Agile
Agile Project Management with Kanban (via Wade Chandler)
- Each vertical swim lane is split into active and done. I get that this creates buffers between states, but (1) why not have to-do/doing/done for each state? What not change the vertical lanes to reflect that true state (e.g., ready for implementation, implementing, ready for verification, verifying) instead of sub-lanes?
- Issues with what the speaker (Eric Brechner) claims
- There’s just a board and no process — not true. Kanban is very much a process.
- He broke protocol for his flow for answering questions, which means he needs a better/different protocol, and then laughed off that there’s no “Kanban police.” A process that has a fickle structure is weak or is itself waste.
- He said his team only has standup and no other meetings. When do you do deep refining that takes longer than an “insertion sort” during standups?
- “It’s alright to do work as it comes in as you need to.” Not true — you have prioritization and WIP limits. Every system of execution needs an algorithm.
- He just moved sticky notes in the order he wanted to talk about “because I’m in charge,” then said that prioritization isn’t hard. Sure, that works for a simple demo, but what about places where the team and the business don’t agree on priorities?
- Lots of vigorous handwaving about how to break down larger things into roughly the same sizes of work. Many words like “just,” “simple,” “easy,” “straightforward.”
- All of his teams stopped estimating because the work they did was delivered on-time or early. I have no idea what kind of work his teams were doing, but every company I’ve worked at in the last decade has struggled to achieve this.
- What makes Kanban project management is (1) a definition of done for each step, and (2) WIP limits.
- You want the output rates of one state to balance with the input rates of the following state. You calculate these throughputs based on observation and context.
- For dependencies that become blockers, he suggests adding a “Track” (i.e., we’re tracking this differently) sub-column for a given state that someone else (e.g., Scrum Master, product manager) drives forward.
- You can ship when your work is done; however, when you need to coordinate with others, you need to let the managing team know when your tasks are done.
- When you get open-ended tasks or things that turn out to be monsters, they become obvious because of WIP limits. Ideally the idle workers (because they can’t produce on any other state) will swarm on those stuck items. Sometimes you’ll split the items into design and implementation sub-tasks.
- When you have tasks that can only be done by one person, you need to focus on either better documentation or cross-training. You want to avoid a single person or skillset being a bottleneck.
- Don’t spend time in daily standups talking about task states you can easily read from the information radiator (i.e., Kanban board). Talk about blockers and dependencies.
- How Microsoft does this at scale is a combination of top-down (marketing, sales, executives) and bottom-up (teams closest to the work, technical debt). You negotiate, iterate, roughly plan, revisit and refine, etc. Big sync meetings occur quarterly, semi-yearly, etc. because doing so more frequently yields too much overhead.
Taking the “You” out of Scrum Master (via Agile Amped)
- Many Agile coaches and consultants are looking for more nuanced problems than Scrum 101, so hopefully their (Ryan Ripley and Todd Miller) book Fixing Your Scrum will get those simple conversations out of the way.
- When your company is used to gauging metrics from a performance-only perspective, sprints are about filling up your plate, going heads down, and getting the work done. Instead, ask whether you’re building something of value.
- The Scrum guide is silent on management; managers are partners in Scrum, so don’t throw them under the bus. You can’t dismiss managers who ask how long things will take and how much it will cost.
- The “State of Agile” report commonly lists misalignment of management with Agile teams as an issue.
- When Scrum Masters get apathetic, you get many more process antipatterns that follow. You need to be laser-focused on removing impediments and helping with delivery. Not just anyone can do this job well. This role has been marginalized (e.g., all they do is report status, order pizza, make sure people have sticky notes).
- You need to love your team; commitment and caring
- You want your team to be wildly successful
- Have zero tolerance for things getting in the way of the team being successful
- Scrum Masters need to look beyond knowledge and certifications. Be introspective and want to grow as a person; read about leadership, history, teams, context. You can’t grow others if you can’t grow yourself. This role is not about you; it’s about others.
- Audience for the book: Scrum Masters primarily, but anyone who interacts with Scrum Masters would benefit from reading it
- The future of Scrum likely involves simplifying it (empirical process control) instead of thinking about all the add-ons that have accumulated over time. There’s also a more of an emphasis on product, not just software. You can use Scrum outside of tech.
Agile Transformation vs. Project Management Offices (via Leading Agile)
- What is an Agile Transformation Office (ATO)? The execution arm of the system of transformation — building the coaching practice; determining the backlog of expeditions and prioritizing work around business goals; measuring the effectiveness of transformation; doing roadmapping and discovery; executing and delivering on transforming the teams; helping with change management and linking it back to business metrics
- Reduce batch size and focus on quality to reduce your time to market
- Want to get beyond shipping code on time (“base camp one”), to deploying end-to-end quickly (“base camp two”)
- The ATO uses business metrics, not delivery metrics; the latter are still important. Velocity increasing, features closing, release readiness being more predictable, etc. tie back to solving some business problem.
- What is a Project Management Office (PMO)? This needs to be a service organization to support the company in a different way of working. PMs think they have the answers, but this is not part of the standard PM training up to this point. Maybe the PMO isn’t needed in its current form after the transformation; still need it when there are synchronized releases (until you can no-friction release on-demand). The PMO focuses on execution.
- You need a language commonality between those doing the work and the business executives. The biggest issue with PMs is the vertical decomposition of work. Features are not a linear project with a 1:1 milestone (phase/handoff); features involve everything required to deliver to market. The ATO coaches are responsible for making sure the vertical slices understand the vernacular of Agile.
- Project managers typically have breadth but not depth of understanding of what’s going on. The Agile way includes everyone in planning — idea all the way to inception, not horizontal handoffs with skillsets you don’t understand. Ross thought it sucked to be a PM because you have responsibility and accountability for things you don’t fully understand much less control.
- You can manage things and process, but rarely knowledge workers who know about the work than you do.
- Business agility is not about reorganizing how you work, it’s about reprioritizing the things you want to get to market.
- It’s not sufficient to have Agile processes around projects; you end up staying project-oriented, which inherently can’t react to market demand.
- You can still have an ATO in a highly-regulated environment. The ATO will design processes that allow you to create products by default in a compliant way.
- “Process cops” are needed (and RACI matrices) when you don’t have a system that’s helping you in an automated fashion via the system of delivery. There’s still a lot of work to be done. Analogy: department of the interior, department of the exterior. They’re still needed, their focus shifts and they move under another umbrella.
- The people in the PMO may not be the best suited to create the ATO. You need skillsets around change management and leadership at the org level.
Remote Agile Coaching (via Agile Amped)
- Idea: make the training async (i.e., videos that can be watched at your own pace), then have meetings to recap and answer questions synchronously. In-person regional meetings were helpful as well.
- Video is important
- Be present in the interactions; make space for a personal touch instead of keeping it only about work.
- Lean into your tooling because it’s difficult to sense where the work is when you’re no co-located with a physical task board
- Have existing people be Agile champions because you can’t have Agile coaches everywhere; this is internal coaching
- You need enough overlap (e.g., 5-6 hours) in timezones or the Agile ceremonies become difficult to maintain.
- For new remote teams… Invest time to get to know one another. See who’s online to chat (in Teams, Slack, etc.) and strike up a short conversation that you haven’t talked to in a few days.
Why Behavior Trumps Empathy – The Secret to Building the Right Thing (via Leading Agile)
- See Donald Norman’s 1984 book “User-centered System Design”. You have a system model, an image of how that should work in the architect’s head, then you have another image that the customer has in their head.
- Persona (from Alan Cooper’s “The Inmates are Running the Asylum”) — archetype of a customer segment that engages with your product to get a job done. Typically you do contextual inquiry (open-ended, non-leading questions), observe people, generate lots of data, then synthesize artifacts with key information to drive what motivates a customer.
- People got really excited about using personas for human-centered design. Most orgs hired an external agency to do this, but then those personas weren’t actually used by the people doing the work.
- Empathy map / empathy canvas — gather people and walk through key factors about a customer segment, have people generate ideas and stories. However, it can be dead-wrong and full of assumptions; it’s better than nothing. Take these to actual customers to see if you were close. Challenge: Doesn’t relate to prioritizing backlogs in a large enterprise
- Impact mapping — draw lines between what we’re going to build, the problem we’re solving that leads to behavior change by specific people that allows us to achieve some kind of goal
- Center = person, behavior, impediment
- Before you build stuff, figure out who the customer is and which hypotheses to test first by collecting data.
- There’s nothing (yet) in the literature about having empathy for your customer leading to better value. We do have quite a bit of peer-reviewed knowledge around behavior change and habits.
- If you’re building some kind or product for your customer, you want them to engage in some kind of behavior change or overcome some kind of impediment. What drives behavior and actions so people can take new actions and have different outcomes? What are the underlying needs? Habits? Intentions?
- All of the Agile ceremonies are meant to install better habits (e.g., write things down as stories but don’t get too detailed).
- Look at the barriers and benefits of your customers to inform what you put in your backlog.
- Adjacent possible — solve a problem for a different customer (e.g., how 3M came up with sticky notes when looking for a better adhesive)
- Build MVPs to inspect and adapt and test hypotheses; this is what Agile is all about.
- Refine your backlog based on impact to value and changing the behavior of your customers.
Business
Leading into the Post-Covid Recovery (via Harvard Business Review)
- Responding to the initial shock was an unexpected high-point (i.e., sense of urgency and a bias toward action), but that’s fading
- Our emotional operating system has been reset, as we see how people respond
- The path forward is less clear than the acute part of the crisis
- Ask yourself (and your team) how you can learn from this and realize this crisis is not behind us
- Recalibrate your team and their routines; many people said they’ve encountered business setbacks but were able to move forward in many other ways that would have been arduous if not impossible without an external catalyst
- When you reopen, pay attention to the small stuff
21 HR Jobs of the Future (via Harvard Business Review)
Various consortia envisioned the future of HR that might evolve over the next ten years. “All 21 jobs embody five core themes: individual and organizational resilience; organizational trust and safety; creativity and innovation; data literacy; human-machine partnerships.”
Career
Thinking of Skipping Vacation? Don’t! (via Harvard Business Review)
Most people who travel for vacation are considering skipping them because of COVID-19 concerns; however, there are benefits to getting away from work (improved productivity, lower stress, better mental health). Tips: get a change of scenery, plan ahead, identify what kind of experience you want to have, spend time outdoors, truly unplug, and create memories.
Building Workplace Relationships Virtually: An Intern’s Perspective (via Cameron Presley)
Cameron is a fantastic developer mentor. Combine that with an organization that takes internships and mentoring seriously, this article is a “golden example” of how to make tech internships a first-class experience.
Culture
4 Conversations Leaders in the #MeToo Era Should Be Ready For (via Harvard Business Review)
- Disclosure — express empathy, assess safety, given them their power back, know your own policies / compliance advice / reporting guidelines
- Intervention — direct (“looks like you missed the memo on appropriate conversations”), distract (disrupt the behavior in progress), delegate, defer (talk to them later)
- Culture — understand how your workplace culture works with this
- Support — harassment is more prevalent than people give it credit; be ready to support your colleagues
How to Attract More Women (and Not the Way You Think) (via Software Lead Weekly)
- Avoid gender-related superlatives like “rockstar”
- Specify real must-haves with regard to years of experience
- Avoid describing a masculine environment
- Chose your gender-neutral language carefully
- Include diverse images
- Actively eliminate biases while sorting through resumes
- Reduce the stereotype threat on job interviews and coding tests
- Educate interviewers about the confidence gap and imposter syndrome
- Make sure you offer the same terms to all
- Make your workplace accessible to parents
Health
Covid-19 Created an Elective Surgery Backlog. How Can Hospitals Get Back on Track? (via Harvard Business Review)
- Develop consistent, transparent, and bias-aware algorithms for surgical prioritization — this can’t be first-come-first-served or loudest-voice-wins approaches
- Expand surgical capacity by transitioning to outpatient care — many types of surgery can be performed in a non-hospital setting, including ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs)
- Form dedicated teams to improve operating room efficiency — cross-train people instead of downsizing
- Think beyond the traditional five-day work week
- Focus on simplifying patients’ surgical care experience — help people navigate the system
Leadership
8 Ways Managers Can Support Employees’ Mental Health (via Harvard Business Review)
- Be vulnerable
- Model healthy behaviors
- Build a culture of connection through check-ins
- Offer flexibility and be inclusive
- Communicate more than you think you need to
- Invest in training
- Modify policies and practices
- Measure
Our book club is almost done with Chapter 5 of Radical Candor. We discussed socializing outside of work and learning how to interact with people that may have different values than you.
Process
Your To-Do List Is, in Fact, Too Long (via Harvard Business Review)
Instead of a long list, have one item that’s manageable; don’t view or consider any other items until that one is done. This is basically Kanban with a work-in-process limit of one. I’ve heard of variants of this approach, such as write down ten things you want to get accomplished today and cross off seven.
Psychology
Sarcasm, Self-Deprecation, and Inside Jokes: A User’s Guide to Humor at Work (via Harvard Business Review)
Context and delivery is key for humor. In general humor adds levity, and those that deliver it well are admired for their wit and confidence, which can raise their status in the group.
- Inside jokes — increases in-group bonds; avoid if you don’t want to leave others out
- Sarcasm — boosts creativity with those you trust; avoid when building relationships or avoiding conflict
- Self-deprecation — lightens the mood about non-essential skills; avoid when you haven’t demonstrated competence
- Dodging difficult questions — helps when you’re confident the audience will find it funny (and you have an actual serious answer); avoid if you don’t think the joke will land
- Delivering negative feedback — makes the feedback more memorable; avoid when the recipient underestimates the urgency or importance of the the feedback
- Coping mechanism — helps when you are in a close group going through something difficult; avoid when it seems “too soon”