Geoff Mazeroff

Agile

Is 2020 a Gold Rush Year for New Scrum Masters? (via Mountain Goat Software)

Many businesses need less convincing that Agile frameworks are helpful, so having people to facilitate Agile workflows are in higher demand. Some people may move into this role from a much more hands-on role such as project manager; they will experience some role shock. Personally, I think people get too wrapped around the Scrum(TM)(R)(C) axle and should focus on Agile verbs (which the article mentions): teach, mentor, coach, facilitate.

Can There Be Too Much Transparency? (via Mountain Goat Software)

• Qualitative: share inside the team unless there’s a good reason not to; consider sharing outside the team
• Quantitative: share everything inside the team, share outside unless there’s a good reason not to

Meaningful Metrics are Simpler Than You Think (via Agile Amped)

• This is intentionally not a heavyweight, OKR, management-by-objectives, top-down approach.
• Identify the things that help you with time-to-market or achieving Agile at scale. The problem is that these measures often have years of lag time.
• Predictive metrics — measure the behavior by looking at the levers (training, tool chains (e.g., Jira), suppliers). Don’t look at the number of people trained; look at whether people are actually doing what you train them on.
• Example: Training people on sprint planning and retros is the first step. Then go look to see how many of those teams are actually doing those things. Next look at the quality of those ceremonies.
• Manage change by measuring behavior.
• Don’t just focus on change; focus on the rate of change. Many of these long-term investments do not occur overnight or in one week. Most companies get impatient and want to see velocities improve and get frustrated when those don’t happen quickly enough.
• The guest (John Carter) suggested only measuring one important thing at a time instead of dashboards of metrics. I disagree. Most of the time if you’re working on something non-trivial, there’s not just one thing that needs to move. Also, aggregate metrics make you chase down anomalies or miss things that need attention.
• Once people are doing the work, then measure quality. Start with a checklist/scorecard about how well those things are working.
• Organizational complexity to adopt the transformation will impact how quickly you get movement. The more layers, the slower it goes.
• What does transparency look like? Start with frequency first because this is difficult to hide (e.g., are you having retros) and aren’t subjective (e.g., the retro happened or it didn’t).

The Best Virtual Teams Do These 3 Things (via Agile Amped)

The show notes and the host didn’t really clarify what the three things were per se, but here are my notes:

• When onboarding remote colleagues… How do we create connections in a virtual environment to build communication, trust, empathy, context?
• Great leaders coach by doing. Change starts with you; even if your managers aren’t, you can. Make space to learn more about your people because we bring our whole selves to work. How do people communicate (e.g., emojis)?
• Remote work during a pandemic is an anomaly. Empathy is important here.
• Add people to Slack channels by default; plus, there have been some new things that have sprung from massive WFH shift (e.g., gratitude, wisdom, places, covid-19, plants).
• Some people think the “water cooler” activities are fluff and not about the work; not true. Take time to do the small things. We’re too caught up in “meetings are expensive and must drive value” and the efficiency altar.
• Idea: co-working Zoom/Teams meeting to feel like another person is with you.
• “Good PM, good team building, good leadership… these don’t go out of style.”

Using Earned Value with Agile (via Leading Agile)

• Most useful in government work where earned value (EV) is mandated or there’s strict adherence to apply the old PMP methods to have some semblance of control over scope and schedule.
• Origins… Imagine a multi-year project where you can’t take any credit until the entire thing is finished. For this to work, you need a predetermined scope and schedule.
• Problem… “Value” is defined for whom?
• How much does it cost to run the team? This leads to a slippery slope of comparing dollars-per-story-point across teams. EV is tricky in Agile and even trickier when multiple teams are involved where velocities aren’t normalized.
• EV isn’t the first tool you’d reach for in Agile, but it’s not in opposition to Agile. It can be a bridge between two worlds.
• Don’t compare teams by 1) equating story points to hours, or 2) having experts form a smaller team to estimate the work (which usually doesn’t include the people doing the work).
• Normalize points before or after. Get reps from the team together to estimate and establish a steady velocity. This requires you to get to the point where any team is comparable.
• Assumption: Value of the completed feature is known, size of feature in story points is known.
• The government wants EV because they’re used to it, but they also get the value of Agile. They seem to want faster delivery of capability of services with less risk (which is what business agility means); EV is a vestige of everyone working in waterfall where projects take years and are usually over-budget.
• The government and large-scale contractors speak the language of money.
• Focus on getting better estimates instead of pointing fingers at the teams.
• Metrics are just that; it’s what you do with them that counts. If you use bad metrics to accuse people of being lazy, or state things are fine when they’re not, those aren’t useful techniques.
• Only use this to show you’re on-schedule and on-budget if your current metrics don’t tell that story. EV is an interface into the investment tier of the company: Are we on track for this thing we’re investing in, or do we need to change course?

Introduction to Agile Portfolio Management (via Agile Amped)

• Agile and adaptive (vs. proactive) funding models are handing COVID-19 better. Agile portfolio management (APM) is about becoming adaptable and resilient.
• Putting Agile in a walled garden around technology doesn’t yield strategic benefits unless you address the customer value stream.
• Fundamentals: ruthless prioritization, matching capacity with demand (reducing WIP), breaking things down, experimentation, conditional bets, measurable business outcomes
• Important: collective decision making, good data to test hypotheses
• Supply side (capacity, where the work gets done; limited)
  • Org must commit to creating permanent, consistent, high-performing teams. You can’t scale on shifting sand.
  • Look for ways to decouple and streamline instead of adding more complexity.
  • Orgs need to get the capacity side right first, or you get alignment and trust problems by over-committing and under-performing.
  • Issues: poor predictability, poor transparency, low productivity, long cycle times that come from optimizing for labor unit cost and utilization. Traditional resource management (fractions of people per day on multiple projects) doesn’t work because of context switching, which destroys productivity.
  • Pulling WIP out of the system becomes political.
  • Better accountability because metrics are around business impacts instead of output metrics (utilization, on-time, on-budget)
  • Move from project-based funding models to product-based (or customer value stream-based); measure “return on team”
• Demand side (funding, request for initiatives; unlimited)
  • This area can shift depending on what’s going on in the world; want to bring new initiatives in dynamically
  • Create a mechanism to align top-line priority to the work that’s happening; you need data for this
  • Digital transformation is breaking down silos between tech delivery orgs that historically have their own governance and asset allocation. Just like DevOps breaks down walls between development and operations, digital transformation breaks down walls between technology and business.
  • Visualize all of the work so stakeholders know what’s out there
  • There’s no perfect strategy; pick something that’s related to a top-line priority, start from where you are, and realize things will shift
  • Not everything has an ROI
• Matching and governance
  • Can be political and difficult; the problem is limited capacity. These orgs typically have way too much WIP, which are reinforced by performance targets that reinforce this (e.g., I won’t get my bonus if we don’t finish this project, even if the project doesn’t bring the most value).
  • APM is a system with new structures, new roles, new ways of interacting a decision-making
  • This traditionally is done with Highest Paid Person (HiPPo) management; shift to data-driven, empowerment, transparency
  • Lens 1: people, practices, tech
  • Lens 2: levels of portfolio (enterprise, strategy, product)
  • Lens 3: making decisions together
  • Lens 4: underlying principles and what’s most important to us as an organization
  • All of these lenses are colored by culture
  • Have a ruthless process for assigning value and prioritizing the work items, make them visible. Move toward a pull-based model instead of pushing work into the system. Need to know throughput with historical data.
  • Make small, contingent bets. Have a good governance process to get high-value work into the backlog.
  • Orgs need to invest in continuous improvement to move past layers of bureaucracy
  • Decision authority = understand the right questions the portfolio cares about; actively stop/pivot if the data tells you that’s best
  • Traditional budgeting supports… asset allocation (what are we funding), forecasting (cash for operations, investor guidance), goal-setting (targets for perf management). Why is the ideal planning cadence for all three every 12 months? What is the horizon 16 months? The budgets are fragile — way too much detail way too far out. It incentivizes games around bonuses and what to do with surpluses (e.g., spend it or we won’t get it next time).
  • Decouple supply and demand and analyze them using separate measures.

Trust vs. Trustworthiness (via Leading Agile)

• Leaders need to connect what’s happening and how it connects to Agile
• Leaders have to trust the team and vice versa
• Common goals: going faster, being responsive. However, speed means nothing if it’s not stable and not predictable.
• Have both sides agree on acceptance criteria and the context in which that work is being developed.
• Necessary components: clear backlog, well-formed (stable) team with the skills, ability to produce and deliver a working tested product
• If you feel like your team can’t deliver, how would you know (what metrics)? Do you really understand the impediments for them delivering better (which the team probably wants, too). Then make changes and see if flow is increased.
• If you’re worried about the team under-committing, ask why. Maybe it’s because they always get more work last-minute. Maybe it’s because there’s a fear of being punished for attempting things that have unknowns/risks.
• Tip: Don’t eat the elephant all at once. Find part of the org you can do this with to get some early wins; make sure leaders see this.
• Things aren’t going to be 100% smooth as you transition; be realistic and have “release valves” where you can create a safe space where people can be frustrated.

Your Agile Team Should Stop Using Story Points. Here’s Why.

• Story points were created as a unit-less measure because two time-based measures (how long to finish, when will this be done) are difficult if not impossible to get right. However, velocity put time back on the table. Velocity is an attempt to industrialize Agile.
• We’re focused on speed of delivery, not value delivered.
• Discuss the purpose of the work and strategies for reducing the effort to get that work delivered.
• “Organizations adopting agile should push back against coaches or consultants that want to introduce the idea of story points early on (if at all), instead focusing efforts on building a culture around an agency to partner with stakeholders and clients directly.”

Leveraging Agile to Get Predictable (via Leading Agile)

• Hypothesis: If we do Agile, we’ll get results. Does this mean culture? Adopting Scrum? More obvious if you have 6-8 people.
• In large, complex orgs, mere adoption (“Step 1”) doesn’t drive business results (“Step 3”). The “Step 2” is the bridge between Agile and business results.
• Future podcast topics: quality, early ROI (products in front of customers), cost savings, innovation, product fit (building the right thing), strategic alignment, value optimization (MVPs)
• Predictability = making and meeting commitments
• Common question: How do I get my execs to spend money on Agile? Fully participate in transformation? Really care, show up, etc.? Answer: Talk about the things that keep execs up at night (e.g., predictability).
• CEO/CIO is making promises to the market about what the org can do. Assumes the delivery organization will help them keep those promises. Need a reliable, trustworthy partner — what we can do and when we can do it by.
• Predictable Agile team (don’t worry about enterprise level at this point) has all the skills to deliver something. It needs clarity on the backlog (i.e., a stack-ranked list of things to build with estimates). Bring the stories into planning, get clarity around the acceptance criteria, then determine if they can execute on it.
• As long as all the needs are met, Scrum will work, and you can presumably derive a velocity for the team. Also assuming you can properly size everything in your backlog and your velocity is stable, you can presumably calculate how long it will take you to complete things.
• (Note from Geoff, not the podcast): This is the old style of management with Agile terms; you’re measuring productivity, not value delivered. See https://www.ryannorris.com/blog/2019/5/28/your-agile-team-should-stop-using-story-points-heres-why
• Don’t have a “shadow backlog;” keep track of defects and technical debt.
• Understand how important predictability is to certain projects. For example, an internal tool may have zero need for predictability. Another may need to be ready for a trade show next quarter. Another may be about supporting a roadmap for enterprise-level clients. Maybe your bidding on a fixed-time, fixed-cost government contract.
• My take is that if you want predictability, you must have a known quantity of work and a team to complete that work with minimal dependencies or hiccups. Isn’t this just waterfall? Nothing wrong with waterfall, but let’s not call it Agile.
• Some teams have determinate backlogs (known dev work) and indeterminate backlogs (break-fix work). You can have a separate Kanban queue for this, lower capacity, rotate on-call, etc.
• If your velocity is all over the map, look at why. Is it system stability? Skills problems? Unclear roadmap? External dependencies?
• As you scale, you have theory of constraint problems (bottlenecks).
• Project-oriented budgets: You deploy people/resources into projects, so people end up being multi-hatted. Stop funding projects; fund products and their teams (business capability, value stream, sub-component, etc.).
• We often think of projects as things we fund to achieve business outcomes.
• Balance your portfolio so that you don’t run some teams at 100% and others near 0%.
• You need predictable teams, or you don’t get predictable at scale.
• Front-load dependency-heavy work earlier into the release. Do the riskiest work first.

Business

The Secret to AI Is People (via Harvard Business Review)

• “Machines do repetitive and automated tasks and will always be more precise and faster. However, those uniquely human skills of creativity, care, intuition, adaptability, and innovation are increasingly imperative to success.”
• The “Four I” framework is intentionality, integration, implementation, and indication.

An Agile Approach to Budgeting for Uncertain Times (via Harvard Business Review)

• Focus on higher performance instead of predictable earnings.
• Focus on achieving outcomes instead of hitting budgets.
• Align resources with strategic priorities to better see the tradeoffs that should be made but aren’t working.
• Plan more frequently.

Career

Feel Like You’re Falling Behind Your Peers? (via Harvard Business Review)

This article was just what I needed, not only for my career, but my hobbies.

• Track your triggers — which activities make you feel “less than?” Awareness leads to transforming those opportunities into something more productive.
• Shift from rumination to purposeful reframing — it’s easy to quit when you feel behind and insecure. Go easier on yourself and look at the work of others objectively (like a journalist) instead of competitively.
• Exhibit a personal strength to regain validation and momentum.
• Redefine your peer set and create a new field of play — this is finding a third option among seemingly mutually exclusive choices. Job crafting also falls into this category.

How to Create Your Own Career Luck (via Harvard Business Review)

• Set hooks in conversations. Have more than plain responses to questions such as “What do you do?”: “I love understanding how things and people work, I’ve been active in the Agile space for tech companies; I recently started thinking more about social equality, and I’m interested in mimicry which is why I build scale models.”
• In conferences, you can call attention to yourself in a win-win-win way: “As someone who’s doing something similar to you, I’m having an issue with XYZ, how would you suggest approaching it?” It makes the speaker feel helpful and lets others in the audience relate to you.
• Make connections with people you wouldn’t otherwise have to (e.g., I’d only contact this person if I needed work), or randomly pair up with others to get to know them better.

Case Study: Stick with a Bad New Job or Cut Your Losses? (via Harvard Business Review)

This format is one I always enjoy from HBR: a hypothetical situtation with no clear resolution, where experts share their advice. I agree with Lauren’s answer, that there was poor leadership and the protagonist was not given the tools to succeed.

How to achieve career growth: opportunities, skills & sponsors (via Software Lead Weekly)

• “Skill alone doesn’t matter. If no one but yourself knows about your skills, you won’t get any opportunities.”
• Pick opportunities based on your growth goals, then determine how to best get those opportunities.
• Sponsors can help you figure out how to navigate the paths, see opportunities, etc.
• The article goes in to greater depth on how to find, manage, or create areas around opportunities, skills, and sponsors. Dig in if interested.

Communication

How to Foster Psychological Safety in Virtual Meetings (via Harvard Business Review)

• Hand-raise — quick, but if people don’t respond fast enough they may be overlooked
• Yes/No — not all questions are binary
• Polls — make anonymous, and can be helpful in Likert-style questions
• Chat — can make things feel more friendly, but can get verbose/distracting
• Breakout rooms — gives people a chance to come off mute and work with a smaller group
• Video — helpful in general, but can get overwhelming visually
• Audio-only — helps with focus and visual overstimulation, but other channels of communication are gone (e.g., body language, when to speak)

Culture

Growth after Trauma (via Harvard Business Review)

• Elements of growth
  • Education — trauma is a disruption of core belief systems; reimagine how you operate and innovate in new circumstances
  • Emotional regulation — try to recall successes and consider best-case possibilities, reflect on your own organization’s resources and preparation, and think about what you can do
  • Disclosure — talk about what happened and is happening
  • Narrative development — your stories should be about a traumatic past that leads to a better future
  • Service — people do better in the aftermath of trauma if they find work that benefits others
• Benefits
  • Personal strength — better equipped to handle future challenges
  • New possibilities — we must adapt and innovate
  • Improved relationships — trauma can help forge new relationships and make people more grateful for the ones they already have
  • Appreciation for life — better at noticing what we still have but may have previously overlooked
  • Spiritual growth — reflection on the “big questions” that are often ignored in the routine of daily life

Why Do Your Employees Resist New Tech? (via Harvard Business Review)

To help drive better, more effective tech adoption:

1. Incentivize technology use
2. Invest in infrastructure
3. Make reskilling and learning part of the plan
4. Don’t make it piecemeal
5. Understand how governments and policy are involved.

The Tyranny of Merit (via TED)

• “Those who landed on top came to believe that their success was their own doing, a measure of their merit, and that those who lost out had no one to blame but themselves. This way of thinking about success arises from a seemingly attractive principle: If everyone has an equal chance, then the winners deserve their winnings. This is the heart of the meritocratic ideal.”
• Meritocracy is corrosive of the common good.
• “What you learn, you earn.” “You can make it if you try.” There’s an implicit insult that the converse must be true.
• Colleges — these should no longer be the arbiters of opportunity
• Dignity of work — not just about making a living, but contributing to the common good; our public life is missing a civic sentiment. We mistake the amount of money people make with the amount of good they are doing. “All labor has dignity.” — MLK Jr.
• Meaning of success — we’re missing a civic virtue of humility.

What It Takes to Successfully Onboard Someone Remotely (via Software Lead Weekly)

This thread has several checklist items to make someone’s first week a success. Granted, the angle is about remote onboarding, but I’d argue these items should be in place even for onsite onboarding.

True Friends at Work (via Harvard Business Review)

“Real life happens at work: success, joy, failure, trauma. We need real friends — right there, at our side — through it all.”

Leadership

Radical Candor (Part 10)

Our book club continued Radical Candor Chapter 6. Topics for today were management fix-it weeks, impromptu advice, gauging your guidance, and being radically candid with your own boss.

What Efficient Mentorship Looks Like (via Harvard Business Review)

Granted, this approach is efficient, is that what needs to be optimized? Rarely can you optimize for many attributes (e.g., efficiency, efficacy), so you may harm one to help the other. “Mentoring should not burn and drain energy. It can be fuel-efficient and effortless. Look for ways to communicate expectations, schedule effectively, and consolidate mentees. These strategies provide room to go farther on the journey as a mentor.”

Executive Coaches, Your Job Is to Deliver Business Results (via Harvard Business Review)

Most coaching involves two leaps of faith: 1) coaching will change behavior, 2) behavior change leads to results. “Coaches don’t want to be held accountable for real business results that they can’t directly control, and senior leaders often feel that they already are on the hook for plenty of performance numbers.” Focus on the results then work backward to find the specific behaviors to get them.

Process

How to (Actually) Save Time When You’re Working Remotely (via Harvard Business Review)

• Create your own commute to transition from home to work mode
• Give yourself a Feierabend (ending point to the day)
• Focus your workload on a daily “must win”
• Put “proactive time” on your calendar
• Reclaim the social in social distancing
• Run time-management experiments

How to Make Rational Decisions in the Face of Uncertainty (via Harvard Business Review)

1. Identify whether you’re working with salient (surprising), contextual (framed), or patterned (regular) data.
2. Recognize the biases — salience bias (overweighing novel data), framing bias (e.g. 80% lean vs. 20% fat), and clustering illusion (things near one another must be related).
3. Invert the problem to identify what you really need to know.
4. Formulate the right questions to get the answers you need based on behaviors, opinions, feelings, and knowledge.