Agile Development Blog

This is #3 in a Series on the Culture of Innovation with guest blogger Lee Devin.

Plan to do what you want. Prepare to do what you must.

Don’t get us wrong, we value planning: it’s important and highly creative work. But in the Culture of Innovation preparation means much more.  In a world that defines success as a result and failure as a step along the way , we plan regularly as we adjust to results, outside stimulus, and feedback.  Preparation marches us up the stairs faster and ensures that we’ll arrive someplace new and valuable.

Planning is an exercise for imagination and not spreadsheets.

In planning we figure out what we need to accomplish this task.  It‘s a process of creative thinking, dialogue, narrowing to convergence, healthy skepticism, and risk mitigation.  In planning we need to treat difficulties as a challenge; to resolve a creative tension between reality and what we want.  Teams brush away perceived limits as they press toward understanding by asking WHY?  Thinking in the 5 Why’s of Fishbone diagrams, these teams do not simply work with WHAT and HOW.  Once done and aligned, the plan becomes a communication of intent and result and NOT a goal or commitment.   Dependable results come from a focus on the limits to throughput, sources of failure, and lack of preparation.

In our experience with Agile teams, we see advanced Scrum teams begin to let go of some planning practices as their expertise grows. The benefits of pull-based planning and smooth flow delivery create new space for them in the market.  As a result of their growing confidence, they increase their ownership of their process, a key step on the way to a culture of innovation.   That culture creates, not just one off innovations, but an environment ready to take advantage of opportunities and happy accidents.   A big part of creating that environment comes from a focus on preparation.

Let’s consider preparation. Teams and managers must learn and practice a set of skills that taken together can help them create a culture of innovation. These skills often seem off the subject, not to the point, and therefore difficult for teams and managers to make time for. We think of preparation in three main categories: for collaboration and leadership; for comfort in ambiguity; and for daily productivity. In this brief introduction we won’t suggest a detailed program. Instead, we’ll outline an abstract of the culture, seen through the lens of preparation.

Collaboration and leadership

You can prepare for collaboration (innovative team work) and leadership (team direction and support) by learning and practicing release and concentration. Teams and their leaders need release from tension, as a way to increase available energy and flexibility; and release from inhibition and vanity for freedom, to include the work of others in their own and to regard the success of the team as their own success.

Take a look at athletes for good examples of release from tension; at actors in a play or movie for good examples of release from inhibition.

Watch Sharapova’s face as she looks up at the ball she’s about to whack; see the pitcher take a big breath and whoosh it out before he throws the ball. Look at a still photo of what the pitcher does to his arm in the delivery: it’s not hard to imagine what would happen to those muscles if they weren’t completely released, free of any kind of tension. Look at Paul Newman’s famous eyes blaze with rage (as Harry Manning, dumped in the river: Where the Money Is) or fear (Buffalo Bill astride a fractious horse: Buffalo Bill and the Indians).

We’ll use a story to illustrate what we mean by concentration. Once upon a time two students of Zen walked along the lake shore. They spoke as follows:

First Student: “I have the world’s most amazing Master.”
Second Student: “Have you?”

First Student: “He performs miraculous deeds. The other day he walked right out on this lake and spoke to us, standing on the surface of the water. Then he walked back, and his shoes weren’t even damp.”
Second Student: “That’s certainly amazing. I congratulate you. My master, however, can do something much more important and amazing.”

First Student: “No way.”
Second Student: “Yes way. My master can do one thing at a time.”

Who among us can do one thing at a time?

As you plan your week next Monday, think about these questions.

• What is the #1 Thing you have to get done right this week? Be clear about that to yourself and with your team and put your best time and focus on this one item.
• What preparation or practice can you do to release tensions with regards to this item?
• Who can you collaborate with to make this an outstanding result?
• What can you do to celebrate the results of this effort?

What might you do to prepare to execute these choices? What kinds of practice might you build into your daily, weekly, monthly, routine?

Comfort in ambiguity

Accident, serendipity, new things. Innovation confronts the team with all of these sources of ambiguity. What’s gonna happen? What should I do? What on earth is this thing? How do we know when it’s complete?

How does preparation contribute to comfort in ambiguity? It gives us grounds for confidence in our ability to manage the new, the surprising, the unpredicted. We don’t need to dread the uncertainty of innovation because we know that we can make good use of whatever comes up.

Teams and managers who do innovation find ways to live with uncertainty about the outcomes of their work. They know that outcomes will be unexpected and surprising. If they could anticipate them, how new could they be? Preparation will involve getting free of the reflexive invocation of the past: “That isn’t how we do things here”; and embracing the uncertain future: “Let’s see what happens when we do this.”

Preparation will sometimes replace planning.

Of course we plan, so that we can do what we need to do. We plan to have the materials we need, space to work in, the right people on the team, to make an efficient schedule. Planning creates sequential progress toward a known goal. Preparation, on the other hand, aims at collaborative iteration toward an emergent outcome. No one can predict the results of a true collaboration. We prepare to cope with whatever happens. In a culture of innovation, whatever happens is likely to be new. It will elude any kind of sequential progress toward a known goal. When an outcome doesn’t seem to have any immediate value, we recognize that nothing is lost: we set it aside (Might come in handy some day.) and press on.

The notion of emergent design conditions any serious innovation.  At Rally Software, we do a number of things in the context of Agile software development to keep from planning too much and to hold space for reaction to ambiguity.  First, we acknowledge multiple levels of planning with less precision as the time frame goes out.  Second, we insert free time into our schedule in the form of slack and programmed innovation time.  Third, we work “sets” of designs through a narrowing process to keep from choosing the design before we learn.  Finally, we do not plan until after we have closed the last cycle: We check the results of that last cycle and consciously review our goals.  We “Plan to get lucky” and provide room for that to affect our next cycle.

We took a young engineer to visit an acting class at People’s Light, the theatre we know best. A bunch of teenagers were practicing improvisation. One sat on a bench in the park. Another passed by, stopped to talk. A story began to develop. Suddenly from the class a third jumped up and walked into the park, joining the two. This newcomer brought an entirely new slant to the story. After a moment the first actor remembered an appointment and left the other two. Someone else from the class joined in. And so on. The story grew, got elaborate, got simple, got turned inside out: the kids never repeated themselves, never stopped. No one ever refused the new material offered by an other. The engineer turned to us and whispered: “This is exactly what my guys need to learn how to do.”

This kind of practice fairly closely resembles the desired skills. Engineers like to look for an answer in the back of the book; they need practice in making up answers out of the available material. The kind of preparation we’ll call exercise strays from the skills it prepares for; it’s off subject, away from the actual work. Athletes exemplify this kind of preparation. “The champ,” goes the saying, “is always in the gym.” Larry Byrd was famous for staying in the gym after practice. Why? To shoot 100 free throws. To build a reflexive confidence that supports the hectic innovations of the game. What’s more, the champ has decided, has made the choice, to like being in the gym; how could he do the work otherwise?

As you plan your week next Monday, think about these ways of practicing or preparing for emergent innovations:

• Schedule some creative time into your schedule to spend in a creative place and time.
• Step back from your #1 item for the week and ask yourself a question about its value: What other things could I do to deliver even more of this value?
• Find one example of yourself closing down to new solutions based on the concept that “This is the way we always do it.” Can you release that constraint?
• Ask yourself: What is the most important thing I have to do this month or quarter?  Not urgent. Important. Do I have enough time, support, and space to do this right?  Try removing less important or merely urgent things from your calendar to make room for this.

Daily productivity

In a culture of innovation, everyone chooses a professional obligation to work happily, enthusiastically and at maximum energy.

Artists and athletes again serve as models. Neither group can do what they do unless they’re totally fired up. High morale and physical readiness are basic conditions of their work and they must learn how to create and maintain them, no matter what. An actor arrives at the theatre well before the half hour call (On time is already late.), and begins the day’s work with an extensive warm up. Vocal exercises, calisthenics, stretches, lines; actors have routines they follow religiously.

An actor we know told us this story. He used the 30 minute drive to the theatre as his time for vocal warm up. One night, distracted by some domestic emergency, he only got through part of his routine by the time he arrived at the theatre. In rehearsal he had discovered a way of saying one of the lines in the 2^nd act that every one liked a lot: his voice got deep and sexy, very nice moment. On this night the performance went very well, in spite of the truncated warm up. Until that deep sexy part. He said that line exactly as he had done dozens of times before. But instead of deep sexiness, what came out of his mouth was tired little squeakiness. The audience were too embarrassed even to laugh. You can bet that actor never missed another warm up.

In software development, this is akin to doing some manual work outside the scope of your automated build, deploy, test cycle.  It can seem quicker to do a simple, one-off integration or system test outside that environment, but unintended consequences always catch-up .  In our experience, cutting the preparation corners usually costs 10X more in the whole lifecycle than it saves in the short-term. Beyond the interrupts of customer-impacting defects, the team loses a bit of the pride and belief necessary for the Culture of Innovation

Team work demands a no less total performance than acting or tennis playing. It needs, but rarely gets, the preparation of a warm-up. A basketball team combines individual warm ups (stretches, shooting around) with group work (lay up and passing drills). Why should knowledge work be any different? Imagine the energy available if your morning stand up included a vigorous warm up led by a different person each day. Jump back!

As teams and organizations reach an Innovate level of Agile adoption or Ri , they take ownership of their process and environment.  Their improved throughput, collaboration, and preparation have brought them to a place where many of the vanilla iteration, planning, and estimating practices of Scrum and XP stop serving them.  These structures helped the incremental transition down a path of increasing agility, but in a Culture of Innovation, where smooth, continuous flow of one thing at a time is the goal, the focus moves from planning to preparation.

Next up in our series – Options, Fall-back and Design Sets

About the Authors: Ryan Martens is a goat cheese maker,  founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development.

Lee Devin is a dramaturg at the People’s Light and Theatre, a Senior Research Scholar at Swarthmore College and a senior consultant with the Cutter Consortium. These activities often interfere with his fishing, and cause him to neglect his grandchildren.

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This is #2 in a Series on the Culture of Innovation with guest blogger Lee Devin.

Failure and success are handy terms when we want to characterize closure in an industrial making process: We call a thing that works a “success,” and a thing that doesn’t work a “failure.” In an iterative collaboration that leads to an emergent result, they’re not so clear cut, not so handy. We come to closure on an iteration. When we test it, we find it doesn’t do some of what we need.

Thinking industrially, we say “This sucker won’t work. It’s a failure.”

But we need nuance here. It makes sense to observe that the thing failed the test. It makes non-sense to say that the thing’s a failure. As part of an iterative collaboration the current thing is a necessary part of a journey toward an innovation. Chances are pretty good that this iteration contains the seeds of the one that finally does the job.

We think of starting to build a new culture by reconceiving a couple of words because we believe that language is the key to our work; use of language is, after all, the fundamentally human action. Those old Greeks had this idea: they thought of language as a distinguishing feature of a human being. They knew creatures in the world who did not speak Greek, who made unintelligible sounds like “Bar, bar, bar, bar.” They called such creatures “barbarians.”

We won’t go that far, but we will suggest that language is our best tool for thinking and making choices, for knowledge work.

In this Blog Post by Tim Walker at Hoovers - Tim asks, How do you cope with Failure?

Before we make suggestions about how to address this difficulty, let’s revisit an important feature of any culture of innovation. The dominant way to make innovations is to run collaborative iterations. Get an idea of what you’d like to have; make one; test it and discuss it among the team and, if possible, with the end user; on the basis of this discussion, reconceive what you’d like to have and make new one; use everything you can from the previous iteration; chase new ideas to their end without predicting results; test and discuss; reconceive; make a new one; and so on until the project reaches closure. You recognize closure when anything you can think of to do makes the thing worse, not better.

Most of us are okay with the idea that the end product of an innovative process emerges from that process and is, finally, unpredictable. What we have not confronted is the idea that the words we use to think about processes and products may interfere with that and may need reconceiving.

Redefining ‘failure’ and ‘success’

If you can plan for and schedule a process, how new will the outcome be? Not very. But, how can you start on a project without identifying a goal, making a plan to reach that goal, and without confidence in your plan? We all know these keys to success, and unsuccessful equals failure. Right?

• Failure! “I’m no good. Better go out in the back yard and eat worms.”

• Failure! “Thank God, let’s drop this sucker and move on. Now that we’ve failed, and learned from our failure, the next idea will be a good one.”

Well, maybe not. Maybe instead of failing, you’ve taken an essential step along the way.

Maybe you haven’t reached an end point and suffered a defeat. Maybe you’ve moved toward an unpredictable closure. Some innovators, Tom Kelley of IDEO among them, believe that to succeed you must fail often. Works for him.

We think there’s a better way.

We can begin by noticing that our models for “failure” and “success” limit our work. This means that we need to make a cultural change, from industrial (plan, design, execute) ideas of making toward artful, innovative ones (prepare, iterate, test, iterate again). Think of a staircase. We don’t regard the first step as a “failure,” as “unsuccessful” because it doesn’t get to the second floor. It’s a step. One of many. Just so, we need to decide to put our attention on our process, conceiving it as a journey.

The change of mind here is: we can’t say, exactly, when we’ll complete the journey, or when we’ll arrive. In fact, sometimes (out of which times come the really good stuff) we’re not even sure where we’re going.  But what we can say is what we just learned and what we recommend that we do next.

At Rally and in many Agile teams, we use a notion from eXtreme Programing called spikes.  In a spike, the engineer sets out to learn what she does not know by conceiving of a simple test to prove or disprove a theory.  These spikes are used to help narrow an estimate, gather data on a continuum of choices or narrow a field of options.  By calling it a spike, the XP creators helped us RECONCEIVE the ideas of success and failure for a story and thus helped themselves and the rest of the team.

Suppose we decide to go further beyond just a small task like a spike and conceive of each iteration toward an emergent innovation as an essential step along the way. Suppose we decide to conceive success as a measure of progress, not closure. In our culture of innovation, this means we conceive product as a result, not a goal. We’ll know it when we get to it.

Here’s an idea that can help. “Nothing is lost, and wonders never cease.”

Artists live by this mantra: when the work reaches closure it contains everything done on the way. (You’ll see actors who don’t seem real. That’s because all they’ve done is learn their lines and blocking and a way to say the lines so that they’ll sound good. You’ll see actors who seem as if they are the character; you can’t believe they’re not personally like that. That’s because all they’ve done is spend hours and hours of thought and research into creating the given circumstances, a complete history, of that character.)

Instead of discarding work that didn’t reach a goal, reconceive the idea of “goal” into “result” and decide to use what you just made as material for the next iteration toward a result that you’ll recognize when you see it. The more of the current iteration you can find to use, the better. The harder you have to work to include everything, the better. In combination with the new ideas you (the team) get from discussion, and from the imaginative effort you spend, something unpredicted, something new, will appear in the next pass. This will happen.

The cultural principle here is: Collaborative iteration equals Innovation.

In this model, we can measure the progress of effort as it converges on the product.  What were the tests results with which stakeholders? What paths will we not follow any further? What potential design sets still need to be tested?

The failure of tests down a path is actually progress and a sign of innovation. Progress is a narrowing of options toward an optimal solution and failures are critical to narrowing.

By adopting the iterative process of Agile we increase the opportunity for innovations, but ultimately we need to prepare for improvisation by changing our idea about language. We need to use language; to decide what words mean. To use language, in other words, as a tool we control, not as a reality that traps us. And that’s a cultural change, not a tip we can quickly use.

We do have a tip, a simple (but not easy) way to begin this complex change. Never say no. Hang that on your wall next to the “No Sniveling” sign. “NEVER SAY NO.” This simple (but not easy) change cannot fail to increase the creative range of individuals, teams, and the organization. It’s not a final answer, but it’s a step along the way.

Next up in our series – Planning and Preparation

About the Authors: Ryan Martens is a goat cheese maker,  founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development.

Lee Devin is a dramaturg at the People’s Light and Theatre, a Senior Research Scholar at Swarthmore College and a senior consultant with the Cutter Consortium. These activities often interfere with his fishing, and cause him to neglect his grandchildren.

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I’ve noticed a piece of advice repeated in many Agile blogs, articles, and books.

Seeing it makes me roll my eyes until it hurts. (Why I would hurt myself on purpose will be the subject of another post, on a blog reserved for psychotherapists.)

Even my very most favorite Agile book, “Scaling Lean & Agile Development” by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, has a section in there with this advice.

I saw it in Jim Highsmith’s new book, too, although by the time he’s done discussing it he does make a couple of good points. It’s an old piece of advice that pre-dates Agile.

What is this old chestnut? Here it is:

Hire the best.

I mean, come on. Is this supposed to be a big lightbulb moment? Where do they find stuff like this, in the “Journal of the Totally Obvious?” Am I supposed to leap out of my chair, smack my forehead and exclaim “Eureka! All I have to do is hire the best! Why didn’t I think of that?”

Is this really good advice? Is it actually possible, or necessary in an Agile world? Is this sensible, if trite, piece of advice useful at all? Talk amongst yourselves while I blather on for a bit.

The problem with “Hire the Best” as an operational principle is that:

a) it immediately excludes most of us, and
b) it’s extremely difficult to do.

What’s the best? The top 5%? 10%? Certainly no more than 20%.

So what about the rest of us? What are we supposed to do? Are things hopeless for us? Should 80% of companies worldwide just give up and shut down because the top 20% of people are taken? What about big companies and the Law of Large Numbers? Can you really hire only the best when you’re hiring 10,000 or 20,000 people?

Something that makes much more sense to me, and which has much more power, is this idea:

Hire well, and develop people.

Check it out! Everybody can do this. “Develop People” is one of the two pillars of Lean, while “Hire the Best” is not. So far, those Lean folks have been right about pretty much everything, so why not this, too? Why would I need to develop people if I only hired the best? Why not save the money so I can pour it into my “Hire the Best” employment initiative?

The Agile Principles say something like […find motivated people and trust them…], and I believe in Agile. So I cannot find in the bedrock of either of my professional beacons, Lean and Agile, any indication that I should “Hire the Best”.

My common sense and experience tell me that it is incredibly hard to actually hire the best, and I like that it might not be absolutely necessary for success. How cool would it be to hire the ‘pretty good’ and then kick the butt of some company that thought it was hiring the best? Is that possible? Yes.

“Hire the Best” is really hard to do.

I’ve worked as a full time hiring manager at more than a dozen companies, all of which thought they hired the best and only one of which actually did. That company really worked hard at hiring the best. At that company, one rule of the hiring thumb was that you only hired people onto your team who would immediately place in the upper 50th percentile.

In other words, when you were on an interviewing team in that company, you were expected to vote to hire somebody who was better than half the people on your team. You think that’s easy? You think that isn’t scary? Try it sometime.

What I’m really really really interested in is something that can take my average team (and let’s face it, Ms. Wishful Hiring Manager, it is overwhelmingly likely that our team is average, for some value of average) and make it better or improve its ability to deliver value to my customers. That’s worth some effort to achieve because it is worth money to my business. If I believe in “The Art of the Possible” then I like this better, because it’s a lot more possible than simply hiring the best.

Anybody can embark on a long, expensive and likely unachievable quest to only hire the best, but if Agile were really valuable,  it would help me to take my team of competent professionals and make them significantly more effective than they were. It might even make them more effective than a gaggle of “the best” somewhere else.

The Agile Principles talk about motivated people, but they don’t actually mention “the best”.  I view this as a good thing because I strongly believe that the best teams are not built from a homogeneous mix of the smartest, fastest, bestest people.

Teams work best when they are diverse and when the power of the team can be unleashed by empowerment and self-organization. I also know from bitter experience how hard, and frankly scary, it can be to really hire the best. (Sorry if I harp on that, but I have scars…)

What I want is what I think both Lean and Agile offer to me as a businessperson. They offer me a way to take solid professionals and then ignite their passion and professionalism within a framework of continuous learning in a way that allows them each to contribute to the fullest extent possible.

That’s something that make Lean and Agile worthwhile to me, and not some lazy idea about hiring the very best (somehow) and then automatically winning.

About the Author: Alan Atlas is a Soul Musician, Certified Scrum Trainer, and Agile Coach at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

This is 1st post in a series we’re working on with guest blogger Lee Devin:

How to Foster A Culture of Innovation

“It took me more than 53 years to understand that culture isn’t just important, it is everything.” -Lou Gerstner

In the coming decade, software and product teams must provide the critically needed innovative approaches to organizations throughout the world. The visual metaphors and practical, hands-on ideas in these posts will give executives, managers, and engineers ways to speed up this evolution. Starting on Monday.

To make and maintain a culture of innovation requires a team to consider that task as a part of their work, complementary to, and as important as, the commercial task. Work on the culture must go forward during the workday. We’ll suggest, for example, that you include a warm up as part of the daily stand up. The team leader will lead this at first, but when it has become part of the routine, leadership will rotate among the group. Team members who learn a new exercise somewhere else will bring that to the stand up. You won’t tack this on to the day as something extra: it’s central.

As well, on analogy with the public schools, an executive or team leader might propose in-service learning requirements. Normally schools don’t require that teachers take specific courses. They demand instead a required number of course hours per year or other interval. Such courses include learning new techniques applicable to the work at hand; but, more important, they can be general—education rather than training.

Google is only the most well known of modern corporations to suggest that workers spend up to 20% of their work time on personal projects. Google encourages personal projects that have no readily discernible connection to current work, and imposes no requirement that such projects result in marketable outcomes. Now and then, of course, they do. And they’re a main reason why the competition has such a problem keeping up with Google. Not even Google knows what the next thing will be. More important, they serve as practice in innovation: people discover and refine their skills in a no-stress situation. They are free to be wildly creative.

In colleges and universities a similar situation obtains, though with considerable pressure attached at certain times in a professor’s career. We mean the custom called “Publish or Perish!” To achieve tenure or to be eligible for promotion, a teacher must make a contribution to the field. Mostly this means publishing the results of research.

Some places, Harvard Business School among them, grant tenure only to men and women who have achieved an international reputation within one or more fields. While this requirement weighs heavily on young faculty, the purpose is clear: research offers faculty an opportunity to practice the skills they teach.

More important, though less observable, accumulation of knowledge beyond what’s needed for tomorrow’s class supports a career after the initial thrill of teaching wears off and interest wanes. Of course these are ongoing programs; they have their true effect over the long term, as they become embedded in the company tradition and in an individual’s sense of work.

But, you say, “How do we have time to do this?”

Turns out that a reasonable amount of time spent in these pursuits increases productivity. When Frederick Taylor began his time and motion studies of workers shoveling coal at the steel mill, they balked at his requirement that they take breaks on a schedule he devised. They were paid for piece work, and feared that Taylor’s breaks were a management device to reduce their paychecks. Taylor insisted, and the workers discovered to their amazement, that their pay went up noticeably.

This notion of pay for story points has not caught on in the software field.

Many folks in the Agile community would argue that Agile is all about culture change. As you know, we do not see Enterprise Agile adoption as solely about anything. For most teams it starts out as a process change, runs headlong into weak testing technology and then confronts some major cultural elements as the scaling or replicating come into play.

Our Flow-Pull-Innovate approach can be mapped into a state transition diagram that blends changes on all these fronts.  It is our experience that teams neither have nor take time to appreciate these cultural items until they have shown some improvement. At this point, it becomes easier and paramount to reinvest some of these gains into continuing the journey. This can be in the form of slack time, schedule time for innovation, or new infrastructure in building, testing, or planning.

Now once teams get to the benefits of pull at a program level, the focus of adoption needs to move towards organizational culture.  I believe the transition from traditional to Agile, involves quite a shift in infrastructure, methods and guiding ideas.  The awareness for the changes in Guiding Ideas seems to come primarily from bottom-up adoption or occasionally from a new senior level executive who was brought into drive change.

Making changes of the magnitude we’ll suggest won’t be fast and easy. If you want to move fast, you’ll want to get help. This can be tricky. Consultants are typically a quick-fix; this won’t do in the long-term, but they can help with a push. However, a culture lasts, and work to create and maintain it should last as well. The consultant’s techniques stop lasting all too soon. We suggest that you find ways to learn about companies and teams that can become role models. This can be difficult. You’ll need to take time to build ongoing relationships of trust and reciprocity.

You can also consult people who routinely work in a culture of innovation. These include (but aren’t limited to) three groups.

(1) Actors make a new thing each night they perform the play, and their rehearsal processes are a compendium of good ideas for innovative agile teams.

(2) Theatre directors are a great source of method and lore for team leaders in an innovative culture. They every day address the difficulty of supervising men and women who have skills that they do not. They can’t bark out orders, but must find ways to encourage constant innovation.

(3) Painters (not house painters) in their work interact with an emerging form, the key element of collaboration, as they create a new and unique thing each time they make a picture. They can be especially persuasive and helpful on the question of replication: since they can’t do it (Every painting they make is new and unique, even if they try to copy themselves.), they have developed views and attitudes that software development teams and their leaders can use to advantage.

We remember a teacher who told his classes, “The way to improve your writing is to apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair.” The way to get started is to get started. Make the commitment. This can be a top down or bottom up movement, but support from above is key to a good beginning and to ongoing success. The budget for subsequent projects should include time and funds for preparation and team building of the kind we’ve described. Team leaders and managers should commit to constant reinforcement of the aim, and to vigorous support of performance by individuals and particular teams.

Keep an eye out for upcoming posts on this theme, where we will cover many of these concepts in greater detail.  But, as always, your feedback in the form of comments would be tremendously valuable in shaping our ultimate path and conclusion.

An Introduction to Lee

Jean and I, along with other Rally coaches write on the concepts of Agile Enterprise Adoption and our recommended approach called Flow-Pull-Innovate; however, most of that copy has been dedicated to the first two states of Flow and Pull.

Personally, I have struggled to write about Innovate because our language seems to be all-wrong. So we recruited a friend to help, his name is Lee Devin. With Lee’s help we are going explore the state of Innovate with words and stories that will help us understand this advanced state of Agile adoption. There are a number of topics that we have discussed in this collaboration and we plan to share all of them through this first quarter of 2010 (see How to Foster a Culture of Innovation)

Lee fishing in Colorado's 11mile Canyon

I met Lee Devin through my next door neighbor Gordon Wickstrom.  Lee was a colleague of Gordon’s in theater and a fellow fly-fisherman. Gordon is an old school theater professor, he believed in structuring the performance to give the actors a place to create. He like Lee has a passion for his craft and feels absolutely fortunate to have been able to work in the theater profession his entire life. Gordon and I have shared many a lively conversation about theater and software and it was one of those conversations that led me to Lee.

According to Gordon, Lee has a more creative approach to theater development; one that is more emergent than Gordon’s. After numerous professional interactions and three fishing trips, Lee and his family are good friends. And his son, Sean has got to be one of the best anglers on the planet; fishing with him is like fishing with Yoda.

Now into Lee’s book with Rob Austin, Artful Making.  This book blends Rob’s research into innovation and agile product development with Lee’s mastery of theater; it is a real joy to read. It conjures up some of my best memories of creating beauty and greatness in software. Their contribution to our profession is to help us break our mental models or metaphors around the work of software development. You can let go of your mechanical metaphors and let Lee give you a complete vision of software as a creative and messy design process for conjuring up real beauty and innovation.  After a fishing outing last summer in Boulder, Jean and I had breakfast with Lee and decided to collaborate with him on work around the topic of innovation. You can read Jean’s words about Lee and Rob, in her post  “What do Actors and Programmers have in common?”

Next up In our series – Reconceiving the Notions of Success and Failure

About the Authors: Ryan Martens is a goat cheese maker,  founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development.

Lee Devin is a dramaturg at the People’s Light and Theatre, a Senior Research Scholar at Swarthmore College and a senior consultant with the Cutter Consortium. These activities often interfere with his fishing, and cause him to neglect his grandchildren.

Jean Tabaka is a wine enthusiast, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

I have been back in the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook this week thinking about strategies for creating a shared vision to 2020 at Rally.

With our newest round of funding, we will be growing rapidly in multiple locations and beyond the max tribe size of 150-170 people. (Dunbar’s Number)  Over that last year, we grew the business well but without advancing our total headcount numbers.  Now with headcount growth slated in the field and in two development centers, we need a stronger foundation to steer our growth.  Doing this work, hit me with a BFO (Brilliant Flash of the Obvious) that is impacting many of largest Agile adoptions that I am working with.

Many leaders are seeing the benefits of Agile and “Telling” or “Selling” their organizations to go there.  But, the “Telling” and “Selling” strategies run counter to many of the guiding ideas behind Agile itself.  I have seen this rub  limit or slow the positive impact of an Agile adoption.  This rub almost guarantees you will only get incremental benefits from Agile and will most likely fall back to your old ways.

As Bryan Smith and Peter Senge remind us “Telling” is just the first developmental step in creating a shared vision to adopt.   This strategy has many flaws including that fact that most people only remember 25% of what they are told.  However, it might be the right strategy given a dire current reality.

In extreme contrast to Telling, is the Co-Creating strategy that has the whole organization working together to create the vision and implement it.  This requires a leadership group that can truly let go and an employee base that has enough personal mastery to understand their own personal vision.   Those are big pre-requisites to this strategy, but it should be obvious that if you can run this strategy, the self-motivating benefits will be highly supportive to getting the most benefit out of Agile.

The complete model, from the Shared Vision section of the Fieldbook includes five strategies that can be grown into over time:

1. Telling
2. Selling
3. Testing
4. Consulting
5. Co-Creating

We have discussed our Flow-Pull-Innovate approach for adopting Agile in larger organizations, but I have talked very little about strategies for leading this adoption process.  I think it is because most Agile adoptions get started in a grassroots approach and are led by the teams that testing it out.  The success of these teams then caused people to take notice and start talking about how to replicate this success.  In essence, I have been assuming, and the market has been executing a Testing level strategy.

I believe to put an organization on the path to continuous improvement, you must at least be executing a Testing level strategy to scale your adoption.  Over time, I believe your ultimate ability to move to the Innovate level of Flow-Pull-Innovate will be tied to your ability to adopt a Consulting or Co-Creating strategies.  As Agile is a journey to greatness, this journey depends upon your organization maturing in all including strategy execution.

What are your experiences with these strategies in your Agile adoption?

At Rally in 2010, our planning team is running a two pronged approach using a Testing strategy with the organization in Q1 for our 2010 plans and a three quarter long co-creating strategy for our 2020 vision.

About the Author: Ryan Martens is a lego building father,  founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you who follow the Agile Blog.

Jean and I have had a great time writing these posts over the last year, and we are humbled by the way you’ve responded.  After a few years of casual, intermittent posting in our Agile Commons community, we jumped off the deep end into blogging this year by hatching out this site and our Engineering Blog.

We are truly grateful for how you have helped us learn and grow: for every comment, every tweet, everything that you have shared with us.

And we are hopeful that the learning has been a two way street. That is, whatever topics or ideas we posted in the blog that particularly resonated with you, we are honored that you invited us into your 2009 professional journey. In fact, we’d like to see your comments on what you found particularly useful or engaging in this past year. And we welcome your suggestions for topics in 2010.

We look forward to continuing this great conversation in 2010.

Thanks and Happy Holidays!

For 2010, lets find ways to focus on teaching our craft and growing the world of skilled software development professionals instead of trying to figure out who is “right.”

I believe much of the “Escalation” that Jean is seeing was correctly titled by Regina Mullen as a battle to be “right.” (see and read Escalation is Killing Agile – Can We Please Stop It? and Escalation is Killing our Healthy Conflict in Agile). That behavior focuses on carving up the pie instead of growing the pie.   There has been so much added to the field of software development methods, tools and techniques from the guiding ideas of Agile.  Now is not the time to stop and eat.

For me, 2010 is about continuing to grow the Agile software development pie’s reach and innovations.

I believe one of the key fixes to the problem of escalation can be found through increased professionalism and certification in Agile. By raising the bar through “difficult and skills-based certification,” as Brian Marick and the board at the Agile Alliance described, we can advance the Agile discourse through :

• a defined a bar that is deep in skill, knowledge and practice
• a significant enough bar to engage College and University study and examination
• research and curriculum that explore the tough questions in a scientific method
• development of more flexible or “T” shaped individuals that can see and work beyond silo roles.

With this back-drop, I am motivated by the notion of creating a  A Community of Thinkers,:

I am a member of a community of thinkers and I believe that communities exist as homes for professionals to learn, teach, and reflect on their work.

A Community of Thinkers creates more leadership in our profession. I see the expanding certification efforts in 2010 as great steps in these directions:

• Lean Software and System Professional – new certification emerging
• Agile Developer Certification – that is also emerging
• Certified Scrum Practitioner – especially as it intertwines with the PMI’s Agile Community of Practice

I encourage everyone in our community to figure out how to put energy toward one or more of these efforts.  The benefit of actively learning, teaching and reflecting on our work should lead us all to expanding civil dialogue that works to understand all points of view and keep expanding our thinking.  Thus broader education and difficult certification helps create a “Community of Thinkers.”  And, a Community of Thinkers will create a virtuous cycle of win/win and thus a larger pie for all.

That is my hope for 2010 in our profession.

About the Author: Ryan Martens is a happy father,  founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

As a Scotsman living in the US I take more than my fair share of trips through Heathrow airport.

There are many things I enjoy about being back in the UK but Heathrow airport is certainly not one of them. For a while HSBC bank tried valiantly to cheer us up, and as we trudged wearily from terminal to terminal, our journey was made more colorful by the many posters from their What’s Your Point of View campaign.

Here is an example of one of their posters:

Looking at these posters made me reflect on my own work as an Agile Coach and how I am often confronted by different points of view.

If I am speaking to a group and criticize waterfall development there is a chance someone will feel I am disparaging their team or their efforts. Sometimes use of the word agile does not serve a good purpose. Many have negative perceptions of Agile and believe it to be chaotic, undisciplined and unpredictable.

As a coach, I don’t like to spend time fixing negative perceptions of Agile. My passion is making teams and organizations successful. I like to steer away from the waterfall vs. agile discussion.

Instead, I focus on sharing what I see happening in high performance teams and organizations:

• Without knowing what value really is we can’t reduce waste. A focus on customer value answers two key questions: (1) Who am I building this for? and (2) Why am I building this? Once we have a keen sense of what value is we can then prioritize our work to deliver the highest value first.

• By delivering early and often we give ourselves the best opportunity to beat the competition to market, realize revenue and discover insights that we can help us improve.

• One of the biggest impediments to delivering early and often is the inability to reduce batch size and many teams struggle with this. This is a battle worth fighting.

• Another impediment to delivering value is not pull testing forward. If we don’t complete our work as we iterate then we are creating technical debt that will affect our ability to release.

• Successful teams know it is best to take small incremental steps towards improvement and to establish a rhythm of continuous improvement. We don’t try to define the perfect process, we don’t set the bar too high and we continuously inspect and adapt.

• As Émile Chartrier once said “nothing is more dangerous than an idea when you only have one”. Successful teams and organizations know that to survive long-term they need to create a collaborative culture that fosters innovation and shared commitment.

Are these are agile principles or lean principles? Some like to draw an ideological line between the two but like Wille Faler I don’t believe that’s a bottom-line discussion. Call them waterfall if you like, so long as you’re successful.

You might not like my list and that’s fine too. Make your own list but don’t just pull it out of a book. Visit the gemba and come up with something visceral that your team can identify with.

About the Author: Ken Clyne is a 26.2 finisher, Certified ScrumMaster and Agile Coach at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

I had the fine fortune of spending a day with Liz Keogh and Eric Willeke in Boulder last week.

What a wonderful experience! The three of us gathered with the goal of producing something for the Lean and Kanban software community. We didn’t know what that would be. We just knew we felt strongly that we should give something to the community.

We were heavily influenced by past conversations with Chris Matts, his call for “fewer leaders, more leadership”, and a desire to see the Lean Software and Systems Consortium (LSSC) learn from some of the trials that other communities and community-leading organizations have undergone. Ryan Martens, the CTO and a founder of Rally, also provided thoughtful input to our discussions during the day.

As we talked, we discovered something. We were all keenly interested in the general notion of “community”. We became less convinced that the LSSC needed a challenge from us, and more convinced that it was applicable to software communities generally. For me, this was a deeply personal statement and commitment.  It played heavily into my recent blog posts on “Escalation”. And yet, together, Liz and Eric and I found the same deep conviction.  So as you look at the statement I provide below, if it’s exactly the same as the copies on Liz or Eric’s sites, it’s only because their arguments were equally sound and convincing.

Because of that personal nature, we wanted to avoid putting our statement up as some kind of manifesto that people can sign. If you feel strongly enough about this statement that you would want to sign up, copy it. Post it on your own site. Attribute it to wherever you got your copy from – the act of sharing is more important to us than the act of creation – and feel free to change it so that it reflects your own values. I don’t think that any statement like this can ever be perfect, nor will we perfectly live up to it.

I am a member of a community of thinkers. So are you.

”A Community of Thinkers” by Liz Keogh, Jean Tabaka and Eric Willeke is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Please attribute to the distributor of your copy or derivative.

About the Author: Jean Tabaka is a wine enthusiast, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

This week, I had the pleasure of attending the seminar “The Way of Artful Making” presented by Rob Austin and Lee Devin , co-authors of the book “Artful Making”.

While I have met both gentlemen separately in the past and heard them both speak, this was one of those golden moments when I was able to hear them co-present. And for me, I loved the odd mixture in the audience: MBA students, MFA student actors, and software engineers. (Okay, guess which group I was in?)

Lee and Rob have a great “pairing” style in presenting. For those of you who don’t know them, Lee is a professor emeritus in Theatre from Swarthmore College. And Rob is a former associate professor at the Harvard Business School and is now full professor at the Copenhagen Business School.

In co-presenting, Lee and Rob take turns applying their perspectives about the look and feel of artful making. For Lee, this is about life in the theatre. For Rob, this is about great product development and, in particular, software development. So two great tastes that, as it turns out, taste great together (sorry, a reference to an old candy advertisement :)

So, what do actors and programmers have in common? Well, some amazingly fundamental things as it turns out:

• Iterative work
• Collaboration
• Innovation

Theatre work and product development both thrive on iteration and collaboration. Lee described this in terms of rehearsal and the emergent look of a play leading up to and even after opening night. Rob affirmed the value of a collaborative and iterative approach in product development and provided videos from Boeing and Bang and Olufsen showing how both companies take advantage of this approach.

What do these practices have to do with innovation? Well in both theatre and product development, Lee and Rob encourage us to embrace what should be the glaringly obvious; that is, iteration and collaboration invariably produce innovation .

What happens when you put iterations and collaboration together? Rob introduced us to a term he had learned during his study of Boeing’s use of iterations: “try-storming”. That is, instead of just brainstorming ideas (whether in theatre or in product development), take your brainstorm and try it.  Find something out about it as soon as possible. Then “try-storm” the next idea. (I think I am going to have to steal that term from him!)

I was also very fortunate to be able to sit next to Pete Behrens of Trail Ridge Consulting during the evening. Talking with him afterward, he reminded me of a few more similarities between theatre and product development:

• You need to be able to surprise people in order to create value
• If you don’t know in exact detail where you are going, it’s okay
• The ideal play/product you hold in your head is very limiting; let go of it
• In iterations, like rehearsals, each iteration may be or even will be significantly different from each other
• We’ve been able to move to being more iterative these days, more Agile, because of technology making it cheap enough to iterate
• Nothing is lost and wonders never cease as we build up each iteration from all the iterations before

Artful Making through iterations, collaboration and try-storming—all are important if you intend to be a theatre or product development organization that is truly innovative in the 21^st century. And THAT is what actors and programmers have in common.

About the Author: Jean Tabaka is a wine enthusiast, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.