Last Responsible Moment

Probably the least understood (or most misunderstood) lean principle is "decide as late as possible". I have seen it used to justify all sorts of weird decision-making policies that generally involve never making decisions, because surely as late as possible means leaving it until the absolute last possible moment, or even later. I have seldom, if ever, seen it applied correctly. So let's take a look at this principle and see what it really means.

The other way to express this principle is "defer decisions until the last responsible moment". There are two points of confusion here. The first is what is the last responsible moment? The other is what exactly do we mean by deferring decisions? Let's look at the last responsible moment. What is the last responsible moment? Does it mean the absolute last minute? Do we leave all decisions until we are absolutely forced to make one because otherwise the whole endeavour will fall flat? No. That makes no sense at all. Leaving decisions until they are forced upon you is hardly being responsible. Does it mean making decisions early because that's the responsible thing to do? Again, no. Making decisions early isn't using the last responsible moment. The last responsible moment is a really hard thing to define, so let's not try. Let's re-word it instead. The intent of the last responsible moment is to make decisions with the maximum possible information.

Agility, Organisational ChangeDave Martin4 September 2018decision makingComment

Holiday Agility In The Workshop - Part 2

Last time we started looking at my holiday workshop experience and seeing how it related to agility and infrastructure agility in particular. We looked at why the two are similar (long lead times for materials, limited rollback options for mistakes and so on). We then started to step through the process of building something out of timber and discovered a few useful rules for infrastructure agility along the way. We looked at the planning and material buying stages and discovered the first two rules for infrastructure agility -

Have just enough information to get started. The detail will follow.
When buying materials, give yourself a little slack. A little upfront cost leads to a lot of downstream flexibility.

Today we are going to cover some more of the process and see if we can discover some more useful rules.

AgilityDave Martin21 February 2018infrastructureComment

Holiday Agility In The Workshop

Happy new year folks! Welcome back to the blog for another year. I hope you all had a great holiday break. I certainly did. I spent a large part of my break productively engaged in my workshop building things. I have mentioned this before but for those who have missed my previous workshop updates, I build things out of timber. Furniture, using traditional joinery so no nails, no screws, no fancy fasteners, just mechanical fit and glue to hold it all together. No cheap timber either. No pine. No MDF. No chipboard. Australian hardwoods all the way. To describe the process of working with expensive timber, let me put it into terms that more of my audience will understand (given that I suspect there are more software people than timber-workers who read this) - imagine working on a software project where every action you make is non-reversible. There is no source control, no revert, no undo, no control-z. Everything you do is straight to production. If you make a mistake you have to throw the whole part (and anything it is permanently glued to) away and start again with new materials, which involves a 3 hour round trip to the specialist timber yard, a lot of expense as you have buy a whole length not the little piece you need, and a long delay if they don't have what you want in stock.

So while I was building, I was thinking about just how anti-agile the whole process is. You need detailed up front plans. Once you start you really can't make changes, you are basically locked in. Materials are in limited supply, have long lead times and are expensive. There are limited options for any sort of teamwork. You can't have a team standing around a table saw. That's unsafe. In fact any more than two (one feeding, one catching and even then only if it's a big piece) and it's just not possible. You can't even have multiple people working on different pieces simultaneously (not in my workshop anyway) - there isn't the space and more than one machine at a time would start to blow fuses. So it really is a solo activity (until it gets to glue time where 7 or 8 extra pairs of hands are really handy for manipulating clamps). In a lot of ways it's a lot like infrastructure projects - expensive materials with long lead times. Detailed up front planning. Limited ability to roll back changes without massive rework. Lots of solo work doing configuration then brief bursts of activity at deploy time when it's all hands on deck. No wonder people say that infrastructure can't be done agile. But then I really looked at what I was doing and realised that most of those things describe the way I used to do woodworking a few years ago when I was starting out. What I was actually doing now, while it looked similar on the surface, was actually quite different. And quite agile.

AgilityDave Martin7 February 2018infrastructureComment

The Agile Transformation. Myth Or Reality?

We have all heard about organisations that have successfully made the transition to an agile way of working. Some of us may even know someone who knows someone who says they worked at one once. But much like sightings of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot or the Tasmanian Tiger, most of these claims evaporate under even basic scrutiny. Now, I know there are agile organisations out there. Organisations that have been born in the agile age and have been built from the ground up with agile principles in mind. I'm not talking about those organisations.

I'm talking about the old, legacy organisations. The ones with decades of process and culture to remake. The ones we are always being told (mostly in press releases or flashy conference presentations) are transforming themselves into new, agile organisations. Shedding the baggage of the past and embracing the bright, agile future. But scratch the surface and how many have actually managed to transform themselves? "But transformation is hard", I hear you say. "It takes time and many organisations just haven't had time to complete the job. What you ask isn't fair". And indeed, transformation is hard so let's relax the criteria a bit - how many organisations have actually managed to establish even the start of a real agile culture?

Agility, Organisational ChangeDave Martin29 November 2017organisational change, anti patternsComment

Are Hyperproductive Teams Real?

We have all heard the story of the hyperproductive team. That beautiful creation that is 400% more effective that regular teams. The team that never stops getting better. But how many of us have actually seen such a thing in the flesh? I have been lucky enough to see one or two but most teams never reach those lofty heights. Why? Is it because we have the wrong people? Not smart enough? Not talented enough? Not committed enough? I don't think so. I have seen very talented teams struggle while teams that had much less raw talent went on to do great things. Although talent helps, there is no guarantee that a talented team will become hyperproductive and a less talented team will not.

Is it the methodology they use? Is scrum the recipe for hyperproductive teams? Is it Kanban? Crystal? SAFe? Less? Again, none of these things seem to matter. I have seen teams struggle and succeed with all methodologies. So what is it then that allows some teams to become hyperproductive? In my experience, there is one thing that allowed my hyperproductive teams to become hyperproductive - they are parts of hyperproductive organisations. The hyperproductive team is a myth.

Agility, Organisational ChangeDave Martin15 November 2017team, organisational change, efficiencyComment

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