Sunday, November 02, 2008

Personal Hedgehog Revisited

[First pusblished at moduscooperandi.com] More than 4 years ago, I riffed off Jim Collins idea of a corporate Hedgehog Concept, with this blog post on Personal Hedgehog Concept. It’s proven to be one of the most popular blog pages on AgileManagement.Net since I started it in August 2003.

The original post used the career of Cameron Barrett as the example. At the time, Cam was pursuing his passion for politics supporting the campaigns of Democratic candidates Wesley Clarke and John Kerry. However, recently I was challenged by Liza Raiser to explain what the Personal Hedgehog Concept means to me.

Actually, I’ve been working on my own hedgehog concept for most of the past 8 years.

First, what am I passionate about? For a long time I’ve been passionate about the underperformance of the software engineering profession and the low rate of success on software development projects. In fact, I was so disgusted with the profession I intended to quit almost 10 years ago. It was thanks to Jeff De Luca, and the original FDD project in Singapore that I regained my enthusiasm for the profession.

So what can I be one of the best in the World at? It’s taken a while, but I started down the path to publishing and what we now call blogging in 1999 at the behest of Peter Coad and Jeff De Luca. 4 years later, Peter was instrumental in assisting me with the publication of Agile Management for Software Engineering. I’ve continued to work at improving my ideas on software engineering process and management of knowledge workers and I’ve continued to work as a practitioner in regular jobs managing software engineers - until recently, when I formed David J Anderson & Associates.

So what changed? Well finally, I was able to realize my Hedgehog Concept. Finally, my skills with software engineering process and management and leadership of knowledge workers were in sufficient demand that they could drive my economic engine. Let’s be under no illusion! There is little to no premium in the market for good management in the software and IT industries. While great individual contributors often become independent contractors and earn high hourly rates, the same does not generally apply to managers. And while employers might be willing to pay a 10%-20% premium for a decent person, often a great manager find him/herself earning far less than the top technical people on the team. This is despite the hard economic evidence that it is management talent that generally constrains the performance of software engineering organizations.

So, for a long time, I’ve known that I had to break out of working as a manager for other people and start my own firm. The question was when? When would the timing be right? Finally in 2008, with a track record that includes successful projects and teams at Sprint, Motorola and Corbis and with a catalog of intellectual property that includes my contributions to FDD, the MSF for CMMI Process Improvement and most recently my contributions to Lean in software development and the innovations with the Kanban method, I finally have sufficient recognition and respect in the industry for it to drive my economic engine.

Along the way, I’ve also resolved my own inner conflicts about whether I had taken the correct career path. I’ve finally come to realize that management and leadership is my real strength and that other things I enjoy are merely hobbies, like painting, art and design, and my synthesis of those talents in user interface and interaction design. It was in fact user interface design that got me started down this road, with my uidesign.net site. Recognizing in myself what I could be World class at, from the things that I can be merely good at, has been the foundation of a new happiness in my life.

So here we are! I’m having the best fun at work since I quit the games industry in the late 1980s and I’m happier than perhaps I’ve been since leaving Singapore in 1999. Finding my Personal Hedgehog Concept has been at the root of that happiness. It’s been a long slog - more than 8 years. A journey of personal discovery. But ultimately it’s been worth it. And now I am excited about the future where I intend to continue innovating in leadership and management of knowledge workers and helping teams deliver superior economic performance.

Are you working on your Personal Hedgehog Concept?

The Tactical Transition

[First published at moduscooperandi.com in a slightly different form]

At David J Anderson & Associates our strategy is to help clients achieve long lasting, institutionalized, enterprise scale agile change. We help them to become what the SEI calls a “high maturity” organization while continuing to use Agile and Lean methods throughout their technology functions. To achieve this we go about changing the organization’s culture. Lasting change takes time. To do it properly can take 9 months to several years. It requires a serious commitment to achieving high maturity - quantitative management, predictability and continuous improvement - from the senior leadership. That’s why many of our clients have C-level titles.

However, not every client needs long term institutional change. So should we turn those other clients away? Perhaps! But not if they truly need us to meet their immediate, tactical goals. I’ve been amazed by the clients we meet who open up the discussion with “I’ve been reading your ... <insert book, article, etc.> and I’ve decided that the solution to our current problems is… <insert methodology FDD, MSF CMMI, Kanban>.”

I’ve been amazed at the demand for FDD and MSF for CMMI Process Improvement. By adding Daniel Vacanti and Eric Willeke who can help us deliver FDD and MSF CMMI projects, we have the skills and experience to respond to demand and provide staff augmentation when necessary.

With these types of clients they have an immediate tactical need. Perhaps they have a mission critical project that is late and over-budget. They need us to dig them out of the hole. So we do that for them. Their need is tactical. They are not concerned about institutionalized change. They are not concerned about resistance to change. They will use positional power and require staff to acquiesce or drop out. Delivery of the project is success for them. And if the process doesn’t survive past the delivery of the project then so be it. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, agile+management, CMMI, FDD, Kanban, MSF

The Relevance of Level 4

[Over the summer, I wrote a number of blog posts for Modus Cooperandi. I’d like those posts to get a wider audience. Starting with this one about the relevance of level 4 organizational maturity…]

CMMI Model Level 4 is often thought of like Nebraska or Kansas - it’s the flyover territory of CMMI. The big offshore outsource companies often think of Level 4 as something that they can skip - jumping from level 3 to level 5. After all, there are only 4 process areas. Two in Level 4 and two in Level 5.

When I was at Microsoft, working on MSF for CMMI Process Improvement, we talked about the future prospect of an enhanced edition that provided full coverage of Level 4 and 5. [The current release has about 80% coverage of Levels 2 and 3, and 20% coverage of Levels 4 and 5.] There was no market demand for a Level 4 solution. Our market research was telling us that there was a market for a Level 3 solution - the one we produced - aimed at the government contracting market in North America and the ISO 9000 compliance market in South America. We also knew that there was a market for a Level 5 template for TFS - mostly aimed at the offshore outsourcing companies. Level 4 just didn’t come in to our plans. It was flyover territory. It seemed no one does Level 4. If you look at the list of CMMI appraised firms, there are very few at Level 4. So why am I suddenly a big advocate of Level 4?

Well, it seems from discussions with clients and potential clients in America and Europe, our clients need to have the equivalent of Level 4 organizational maturity in order to meet their business goals and strategic objectives. They don’t need to be an optimizing organization at Level 5 - that would be icing on the cake. But they do need to be predictable. They want to have strong delivery with low variability. The want to be proactive and drive down cycle times using objective quantitative management. They need all of this to deliver on business goals within the tight financial controls and corporate governance that they now find themselves under. They need to be the equivalent of Level 4.

The real problem is that typical Agile methods can only take them to Level 3. So Agile isn’t enough. That’s where we come in. Our experience in creating cultures that drive towards high maturity (Levels 4 and 5) while implementing Lean and Agile techniques is still fairly unique. We help clients reconfigure their organizational culture to enable a high maturity organization to emerge while still gaining all the benefits of Agile and Lean methods.

The aim is to generate a clutch of Level 4 equivalent organizations. Clients who can estimate projects and iterations and deliver results with a low degree of variation from the original estimate. Firms who use predictive methods and leading indicators to learn and adapt quicker than those simply using retrospective methods and lagging indicators. And businesses who are led by objectivity and have left superstition and subjectivity behind in their organizational past.

CMMI Model Level 4 has real business relevance. Business that achieve it will achieve their business goals, hit their numbers and delight customers, shareholders and employees. Getting to Level 5 will allow a firm to become ever more competitive and to dominate their market. But for many firms the need to achieve the equivalent of Level 4 maturity is a business imperative, now! Anything less will leave all stakeholders dissatisfied. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, agile+management, CMMI

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

Sunday, March 30, 2008

A Failure Tolerant Culture Leads to Success

The Great Britain cycling team has just won an unprecedented 9 gold medals at the World Track Championships, held this year in Manchester, England. While home advantage might count for something, this article on BBC News is telling. Director of Performance, David Brailsford is clearly a leader who understand the importance of the W. Edwards Deming principle of first you drive out fear (point 8 of his 14 Points of Management). Brailsford puts his failure tolerant attitude at the top of his importance list when it comes to the secret of the team’s success.

“You cobble them all [athletes and staff] together, give them a good environment, you push them, make them not scared to fail,” said Brailsford.

“And you say ‘Let’s end up all over the track having tried to win rather than play safe and get a silver or bronze’. You remove that fear from the athletes and off we go.”

Time and again, I find it difficult to find better management and leadership advice than Deming. I find that creating a failure tolerant, fear free, innovative culture is the key to creating continuous improvement and ultimately achieving world class performance. It’s remarkable how well this advice holds up across so many walks of life: manufacturing; sports; and knowledge workers professions. Technorati tag: Management+Science