Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Lead Well and Prosper

For ages, Nick McCormick‘s little book on leadership, Lead Well and Prosper has been lying on my desk waiting for me to blog about it. I’ve moved offices. The first copy got lost. He had to send me another one. But finally I’m managing to blog about it.

It’s under 100 pages and has 15 chapters. 15 successful strategies for becoming a good manager. One in each chapter. It’s a very readable straightforward little book. You could read it all in a single sitting. It’s got some lovely funny cartoons. The end of each chapter has a short bullet point summary of do’s and dont’s.

You might find yourself nodding thinking - yep, I know that! yep, that too! But it is often advice we struggle to use in our lives as managers and our relationships with others in the workplace. However, this stuff is so hard to do. Take Chapter 11 for example, “Clean up your own house first” (actually advice I heard continuously from my boss at Sprint, John Yuzdepski. He really believed that as a business unit we had to demonstrate we could run the web site perfectly before we raised issues with the IT or network folks). So here are the bullet point advice from the end of chapter 11.

Do’s

• Keep a positive attitude
• Voice concerns constructively. Be prepared to offer solutions - and work them
• Vent occasionally to your boss but not with peers or team members

Don’ts

• Disparage other people or groups within your company
• Be a whiner. It is OK to raise concerns
• Vent to peers or team members

This is great advice! It is just hard to do. The suggested action is to pick a problem you have with another group and pull the team together and try to work it out. Encourage collaboration. Don’t let it turn in to a blame fest. Keep the focus on the solution.

Of course, all of this assumes the manager of the other group actually wants the problem solved and that they are willing to collaborate with you. They might want the problem solved but only if they get to take credit for it. So it doesn’t work if the initiative comes from someone else. Good management and (some aspects of) leadership can be taught/learned. This is a great little book for that. But ultimately, no end of advice will overcome dysfunctional people in your organization. Technorati tag: Management,.Leadership, Book+Review, Nick+McCormick

Saturday, September 06, 2008

Zen of Agile Management, North America, November 2008

I’ll be repeating my one-day Zen of Agile Management workshop from QCon in London this past March, at Agile Practices in Orlando Florida on November 10th and again the following week at QCon in San Francisco on Tuesday November 18th.

In both locations the class is in the well tried and tested one-day format. This class has been universally well received since I first introduced it at VS Live in Orlando in March 2006. I’ve updated the material only slightly since London this past March to include my new prioritization approach. Here is the abstract for the class…

The Zen of Agile Management

What is the essence of agile management? How do you create a culture of continuous improvement? With light touch, empowerment, delegation, high levels of trust, and focus on the correct leverage point to drive maximum advantage. Learn the Zen of agile management! This popular 1-day tutorial will give you an overview of the techniques developed by David J. Anderson in the last 8 years through his experience managing teams at Fortune 100 companies such as Motorola and Sprint using Feature Driven Development, Microsoft Solutions Framework (and Team Foundation Server) and his latest work at Corbis using Lean ideas such as Kanban and Theory of Constraints. This full-day workshop dives into the heart of how to manage with queues using kanban boards, identify and eliminate bottlenecks and reduce variability using cumulative flow diagrams and other metrics, measures, and indicators to provide line, middle and upper management reporting. David’s will pass on his experience as senior director of software engineering at Bill Gates’ private company, Corbis, detailing how to build a kaizen culture and institutionalized enterprise scale agile change.

There are 8 exercises:

1. How to create or destroy trust?
2. Value Stream mapping and Measuring, Tracking and Reporting Progress
3. Constraint Management and Bottlenecks
4. Waste Identification and elimination
5. Iteration Planning
6. Advanced Higher Maturity Iteration Planning
7. Product Mix Selection and Prioritization
8. How will you Manage?

Zen of Agile Management in Sao Paulo, Brazil, October 2008

I’m bringing my Zen of Agile Management workshop/class to Sao Paulo Brazil this October. This class has been universally popular since I first introduced it at VSLive in Orlando, February 2006. It’s in a 2-day format so the pace will be easier and we can get in to more depth than I normally do in the half day or one day format. Apart from Orlando in 2006 I’ve given this workshop Singapore, Hanoi, Antwerp and London (QCon 2008). I change it around depending on the format and audience but the main content is based on my book and my writings on Lean Project Management (much of which was encapsulated into MSF for CMMI Process Improvement). I’m also giving this class in one day format at QCon in San Francisco and Agile Practices in Orlando in November.

This is a chance for a Brazilian audience to learn my approach to managing agile teams, and creating an agile transition in an organization. I’ve always taken a high maturity approach that eventually leads to predictability, low variability and an objective, quantitatively managed organization. The class in Brazil will include a portugese translator and hence two days for material that would normally take me about 8 classroom hours to cover should be perfect. I’ve updated the class to include new material I’ve been blogging about this year: my latest thinking on prioritization; some basics of kanban and pull systems; combining Agile and CMMI; and some coverage of real option theory for decision making.

Attendees will learn…

1. How to create or destroy trust?
2. My Recipe for Success
3. Metrics, Meaurement, Tracking and Indicators for Agile Management
4. Identifying Bottlenecks and Constraint Management
5. Waste Identification
6. Issue and Risk Management
7. Simplistic Iteration Planning
8. Advanced Predictable Iteration Planning based on low variability processes
9. Pull Systems and Kanban
10. Product Mix Selection and Prioritization
11. Real Option Theory and Decision Framing
12. Combing Agile and CMMI
13. Achieving a High Maturity (“Kaizen” culture) Agile Organization

The class will include case studies using Feature Driven Development at Motorola (2004), a pull-system at Microsoft (2004-2005), and a fully developed kaizen culture and kanban system at Corbis (2006-2007).

Zen of Agile Management with David J. Anderson, 21-22 October 2008, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Sign up now! More details (in Portuguese) can be found here.

This workshop is delivered in connection with “Speaking of Agile” conference on the following days, where I’ll deliver the opening key note.

I am looking forward to making many new friends in Brazil. I hope it is the first of many visits. :-D

Friday, September 05, 2008

An Alternative Recipe for Success

My long time colleague and collaborator Daniel Vacanti does not blog. He occasionally writes stuff down and some of that might even get published one day, but he doesn’t blog. So I’m going to blog for him today…

Dan has his own alternative to my Recipe for Success. I thought it might be interesting to list Dan’s four hot points and then add some commentary.

1. Break work down in to small fine-grained similarly sized elements
2. Prioritize
3. Emphasize quality throughout the lifecycle
4. Make frequent incremental releases to production

Number 1 requires that each work item is independently testable and preferably independently deployable

Number 4 requires the use of latent code patterns (assuming a single code line is being maintained in a continuous integration fashion) to prevent code that isn’t ready for release from escaping in to the wild accidentally. It also requires that latency is added to the test suite as a standard part of testing prior to release. Test the functionality being released and test the latency of the functionality that is complete but not being released.[Why does this happen? Well completed functionality may belong to a different project with a different release schedule but may be living in the same code base and environment. This is more likely to occur in an enterprise environment than a product or service company.]

Comparison and Commentary

Breaking work down to small fine-grained similarly sized elements has been a core part of Feature-Driven Development (FDD) since the days when it was still known as the The Coad Method (circa 1995). I made this a key tenet of the message in my book. So why did I drop it from the Recipe for Success? The recipe was originally called “low hanging fruit” and was supposed to highlight 4 things that a new manager could do to quickly generate improvement in a dysfunctional team or project. I’ve been under pressure (from commentators on this blog) to add a fifth element to my recipe, stating that reducing variability in the process is also important. The notion that we break work down to small fine-grained similarly sized elements is precisely the same idea. It’s a low variability play.

I didn’t include reducing variation in the Recipe because in my opinion it is hard to do and meets with a huge resistance. It asks people to heavily change their behavior in such a way that they don’t comprehend the benefit. My belief is that while a team gets on with the 4 steps in my recipe, they will eventually realize that they have to reduce variability. In other words, reduction of variability is a higher maturity activity. No coincidence, in my opinion, that the same idea appears at CMMI level 4. A High Maturity level in CMMI.

Dan’s view can be made to work through strong management and enforcement through positional power. The team can acquiesce or move elsewhere. While this can have tactical advantages, I’m on record several times since August 2006 stating why I don’t believe in using position power like this. Acquiescence is not conducive to institutionalization and long term adoption of an approach. Hence, I believe that you fix other things first and let variability reduce over time.

Dan includes prioritization and he puts it at number 2 while I had it at number 4. Again, my reason for this is that it is hard and it requires the collaboration of people from other departments outside engineering. Of the low hanging fruit, it is the highest placed and hardest to obtain. Hence, while Dan and I are in agreement, I feel that some basic organizational maturity is required before prioritization can be done successfully.

We’re in complete agreement over quality. As Robert C. Martin said in his after dinner speech at Agile 2008, “The jury is in on this one!”

Finally, Dan suggests that frequent incremental releases to production are key. And yes they are! So why doesn’t it appear in my recipe? Well I like Dan making it explicit. The notion that your reduce (or limit) work-in-progress appears at number 2 in my list. You can’t achieve this without being capable of making frequent incremental releases to production. However, as I said, I like that Dan makes it explicit. It was explicit in the Principles Behind the Manifesto and it still should be.

So Dan’s recipe and mine are not so different. The order and emphasis is a little different. Dan wants to focus on reducing variability. If it were in my recipe, it would be number 5. We agree on quality, small amounts of work-in-progress released to production often and prioritization. The one thing Dan misses from my recipe is balancing demand against throughput. This is the mechanism I use to achieve sustainable pace and to implement a pull system which provides a nice mechanism for simple prioritization. Prioritizing becomes easier when you have demand balanced against throughput of work items.

Combing Ideas

So if we combine Dan’s recipe with mine, we’d get something like this…

1. Focus on Quality Throughout the Lifecycle
2. Reduce (or limit) Work-in-Progress and Release it to Production Frequently
3. Balance Demand against Throughput
4. Prioritize
5. Reduce Variability in the Process by analyzing work items in to small, fine-grained, similarly sized elements that are independently testable and deployable

:-D It won’t fit on a T-Shirt quite so readily Technorati tag: Agile, Agile+Management, David+Anderson, Daniel+Vacanti

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Agile Edge London 28th October

That’s right it’s not cricket! Valtech UK are holding a 1-day Agile Edge conference in a similar format to the US events I’ve been attending this year. The event will be held at Lords cricket ground in London on 28th October. I’ll be giving the key note speech and a breakout session on Agile and CMMI. I’m not giving the full kanban breakout - they didn’t ask me to. I’ll be presenting material you haven’t seen me discuss in London. So I hope to see some of my agile community friends from London at the event. It’s great value at just 195 pounds.

My Chief Process Scientist designation with Valtech is for US only. I’m not contracted to Valtech UK. They invited me to do this event indpendently and I accepted. The program lists me as an “industry luminary.” Sounds important, huh!

To show I’m not playing favorites I did a Thoughtworks event in London in the summer. It was a private event for employees so I didn’t advertise it on my blog. Technorati tag: Agile, Valtech, Lean, Management, Leadership