This week both Jean and I delivered talks on the Agile organization at Agile 2010 in Orlando. Whether you were able to attend one, both or neither, this post shares the handouts and materials that we used in the talks.
If you attended, please provide comments on what you liked, were puzzled by and might change in the future.
Jean’s work was a three-hour tutorial on learning models for managing the Agile organization. She ran three exercises and provided a bibliography of books/resources that we have used here at Rally:
In addition to Jean’s talk, I presented an experience report on our use of Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) at Rally. This report tells a story of our evolution of strategy execution from Gazelles/Scrum to Lean/Agile.
We hope these resources provide you with ideas for scaling your own Agile efforts beyond their current levels. Again, please comment on the blog with what you got from the materials or the talks. We want to hear from you on this topic.
I have a reason for liking Bob Payne. Bob has empathy and a true love for giving back. That resonates with some of what we are trying to do here in Boulder. Rally, as a B Corporation, has expressly created a charter about giving back to the community: 1% equity giveback, 1% employee volunteer hours (over 2500/year in the last two years) and a number of other local not for profit initiatives. For Bob and us, adopting Agile has been an important component in how will pull our empathy and our software skills together. With Agile, we seek to deliver feasible, effective, desirable solutions in our complex world. And reaching beyond our corporate walls to deliver that desirability catapults us to being truly empathic in our solutions.
When you meet Bob, you immediately get what “giving back” and empathy is about in his Agile work and beyond. Bob is always looking for new ways to bring Agile to our community and the greater community: our complex world. Out of his own interest in giving back to the Agile community, Bob set up his Agiletoolkit podcasts site. A gift for all of us. At the recent ADP West conference, Bob was there with his sound setup. Bob took interest in Rally’s Agile Zen acquisition when interviewing Ryan Martens. And I had the great fun of talking about Seth Godin’s book “Linchpin” that both Bob and I had read.
In this post, I’m so honored to have the opportunity to turn the tables on Bob and be the interviewer.
“Bob, what got you started recording your Agiletoolkit podcasts?”
I began recording the Agiletoolkit podcasts in 2005 after hearing several interesting podcasts and wondering if anyone would be interested in a podcast about Agile. I had always been a gadget person so fiddling with recording equipment and microphones was a natural for me. In fact, I now also have an iPhone App for the podcasts.
I love having the conversations and the podcast gave me an excuse/push to have conversations with people that I might not connect with in the halls at a conference. A good example of that was when someone said to me, “You have to talk to this guy Arlo.” Without that introduction via the podcast I am sure I would not know Arlo Belshee as well as I do now.
While I am by nature gregarious, I do not search out “networking opportunities”. The podcasts have forced me into a new comfort zone that includes a lot more people from the community than I would have connected with through normal channels. While I hope people appreciate and benefit from the podcasts, I do them for myself. That affects the style of the podcasts. Since I am not trying to be polished or create an edited product, the podcasts have a more natural/comfortable feel. I just wish I said “UM” less and a was little more polished on my delivery. But…I am who I am and it is what it is.
“How did you get into Agile philanthropy?”
Agile philanthropy started as a way of trying to meld my passion for doing good in the world with my passion for agile methods. Using the power that is evident in the agile community to do great things is one of the goals of Agile Philanthropy. Ideally we will get to the point that this movement is self-sustaining. But we are really just starting out on this journey. I hope that I can grow the movement in the direction of local chapters doing work for local not for profits. Right now everyone is very busy and I am the bottleneck. We are currently working with Mano a Mano and Haiti Partners. And, I would love to have people with a passion for a particular cause to contact me and start up their own chapter.
“What about your other philanthropic interests?”
I am very interested in local sustainable food, economic development and social justice. I volunteer in my kids’ schools quite a bit. Most recently, I built incubators with the kids and hatched chickens and worked with the teachers to incorporate that into the curriculum. I have been working to get local food into the schools; to create school gardens; and, to relax the laws in Washington DC as they pertain to the keeping of bees and hens. Most of my other work is more directly related to the work I do in Agile Philanthropy.
“When did you start the Mano a Mano project work and what have you and your yearly teams accomplished at the Agile conferences?”
Seems like forever but we introduced Mano a Mano three years ago when the conference was in DC. I was running the development lab in the basement and hoped that I could get some real work done in the lab that would do some good. After that, I tried to make it more formal and improve what we have done for them each year. They have been very appreciative and very patient with us since I am learning as I go with this process.
To date, we have moved them onto a Content Management Platform and developed their iPhone optimized donation page. Most importantly, I am happy that I have connected Mano a Mano with David Hussman and a number of other volunteers in the Twin Cities that are helping out on a regular basis. Wayne Simacek showed up for an event that Jeff Patton and Ed Kraay were holding to help Mano a Mano define their web strategy and ended up staying on as a volunteer member of their IT staff.
It is that kind of leverage that I hope to bring by connecting the two communities.
“What do you have in store for us at the Agile2010 conference?”
For the Agile2010 Conference, I am working again with the UX stage to do an Extreme Makeover for the Mano a Mano web presence. We hope to be able to work on their information architecture and site design to improve the impact of the message that Mano a Mano is putting out. We are looking for volunteers to come by the LiveAid lab and help with the effort (hint, hint).
I also hope to get people interested in replicating this model for not for profits that they are passionate about.
You can do this too
To end this post, I want to thank Bob for the example he sets for all of us. I also want to emphasize Bob’s call to action to get engaged locally. You can do this through your existing local Agile group. Or, you can create a new group with an express charter to give back to the community. Recently Brad Feld here in Boulder wrote about the “Boulder New Technology Meetup” event that supported over 300 people engaged with 20 local non-profits. And here at Rally, we are marching along with Bob philanthopically working to give back: supporting Intercambrio, donating time to local non-profits (Community Food Share and Growing Gardens) and working with the Salesforce Foundation.
Writing or receiving a break-up letter can be fairly daunting or shattering, depending on which end of the letter your name appears. That letter puts a pretty hard stop to a relationship. It’s communicating detachment and finality. It can create a lot of pain whether intended or not. In contrast, a love letter is uplifting. The endorphins fly! Someone is revealing their attraction for you, and their hopes and wishes for a future with you.
Now, there is a reason I have these letters on my mind. I’ve just returned from Rally’s Agile Leadership Forum – a great gathering of people eager to lead successful Agile transitions in their organizations. The event included a lively presentation from Forrester Research’s Senior Analyst Dave West: “Agile Adoption – Research Findings on the Adoption of Agile.” (You can find some of Dave’s data in the “Forrester Wave: Agile Development Management Tools, Q2 2010″). We also enjoyed an inspirational talk from our CTO Ryan Martens, called “Moving Agile Beyond Software.” These great presentations were followed by breakout sessions and a panel discussion about Agile challenges. Now, how to end the event?
As emcee of the forum, I not only kicked off the event, but it was my job to bring closure to the gathering as well. How can we have people walk away with thoughts about Agile? Why are they interested in the first place, and where do their concerns lie? I was inspired by a video I recently saw about “breakup letters.” The Breakup Letter is a design research tool that Smart Design uses to understand the emotional connection between people and their products, services, and experiences. One person broke up with his cell phone, another, her single-cup coffee maker.
Now, just how does this relate to the Agile Leadership Forum? I liked the concept of the breakup letter, but I decided to entirely flip the idea and close the event by asking everyone to write love letters instead. In the spirit of Cyrano de Bergerac, I asked each table of participants to work together in crafting a “Dear Agile” letter. In this letter, they were to convey their attraction to Agile. And, they were to reveal where they were concerned about as well. All letters were to be from a secret admirer :-)
Once the groups began to read their letters, I knew we were on to something. Though I don’t have the reading of the letters on video, here are a few examples of our “Dear Agile” love letters.
Run this exercise in your own group to find out what the Agile “lure” looks like and also what the “turn-offs” might be.
Breathlessly awaiting your comments,
Jean
p.s. If you want to read some of the transcribed texts of the love letters, read on!
__________________________
Dear Agile,
I have admired you from a distance for some time. Waterfall and I are in the process of an ugly breakup. There is so much about you I need to know. My friend says great things about you. You are so simple and straightforward– no mind games like Waterfall.
This won’t be simple. Waterfall still has clothes at my place. My Facebook status is confused.
In the relationship as we get to know one another, we will have to know each other carefully– co-locating right away? Are we sprinting too fast?
Be gentle with me.
Looking forward to a rapidly developing future.
xoxoxo,
Secret Admirer
__________________________
Dear Agile,
I love you because you offer quick cycles, better quality, and better teamwork. From the first time I saw you, I thought I could begin saving money and add business value.
But, fair Agile, you are not so simple. I’ve heard you are a micro-manager. I don’t totally understand you. Some people are confused by you. On the surface, you sound so perfect and simple, but the more I get to know you the more questions I have.
But, among all my choices, I choose you. You promote collaboration, and allow me to turn things around quickly. You’ve helped me trim weight and stay lean. Don’t disappointment me, I trust you!
With all my love,
Megedá
___________________________
Dear Agile,
I loved you from the first moment I saw you, I loved your fast, speedy releases and that you don’t come with a lot of baggage or documentation. You’re simple and down to earth. You are a great communicator. I always know where you are and my friends love you, too.
I am, however, a bit concerned that not everyone accepts our relationship. I am worried that as my job continually grows and my needs scale up, whether you can handle the increasing challenges. And I’m concerned whether I can afford you… Our relationship and your attachments are what intrigue me the most.
Looking forward to spending more time with you and getting to know you better. – Your secret admirer.
___________________________
Dear Agile,
We love you, we think you are awesome – for the following (bulleted) reasons:
Agile accepts changes and encourages frequent changes
Agile can start implementation before full requirements are known.
We do however have a few problems with you agile –
Do you notice a difference between problems and difficulties? A problem has a solution. When engineers solve it, the problem goes away. It’s a question raised for solution with fixes, tests, and checklist updates. In contrast, a difficulty has no solution. A difficulty wants you to sit with it, address it, not solve it. Artists know this world of the difficult very well. No definitive fix, test, or checklist will suffice. Sitting with and playing with the difficult is simply part of the knowledge work of the artist.
For both the engineer and the artist, a difficulty is often what tangles up the solution to a problem. We see problems and difficulties all around us in the world of innovation. What’s needed to address a difficulty may not be clear at first, if ever. You may, in fact, never achieve that lovely industrial clarity. And yet, our ability to gaze unflinchingly into the face of difficulty will lead us to solve problems with greater innovation and deeper artistic mastery.
Difficulties require “AND” thinking
Difficulties are fuzzy. Improving how we address difficulties requires us to hold a large container with the word “AND” versus the word “OR.” This concept was first introduced to me in Peter Senge’s Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. I also delved into the topic in his course on Leading and Learning for Sustainability. To work with difficulties, we hold and play with a spectrum of possibilities, multiple solutions sets: this AND this AND this AND this. For the actors in a theater ensemble, AND means absorbing a variety of possibilities with the materials surrounding the play. Many innovative outcomes await based on the ensemble’s ability to hold the ambiguity of the art and embrace that sense of release.
For engineers, this might look like the following: you are solving multiple simultaneous equations for problems you see in the larger system. To be able to hold on to this container, you and the team have to feel safe “failing” with lots of little experiments. You must keep the “art of the possible” in mind. This is not an easy task for an individual, much less a group. Difficulties that accompany problems require the courage and patience to sit in a large container of ambiguity.
Consider the wicked problem example
In their book Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions Peter DeGrace and Leslie Hulet Stahl help us delve further into problems and difficulties. Wicked problems arise out of several conditions. First, the problem domain is complex and fraught with difficulty. Then, the solution domain is similarly complex and difficult. Finally the two overlap. That is a wicked problem. Wicked problems hold nests of difficulties. Let’s compare the wicked problem of an engineer and one of an actor.
The engineer’s work begins by reading a user story and exploring the problem sheet from the architecture council. In this assignment, the engineer must be prepared to address known and unknown difficulties on the path to a solution. The engineer recognizes that there is no one solution. How difficulties are addressed may be the key to just how innovative the resulting solution is.
This assignment is the equivalent of a script given to actors. The script is not a limit, but rather material on which to perform and interpret to create something new. There is no one solution. And so, the actors hold ambiguity as they move to the ultimate offering to their audience. How the final play comes together may depend on the ensemble’s ability to play with and address the large realm of possibilities.
The art of the possible and innovation
Like actors, engineers and other knowledge workers need to do our homework, invite innovation and alternative solutions. We need to address difficulties not by point solutions, but by applying “AND” thinking, creating large containers of possibility. We must embrace the art of the possible. In the case of the actor, this comes in the form of rehearsal, ensemble and release that ultimately leads to the actual performance. In the case of the engineer, this work comes in the form of design spikes, set-based engineering, and tests. In both cases, experiments create space around difficulties. The art of the possible broadens the team’s or troupe’s innovative outcomes.
For such a culture of innovation, “AND” thinking is a vital function. At Rally, we apply “AND” thinking in how we address difficulties in a variety of ways. We may take a particular problem with its difficulties and spread it across a paired team of engineers. The teams work safely in an “art of the possible” mode for addressing difficulties in a way that leads to a better solution. We eventually move through the “AND” to a final solution, having addressed the difficulties in a variety of contexts. How you invite “AND” thinking and the art of the possible into your organization may include your Chief Engineer, a Product Owner, Director of System Engineering or a peer engineer all working in a new larger container.
Say “No,” to “No way!” and “Yes,” to “Imagine if…”
Within given circumstances, which are different for each team member, and a safe container for the conversation, the group can play out the implications of a solution, and discover its virtues and flaws. As with an ensemble of actors working through the possibilities of a scene, the only rule is: Never say, “No!” Swallowing that “No” can be hard! You must fight your first response to a suggestion or proposition, which is often “No, there is no way that it will work.”
Instead, the thing you must do is think, “Wait a minute. Let’s assume it will work. Let’s find out what happens when it does.” And, you’ll find out what happens when it does by behaving (thinking, talking, deciding) as if it is in place and working. If your first response is “Oh, wow, what a great idea!” the release might be, “How do I fit myself into this? What can I do personally to make it work?” The tool here is imagination.
We must find comfort in ambiguity and uncertainty. The question is: how can you create the container that allows your team to live with this difficulty and keep from jumping to try and solve it? If we create a culture friendly enough to notice accident and serendipity, we set ourselves up for the asymmetric payoffs associated with successful innovations. Our “AND” thinking and art of the possible ferret out the wicked problems and harvest collective team creativity.
Ryan Martens: Age of Reconsideration, Reform and Regeneration
The last decade marshaled in a new empirical way of working with increasingly complex, interconnected and highly-critical software-based systems – Agile. We are entering a period of reconsideration, reform, and regeneration in software, systems engineering and project management. Agile is working, Lean Software and System is working, and the combination is starting to prove very powerful with regard to throughput and workers. The benefits of autonomous work, engagement and mastery are driving systemic improvements in our way of working and growing to meet complex challenges of our world.
These results illuminate a future vision that has the potential to expand our current notions of Lean and Agile from software teams and into real organizational agility. As a result, there is a chance to unite and unify many communities under the guiding ideas of flow, pull, and value. All of these communities are being drawn in and starting to play well. These are beautiful days with all the implications to CMM/SEI, Agile, Scrum, Lean/LEI, and PMI/PMBok communities yet to be determined.
In the first half of this decade, look for collaborating across boundaries, seeing larger systems and groups working hard to create their future realities. Following that period, look for messy consolidation as the winners of this new platform emerge for a new golden age of networked, software product and system development. Together we’ll be focused on the problem domain of global scale difficulties in governance, cyber-warfare, energy, water, communication, commerce, medicine, climate, transportation and nano-technology.
Thinking about our path with Lean, I’m compelled to draw upon research I’ve been doing in Systems Thinking and, more recently, what I’ve been learning in Systems Engineering.
In Systems Thinking, we recognize a world of system archetypes based on the dance of balancing loops, reinforcing loops and the outside agents that may cause them to transition. Lean, as a system of thinking, has certainly responded to systems that rely too much on take-make-waste. A set of negative reinforcing loops: the more you waste the less you have to take and make. Outside agents, the scarcity versus abundance of materials, has led us to Lean. Lean principles and practices create a positive system wherein the more we reduce waste the more value we get which in turn reinforces more waste reduction. It is a reinforcing loop propelled by continuous improvement.
Recently, I attended the Lean Software and Systems Consortium’s 2010 conference in Atlanta. What a revelation. From James Sutton’s talk on Lean Systems Engineering, I added new vocabulary that I think will become critical to Lean’s future.
Will Lean be our best source of practices and principles in the future? That depends on what will be guiding our systems:
Scarcity
Abundance
Desperation
Conformity
Once we have clarity about what guides our system, we can understand more about the system in which we are operating:
Simple
Complicated
Complex
Chaotic
Lean has steadfastly addressed pressures of scarcity and hence a system of complexity. That brings me to Dave Snowden’s work captured in Cynefin, a Welsh word he has used to describe a framework of problems, situations and behaviors in these four systems. For our world of complex systems, Lean provides the perfect high-level thinking for what we must embrace: emergent practices informed by, as Snowden puts it, “sense-making”
As we move into the next 10 years of Lean, I fervently believe that our sense-making must inform us about what supports emergence that responds to complexity. The practices will follow. For now, let us concentrate on the systems in which we operate, what outside agents or pressures are guiding our systems, and how we can best continue to formulate and hold dear the practices that will naturally emerge.
Jean Tabakais a wine enthusiast, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development.
I live in an Agile and Lean world where we take a “stop the line” mentality for granted. I am encouraged to give my observations and recommendations about continuous improvement. I’ve been learning to create my own reality, to continue learning and to find my strengths in cross-functional work. I passionately read about, talk about, and practice Agile and Lean principles. These principles continually inform how I can create benefit for my company and how I derive benefit from my company.
I’m the lucky Tabaka.
My father, Jim Tabaka, was a life-time white collar worker for GM, starting fresh out of University of Illinois with his mechanical engineering degree. He worked 12 hour days, on his feet the entire time, walking the plant floor, making sure cars kept coming off the line at all costs. He retired at age 55 with a great pension and unbelievable health benefits.
My brother Tim Tabaka is a retired GM blue collar autoworker. Well, retired is the euphemism for, “Would you please leave early so that we can bring in a younger, less experienced, cheaper workforce?” During his time at GM he worked any shift he was told to work. He even moved to a different, older plant. Why? He needed the job and they wanted to replace the older workforce with a cheaper, younger workforce.
My nephew, Andrew Tabaka is a current GM autoworker. He came in under-skilled and now works a night shift for a GM subsidiary building brake assemblies. Andrew is one of the people Tim trained on his way out. Andrew is 24 and this is his first job. I suspect he intends it to be his life-time job. Well.
I’ve never worked for GM but learned to drive a stick-shift on a Chevy Corvette (yes!) And, while growing up, my dad used to take me to visit the plant where he worked in St. Louis. The acres of parking lot outside the plant were for all the cars that had rolled off the line but could not be shipped to a dealer. Too many defects.
Get the picture? We have been and are a GM family.
And I’m telling you this for a reason.
In 1984, GM and Toyota entered into the NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing Inc.) agreement to co-run an auto plant in Fremont CA. NUMMI made big news at the time. It took an existing, highly dysfunctional GM workforce and turned them into one of the most productive auto plants in the US. A documentary about this recently aired on Ira Glass’s “This American Life”. What a story, too fantastic to be made up: the complete turn-around of a failing GM plant to a thriving joint venture. The documentary recounts 30 disgruntled, unmotivated GM employees traveling to Japan to work with Toyota employees to learn “The Toyota Way”. It features commentary from Jeffrey Liker (author of “The Toyota Way”) John Shook (author of “ Managing to Learn”) as well GM line workers and GM management. The power punch of the Ira’s story? GM never replicated the success at the NUMMI plant. Several theories about this failure are postulated at the end of the documentary. It is up to the listener to form their own conclusions.
Two weeks ago, as a coda to the documentary:
The Fremont NUMMI plant had its last Corolla roll off the line. NUMMI was shut down, this time for good. It was the first factory ever shut down by Toyota.
I care both personally and professionally about that darn NUMMI plant. The Ira Glass documentary about NUMMI’s turnaround and GM’s failure to replicate struck a deep chord for me. I called my brother Tim that evening to get the real scoop. I had heard him recount what his life was like in a GM plant and I wanted to hear it from him again.
The truth is the NUMMI success DID have an impact on GM outside the Fremont plant. Prior to the NUMMI conversion, life in the Oklahoma City plant where Tim worked was miserable. As in the story “Rivethead” by Ben Hamper about GM plant life in the 1970’s, alcohol abuse, absenteeism and nervous breakdowns were common place at Tim’s workplace. He lived the life documented about the Fremont plant prior to the Toyota venture.
Life with the Andon.
In the late 1980’s though, Tim told my about how things were changing, amazingly so. A “stop the line” mentality was adopted at their plant. Use of an “andon” was introduced. One tug on the andon was the alert to call over for some help; a second tug was “stop the line” we need more time to fix this. Tim was one of the people who roamed the plant floor prepared to assist when the andon was pulled once so that it wouldn’t have to be pulled again. Every station had its own andon “song”. (Apparently the “Baby Elephant” song became the bane of my brother’s existence.)
Life was so much better (the “Baby Elephant” notwithstanding). Workers were encouraged to stop the line and fix problems versus pushing cars through. Teams were brought together to offer suggestions for how to improve the work processes and the flow within the plant. Quality went way up and defects went down. Morale and motivation went up. Alcohol and drug abuse went down (this is anecdotal from my brother, not based on an actual study.) And for Tim personally, plant life improved dramatically. The new system played into his strength: being a cross-functional team member, challenged and rewarded for doing his work.
Back to the NUMMI story and what GM ultimately adopted.
Fair enough. I have my brother Tim as an example of an autoworker who benefited (well, except for the darn “Baby Elephant” team’s issues). But I also have a father who, as a GM executive was expected to tirelessly follow and communicate the GM line. It took its own deep toll on him. And I have a nephew who continues to work as a very replaceable night shift cog in a different plant in the GM machine. GM has declared bankruptcy for any number of reasons. And now, my mother’s benefits, my brother’s pension, and my nephew’s pay are in peril.
My name is Jean Tabaka, daughter of Jim Tabaka, sister of Tim Tabaka, and aunt of Andrew Tabaka. My father never benefited from Lean thinking. My brother had a wonderful brief taste of it. And my nephew is now somewhere in an odd stew of Lean and non-Lean practices.
I’m the lucky Tabaka. Lean has brought me a lot and taught me a lot in my Agile world. While Lean may be most closely affiliated with the Toyota Production System; and while it may be assumed that failure to adopt the TPS was GM’s ultimate demise, I believe the Lean lessons have continued to grow, spread, and morph as a result of both success and of failure in Lean adoptions.
GM, Toyota (yes Toyota), NUMMI, the Oklahoma City plant and others all have their stories of success and failure. Each had their approach to Lean adoption. Like Tim Tabaka and NUMMI, we have our lessons to learn from Lean in our software world. Lean is not the panacea. The TPS cannot tackle all issues. Agile is not the panacea. No one methodology can guarantee product success in all situations. Our continued belief in checking the value of our adoptions is critical. Our conviction to pay attention to failure modes as well as success is key. If you don’t believe me, ask my brother Tim.
On April 21 in Atlanta, the Lean Software and Systems Consortium will come together for its second US conference. Last year’s event in Miami was “amazing” according to Jean. So this year, Rally is exhibiting, I am speaking while Jean and Aaron are running the open space on Friday. The price per attendee goes up by $250 on March 31st, so if you do intend to go, REGISTER now.
At our booth, Rally will be demonstrating its product support for highly-visible Kanban, WIP/Cumulative Flow reports, and cycle-time metrics. Join Alan Atlas, Jean Tabaka, Aaron Sanders and Craig Langenfeld in our booth.
I will be presenting an experience report titled: PDCA: Beyond Simple Inspect and Adapt. On spring break this week, I’ve been thinking more about the details of my talk. Here is my abstract and outline for those of you who might consider attending:
Lean and Kanban focus on practices of continuous flow of product delivery. Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) is a Lean discipline that moves beyond inspect and adapt of Agile team-level processes. At a corporate level, PDCA provides guidance for strategy as well as problem-solving work. In 2009, I led Rally’s move to PDCA for the company’s strategy process at both the annual and quarterly levels. My primary guide was Pascal Dennis’ “Getting the Right Things Done”. In this experience report, I share Rally’s PDCA first year of adoption: where we started, how this impacted our corporate behaviors, and where we are now. I want to share Rally’s story to compel participants to embrace PDCA and get good at it. I ask each participant to come with its organization’s #1 goal and success criteria. I will close with a planning A3 exercise from Pascal’s book .
Outline
What brought me here—background on why I am passionate about sharing my organization’s overall Lean story including the addition of PDCA, A3’s and concurrent set-based development. This talk focuses on PDCA as the critical step in increasing structure and discipline in strategy execution.
Point of View – Use PDCA to move your planning horizon out and as the principle governing mechanism for organizations in continuous flow.
Benefits — Mature your strategic planning and execution environment to handle the complexity of increasing speed, agility and scale and to gain alignment, pull and innovation.
Where we were and what was not working
The context at Rally was based on a couple of key concepts:
Core Values, Core Purpose, Sandbox and BHAG from Jim Collins
3 to 5 Quarterly Rocks, success criteria and Scoreboards from Gazelles
Rock team structures – cross departmental and story based
Facilitated, highly collaborative cross-departmental meeting of 30+ managers and above
Highly critical, non-cross departmental initiatives were de-prioritized
ORID process added to keep from jumping too solutions, but the data was not visible enough
What we decided to do about this:
Explanation of PDCA — A brief overview of PDCA in general and then specifically what I used as guidance from the Pascal Dennis book, “Getting the Right Things Done: A Leader’s Guide to Planning and Execution”.
Our initial experiments with A3 process the year prior — Working with our Ops team and product marketing teams on problem solving using real data
First quarter — How we kick-started Rally’s company-wide adoption of PDCA . I describe our “Mountain Team” and their transitional role.
Defining Rally’s True North
Creating our second level tree with current and needed metrics
Socializing these throughout the company seeking feedback in anticipation of our annual and quarterly planning
Started new experiments based on quarterly planning decisions
Next Quarter – Review new experiments, discussed learning and drive A3’s into the planning process
Mid-course adjustment by Mountain team, in middle of the quarter – What we discovered working and not working
The rocks were all dependent on each other.
Had to run Rock of Rock team meetings to steer to a final solution
Coordinated release planning would have
Final quarter – We worked to expand the plan. We took the Mountain team’s True North and feedback to drive our PDCA for Rally’s Annual Corporate planning by:
Taking company-wide feedback into our Annual planning to collaboratively drive cross-department A3 creation around each branch of the tree
Mountain Team retrospective over the course of year 1 that helped create a planning rock team. The Mountain team’s role as a transition team ended.
Year 2 – Doubling down our efforts to go from amateurs to intermediates —Changing our process to institutionalize A3’s and PDCA as our strategy execution approach:
Quarterly rocks moved to a world of pre-defined from developed on the fly
Quarterly planning moved from ad-hoc based on yesterday’s weather to more programmed based on True North and meeting the target metrics
Strategic planning worked to validate annual True North in the context of long-term planning, shared vision development, cross-boundary collaboration and larger systems
What we learned and what you should do about it
The cycle of adoption is a year, quarterly cycles work to improve the process, but it is hard to make leaps on a quarterly basis.
Year 0 – Introduce Lean thinking (A3 in our case)
Year 1 – Introduce PDCA (Novice)
Year 2 – Invest or abandon (Your choice)
A3 is now the language for problem solving
Making sure we are solving the right problem (aka slowing down to speed up)
Do not have a overall guidance team steering the continued PDCA process – it is owned by the “team”
Putting pressure on the organization to get more clear about our economic models to mature from “Theory-based decision making toward the right solution,” Now “Data-driven decision making toward the right problem”
Where to start – The Strategy A3 an exercise
What is next? – We call it the Innovative or Lean Organization. Seeing large systems, collaborating across boundaries and creating your reality.
Point of View – Use PDCA to move your planning horizon out and as the principle governing mechanism for organizations in continuous flow.
Call to Action – Introduce the language of A3’s through problem solving or Strategy A3’s
Benefits — Help build a company of problem solvers to focus your efforts on the critical few things.
Where I hope you go with this: Great companies build great software, great experiences and work on creating win/win scenarios.
Are there other questions you’d like to see answered in Rally’s experience report on Plan-Do-Check-Act? I look forward to seeing you at Lean SSC.
I’m traveling this week to Rally’s Agile Success Tour in San Diego. I love attending these events because they’re a lot of fun and participants seem to get a lot of value – getting out of the office for a half day is a great way to learn and think about how you can get started or get better with Agile. Plus, the Rancho Bernardo Inn is pretty nice place to spend a day.
The site of Rally's Agile Success Tour - the Rancho Bernardo Inn
But my day job is as a Product Owner, so I’m still trying to keep up with my team while on the road. And this trip has been a good reminder of the challenges of working remotely. Here are seven things I’ve remembered that make a big difference if your team has remote members:
1. Actually log in to your chat client. Instant messaging is a great way to quickly make contact with people on your team, but if everyone isn’t actually logged in to chat, you often can’t reach the best person. If I want to talk to Fred, but I can’t reach him, I’ve got to make a decision – do I wait, or do I interrupt Jason, a developer on his team?
2. Dial in the bridge. If you’re having a meeting, and you have remote team members, make connecting to the conference bridge a habit, even if you don’t think anyone remote is going to be attending. Plans change; something comes up such that someone who was going to be in the office is out. If you don’t connect the conference bridge, remote employees will either give up, or frantically try to catch local participants on IM in the hopes that someone brought a laptop to the meeting.
3. Check in and out on the phone. Assign someone in your meeting to remember the remote team members during the discussion. And make sure you check in with the people on the phone before you hang up at the end of the call. (Give them a few seconds to unmute before you assume they’re gone!)
4. List your cell numbers. At Rally, we have a Google spreadsheet that lists office and cell numbers for everyone. I’m rarely at my desk during the workday, so cell is the only reliable way to reach me.
5. Skype your standups. In our team room, a couple of the machines have Skype running. When you’re remote, video goes a long way to improving connection with the team. Showing some video of the absurd furnishings or the view outside the hotel room makes it fun. This morning, I had some bandwidth issues and could only use voice – it didn’t work nearly as well. Also, with a team like mine, a remote employee who doesn’t enable video for an early morning Skype session will invariably be subject to baseless accusations of not wearing pants.
6. Leave Skype running for a few minutes after the standup is over. Often interesting conversations pop up in the 30 minutes following this meeting. As a PO, I often overhear useful bits of information at this time, and it makes it easy for people to ask me questions they might have forgotten during the standup.
7. Update your stories. This morning, when I logged into Rally, it looked like a ton of work was in progress. Turns out, my team just hadn’t updated their tasks and stories. Often Rally is the window your remote team members have into what’s going on. If you don’t update stories, you can end up with unnecessary confusion. Fortunately, we cleared it up in our daily standup meeting.
These were the things I remembered this week. So what tips do you have for making life easier on remote team members?
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 2nd 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
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.
RallyDev.com
I have a reason for liking 
Agile philanthropy started as a way of trying to meld my passion for doing good in the world with my passion for agile methods. Using the power that is evident in the agile community to do great things is one of the goals of Agile Philanthropy. Ideally we will get to the point that this movement is self-sustaining. But we are really just starting out on this journey. I hope that I can grow the movement in the direction of local chapters doing work for local not for profits. Right now everyone is very busy and I am the bottleneck. We are currently working with 
depending on which end of the letter your name appears. That letter puts a pretty hard stop to a relationship. It’s communicating detachment and finality. It can create a lot of pain whether intended or not. In contrast, a love letter is uplifting. The endorphins fly! Someone is revealing their attraction for you, and their hopes and wishes for a future with you.
Do you notice a difference between problems and difficulties? A problem has a solution. When engineers solve it, the problem goes away. It’s a question raised for solution with fixes, tests, and checklist updates. In contrast, a difficulty has no solution. A difficulty wants you to sit with it, address it, not solve it. Artists know this world of the difficult very well. No definitive fix, test, or checklist will suffice. Sitting with and playing with the difficult is simply part of the knowledge work of the artist.
My father, Jim Tabaka, was a life-time white collar worker for GM, starting fresh out of University of Illinois with his mechanical engineering degree. He worked 12 hour days, on his feet the entire time, walking the plant floor, making sure cars kept coming off the line at all costs. He retired at age 55 with a great pension and unbelievable health benefits.
My brother Tim Tabaka is a retired GM blue collar autoworker. Well, retired is the euphemism for, “Would you please leave early so that we can bring in a younger, less experienced, cheaper workforce?” During his time at GM he worked any shift he was told to work. He even moved to a different, older plant. Why? He needed the job and they wanted to replace the older workforce with a cheaper, younger workforce.
Fair enough. I have my brother Tim as an example of an autoworker who benefited (well, except for the darn “Baby Elephant” team’s issues). But I also have a father who, as a GM executive was expected to tirelessly follow and communicate the GM line. It took its own deep toll on him. And I have a nephew who continues to work as a very replaceable night shift cog in a different plant in the GM machine. GM has declared bankruptcy for any number of reasons. And now, my mother’s benefits, my brother’s pension, and my nephew’s pay are in peril.
