Some wisdom to share

If you keep doing the same thing you'll keep getting the same results.
If you don't try, you'll never succeed.

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What is the Declaration of Interdepence trying to say?

Via InfoQ.

Tim Lister translates the Declaration of Interdependence into plain language in his introduction to agile leadership. Here's the gist of Tim's message:

1. We increase return on investment by making continuous flow of value our focus.

At least with the time we had, we delivered as many of the most valuable features we could.

2. We deliver reliable results by engaging customers in frequent interactions and shared ownership.

We make pace and rhythm visible early and we force the interaction with the customer into a partnership.

3. We expect uncertainty and manage for it through iterations, anticipation and adaptation.

Requirements emerge, they are not gathered. Let things evolve. Start with what the customer says he wants - use it as a warm-up exercise. The customer may say he wants so and so but, more often than not, he has no idea what he really needs nor what he could get. It's often possible to deliver something that he's never even dreamed of.

4. We unleash creativity and innovation by recognising that individuals are the ultimate source of value, and creating an environment where they can make a difference.

Push decisions down and out. Don't worry who is where in the hierarchy find the right home for the decision. Are you the right person to make the decision? You might have the authority to make it but you do you have the right experience and the confidence to make it? Make the workplace safe for people to make decisions.

5. We boost performance through group accountability for results and shared responsibility for team effectiveness.

The great projects have emotion and people care. Emotion comes from collocation and dedication. Their sense of pride is tied up in the success of the project. Every person knows that they can't succeed unless the team succeeds. Early wins beget later wins. Iterations provide shorter delivery timeframes. Delivering working software every iteration (and not parts of specifications) gives the epiphany of 'working' and that's a real adrenaline boost.

6. We improve effectiveness and reliability through situational specific strategies, processes and practices.

To be truly efficient, the process itself must embrace change.

Tags: apln, declaration of interdepedence

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Energized Work Website in beta

We've been beavering away on the second iteration of the beta Website. We'd welcome any feedback. The links top-left of the page aren't working yet so they're just underlined keywords at the moment. Next week we'll put the site live.

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The Pickled Effect

As an organisation matures it develops a way of working that is typically borne out of progressive trial and error. In a young organisation, change occurs often and changes are often big. But as time progresses changes become smaller and smaller and less frequent until eventually the organisation settles into a steady state. Of course, change for change's sake is a bad thing. But without continued effort to undertake change that specifically brings about improvement, and enables the organisation to be responsive, innovative and competitive in a rapidly changing business world, the steady state becomes a lacklustre default. Sure it works. People are working and managers are managing. There's not really a 'buzz' anymore and it's unlikely to produce 'eureka moments' resulting in product breakthroughs that will take the market by storm. But it's plodding along nicely, shareholders seem reasonably happy, people are in their comfort zone and they don't see anything wrong.

In a more critical light, I might say that the default state is stale and fails to push the boundaries. Managers are often leading the inevitable. They spend their time managing plans and events that, in all likelihood, are going to happen anyway. There's little invention and practically no investment in continuous improvement. If problems are identified - "what we have here is a communication problem" - they're simply talked about. Action is seldom taken to identify and deal with the root cause. It's simply enough to label the problem, perhaps make some superficial changes to address some of the symptoms, and then basically ignore it, hoping it will go away. It doesn't go away and so people learn to live with it, accepting it as 'just the way it is'.

What happens when someone realises the market is leaving the organisation behind, and fast? Executives become nervous and request more effort, managers become pushy and people become stretched. Processes that worked in the default state now either hold things up or cause failure. And all the while the pressure is building. The default state doesn't cater for innovation and responsiveness. It isn't geared to take the organisation to a new level of success.

Real change is required. A tweak to the organisation chart won't cut it. Extraordinary results require extraordinary ideas from extraordinary people using extraordinary processes. Everyone sees that the company is broken and that people are miserable, but nobody has the courage on their own to start changing things. Change is seen as too painful and too disruptive. It's going to get painful anyway whether change is attempted or not. Pain is inevitable. Misery is a choice. And change doesn't have to be disruptive. Don't be too busy chopping wood to sharpen the axe. Set things up for success. Create a sense of urgency. Focus on achieving behavioural change and be sensitive. Communicate intent clearly, openly and up-front to neutralise uncertainty and anxiety. Maintain transparency. In parallel, start working with people to define a shared vision and strategy while empowering more people to take action to bring about the changes they feel are required to improve how they work. Look for quick wins. Success is addictive and motivating. Build momentum. Share experiences and knowledge. Initiate a culture of continuous inspection and adaptation and improvement.

The greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different.

- Roberto Mangabeira Unger
(Via Head of the Kyu)

Tags: organisational change

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Accounting practices can get in the way of delivering value

R&D expenditure can expensed or capitalised. When it's expensed, the total expenditure is declared as expense in the current period, reducing current profits by that amount. When it's capitalised, part of the expenditure is declared as expense in the current period and part is declared as expense in future periods, increasing current profits and reducing future profits. Capitalisation can provide a signal to investors about future benefits of current R&D projects, whereas expensing can reveal strategic information about R&D to competitors. I'm not an accountant and I admit there's much more to this than I currently understand, but I'm wondering if the motivation to use capitalisation is to give the perception of greater current profits. Is this short-termism?

"Short-termism refers to the excessive focus of some corporate leaders, investors, and analysts on short-term, quarterly earnings and a lack of attention to the strategy, fundamentals, and conventional approaches to long-term value creation. An excessive short-term focus combined with insufficient regard for long-term strategy can tip the balance in value-destructive ways for market participants, undermine the market's credibility, and discourage long-term value creation and investment. Such short-term strategies are often based on accounting-driven metrics that are not fully reflective of the complexities of corporate management and investment."

There's something here that resonates with me: Excessive focus on the short-term combined with insufficient regard for long-term strategy and value creation can actually begin destroying value. There does seem to be a tendency to view accounting measurements as reality and not accounting conventions.

There's got to be something wrong when the financing process for projects is so focused on capitalisation of R&D that it actually degrades a project's ability to create value and generate profit by delivering product to customers quickly and repeatedly. Isn't this an implicit acknowledgement by the organisation that it expects the project to fail, by being late and over budget? Isn't this approach largely about damage limitation? I don't call that being set up for success. You're beaten before you start.

If a process to support capitalisation adds significant waste in the form of an inventory of every conceivable requirement (detailed up front and captured within huge specification documents), it has got to be partly responsible for the failure. Hasn't it? And when the process gets in the way of generating sales revenue the alarm bells must be ringing. Right? If it were my money I'd want it spent on creating working software and getting it to the market pronto. Capitalisation is important but it should never be as important as getting product to customers. Only when you deliver functionality that customers want can you secure their loyalty and continued custom, and make money.

Tags: project finances, r&d capitalisation, value

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A new start at Energized Work

My company, think-box, will be winding down in the coming weeks or months but you can't get rid of me that easily. It's purely an administrative move to make room for the new company, Energized Work (logo concept to the right), which I've co-founded with Gus. We've worked together over the last year and it's simply been awesome. We've achieved some great things, experienced the highs and lows on some rough rides but we've always had lots of fun. We work extremely well together and the combination of our skills, experiences and approaches is entirely complementary and is proving to be very effective. The Web site is under construction but there's a holding page up with some introductory blurb. This blog will continue, as will Gus' wiki, but they'll both be re-branded eventually.

Our goal is to work together at clients and we also want to pursue other avenues too:

Consultancy:
Are you confident in meeting and exceeding your customers' expectations? Is your organization struggling to compete because you're unable to respond to customers' requests quickly with high quality software? Do people in your organization understand your vision and do they work towards it? Is your organization sufficiently transparent that you know what's actually happening inside it? Are decisions getting made or being made too slowly in your organization? Does the structure and culture of your organization provide a habitat where people can work effectively and freely, be creative and achieve results without impediment? We can help you deliver value to your customers continuously by reshaping your organization along product streams and growing cross-functional product teams that share your vision and are capable of responding quickly to meet customers' needs. We can show your business people how to maximize return on investment and we can work with your financial people so that you have more choice and flexibility in how you fund your product portfolio. We'll show you how to collect and report empirical data and maintain total visibility so that you will always know the status of your projects. We'll help you focus on leadership and collaboration rather than management and process, and transform your working environment so that people are empowered to self-organize and feel safe taking responsibility and making commitments. This will give you the confidence to push the decision-making to the people doing the work so they can deliver more value and increased quality with a sense of urgency.

Coaching:
Is your product development realizing your vision? Are your products providing the value you expect? Are you delivering the highest value features to your customers at least every month? Do your teams need a tune-up? We can coach your teams to deliver value and high quality reliably and in a repeatable manner, improving their throughput, raising their morale and setting them up for success. By pairing with your people we can show them how we use agile practices and lean thinking, and demonstrate how our values and principles help us to do the right thing. We can help them develop the necessary skills and discipline to deliver working software with fewer defects, again and again.

Start-up Enablement:
Are you a start-up and need to get something out there quickly? We can bootstrap your product development so that you can begin achieving business milestones while you're still recruiting. Hire our team to be your team. We can get your product into production early and incrementally, gaining visibility for your company and earning money for your business. And then, as your business takes off, we can gradually handover product development to your team, leaving you with a high quality solution to build on.

Team for Hire:
Do you need a product developed without the organizational overhead of forming a dedicated team? Do you need some extra bandwidth to explore product concepts and new revenue streams? Or do you simply need some creative and innovative solutions from experienced professionals? We can provide an experienced ready-to-go agile team with a proven track record of delivery, that has all the skills and can hit the floor running, to work at your place or ours.

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Proposed session for XPday

I've decided to take a plunge and have proposed a session for XPday. It's a world cafe version of the open discussion about Compromised Agility that I ran at the inaugural Agile Practitioners Forum. The aim of the proposed session is to debate whether adaptations that compromise values and principles actually degrade a team's agility, impacting their ability to deliver successfully. It would be appropriate for anyone who is working, or who has worked previously, with agile methods regardless of their level of experience. Here's the description of the session:

Teams stand a better chance of realising project success when they demonstrate agility, i.e. the ability to deliver value to customers in a continuous flow realising maximum return on investment for the business while dealing with change in a rational and empirical way - and having fun doing it.

The aim of this session is to debate whether common adaptations, imposed by organisation or culture, degrade a team's agility, preventing the team from being all it can be and impacting its ability to deliver successfully.

Achieving agility isn't easy. It's partly about process and practices and yet its capability is rooted in the culture and mind-set established by the underlying values and principles. Agility requires awareness, discipline, sound judgement and courage, plus a trusting and empowering environment that understands small failures to be important learning experiences that drive continuous improvement. Often teams focus on the process element and the practices or adapt things before they’ve even tried them. And, in the name of adaptation, compromises are made to maintain a fit with the organisation structure, corporate culture, command-and-control environment or current working practices. The freedom to do the right thing is an important part of being agile. Do compromises lead us to do the wrong thing? Do compromises that undermine the values and principles always lead to compromised agility, i.e. a degraded capacity to deliver value to customers because flow is interrupted and return on investment is diminished?

Many organisations, despite trying to be agile, still see their projects fail. Why? In many cases I believe they are practicing compromised agility (a.k.a Corporate Agility). Perhaps they don’t understand the cultural aspect of what is required to achieve success using an agile approach. Or perhaps they lack the conviction to bring about the organisational changes necessary to give a team a fighting chance of achieving agility.

In my opinion, compromising the values and principles, to make Agile more acceptable to the organisation or apparently easier for people to perform leads to compromised agility and nurtures an accepted mediocrity that increases the chances of project failure.

My yardstick for agility, and whether it's compromised, is the following 'handbook':

VALUE
IF you're repeatedly releasing software
into the production environment
at least once every month
that realises value for your business
and satisfies your customers...

QUALITY
IF you're paying constant attention to technical excellence
with simple, effective, incremental design
driven by continuous, repeatable automated testing
with at least 95% coverage...

LEARNING
IF you're learning
by inspecting and reflecting every iteration
and you're re-planning, adapting and improving
all of the time based on what you've learned...

TEAM
IF your team is empowered to self-organise and be creative,
sits together and engages in face-to-face communication,
includes your customer
and all the necessary skills to make its own decisions and take immediate action...

THEN YOU HAVE NOT COMPROMISED YOUR AGILITY

Tags: agile values, agile principles, adaptation, compromised agility

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Supportive, ignorant or hostile?

slots

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Is the Agile Alliance irrelevant?

On the Agile Forums, Brian Marick said "a lot of people think the Agile Alliance is irrelevant". What do you think?

The poll is anonymous. And if you're working with agile methods your opinion is important so please don't leave without voting. And please share this poll with your colleagues.

Simply click 'yes' or 'no'.


Tags: agile alliance

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A true leader

A true leader has the confidence to stand alone,
the courage to make tough decisions,
and the compassion to listen to the needs of others.

He does not set out to be a leader,
but becomes one by the quality of his actions and the integrity of his intent.

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A social network for people interested in agile and lean product development

I've been working in the social networking domain for the last year and Jason Gorman had the initial idea of setting one up to see what interactions and collaborations might flourish. So I created a network called Delivering Value.

Actually I'm not sure where it will take us, perhaps nowhere, but I thought it might be interesting to find out. While there continues to be plenty of interaction on the Extreme Programming and Scrum Development groups over at Yahoo, I'm sensing some apathy out there. Are people disengaging from the wider community? Sometimes it feels like it. Steve Freeman says "we are being sucked into the corporate morass".

So give it a go. What's to lose? Come and connect with other people, talk about stuff, exchange ideas and experiences, and create stuff and share it. I've created some photo albums with pictues of planning boards, bullpens, games, etc.

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Social associations

Many companies recognise the human capital they host, i.e. their employees and their knowledge, talents and expertise, but they fail to unleash the social capital of their employees' collective knowledge and the effectiveness of jelled teams.

Companies need to invest in creating a sociable working environment where friendly, respectful and trusting relationships between people are nurtured so that individuals voluntarily subordinate their personal goals and associated actions to those of their team and the wider organisation.

Tags: socialisation, team

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Improve continuously

Toyota's Kaizen has 3 steps:

1. Create a standard.
2. Follow it.
3. Actively search for a better way of doing it.
   

And repeat, over and over.

Standards are important because they provide a reference point against which to measure improvement.

Sadly, standards are often abused and misused by management. In most organisations they're about achieving uniformity. They're used as edicts to maintain control of people, preventing them from performing their jobs in the manner they see best, and are rightly perceived as restrictive and oppressive by those poor people. In such organisations, standardisation does suppress innovation and, because standards are set in stone from on high or centrally, they prevent continuous improvement from happening.

At Toyota, the people performing the work create their own standards, which they are free to change to realise improvement. People continuously inspect and adapt to improve. They are continuously learning and capturing their knowledge in their standards.

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Keep it lean

Too much of everything? Too many features, choice, and steps? Too much information, too much to think about? Too much time and too many delays?

Realise benefits by seeking simplicity. Simplify! Mammoth solutions containing every feature under the sun are over-scoped, too complex, and usually indicate a lack of understanding of customers' true wants and needs. Complexity throttles flow and kills value. Start thinking lean and build solutions from the customer in, eliminating complexity as you go. Do more of what matters by eliminating what doesn't.


Reference: The Elegant Solution

Tags: lean, simplicity

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Bad managers and good leaders

Where there's smoke, lurks failure. Watch team capability go up in smoke in 3 easy management steps:

1. Do not commit fully and demonstrate less than full conviction. Expect full commitment from others.
   


2. Micromanage people and their efforts.
   


3. Delegate accountability and then deny ownership. If something goes wrong, hang people out to dry.

Innovative leaders make meaning through:

1. Integrity. Doing the right thing by consistently accepting responsibility and demonstrating sound judgement.


2. Vision. Setting a firm ambition toward creating a new reality that everyone can share.


3. Guidance. Demonstrating a sincere desire to see people succeed by showing unwavering support and constant encouragement.

Tags: management, leadership

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