Life after your First Agile Project

This blog post is adapted from a workshop/presentation I recently led at the May NWA PMI Professional Development Day.​



So, you just finished your first Agile project in a Waterfall organization. Now what? Let me put my Agile Coach hat on and tell you, “It depends.” It depends on whether or not it was a positive experience and how supportive the overall organization is of this “Agile thing”. Let’s run through a few possible scenarios.

Agile Sucks

You may be one of the many people whose first exposure to Agile is a negative one. Maybe your team was uncooperative. Maybe there were too many practices that were too new for the team to successfully adopt. Maybe the organization was so un-Agile that your team got exhausted from trying to swim upstream the whole time. Or maybe your team never really became an Agile team; you were a bunch of silo’d individual contributors with Waterfall mindsets trying a new front-end to the same process you’ve always used to get the job done. Whatever the reason, all you know for sure is that Agile sucks. It simply does not work; not for you, maybe not for anyone.

As an Agile Coach, I am sincerely bummed if this was your experience. I wish I could have been there to help make sure you knew why you were adopting Agile, not just how to go through the motions. I wish I could have been your heat shield, to protect you from the Agile defeatists and remove organizational impediments for you. I wish I could have helped you through the forming and storming stages of a team into norming and performing, so that you could benefit from a team who, corny as it sounds, was greater than the sum of its parts. I wish I could have helped you learn how to continuously improve not all at once, but incrementally.

But I wasn’t there, so what will you do? I hope that you will take pause and consider the possibility that those Agile proponents can’t all be crazy. What did they do or have that you didn’t? What might you have missed? Get involved in virtual and physical Agile communities, remain open-minded, and stuff your toolbox with as many practices and approaches as you can. Study the Agile Manifesto and its principles and recognize that what it’s defining is a mindset, not a methodology. You have to be Agile before you can successfully do Agile.

Agile Recipe

Maybe you had some success with Agile – or at least you think you did – and you want to keep doing it with all your future project teams. What really happened is you ran a successful Scrum project, and you’re ecstatic that you found a working recipe that will turn any team into a high-performing team. The team followed the Scrum Guide to the letter and there’s no doubt in your mind that this is what Agile is all about. Agile is Scrum, Scrum is Agile. If you follow the exact same approach, you are confident you will have similar results with your next team. After all, this is the same company, same culture, same organization support and/or impediments. Why shouldn’t you expect the same results?

The short answer is because it’s not the same team. Even if some of the people are the same, if the make-up of the team isn’t exactly the same then it’s a different team. You’ll be starting back at the forming stage with a new backlog, maybe even a new Product Owner, and there’s no guarantee that this group of people will interpret and embrace the Scrum Guide the same way the old team did. Hopefully you learned enough about teaching, coaching, and/or facilitation from your last team that you can guide this new team through the same pitfalls in a faster, safer way. Hopefully you learned Servant Leadership skills that will help you get buy-in from the team to try this new thing. Hopefully.

Hopefully you learn by the end of this project how much more successful the project would have been if you would have kept your previous team together. There is a cost associated with breaking up a high-performing team and knocking everyone back to the forming stage. There are also reasons that you may want to incur that cost in order to reap specific benefits, but “because the project ended” is not one of those reasons.

Keep the Scrum Team

Not only did you have success with the team, the team became a family. You are now a high-performing Scrum team that knows the process and each other so well that you couldn’t dream of breaking them up. You manage to keep the team together for the next project, and you hit the ground running.

This is great, but you have to be careful. If you have decided that Scrum is the be-all end-all of Agile then, eventually, the team will begin to stagnate. Scrum ceremonies will become ritualistic instead of productive, thought-provoking team activities. Group-think may begin to crop up, and the electric feeling of respectful debate will flicker out of the team. Some team members may become too comfortable, others restless. If you don’t do something, you’ll lose everything you fought to keep.

My hope is that you learn that Agile isn’t about following a recipe. It’s about starting with a recipe and making it your own. It’s about evolving the way you cook, trying new flavors, and learning how to transition from cook to chef. Hopefully you find all the success you were looking for and more, because our successes motivate us to keep going, keep trying.

Become comfortable with mining for conflict and facilitating conflict to unearth change that will make the team better. Stay in tune with the latest ideas and do your best to keep the team in the “Learning Zone”.

Grow the Agile Team

credit: universal studios

Perhaps you’re one of the rare few who, by the end of your first Agile project, recognize already that the team should be together and should not be limited to just Scrum. Perhaps you’ve already begun incorporating aspects of Lean, Kanban, DevOps, Lean Startup, Lean Enterprise, eXtreme Programming, or any number of other Agile approaches to help your team stretch and grow. You have a vision for how amazing your team can be – a unicorn among horses – and you recognize that Agility is a journey, not a destination.

The team can only become so awesome before running into major roadblocks within the organization. The team can become locally optimized, but the benefits will be limited until the entire system is optimized. After all, this is a Waterfall organization – you can run whatever methodology you like within your team, but there’s still an overall process that must be respected.

You’ll soon find that, in order to best help the team, you have to spend less time with the team and more time fixing the environment they live in. Maybe it’s the dependent teams – adjacent teams doing similar work or component teams, such as Security, Infrastructure, or Release teams. Maybe the Operations team is pushing back, trying to drive constancy at the sake of functionality. Maybe it’s the way work is approved and projects are formed that prohibit the team from responding to customer requests and market demands as quickly as they are capable. Maybe there are leaders or others in the organization that are afraid of change and, consequently, are passively or actively sabotaging the spread of Agile.

If you are successful, you will find that organizational Agility provides orders of magnitude greater than a single Agile team. You’ll find that what the team does rarely have as great an impact on their performance as the environment in which they operate.

The Best Lesson I Learned the Hard Way

Let me preface this by saying I do not recommend learning lessons the hard way. There's a wealth of human experience out there to learn from before you go off and make the same bone-headed mistakes. However, bone-headed mistakes will be made regardless of how cautious you are. In those cases, please go into it with a Fail-Fast, Kaizen mindset so that the mistake becomes a short-lived learning experience.

The Almighty PM

I've made a lot of mistakes in life, which means I've learned a lot of lessons “the hard way”. The one such lesson that has had the most impact on my current work life took place my senior year of college. I was in a capstone class where we were to organize ourselves into a real software team to develop a real-life application on top of a new API that we had Beta access to. We were given a little guidance, including how previous classes and many companies organize themselves, but told we could do whatever we wanted. We ended up with a very “traditional” model of a few Dev teams, a few Testing teams, an Architect, and the one Project Manager to rule them all.

I was eager to prove myself, so I went for the PM position (oddly enough, I didn't really have any competition from my obviously more self-aware classmates). The problem is Computer Science majors in their fourth (okay sixth) year of study haven't usually had any PM classes or experience. My architect laid out the architecture, lots of open source Java, wikis, subversion, etc, and the class was excited to get started. However, I was concerned about how to manage the work, as well as expectations. I started demanding individual Gantt charts up-front for the duration of the semester. I was asking each team lead to compile the Gantt for their team and report that to me so I could put it all together.

The Blind Leading the Competent

Basically, I was trying to command-and-control manage a team of part-time team members, all of whom were taking at least 12 hours that semester and had limited time to spend on this class. Of that limited time, I was asking an unreasonable amount of time on administrative work. My architect was an excellent “Yes Man”, which made it difficult for me to see what I was doing wrong. The tipping point came when we weren't getting the information we were asking for from the teams and we were way behind where we expected to be on the application. Our professor was pulled away for a class and gave me the option of keeping the class time or giving everyone the day off. My architect decided, with my blessing, to use that time to express our mutual disappointment with the team and shame them into getting their act together.

I knew it was all over when the architect started his oratory with something to the effect of “By the time I finish talking you should all be mad at me, and that's okay because I'm mad at you.” It was a horrible hour and ended with our organization in shambles. I was a broken, broken man who was certain I was going to fail the class.

A Lesson in Servant Leadership

Then one of the testing team leads asked if he could meet with me to talk through things. He kindly and patiently explained why what we did was so stupid and counter-productive. He told me that the teams needed a cheerleader, not a dictator. He asked me to spend time with the individuals on the teams. He wanted me to spend more time in face-to-face conversations instead of mass emails. He wanted me to understand how hard the class was working to accomplish a common goal so that I would stop wasting their time with unnecessary busy work. He wanted me to focus on listening and removing roadblocks. He is now, unsurprisingly, a manager at Amazon, and someone I still hold in high regard.

I didn't fail the class because the objective of the class wasn't to develop a fixed scope within fixed time and budget. My wise professor wanted us to experience real-world project work as best we could in an academic setting and learn from it. He saw me try to turn things around at the end and knew that I had seen the error of my ways. He knew that I had learned my lesson, albeit the hard way.

Lesson Learned

So what lesson did I learn? To be honest, I initially thought that the lesson I was supposed to learn was that I suck at Project Management. I could not be trusted with leading a project to completion. I could code well and kinda sorta test, but the realm of Project Management was beyond my grasp.

This lesson was reinforced when I entered the workforce a few months later and saw command-and-control PMs leading projects “correctly”. These were professionals who did not go on rants against their developers and testers. They were not perfect, but they did their best to make things work in alignment with the command-and-control, iron triangle, Waterfall-driven style they were trained to use. Despite their best efforts, I found myself in War Rooms quite frequently, and my wife learned to not expect to see me in the months surrounding a Production install. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was living through the hell that I had just put my classmates through.

Of course, that wasn't the PM's fault. As I said, they were doing the best they could, and we were doing the best we could. The problems were much deeper than any one individual. We had to change the way we work, starting by not only recognizing but emphasizing the human element of software development.

The real lesson is that command-and-control Project Management doesn't work. Had I taken the time to understand Lean/Agile development processes and practices, I could have done a decent job as a Scrum Master or Agile Servant Leader in my capstone class. I might have even done some coding and testing alongside my cross-functional Agile development team(s). Even before I learned that lesson, I learned the importance of being a cheerleader. I have always striven to let the teams I've worked with know what a great job they're doing and how much I appreciate them. I haven't always succeeded, but that pep talk I received my final year of college never left me.

Once I realized that what I was experiencing in corporate life was essentially the same as that capstone class, I vowed to change things. I delved into the world of Lean and Agile and brought the things I learned back to my area. To many people it looks like I've picked it up extremely quickly; in reality, I've been learning this lesson for at least six years. If anything, I'm ashamed it took this long to finally “click”.

Descriptive versus Prescriptive

“Imposing an agile process from the outside strips the team of the self-determination which is at the heart of agile thinking.” -Martin Fowler, Agile Manifesto signatory, from his October 2006 blog post, “Agile Imposition”

As a member of the SAFe community, I've heard and experienced a lot of concern and displeasure with what is perceived as a highly prescriptive Agile framework. However, having actually met and worked with Dean, Colin, and Alex, I have never felt they were trying to shove a framework down my throat. To me it felt more like "your organization is new to Agile and we come with decades of experience; try this framework on, including all of these recommended practices, see how it fits, then tailor it accordingly." Granted, that vibe came from face-to-face conversations, not websites and white papers.

This problem is not unique to SAFe. Pure Agilists have always pushed for a more "hands-off" approach. It's interesting to me how married some of agilists become to a certain methodology - conversations with these people usually boil down to "you should let people do whatever they want, but if you're a good coach and they really get the principles then they're most likely going to go with my favorite methodology." This is often coupled with, "I also offer Agile Coaching services..." The problem is, they've got a point about the coaching. You can't leave teams all to themselves; you have to support them somehow. I'm not saying all Agile teams need a dedicated Agile Coach, but they need the resources necessary to ensure the direction in which they adapt is in accordance with Agile principles and the environment that will support them when (not if) they fail.

Many of my thoughts on this subject have recently been affected by the information I was recently exposed to at OpenAgileAdoption.com. One of the references cited is Martin Fowler's "Agile Imposition" - an article written nearly seven years ago and more relevant now than ever before. Of course, Fowler and Open Agile Adoption are both focused more on organizational transformation than prescriptive frameworks, but I think the principles still apply. It all boils down to enacting change through influence but without mandate. It's a principle that every good Scrum Master is already familiar with - Servant Leadership. You've got to not only lead the horse to water but get them to realize just how parched they are!

So how do you do this within the context of a framework? My opinion: change the way you say what you're trying to say. More specifically, make it clear why you recommend certain practices, when they're relevant and highly likely to improve results, and when it might make sense to try something else. You're still going to lay out the recommended practices, but you'll be taking a descriptive approach to explaining them rather than a prescriptive approach.

The Scrum Alliance uses the term "Common Practices" instead of "Best Practices" to describe what would traditionally be considered "Best Practices". By changing the term they change the reader's perception. They're not saying "you need to do this or you can't be considered among the 'best'"; they're saying "this is something that a lot of people do in this situation, and here's why." That's the approach the entire industry needs to be taking. I would bet that many framework authors already think that way. The problem is that way of thinking is not reflected in their writings.

What do you think? Does this resonate, or am I way off base? How would you expect websites and other communication regarding what are typically seen as "prescriptive frameworks" to change to be more in line with a descriptive approach?

Taming the Wild West: the Differences between Agile and Cowboy Coding

One of the strongest arguments for Agile is that it’s not Waterfall. However, not everything that isn't Waterfall is Agile, a fact that’s not always understood. This misunderstanding hurts the Agile brand when people familiar with only Waterfall begin associating all other methodologies, including a lack thereof, as Agile. I want to be very clear about this: Agile is not Cowboy Coding, and Cowboy Coding is not unique to Agile teams. It is important both to understand how Agile and Cowboy Coding are different and what Cowboy Coding looks like so that you can identify it on your teams (yes, even Waterfall teams).

The Loner

One of the easiest signs of a Cowboy Coder is that he’s a loner. He may be working under the name of Agile, but there are no Agile methodologies or frameworks I’m aware of that support such behavior. In fact, the backing principles of the Agile Manifesto state, “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project”; “Build projects around motivated individuals”; “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation”; “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams”; and “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.” The manifesto, its principles, and all Agile methodologies and frameworks I know of are very human-centered with an emphasis on collaboration.

If you have a loner on your team that insists on working in a silo, there’s a possibility that you have a cowboy in your midst. Try to rein them in using mandatory meeting/ceremonies that promote meaningful conversations and practices like Pair Programming. If they absolutely refuse then you will likely end up spending considerable time managing the work around them – holding ad hoc conversations, formal code reviews, knowledge transfer workshops, etc. – with diminishing returns.

Straight to Production

Working directly with Production code or with a source code repository that isn't versioned is a bad idea. Don’t get me wrong, I love Continuous Delivery and working off the trunk, but a software development team must be very mature and disciplined to make this work. They use feature toggles and branching by abstraction to protect code that isn’t ready for Production. They build test suites around the code so that each commit is verified against regression. They do their due diligence to make sure that a change isn't going to blow up if it’s pushed to Production. Cowboys, simply put, don’t.

If you find yourself consistently in a situation where the same person or people are making changes directly to Production without due diligence then you might just be working with Cowboys. Have them read up on DevOps and Continuous Delivery so they can learn the right way to get changes to Production quickly. Emergency situations that require quick, non-vetted changes to Production should be avoided at all costs.

Wastes of Time

The Cowboy will often refer to Testing and Documentation as a waste of time. They may even commit the cardinal sin of Agile, reciting the Manifesto blasphemously: “‘Working software is the primary measure of progress’; anything else is just a waste of time!” To those people, I would ask them to define “working”. Does it pass the Acceptance Criteria associated to the work (or did you even bother to ensure you had Acceptance Criteria)? Can anybody actually use it, or is it too buggy or complex? Is anyone other than yourself aware of the assumptions made around input, output, workflow, etc.?

Without proper testing and documentation, you can’t prove your software works nor can anybody understand how it works. With that being said, if your tests and documentation don’t contribute to the value and usability of the software then they are, in fact, a waste of time. Focus your testing efforts on tests that actually stand a chance of failing and finding vulnerabilities. Don’t spin your wheels creating “write-only” documentation. This is the approach that Agile espouses; anyone who says tests and documentation are altogether useless is operating with a Cowboy mindset, not an Agile one.

“Emergent Architecture”

One of the backing principles to the Agile Manifesto states “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams”. There are those who believe this means “just make it up as you go.” That’s not entirely accurate. There still needs to be intelligent design, and that design needs to make the software as easy to comprehend and maintain as possible. As another principle clarifies, “Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.” This means having a thorough understanding of the latest design patterns and practices. It means taking the time to refactor working code into something better. It means taking a little bit of time up-front to design what you think will work and adjusting as you go.

Agile developers do not shoot from the hip. They take pride in their applications; they have a sense of ownership. They will throw research spikes, read books, build proofs-of-concept, attend conferences – do what it takes to build the right thing in the right way. You’ll spot a Cowboy by their purposeful lack of direction, sticking code wherever they please with the sole purpose of “getting something to work” so they can move on to the next thing. If they do it in the name of “emergent architecture” then call shenanigans. That’s not architecture, it’s just reckless.

Somewhere to Hang their Hat

The good news is that cowboys can be tamed if they can come to appreciate the practices, tools, and frameworks that Agile provides. Cowboys won’t jump on the bandwagon just for the heck of it. There will always be some that refuse to be tamed, but many will see the benefits and forsake their wandering ways once you give them a safe place to hang their hat.

One of the great things about reformed Cowboys is they are used to developing quickly and cross-functionally. If you arm them with XP practices, Agile tools, a Kaizen mindset, and continued training and development, they can become model developers that contribute quality software time after time.

Just don’t make the mistake of trying to get them to do something for which there is no tangible benefit. They don’t take too kindly to that.

People != Resources

Within my area, I've become famous for correcting people when they say "Resources" and mean "People". I work hard to get people to think of each other as human with a unique skill-set and personality, not interchangeable cogs in a machine. When people start complaining about a "lack of resources" I ask them to make a shopping list and I'll pick some up from the store.

Apparently, my message is getting through.

The other day I was in one of the rooms our teams work in and saw this on the whiteboard.

I thought, "Wow, I really got through to someone!" Then, I saw this underneath that:

So not only do they understand that people are not resources, they point out an example of what would be considered a resource. Then, to drive the point home, I found this:

It's true, they're not! What I love most about this is that I didn't write any of this - members of my team saw the opportunity to share a message that they had bought into because they saw the value in treating each other as people, not just resources!

Finally, a bit of nerdy humor to finish this off. What else would you expect of a bunch of geeks? :)

People vs. Process ... vs. Principles

“Be firm on principle but flexible on method.”

-- Zig Ziglar

Until recently, I have observed the difficulties and issues manifested in the work environment and debated, both with myself and with peers, whether the root cause was the people being unskilled or unmotivated or the lack of a quality process. It was not until recently that I have come to realize that it is the founding principles on which we operate that makes the biggest difference in how successful we are.

When debating people versus process, the argument for people is that good people seem capable of producing amazing results regardless of process. However, I’ve seen great people time and again be suppressed by poor process, being forced into inefficiency for the sake of policy. In grass-roots meetings and informal conversations, both within my company and in conversations with others across the industry, I hear complaints of red tape, write-only documents, and wasteful tools and bureaucracy that dishearten and discourage talented people. At best, people are being forced to work below their capabilities. At worst, people are lost to another company that doesn’t include such roadblocks.

On the other hand, a good process can, ideally, bring a team to a hyper-performing state quickly and keep them there, while poor processes seem to only be good for shielding people from the ugly truth. Processes, policies, methodologies, and frameworks that emphasize value and seek to eliminate waste tend to bring out the best in people. The downside is that the best processes expose weaknesses within the team and force them to confront their demons. If the problem is the people are not skilled or committed enough then they may not be willing to put in the effort required to get the team to where they need to be. The best case scenario is the team members who are unwilling to change leave to free up the rest of the team to reach their potential, while the worst case is they stay and cause the team to drag and stagnate.

Neither of these seems to get to root cause, so let us consider the principles that form the foundation for people’s decisions and behaviors. When considering founding principles as the root cause, it is necessary to start with two assumptions. The first is that the people doing the work are genuinely doing the best they can with what they have. It may be somewhat altruistic, but I believe it is true for most people. The next assumption is that these same people are working with a process and in an environment that allows for and even encourages continuous improvement. Whether it’s explicit or not, people tend to adapt the way they work over time, based on their experiences and their guiding principles.

If my assumptions hold true, and my experience tells me they do, then those guiding principles that determine in which direction the process evolves are the most important factor in driving productivity, efficiency, and morale. The founders of the Agile Manifesto understood this. They came from various backgrounds exercising various forms of what are now considered Agile Methodologies. They did not define any specific process for success – instead, they defined a mindset, a paradigm, for approaching Software Development. They backed this manifesto with 12 principles, only one of which pertains to the type of people that are needed to be successful:

“Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”

The only qualification they state is that the individuals be motivated. Surely some people are inherently more driven than others, but, for the most part, motivation is something that can be fostered by the culture and environment that the individual is operating in. The other 11 principles provide great insight into how those people should work as well as what should be done to support those people in their pursuit of high quality Software Delivery. If people have learned and accepted these principles then they will recognize how important and urgent it is for them to improve individually, not just as a team. It is not a character flaw to admit imperfection – indeed; it is the manifestation of character that one can admit to room for improvement.

The Agile Manifesto is not the only source of correct principles. There are many books and courses in existence that focus on this very subject. The whole premise of Lean Six Sigma is there are solid principles that can be applied in any situation to eliminate waste and reduce delay. I think Lean, Agile, and Product Development Flow principles are the most crucial to our combined success, but I recognize that there are others. What I would like for you to ask yourself is, “What are my guiding principles? When things get uncomfortable, how do I evolve the way I work?”

Why is this important? Because too often we pick up a new process hoping it will be our Silver Bullet, the solution for all our problems, the answer to all our prayers. But we adopt these processes without taking the time to understand the principles on which they were founded. As a result, we bend the process to fit what we are comfortable with and lose much, if not all, of the benefit the process could have afforded us. This mistake of adopting a process without adopting its defining principles is what I’ve referred to previously as the “Movie Version” of that process as opposed to the “Book Version”, and the book is always better than the movie.

Only by taking the time to understand correct principles will we be able to govern ourselves most effectively. As Blaine Lee said, “The principles you live by create the world you live in; if you change the principles you live by, you will change your world.”