vs. fixing stuff that wasn’t done right the first time? If you can figure out the sources of fixing work and make some progress there, you have a boost to productivity. Agile methods can address some of the sources of fixing work…but not all of them.

 Cycle time. How long does it take to go from an idea to a valuable product in the hands of a customer? Again agile methods can help with delivery. But if it’s the upstream process–planning for products and releases–is broken, you may not see improvement until you address those issues, as well as the development process.

Number of defects escaping to production. This is a category of fixing-work that is a direct indicator that the quality of the development process is improving.

For each of these metrics, it is the trend that is important, not an absolute number.  The trend will tell you if your attempts at improvement are having an effect. Remember, most changes take time to take hold. If the trend doesn’t move in a month, it may not mean you have taken the wrong action and need to change direction. If the trend isn’t moving over time, then, examine what is happening in the development area. But also look at other aspects of the system. There are few one-to-one cause and effect relationships in complex systems and the trend you see may or may not be directly related to your change. One company I worked with was alarmed to see that defects released to production went up after they started using agile methods. It turned out that prior to the effort to measure defects released to production, no one paid much attention unless the defect brought down a customer site. The increase in the defects trend was related to reporting, not a failure to improve quality.

I find that the three metrics above are generally useful for understanding how a software development organization is functioning as a system. But your reasons for adopting agile methods may be different.  Consider the goals you are trying to achieve.  What signals would tell you that you are moving in the right direction?  How might you measure those?  When you think about measures, be wary of target numbers. Measuring against targets almost always causes distortion. That means that people will behave so as to reach the target, perhaps in ways that are counter to the actual goal behind the target. Distortion will keep you from seeing the real picture, and may also cause real harm to your organization.

Useful metrics give you a window into how the system is functioning, and whether your change is having an effect. The numbers themselves are neither good nor bad. They are information that signals you to go and find out, investigate and reason about the system.

I recently met with a group of managers who work in organizations adopting agile methods. Several of them asked whether functional managers should become ScrumMasters or coaches.

That’s a risky road.

One manager was adamant. In his view, making managers ScrumMasters was the best course of action. According to this fellow, managers already know people’s strengths and weaknesses. They know the domain, and the organization. So, he reasoned, the managers are already equipped to tell people what to do.

Errr. Not so much.  Coaches and Scrum Masters rarely tell people what to do. Usually, they work by different means–modeling, coaching, teaching.

But it begs the question, can a manager be an agile coach or ScrumMaster?

Here’s what I look for in an agile coach/ ScrumMaster.

Experience. If your company has used serial life cycles or ad hoc methods changing to agile methods is not a trivial matter. Nor is it simply a matter of adopting a few engineering practices or using time boxes.  Succeeding with agile does require engineering practices and time boxes. But the real change happens between peoples ears. It’s a shift in thinking–and not just by the development team. Some people change the way they work by changing their thinking. But many more change their thinking by changing the way they work.  Book learning and training is good, and it’s no substitute for experience in the agile way of working.

A deep understanding of agile practices and methods. Coaches need to know the why and when, as well as the how. They need to understand how practices fit together, the intent behind practices. People do need to adapt methods to local conditions.  Without understanding, adaptation is risky. I’ve seen teams and companies “adapt” themselves right back into the situation they were trying to fix because they didn’t fully understand the “why” behind some agile practices. An agile coach needs to be able to think through what adjustments maintain the essence of a practice, and which adaptations sustain the current pattern.

Coaching skills.  Seems obvious. An agile coach should know something about coaching. That means helping people learn skills through practice and feedback. It means helping people think through issues and see new alternatives.  It may mean providing answers, facilitating, or acting as a mirror. If often means helping people think about the way they are thinking, and helping teams get unstuck.  (It does not necessarily include “life coaching.”)

Coaching is tricky when a person also has the responsibility to rate and rank individuals. Coaching requires openness and trust. When people fear that revealing lack of knowledge or skill will show up on their annual review, they are less likely to ask for help. I know of several companies where managers are now “coaches” (and managers). Its confusing for the team members.  They don’t know who they are talking to–the person who helps, or the the one who will hand out a rating at year end.

Understanding of teams and team dynamics. Another skill that would seem obvious, but is often overlooked. When the job is coaching a team, the coach needs to understand something about how people behave in goal-oriented social units. He needs to know the foundations and enabling conditions that allow teams to form and thrive. He needs to recognize when problems are related to the design of the team, when they are system patterns, and when there are individual problems.

Interpersonal and collaboration skills. Coaching is about enabling other people to be more effective. The zeroth step is to make contact with people. If a coach cannot do that, he won’t be able to build relationships and trust. I do sometimes meet coaches who are all about “me.” Doesn’t work. Coaches need to be able to work with others, share credit, and let others shine.

Influence and organizational smarts.  It is silly (or worse) to expect a ScrumMaster to remove significant organizational impediments and drive organizational change–even though that’s often the hype. Coaches need to be savvy about the organization and to have influencing skills, so they can help managers understand the costs of impediments.

If you want empowered teams, you need to change the dynamic between managers and teams.  Slapping a new tittle on a manager (or project manager) will not change the dynamic unless the manager’s mindset and actions also change.

Of course, some managers do have all the qualities and skills to make the transition.  And some teams have the gumption to call out their former managers when they slip back into command and control thinking or acting.  Even when the mangers is willing and capable of changing the way he interacts with a team, it will take time for the new pattern of interaction to take hold.

But for many companies, calling managers “coaches” or “ScrumMasters” is really hierarchical control in coaches clothing.

Organizations still need managers.  Call them managers, and have them do management work–improving the organizational system and translating strategy into action. And get a coach to be the coach.

This article originally appeared on gantthead.com 

In the early days of agile, some pundits (and developers) cried, “We don’t need no stinking managers.”

By now, most people realize that organizations still need management (and people in management roles) after they adopt agile methods. However, if those organizations want all the benefits of agile, managers must also change the way they work.

Managers can play an even more valuable role in organizations as teams become self-organizing and take on more responsibility. But if managers want teams to take more self-responsibility, they need to shift their focus from monitoring the day-to-day work of individuals and let teams grow up.  Here are three common areas of confusing as managers and teams negotiate their new relationships.

Messing with Team Membership

No group is a team the first day they are together.  Becoming a team takes time–time to learn how each person fits in and contributes, time to lean how to work together, time to develop group identity and trust.

If you want the benefit of the team effect, provide the enabling conditions:

• A clear and compelling goal
• Appropriate constraints
• Stable membership
• Time for the team to gel.

Plucking people off the team or poking people into the team causes a re-set in the team forming process. Mess with the membership often enough, and people will stop trying. When team membership feels like a revolving door, individuals won’t put in the effort to form team bonds. You may get a group that functions reasonably well, but you’ll miss out on the team effect.

That doesn’t mean that team membership never changes. People leave (or are asked to leave) and people join. Hiring new people for a team should always be a joint decision, involving team members. And when people are asked to leave it shouldn’t be mysterious to the team why that happened. (For more on hiring as a collaborative process, see this article.)

Delegating then De-delegating Decisions

As a general rule, delegating decision making to the people who are closest to the work is an excellent principle. Doing so can remove bottlenecks, lead to faster decision-making, and improve customer responsiveness.

Except when it doesn’t, as happens when a manager and a team haven’t clarified who makes which decisions. Or when a manager delegates a decision, but doesn’t clarify boundaries or constraints around that decision.

When managers see that a team is about to make a poor decision, they may be tempted to countermand that decision. Countermanding a decision prevents the problems that would have been caused by a faulty decision. But it leads do a different kind of problem–loss of trust between the team and the manager.  Team members may feel the manager wasn’t serious about delegating decisions in the first place. They may believe that he only delegates decisions on the condition that the team decides exactly what the manager would choose.  Such situations will damage a mangers relationship with the team.

If the team makes a decision that will result in real harm to the company, a manager must intervene. How he intervenes makes a difference. To prevent real harm to the relationship, refrain from blame. Acknowledging that key constraints weren’t clear or communicated will help. Use the opportunity to learn from the mistake, and to set appropriate boundaries for team decisions.

Strategic decisions belong to management. But tactical decisions, course corrections, and decisions that affect day-to-day work belong with the development team. Some decisions fall in between, and require both management and front-line input.

Work with the team to identify which decisions are squarely with the team, which ones you share, and which ones are management decisions. Then set boundaries, about cost, impact, and scope.

For example, when it comes to hiring a new team member, the decision about what skills and qualities to look for in a new team member is probably a joint decision.  The choice among candidates is best done as a recommendation from the team (which you may over-ride at your own peril). But the offer and salary are neither a team decision or a joint decision. Employment terms and salary (in most organizations) are management decisions.

Clouding Team Commitments

One of the secrets ingredients for team success is that team members make commitments to each other to complete their goal. Peer pressure can be a wonderful thing. But commitments can lead to conflict, it’s not clear who makes commitments to whom about what.

Fred, a member of an agile team, participated in a planning meeting where he and his teammates committed to deliver six stories during the next iteration.  Then Fred when to the team manager, Megan, to get approval for a two week vacation, starting the second week of the next sprint–as he had done every spring for the last four years.

But this time, the result was a mess. The other team members were mad at Fred, for committing his effort to the team, when he knew he wouldn’t be in the office for half the next sprint.  The team members were mad at Megan, too, for giving Fred permission when they thought he should have talked to them first. Fred and Megan felt attacked–for doing what they’d always done.

Managers are still point-person for matters of company policy. But work commitment a happen between the team as a whole and their product owner or customer. Megan and Fred landed in the middle of that. In the end, Fred took his vacation. The team needed to renegotiate their commitment to the product owner. Megan attended the meeting to explain what had happened to the product owner.

When Fred (gratefully) returned from two weeks at the cabin with his three kids and the in-laws, they all had a sit down. They talked about which commitments the team could make, what the team could negotiate among themselves and where Megan needed to be involved for legal reasons.

I hear managers say they want teams to take more responsibility. The best way to make that happen is for managers to stop acting in ways that take responsibility away from teams. Start with these three areas.  Then, spend some time examining your relationship with the team. What else could the team do that would enhance their autonomy and responsibility? What else are you doing that might confuse the team about how much responsibility they really have?

Every team needs leadership, even self-organizing teams.

When I make this statement, some people assume I mean that every team needs a designated leader.  I can’t blame them, most people are accustomed to thinking of leadership residing in a role or a charismatic individual—a “born” leader.

On self-organizing teams, there isn’t one leader.  Agile teams may have a coach; however, the coaches job is to help the team see where they need to improve and help them learn specific skills.  The coach may lead at times, but the coach isn’t the leader.  In fact, if the team looks at the coach as the leader, they’re in trouble. Holding up one person as leader will hamper team development.

Before we go any further, let’s define leadership: leadership is creating an environment where everyone can contribute to solve the problem at hand.

On teams that function well, every member of the team leads.  Each person takes responsibility for helping the team move forward.

But acting at random or on gut feel isn’t enough. Empowering leaders can be more effective when they work out of a model that helps them make sense of what they see happening on the team.

One such model is the MOIJ model articulated by Jerry Weinberg.

1. Every team needs motivation—and I don’t mean pep talks, cheerleading and extrinsic rewards.  Teams do best when they are intrinsically motivated, when they derive satisfaction from the work and team relationships.

Team members lead when they work for appropriate harmony and consensus—and engage in constructive conflict.  Leaders pay attention to how other team members are participating, so that everyone can use their talents and creativity. Leaders pay attention to how the whole team is working together, and building a team culture that supports achievement and good working relationships.

When only one person on the team pays attention to motivation, the team doesn’t learn how to create the environment for their own success.

2. Teams need organization.  Organization is more than the boxes on an org chart.  Organization includes physical space, time, and structure.

Leaders make sure that the workspace supports the team with appropriate equipment and information. Teams need someone to lead by pay attention to commitments and the ticking clock.  They need to figure out how to allocate the work so that it gets done and there’s a balance between people expanding their skills and relying on experts who can do the work most quickly. Teams need structures that help them work effectively together, for example, working agreements or configuration management.

When only one person pays attention to organization, he comes across as a nag. After a while, people ignore nags.

3. Teams need information.  They need to see a vision, generate ideas, bring in data and analyze and connect the dots.

Along with a flow of ideas, sometimes, a teams need a Devils Advocate.  A Devil’s Advocate challenges habitual thinking, checks solutions against foundational principles and values.  Without a Devil’s Advocate, teams can slip into group think, or miss risks and weaknesses when they consider options. But like the nagging organizer, no one enjoys a habitual naysayer. When there’s only one Devil’s Advocate he’s likely to be marginalized.  Like all the other leadership activities, it’s important to spread this one around.

Team members also need to know when they have too many ideas, and it’s time to slow the flow. We usually don’t think of following as a leadership activity.  But I’ve seen teams where everyone wanted to have his or her way.  I’ve seen teams sidetracked when members keep throwing in new ideas each time they come close to a decision.  Those teams argue and debate endlessly and don’t make forward progress.  Knowing when to zip the lips and follow is leadership, too.

4. Finally, every team needs people who can recognize when they are stuck and need a jiggle.  My favorite jiggle is a paradoxical question: “How can we make the situation worse?” Simply commenting on the stuck-ness can sometimes shake a team out of their rut. Changing position—standing up if the team has been sitting–can jiggle the team into productive action, as well.

***

What happens when only one person on the team—whether a formal or informal leader—tries to do all the leadership?  I suppose there are the rare individuals who can do it all. But on most teams that aren’t sharing leadership, are missing some leadership ingredients.  When teams rely on one individual they flounder when the leader isn’t available.  Worse, they don’t develop their own capabilities and slide into dependency.

Leadership is about making sure the team is functioning well and creating an environment where everyone can do his or her best work.  And it takes a whole team of leaders to make a self-organizing team.

Slides from a talk I gave on Double Loop Learning in Retrospectives:

And take a look at PROMOTING DOUBLE LOOP LEARNING IN RETROSPECTIVES.

“The thinking that got us here isn’t the thinking that’s going to get us where we need to be.”  attributed to Albert Einstein

I have  this niggling concern about retrospectives.

I have no doubt that retrospectives that are too short, don’t result in action / experiment, or fail to delve beneath the surface are a waste of time. (I suspect many retrospectives fall into this category, since many people teach that an entire retrospective consists of Keep/Drop/Add or some variant there of. This is seldom sufficient for deep or creative thinking.)

But what about earnest retrospectives that focus on an area of concern, examine data, analyze underlying issues and result in action?  I worry that some of those fall short, too.  Why?  Because the thinking that got us here isn’t the thinking that will get us where we need to be.

People work out of their existing mental models. When they examine their current actions, they may achieve incremental improvements.  But they may  take a potentially useful new practice and kill it with 1000 compromises, shaping the new practice to fit the old mental model.

This can happen even when people are trying to learn a new way of working. The first OO program I wrote looked remarkably procedural– I was trying to wrap my head around the new paradigm, I hadn’t quite gotten there yet. In a retrospective, if people try to improve their agile practices, they may improve them right back to serial development.  Or, people may make a genuine effort to improve, but they only know what they know, and the possibilities for improvement they can see are within the bounds of their current thinking.

So the task, then, is to examine the thinking and expand possibilities.

Single and Double Loop Learning

Single loop learning asks, “How can we do what we are doing better.”

Double loop learning asks “Why do we think this is the right thing to do,” and involves scrutinizing values, thinking, and assumptions.

Transformational improvement and significant learning come from making beliefs, assumptions, and thinking explicit, testing them, and experimenting.

Teams may need a little help to make the jump into the second learning loop, As teams are examining their practices, ask questions that help teams surface assumptions and test them.

• What would have to be true for [a particular practice] to work?

• [practice or action] makes sense when ___________.

• [practice or action] will work perfectly when _________.

• [practice or action] will work well-enough when_________.

• [practice or action] will be harmful when__________.

• What do we know to be true? How do we know that?

• What do we assume is true?  Can we confirm that?

• Why do we believe that?

• What is untrue, based on our investigation?

• What do we say our values are?

• If an outsider watched us, what would he say our values are?

• What is the gap?  How can we make the gap smaller?

• How could we make things worse?

Chewing on a good subset of these questions usually helps a team see their assumptions, and take a different view on what has worked, what hasn’t worked as expected, and the reasons why.

Then, they are in a better position to choose a more effective action, or design an experiment that will help them learn what action to take.

A while back I talked to a CEO of a contract development shop.  He wondered how Agile could help him with fixed price, fixed scope contracts to deliver software.

Of course, the requirements that come with these contracts are never complete or completely accurate. The first thing that comes to mind is to stop making impossible contracts.  For this CEO, that doesn’t seem possible, at least at this time, given the context he does business in.

In any fixed cost/scope contract there comes a time when the two parties must have a conversation about the short-comings of the requirements, the delivered software, and the budget.

In a waterfall delivery, all progress reports are proxies. You’re reporting on intangibles–designs, test cases, or code that isn’t fully integrated or tested. This is all reporting on faith, because it is not verified by working software.

When a change request does come up, it’s unanchored from the experience of how actually using the software. It’s only words, and the impacts are made tangible in cost thinking, how much it will cost to modify existing artifacts, ripple effects through the code, test cases, documentation.  There’s usually some accounting for the benefit and risks, but those tend to feel subject to inflation, based on conjecture, squishy. What does feel clear is that the change request process takes up time, and approving the change will cost more money. More often than not, the interaction feels like a tug of war. One side is arguing to spend more money, and the other is working with equal vigor for the opposite.

When the moment of truth arrives–the long tail of testing–it becomes apparent that all the progress reports up until that point weren’t reliable. After you’ve made the up-front promises and signed on the line, you have one big opportunity to build trust. If you blow it, you’re sunk. At that point, it’s difficult to have a conversation about meeting goals–especially when the lawyers get involved.

However, if you are using agile methods, you demonstrate some small piece of software every few weeks. People on both sides of the contract see tangible progress.  They have a chance to correct misunderstandings about requirements, and fill in the gaps in each others understanding. People on both sides of the contract can see and experience the short-coming in the requirements, so it’s not the tug of war a traditional change process sets up. People on both sides have more reliable data on which to make decisions.

Most important though, both parties have had many opportunities to build trust based on something real–working software.

So when that point comes, when both parties to the contract must have a conversation about meeting the aim of the contract, it’s a very different conversation.  The moment of truth will probably come sooner, when people have more options.  The conversation will be based on shared understanding of progress and trust.  And that’s a very different conversation.

Not so very long ago, I made my living writing code. My colleagues and I did our best to understand what our customers needed, and to write code that was easy for other programmers to understand, solid, defect free.  When our managers asked us how long it would take to create a new feature or modify and existing program, we studied the problem, considered how much code we’d need to write or change, how we’d integrate the new functions with existing functions, and what sort of testing would allow us to feel confident our work was complete and correct.

Our managers were often not satisfied with our estimates.  They wished we could deliver working software more quickly.  They suggested we were exaggerating how complicated the work was.  They hinted we were padding our estimates, and spoke sternly of work expanding to fill the available time.  Then they revised the estimates to fit their desires and handed down a due date.

Strangely enough, the work usually took longer than the managers wished it would.  Our managers contemplated the gap between wished-for and actual delivery and pronounced us not sufficiently productive.

And so the quest to improve our productivity began.  First it was CASE tools.  They were supposed to improve productivity by an order of magnitude (they did not).  Then came Rapid Application Development (apparently the managers stopped reading after “Rapid”).  The next improvement, Object Oriented programming, was supposed to save the day (it did change the way we think about programming).  When I left that company, the productivity pill was a development methodology that took up an entire 4-foot bookshelf.

And the quest to improve productivity in software organizations marches on.  More and more often, the quest includes some flavor of Agile Methods, and a promise of hyper-productivity, quick delivery, and change for free.

Agile methods can help achieve business results, get software out the door faster, adjust to new priorities, and dramatically reduce the number of errors that reach the customer.

Agile encourages close collaboration with a product owner or customer (whether that’s an internal customer proxy, product owner or an end-user of the software). This helps teams understand the customer and his context, so they can make better decisions about feature design. Short iterations and frequent demonstrations of working features keeps development close to customer needs and wants.

Agile methods encourage planning based on demonstrated capacity, using agile methods can help prevent cost overruns and help managers make decisions to continue funding feature development–or not. Iteration planning and tracking story points helps teams and management understand capacity. Without this information, plans are merely wishes.  Armed with such information, managers have the opportunity to review progress and viability at the end of every iteration.

Working in short iterations to produce working software can allow a company to realize revenue early; when teams finish small chunks of features each iteration, it’s no longer necessary to wait until all the features are completed to test and deploy. Every feature slice is tested and ready for customer acceptance at the end of the iteration. When the slices add up to a marketable set, managers can choose to release.

Agile engineering practices such as automated unit and customer tests, pair programming, and frequent integration find errors early which reduces the number of defects released to the customer. That results in lower support costs, find and fix costs and bad press generated by buggy products. Practices such as simple design, Test Driven Development and refactoring keep the design flexible and clean, avoiding design degradation and escalating costs for future changes.

Many teams who use agile methods are building strong cross-functional teams and report that their satisfaction with work-life and work/life balance is higher. Working at a sustainable pace and re-establishing pride in work bring intrinsic motivation. That makes it easier to attract and retain employees.

But when agile methods—extreme programming, scrum, kanban or some combination there of—are imposed as a way to “fix” perceived programmer productivity problems, the effort almost always fails.  Sheep-dip training programs, “going agile” by decree and cherry-picking the agile practices that don’t seem difficult won’t achieve great results.

No method, or set of methods can improve results unless managers also change the way they do their work.

Managers need to get organizational systems working.  Managers must do the hard work of understanding the market, their customers, and make difficult choices about what work to do and what work not to do.  Managers need to study how teams and organizations really function and then create systems and environments that don’t hinder people from doing work.

Writing software is hard.  Agile methods can help.  But they are not a silver bullet.  And no method can improve productivity unless management also changes.

A while back I was contacted by a potential client who wanted to “go agile.”  But they wanted to do it in a deterministic manner.  They wanted a plan, complete with milestones and dates–mostly indicating that other people had changed their behavior as dictated by management.

Sigh.

One could make a plan for mass training (aka sheep dip), I suppose.  One could   dictate that by June 10, 20XX, all teams will practicing TDD.  Or that all projects will be converted to backlogs and loaded into agile project management software.

But that doesn’t seem so agile to me.  It seems like it misses the point of learning and adapting; of embracing values; of understanding systems and patterns, how the work works, what’s working and what’s not.  Without considering the WHY behind processes and learning as you go, you are only going through the motions.

Start with understanding the current state, and what problem you are trying to solve by “going agile.”  Understand how the current structures and goal alignments are supporting or hindering the goal of delivering products to customers, and identify targeted changes that will improve that ability. Identify where and you can change the pattern and establish structures that will help the new pattern take hold.

Make a Road Map, knowing that you don’t know everything and can’t foresee all you’ll discover on this journey of change. Describe the desired pattern and the steps that you can currently envision to get there.  You won’t be able to see all the steps. If your initial actions are effective, your culture will be changing. Any far-future actions you described from the driveway may no longer be what’s needed when you are 100 miles from home.

It’s impossible to know everything at the outset when you decide to make what amounts to a cultural change. You take some steps, observe the effects of actions, and adapt, learning as you go.

Deterministic planning fails with complex software systems, and it fails with organizational change. Organizations are far too complex, and we need to plan for adaptation, learning, and the fact that the organization will be changing as the plan unfolds.