Agile Development Blog

Question: what do Neil Young, Simon Sinek, Don Reinertsen, and Jean Tabaka have in common? We all want to know why.

Several weeks ago, we introduced a new blog series “N Levels of Planning”. Our goal in this series is to investigate how Agile planning can benefit from thinking of planning as a number of levels, or layers, or paths. In this series post, I’d like us to take a conceptual step back from what we mean by “N”. I’d like to instead think about the “Why” of Agile planning regardless of the number of levels.

The Neil Young Connection

Warning: minor non sequitur. In 1970, Neil Young released his “After the Gold Rush” album featuring as its first track the great tune “Tell Me Why”.

Love that song! I had this song buzzing through my head after a discussion with colleagues about “Why.” Lyrics like: “Still the searcher must ride the dark horse, racing alone in his fright,” and, “Tell me lies later.” What can it mean?! What is there that is so important about starting with “Why,” and to ask it repeatedly? What did the Neil Young of yore get about the searcher, the dark horse, and the race that I needed to revisit now? And what does it have to do with Agile planning?

The Reinertsen Principles

I had some suspicions after reading Don Reinertsen’s “The Principles of Product Development Flow” that the “Why” is indeed what should be driving our Agile product development. In his book, Reinertsen exhorts us to inform our decisions about product development by starting with value flow. You may call this stating the glaringly obvious. For me who had been handily sticking to the “How” and “What” in my computer science expertise for decades, this tumbled several of my false idols. Ugh.

Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle

Recently, several colleagues here at Rally pointed me to a great TED talk: Simon Sinek’s “The Golden Circle”. If you haven’t watched it, take a gander. Sinek’s very simple model consists of 3 concentric circles, the innermost being “Why”, the outermost being “What” (See the picture above of the turquoise post-it.). Sinek defines successful businesses as those that start, not with “What” or “How”; they start with the core “Why”. This articulation of the “Why” rallies the business around one compelling vision and creates a vital emotional connection with its customers. “How” the company delivers on the “Why” follows from and is directed by the “Why”. Then and only then does the business move out the circle to the “What”. What exactly will our product be? Well, we know why we are building it, and we know how to deliver on this. Now it is time to build it!

We missed the “Why” boat in our initial Agile scaling advice

I was thinking about Sinek’s Golden Circle with regard to how we plan in Agile teams and Agile organizations. Too often, we have a tendency to start with  “What” as the core for our planning. If we are really maverick, we may start with “How”. Too often, I fear that our planning “Why” is conspicuous by its absence. I am fairly certain Ryan Martens and I fell into this “What” trap when we defined 5 steps for Agile scaling and maturing using Flow, Pull, and Innovate. Why were we defining how to scale and mature should have been the first question? And then How shall we do that? Okay, we did get the How: we turned to Lean Thinking principles about Flow, Pull, and Perfect (which we renamed Innovate) for guidance. And then we quickly jumped to What the practices are: 5 steps of what to do, what roadblocks to expect, what benefits to reap.

Agile planning levels need to start with “Why”

This is what I now believe to be true. Just as businesses must be driven by the “Why”, I believe we must consider the “Why” that drives any of our Agile planning. My hope is that we in the Agile product development world would come up with a fairly common answer for “Why”: smooth flow of value delivery. Period. Our “How” can be informed by the set of principles we believe would best address our “Why”. We can turn to Lean Principles as a great guide. Here, I’ll admit I favor Reinertsen’s principles of product development flow as the canon for “How”. We’ve got the “Why” and the “How” for our planning. Now we can declare our “What”: what will be our planning practices in our Agile organizations?

How Jean Tabaka fits in

With “Why”, “How” and “What” as our planning guide, there is one more beautiful gift of symmetry across Neil Young, Don Reinertsen, and Simon Sinek. Not only does this virtuous Golden Circle guide overall planning. I believe that within each of the “N levels of planning”, we can see that there is a “Why”, “How”, and “What”. Here is an example: “Why should we have a daily level of planning?” “How should we guide that planning, i.e. how would we know we were doing a good job of planning at this level?” And now, “What will our practices be around daily planning?” As we regard levels of planning as not just sufficient but necessary, we turn back to the “Why”, find guidance from the “How”, and then create the useful “What” practices.

Back to Neil Young’s “Tell Me Why”. I think we can avoid “riding the dark horse racing alone in fright” if we start our planning with a compelling “Why.” And, with thoughtful  “Why”, “How” and “What” levels of Agile Planning, I believe that we can avoid the “lies later” as well.

This is what I believe. What do you believe?

Jean Tabaka is a crash skier, sometime poet, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka

At Rally, we are always working on both maturing and growing our use of Agile. We started with a single development team and over the past 6 years have been through the process of splitting, growing, partnering, and acquiring.

We did this while continuing to inspect and adapt our development and our strategy execution processes.  We have teams in various stages of maturity using Scrum and Kanban to run all parts of our company.   As the CTO, I have my focus on our strategic planning and execution process.

In 2008, I started to focus on maturing our annual and quarterly planning.  To do that, I used Pascal Dennis’ book titled “Getting the Right Things Done” to structure those efforts.   (See related post about Learning from A3′s a story of 2009 Quarterly Planning at Rally.)

As part of that effort, we worked to change our quarterly and annual planning process to specifically follow a Plan-Do-Check-Adjust model. (Note that I like Pascal’s use of Adjust, not Act which is typically quoted in the Toyota models.)

Prior to 2009, we were simply using an inspect and adapt process to determine annual and quarterly priorities, aka quarterly rocks, based on feedback from last quarter’s results and the corporate roadmap.

This process worked well, but we had some issues including:

• A moving definition of done based on different standards of work (research, implementation, campaigns..)
• A delay in the feedback loop on strategic efforts made it hard to check and close well
• Too many efforts in a quarter lead to poor quality (We found 5 rocks to be too many for us during a quarter)

None of these are different than what most teams experience with going Agile.  So we (1) adjusted and moved to limit our WIP to three rocks, (2) focused on inspecting the definition of done in the meeting, (3) used company wide survey’s to keep from developing group think and (4) chose to do company celebration based on quarterly metrics and not the completion of quarterly rocks.

These all helped make the current process work, but the process was still frustratingly unpredictable, semi-random and always left something to be desired.  Many of the reasons for this are explained in Alan Shalloway’s and Don Reinertsen’s posts on PDCA and types of process The Difference Between “Inspect and Adapt” and Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA). Unlike Alan, I do not see or perceive a big issue with Scrum.  Based on my previous post around the roots of agile; Dean Leffingwell and I are in the same camp; Scrum is Lean.

As a result of moving to PDCA approach, we created a single “True-North” goal for the year and drove our quarterly rocks  towards that goal.

Now in Q4 of the year, we had some new changes to our process. By following the PDCA cycle for the year, we put a fine point on CHECK in this final quarter; Subsequently, we have a  Q4 quarterly rock focused solely on checking our Q3 and annual work to fine tune it based on real output.  This is an example of where PDCA cycle is more intentional than basic inspect and adapt at forcing the discipline of checking.

We focused a quarterly rock on checking  to make sure that we are done-done-done with our True North goal for the year.  We also have another Q4, cross-functional rock team focused on preparing for Q1 and 2010 annual planning.  This PDCA-driven rock is a major milestone for me personally.  It moves annual planning solely from my shoulders to a team effort; this pushes ownership of strategy down to the extended management team.  As a result, I am very happy with the move to PDCA for our 2009 strategy execution process. In Don Rienertsen’s terms,  our PDCA-driven process is more defined, while still with un-predictable output and governed with lots of feedback.   This was simply an increase in process maturity that was mandated by our continuing growth.

To do this, we create a team, called the Mountain team, to help the company transition our strategy execution process.   This team steered the transition and proposed our quarterly rocks based on the PDCA process.  And thanks to the ego-less and steady hand of our CEO, we have a very collaborative culture that quickly converge on these changes and quickly put them into action.

I hope this was helpful for you to learn about our experiences with continuous process improvement and our step-function transition processes.  Please note that we are not a perfect comparison to larger organizations trying to transition to large scale agility.  In addition to doing lots of growing, we have another difference that started when we began back in 2003.  We built Agile and Lean principles into our core values.  You can see the difference this might make in my comments to Israel Gat’s post More on Agile Social Contracts.

Specifically our core values are:

• Create your own reality
• Make and meet commitments
• Theory-driven decision making
• Treat people with respect
• Support our community and give back
• Maintain a healthy work/life balance

This is the social contract that we keep with employees. During transitions like this you need culture or a social contract to reinforce your moves toward Agile and Lean behaviors.

About the Author: Ryan Martens is a telemark skier,  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.