Teams As An Ideal Gas

I have a confession to make. I'm a bit of a physics nerd. Actually that's not true. I'm a huge physics nerd. I'm not a trained physicist, I'm an engineer by training (which is pretty close...BTW that loud noise you just heard was a bunch of physicists' heads exploding at the thought of being compared to an engineer) but I have always loved physics. All that sets the stage for my next sentence - I was reading an article the other day on ideal gases (as you do) and suddenly thought that gases make a great metaphor for our teams. Stick with me on this...

An ideal gas is a construct physicists use to better understand the behaviour of real gases. Real gases are messy and awkward and do some strange things (like heat up when you compress them) which make studying them difficult. An ideal gas is a conceptual model of a gas that you can use to infer the behaviour of a real gas. In an ideal gas, you assume that the particles that make up the gas are free to move without impediments and when they interact, they do so in a perfectly elastic collision - both particles rebound and go about their business with no loss of energy. The speed of the particles is related entirely to the temperature of the gas. The hotter the gas the faster they move. This also makes an ideal gas a model of an ideal team.

AgilityDave Martin4 October 2017teamComment

Pirate Teams

A few months ago I saw a meme floating around contrasting a good agile team with a group of cowboy coders. Their chosen metaphor was a nautical one. The good agile team was the navy (age of sail style) - disciplined, focused, effective, working together for a common purpose. The bad team was, of course, pirates - rough, undisciplined, attacking stuff at random, scary but ultimately ineffective.

I looked at that, and knowing a little something about pirates (real ones, not the Long John Silver/Jack Sparrow/Captain Hook type Hollywood ones) it didn't quite ring true. In fact, if you look a little deeper, the age of sail navy is actually quite a good metaphor for traditional organisations and pirates actually make a great agile team. Since this is International Talk Like A Pirate Day, heave to for a moment ye scurvy dogs and let me explain.

Agility, LeadershipDave Martin20 September 2017team, patterns, organisational changeComment

Why Do Agile Teams Slip?

"Come and have a look at my team" says my new stakeholder. "We have been doing agile for a few years now and while we started well, I think we have slipped back to old habits". How often have you heard this when starting a new engagement? Quite often? What do you see when you take a look? It's usually lack of planning, absence of meaningful retrospectives, ineffective standups, lax WIP limits, poor metrics, mini waterfalls. Yep. They have slipped all right.

When you ask the team why they think they have slipped, you will usually get answers like "we scaled up and things went wrong" or "the rest of the organisation is pulling us back" or "some key people left" or something like that. In my experience these are never the real reason. They may have contributed, but the underlying problem is something else entirely. That underlying problem is almost always the same - they never had the basics right in the first place.

AgilityDave Martin6 September 2017coaching, anti patternsComment

Value

We talk about value a lot in agile. The whole point of agile is often given as "the ability to deliver value quickly". Lean looks at value streams and flows of value. But when we say value, what do we really mean? What is value? The dictionary tells us that value is "the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something."

So value describes something that is important to someone. But who? When we ask ourselves this question, we usually come up with and answer of - "the customer". This isn't a wrong answer, customer value has to be our of our key drivers. Make the customer happy by giving them what they want. That's the key to business success. But note that I said "one of our key drivers", not "our key driver". There are other "someones" out there who are also important, and often get forgotten. What about the organisation itself? Its employees?

AgilityDave Martin28 June 2017valueComment

Sustainable Pace For Organisations

We have all seen the press releases come out. The CTO of some big organisation proudly announces that with this new agility thing they are now able to release to market every three months instead of yearly. Great news isn't it? Great endorsement of agile techniques, isn't it? Have you ever worked in one of those organisations? What is it like working in the delivery teams for one of those organisations? Is it, as the press release seems to indicate, some sort of IT workers' paradise where features flow easily into production and there are smiles and profits for all?

Or does it feel like an endless treadmill where releasing every three months just means jumping through all the hoops you had to jump through for the yearly releases but now instead of doing it once a year you are doing it all the time? Where the nightmare month you used to have once a year to push the release kicking and screaming out the door is now your normal workload? Chances are, it's not the first one. Feeling burned out? Are we achieving our results by throwing away one of our key principles - the principle of sustainable pace?

Leadership, AgilityDave Martin7 June 2017organisational change, sustainable pace, anti patternsComment

Scaling Up To Scale Down

Last time we looked at the trend towards massive scale in the agile community and some of the problems scale leads to. We looked at an alternative approach. A scaled down approach -

"Imagine, instead of a huge program, we have small groups of teams, say 2-5 teams in a group. Each group manages its own stakeholders, environments, dependencies and the like. Each group is directly aligned to a set of business stakeholders with a common set of outcomes, is funded through an investment pool aligned to business outcomes, not specific project deliverables, and delivers value end to end for the stakeholder group."

This approach would allow the organisation to deliver value efficiently without the need for massive scaled structures and the complexity and inefficiencies that go along with them. The only problem of course is that such a structure is impossible in most organisations because they are built around large programs and large platforms and simply don't have the ability, architecture or processes to handle a scaled down operation.

AgilityDave Martin23 May 2017organisational change, scaling, anti patternsComment

Should We Scale?

There has been a trend recently within the agile community to embrace massive scale. Not just a few teams working together but really large groups. Every day we see examples of bigger programs, larger release trains, all successfully being managed through agile techniques. Just recently, a colleague ran a PI planning event for close to 1000 people spread across three countries. I have seen other organisations proudly boasting that they have "the largest release train in the southern hemisphere", with some figures on the incredible budgets that the train is managing. The SAFe framework now has 4 levels rather than 3 to enable it to manage bigger and bigger structures. Less has Less-huge to do the same.

While I celebrate the achievements of the coaches successfully helping organisations achieve this, and the incredible feat of facilitation that a 1000 person, 3 country PI event must be, I can't help worrying that this drive towards massive scale is not altogether a good thing. Large companies want scale because that's the way they are used to working. They are used to thinking in terms of large programs of work involving hundreds of people. In order to help them, we have developed techniques that allow us to handle this sort of scale. But just because we can do something, it does not automatically follow that we should do something. There are significant downsides to scale.

AgilityDave Martin10 May 2017organisational change, scaling, anti patternsComment

When To Remove The Training Wheels

We were having a discussion about coaching teams at work a few weeks ago, in particular how deeply embedded a coach should be, so I naturally got to thinking about teaching kids to ride bikes. I know that sounds like a stretch but stick with me. Back quite a few years ago when I was teaching my kids how to ride, I did a lot of observing of other parents and, being a geek, did a bunch of reading online about how to go about it. There are generally two accepted ways to teach kid to ride and the difference is on how long to leave the training wheels on.

Method one leaves the training wheels on for a long time - until the child is "fully confident" and the second leaves the training wheels on for the shortest possible time (there is a third radical method that rejects the training wheel altogether but we shall leave such heresy out of this discussion for now). I was, for the record, a method two parent but I observed a lot of parents using both methods. Method one is the intuitive one - leave the training wheels on until the kids knows how to ride then take them off and away they go. Easy. Trouble is, it quite often doesn't work out that way because training wheels have some significant disadvantages.

AgilityDave Martin8 March 2017coachingComment

Don't Wait To Communicate

A nice short post this time to ease myself gently back into the business of blog writing in the new year. I hope everyone had a fantastic holiday season filled with as much of your chosen way of celebrating as you could handle without doing yourself lasting damage.

How many times have we seen this situation - it's standup time and the team are gathered around the board sipping their morning coffees. "I need to raise a blocker" says one of the team. "I need some help with the design and I've been stuck since lunchtime yesterday so can anyone help out this morning? I probably only need 10 minutes". The team discusses the problem, tasks are rearranged and the team works out how to get the job done. Sounds great doesn't it? But there's a problem here. Can anyone see it?

AgilityDave Martin22 February 2017team, communicationComment