Building an agile organic learning machine

Why is so important for your company to actually let the agile worth spread around it?

It happens that when a company decides to embrace agile, it thinks to help its teams during the transition from a previous software developing model (waterfall or in general any phase or gates development model), to an agile one. These companies often hire a coach in charge to accompain the teams throught this transformation, by delivering training and assisting and facilitating their way of working using the new paradigma.

After a first period, the honey moon period, the teams start to struggle because of difficulties of changing their working behaviors, because of many impediments often coming from external interferences or interconnections with some other external teams (agile or not).

This is the moment in which the coach and the company, start to think about scaling agile in the enterprise, introducing what Schwaber and Sutherland called ‘Scrum of Scrums’ or Shalloway revisited and named ‘PCT – Product Coordination Team’.

No matter what the name and method you and the company choose to adopt, start soon to scale agile, otherwise synch problems become so important and tough, that agile is no more the fantastic new model to adopt for developing software.

What I’ve seen and experienced, is that scaling agile is not enough. There’s at least one another step to nurture the change process that such a company needs to totaly and completely understand and embrace agile.

What is missing, at all, in a scenario like that, is an organic mechanism of knowledge sharing and learning.

Let me explain.

As you probably know, a superb way to share knowledge within a team, is to pair.

XP prescribes (yes, it is prescribed like what the doctor does with medicine) the practice of pair programming, in order to cure these main symptoms:

1. general knowledge leverage for junior, pairing them with senior guys
2. in case of particularly complex or important piece of code to develop: here the reason is that two pair of eyes is better than one
3. in case of high specialization of one team member over a specific professional domain or part of code (do you knowthe bus factor?)
4. help the team members to know better each other

Hence pairing helps a lot within a team; but how it can be used to involve the entire company? It cannot.

We have, instead, some other techniques to spread agile within the company and these are called: communities of practices, open spaces, user groups and conferences.

Communities of practices

This kind of “human aggregation” is what a company, the one that has several teams adopting agile, should initiate in its reality. These groups share common interests. ScrumMasters or ProductOwners communities or, yet, organized by methodology: Scrum, lean, XP or Kanban communities. Within these free association of the employees, the company have a great opportunity to create occasions where the people share ideas, experiences and usually create new standards or best practices to apply.

Open Spaces

Visit this link to gather detailed information about this open spaces.

This kind of meetings can be used to share knowledge, to try to solve problems, to analyze risks or to share any experiences with other colleagues. Take a look here: the Agile Coach Camp 2012 un-conference, is completely arranged following the open space philosofy.

Here are my reflections about the past event in 2011 and, obviously, I’ll be there also this year (within a week……can’t wait).

 User Groups

Even if a company does not have the possibilty to create the knowledge sharing spaces above reported, it must try to invite the team members to join the agile user groups already existing in their city. It’s much more easy, if the company directly contacts the external groups asking for the meeting dates and arranging an evening with them.

Conferences

The last, but not the least, method is to let the guys attend to some conferences. This has the double positive effect to let them learn from professionals and create a team building effect. A moment in which the team members can confront each others.

Agile, as you know, is a matter of practicing, collaboration and confrontation. It’s paramount to create a process that helps to refresh and reinforce constantly the knowledge and the practices.

In my opinion, a company should not be afraid to spend some money to create these “spaces“: these are investments, to be looked as great opportunity to let the entire company grow and becoming an organic learning machine.

Agile Coach’s Responsibilities

On sunday I participated to the last day of an interesting course started in February, regarding the coaching world. I decided to enroll to that course, because I felt that one important piece of the puzzle, to consider myself an agile coach, was still missing.

A strong preparation in agile project management, studying, attaining the CSM and PMI-ACP certifications, working actively in the agile world, participating to related events and keeping in touch with the several communities, were for me all important and mandatory steps to walk, but the journey was not yet finished.

Being an agile coach, means to actually work according with two different, but strictly inter-connected plans.

The first regards the core agile values, principles, techniques and rules, helping and facilitating people to get there, understand and master it as a whole.

The second one, on the other hand, mainly regards the perceptions and feelings people have about this novelty, that at least for the next few months, will change their habits. It’s more a matter of how they cope with agile, how they react to it in terms of applying the new knowledge, considering the huge impact in the way they communicate and collaborate each other, and finally, they peform.

This last area is much more unpredictable and complex to manage for a coach, because it has a lot to do with human beings and their perceptions, fears, willingness to change. A paramount reason that pushed me to enroll to a coaching course (even better if it is an course endorsed by an Internation Coach Federation), had to do with such an intangible, subject and sensitive world: World that obliged me to be more prepared and conscious about it.

Be an effective and memorable agile coach means to master the theory, be a good communicator and a great mentor, facilitating people to build new working habits and substituting the old ones.

Helping them to leave behind any fear about the change, sticking to the rules and finally letting them to freely and quickly reach a fluent way of performing (shu-ha-ri).

Here are some previous related posts:

• SCRUM training done: what’s now
• The magic wand coaching technique
• Facilitating the process of learning and growth of an agile team
• The Agile Team: a tribe or a theatral troupe?
• Team Members’ Profile Game

Newspaper article about Manifesta and my talk

A local newspaper (http://www.merateonline.it/articolo.php?idd=20949) published an article about the Manifesta festival.

Inside is also reported an abstract of my talk “Creativity, Talent and Agility”

#Agilmente PMI-NIC Conference Reflections

May the 11th I participated to the #Agilmente conference organized by the PMI NIC in Portonovo (a wonderful place at the mediterranean sea), in collaboration with club ti Marche (@clubtimarche) and Controller Associati Ancona.

In that occasion I had also the pleasure to give a talk named “Agile project management: a trade-off between pro-activity and re-activity“.

The key point of that talk was to demonstrate how agile can correctly balance a proactive approach (planning) with a reactive one (respond to changes and events). Many practices, rules and methodologies, actually, in the agile methodologies encapsulate both the attitudes: one nurtures the other and viceversa in a never-ending process and this characteristic helps to fill the gap between the two approach.

Indeed, the traditional project management approach tried already to fill that gap, prescribing, for example, techniques like the “rolling-wave-planning” that aims to have a great analytical detail, mainly of what is going to be developed in the short time period, leaving, instead, in a less fine analytical grain, what will be developed in the future (remember, the future is unpredictable).

And again, another prescription of the traditional discipline is to frequently monitor and control the project in order to tackle any unplanned variation, but unfortunately what is missing, is a smart and lightweight method to manage such variations or changes. Infact any changes, however, must be tracked, documented, estimated, passed to specific person, board or dedicated committee for large projects, in charge to take decisions about that and finally planned for future implementation.

This, doesn’t allow to respond quickly and faster, making it impossible to satisfy the new needs of the clients (giving to her a real advantage).

Other interesting talks were about agile contracts and how much important is to strictly collaborate with the client (delivered by @MicheleLuconi) and how to evolve ourselves and the relative organizations, embracing agile and lean methodologies (deliverd by @mgaewsj, see picture below).

It was also interesting, the presentation held by the president of the associated controllers . This category of professionals, has mainly to do with figures, numbers and reports, but even in this case the presenter, stressed the importance of communication, waste avoidance, collaboration with the customer trying to deliver the real value he wants, even if, in the end, it could be intended as cold figures, numbers and reports.

Being an active actor of that conference, was a real pleasure.

Thanks to all the organizators.

Talk at “Manifesta 2012 – Creativity, Talent and Agility”

Saturday the 12th I’m speaking at Manifesta 2012, a festival organized by the provincial institution of Lecco and the Badoni high school of Lecco with whom I’ve already collaborated.

Scrum training done. What’s now?

The SCRUM training is already finished and now it’s time to start using it. But, how to start? Simple, start now, from where you are. 

Your company sent you and your team to attend to a fantastic two days scrum course. Your company knows how important the training is, especially when it’s a matter of change the way you worked since now. Your company also knows that at least for a while, an agile coach should collaborate with your team in order to facilitate the transition, helping you to go through it.

The company, hence, chose a smarter and clever coach

But, now? You could ask….now? It’s your time!

It’s time to start, really, sticking to the rules, participating proactively to the various meetings, using TDD in the right way. It’s time for you and your team to do, for example, more and better pair programming, to work actively with the customer and to reflect on team’s errors, trying to correct them, improving the process. It’s time to effectively communicate, collaborate, demonstrate honestly and frequently your progress.

In one sentence: it’s time to change the way, you all, worked since now…and often (always) that’s the real problem.

I noticed that every scrum class I had, agile and scrum are always well understood and the attendees completely agreed with what was explained. Furthermore, when the training is finished, they are thrilled, really motivated to start adopting it, as soon as possible. Obviously this is always a good news: a first important step toward the right direction.

But it’s not enough.

Infact, typically during the second or third iteration (depending on the duration of each sprint), the team enters in the storming phase (see Tuckman’s stages of group development) and they start to realize that adopting agile is not so simple, because it asks and requests a change, a strong change in their working habits.

Anyone is scared when facing changes: we are called to leave our habits, our certainties in doing things, by moving forward toward a place we don’t know. What the possessed trainer said about scrum, it’s now a foggy memory and the team, unfortunately, starts to think that such a methodology is not so amazing as s/he described.

This is the time when the team starts to use the new knowledge and often these new practices conflict with the old ones.

Some team members remain in any case aligned to what the agile discipline says because they are sure about it (they are the ‘allied‘: take care of them).

Some others complain but continue to stick to it: let the ‘allied’ convice them.

Some others don’t apply the new knowledge: you are directly called to coach these skeptics.

As Tuckman said during the storming phase, the team needs answers to their questions, to be reassured about the results they were promised.

This is a paramount passage and the coach should:

• check and verify how the whole process is applied
• reassure team members about their doubts
• understand what the main problems are
• coach the team, trying to help it to find the right answers
• coach any member who needs dedicated time, helping it to perform better
• proactively assist the team during the retrospective meetings
• reinforce important topics through dedicated training
• be sure that the scrum masters are perfectly aligned with the scrum foundamentals
• identify most motivated members, letting them to spread the knowledge, behaving as change agents

Finally, the coach must take in high consideration the relations with the other external stakeholders.

This means that she must engage them frequently, at least initially, communicating about progress and insisting on having them attending to the demo meetings: witnessing interest, curiosity and commitment.

“Why Agile” Talk with ESPM

June the 7th, I’m having a talk “Why Agile”, in Turin for the ESPM – European School of Project Management.

The talk will go deep through the reason why agile can be the answer when facing to complexity, short time-to-market constraint, high quality standard to meet.