Thursday night after introductions, speeches by the mentors and some exercise to help people to get to know each other, it was pitch time.  I wasn’t really planning on pitching anything, but about half-way through pitches I decided to anyway.  I’m in no way shape or form a salesguy so I’m sure my pitch was pretty lame but mine made the top 15 based on votes from the crowd.  The idea was came from when I was a consultant, I experienced companies that sucked.  They had one other thing in common.  Good people worked there.  My idea was to help figure out how to get exceptional people into companies that didn’t suck using the theory that myself and Don Gray are pitching for Agile 2012.

After some networking, 3 other people joined.  Nikolai Bratkovski, Oleg Melnikov and Lily Samerkhanova.  Nikolai and Oleg co-founded HealthAware.ca and Lily is studying design and architecture.

Here’s the quick version of what Lean Startup is.  Start with a problem hypothesis and figure out a solution hypothesis.  After that, come up with your set of assumptions and identify your riskiest ones.  After that, “get out of the building” and go talk to who you think your customers are.  As you get information you’ll either validate or invalidate your assumptions and you can decide what to do, stay the course or pivot. The key is to validate your customer by getting them to give up something of value.   That can be money or something else of value.

After Thursday night we had already decided to pivot, we figured the original idea was too hard of a problem to solve because it involved helping people overcome fear and software can’t really do that!  I wanted to go ahead with trying out my theory of using MBTI and culture models to match employers/teams with people but it sounded like building a time machine.  That’s something everybody wants but knows isn’t possible.  You’re looking to find a balance between feasibility, desirability and viability.

As we interviewed and showed paper prototypes to 20 or so possible customers the idea evolved from finding better jobs for good people to allowing companies to quickly find the best possible candidates quickly and efficiently by some organizing and filtering of applicant information.

On Saturday we got our first paying customers, based on paper prototypes, and an explanation of what our differentiator was.  Saturday night at about 9:45pm Trevor Owens came up to us because he had the problem we were trying to solve.  He offered us $50 to go through 60 resumes and find the 10 best candidates for an Event Coordinator.  I wanted to go home, we’d been there for 11 hours already but the sweat shop started rolling and by midnight we ploughed through 60 resumes and had our top 10.   He called the candidates the next day and If he hires one of them, he owes us another $150!

On sunday we fine-tuned our presentation and findings and all the teams presented.  I was completely shocked that we won!  The winning team is the team that executed the method, demonstrated learning and generated evidence to support how they went through the process.  Getting $950 helped too.

Of the many learnings I took away, these 3 stood out the most:

1. Let go of your fear: Max Cameron’s workshop was awesome.  At LSM Boston he mentioned he felt that same fear of going up to strangers and asking them for money for his idea.  The rush comes from that first customer that is willing to give you something of value.  Trust is so important and you need to know how to earn that trust quickly by using the right language.  I had a customer hooked really early and chickened out asking for money.  I didn’t make that mistake again.  Max’s story was inspiring, from the language he used to how passionately he spoke about building trust and listening to customers, understanding their pain and finding something to stop that pain.  Worst case, the customer says no and you move on.  Well, one team won the ‘almost-got-beatup’ award so maybe ‘no’ isn’t the worst thing that could happen.
2. Let go of your assumptions: They told us this would happen and sure enough I still fell in the trap.  Your ideas and assumptions will be wrong.  Deal with it.  The first couple of times when mine were wrong, I was mad.  I couldn’t let it go.  How could me, the smartest person ever, be wrong?  Had to be a mistake.  One of the mentors said many people with the next million dollar idea come in excited and leave with a crushed ego.   Make your assumptions, design tests for them, pivot and if you can’t validate them, move on and let it go.  I learned that by Friday night and it was a hard lesson to learn.  Your assumptions are worth ZERO until you talk to your customer.
3. Do Whatever It Takes to Deliver Your Service:  Eric Ries joined by Skype to answer some questions.  When people asked for advice he would ask “how many customers do you have?”  The answers were all sorta like “uh, well, we have 9 people that love it, but we don’t have any software to show or….”  Eric replied with “that’s entrepreneur speak for ZERO”  If your service crashes you have demand and that’s a good problem to have.  One tweet isn’t a conservative way to get feedback, it’s useless.  Write a bot and saturate twitter.  If you service crashes, you have demand.   One of the teams, Printify, had an idea to provide printing services in the cloud.  Upload your doc, they’ll print it and you pick it up on the way to where you’re going.  Eric’s advice was “start printing!” Tell students and anybody on the street you’ll print their document and bring it to them.  That’s the measure of whether or not the service is valuable.  We stayed up until midnight churning through resumes, finding social network information for 60 people all in the name of a paying customer.  That’s validation and that’s what’s going to work.
4. MVP = Experiment: This was a biggie for me.  I always figured MVP (minimum viable product) was an actual product with a minimal set of features that are valuable.  That’s how I approached using Lean Startup where I work now.  An MVP is nothing more than an experiment.  It can be a landing page, poster on the street with a phone number, paper mockup, a survey or a hacked together service.  Make sure it’s an experiment that is testing one of your assumptions.
5. Beware of Confirmation Bias: During Max Cameron’s workshop, he talked about the danger of confirmation bias.  Basically it’s the phenomena that happens when you have what you think validated.  Remember, because you read something on the internet, doesn’t mean it’s true.  Stay honest with yourself.  I’ve been guilty of this many times.  ”See!!! I’m right!!!”  It’s not helpful.

This experience was life changing.  It changed my whole perspective about how I approach problems and ideas.   I used to get annoyed with all the hoopla and tongue-in-cheek “you’re wrong!” snarkyness that comes out of the lean startup community but once you really experience that feeling of validation and invalidation with face-to-face (or phone) conversations with your customers, you will get it.  I get it now.  I “knew it” before, but now I get it.  Really.

Other Notes and Highlights

Alyssa Richard showed how they collected metrics to find out what messaging worked best for RateHub, where people were coming from and what keywords drove the most leads.  She also talked about calling hundreds of brokers in the early days to get off the ground.

Carlo Perez from Uknowa went into a ton of detail about how they organized their site, language tests for landing pages and how it was frightening to call contractors out of the blue to offer them business.  He talked about how he and his team used 30 minutes of their lunch hour at their day jobs to call people.

I want to thank all the sponsors, mentors and attendees, the energy and passion in the room was simply staggering.   Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get out of the building.

• organizational culture type
• type and temperament of the influential people or ‘change sponsor’
• flow of power throughout the organization

I am still learning about this and refining that theory.  Here’s a quick example, suppose you, as a change artist, are brought in to transform an organization to Agile.  Suppose this organization is a control culture (likes rules, process, stability, hierarchy and power) and the change sponsor (VP or Director or whoever brought in Agile, let’s call him Rick) has MBTI preferences that lend themselves to align with the attributes of a control culture.

Rick may be more likely to see ‘Agile’ as a set of processes and practices over a set of values and principles.  As a change artist, an Agile Adoption approach may make more sense.  ’Adoption’ and ‘Transformation’, IMO, are different.  Transformation is transforming an organization’s culture to build a learning culture or Agile mindset.  Adoption is adopting Agile practices and processes for perceived benefits that are (or at least seem) concrete.

As a change artist providing a less ‘fluffy’ and values/principles approach in favour of a more pragmatic approach of a list of processes and practices with benefits, possible outcomes and an implementation plan increase the odds of a successful change.

Today at AYE we had a small open space session and talked about MBTI and temperaments, how each temperament (SP, NT, SJ, NF) are affected by change using the Virginia Satir change model and how those temperaments may naturally fit into the different organizational cultures.  Susan Davis brought up using MBTI function pairings instead. (ST, SF, NT, NF).

First we talked about temperaments:

NT: Rationals, Visionaries – use logic to make decisions, have grand visions of what’s possible

SP: Artisans, trouble-shooters – like to solve problems as quick as possible to find the next problem to solve

NF: Idealist, catalyst – want to make sure everyone in the group is ok and feels included

SJ: Guardian, organizers, stabilizers - like rules and plans, certainty

Of course these are paraphrased, there is a great wealth of information about types and temperaments, these descriptions will suit the purpose of this post.

Next we related temperaments to the Virginia Satir change model.

NT: see the vision of the change and want to progress quickly through chaos.

SP: want to move through chaos as quickly as possible to get to the next problem and adapt quickly

NF: want to make sure everybody is ok while they move through chaos and want to get to the transforming idea so people will be ok.

SJ: may question the need to change and move back to the status quo

Each person will move through the change model at different rates and intensities.

Next we looked at Organizational Culture Types:

Control: rules, process, certainty, power, hierarchy.  ”we succeed by establishing and maintaining control”

Collaboration: teamwork, synergy, interaction.  ”we succeed by working together”

Cultivation: purpose/faith, creativity, let things evolve.  ”We succeed by growing people who fulfil our vision”

Competence: efficiency, craftsmanship, expertise.  ”We succeed by being the best”

For a fantastic description of culture types, check out Michael Sahota’s post here.

Next we talked about how some temperaments may have a more natural fit in certain cultures.  For example, NF’s may fit more naturally in a Cultivation Culture which emphasizes people and possibilities.  This culture is in direct conflict with a Control Culture and people who relate more to Control Cultures may have a hard time adjusting to a Cultivation Culture or they may not adapt at all.

What clicked for me was when Susan Davis brought up mapping MBTI function pairings with organizational culture types.  Quick side note on MBTI, my type is ISTP:

E/I: Introvert/Extrovert (Energy – Attitude)

N/S: Intuiting/Sensing (Data  - Function)

T/F: Thinking/Feeling (Decision – Function)

J/P: Judging/Perceiving (Action – Attitude)

My temperament is SP (Artisan).  My function pairing is ST.  I am a 50/50 split on N vs S so my temperament aligns well with the NT temperament.  I like solving problems, I like inflicting help, I like stuff that is awesome and in the end, it’ll all work out, whatever it is!  You can read more on function pairing here.

I will make a better diagram, here’s what we drew up.  On the Y axis of the organization culture type, “Reality Focus” for organizations aligns well with people with “S (sensing)” function while the “Possibility Focus” aligns well with “N (Intuiting)” function.  On the X-axis, “People Focus” aligns with “F (Feeling)” while “Company Focus” aligns with “T (Thinking)”.

I’m sure that sounds confusing.  Here’s what clicked, which is my theory.  If you as a change artist understand the culture of the organization and the teams (organizations will have sub-cultures on different teams, departments, social circles etc) and the MBTI preferences of the change sponsor and people in the organization, you may be able to come up with an Agile Adoption or Transformation plan that as a higher chance for success.

The reason I theorize that is solely based on experiences I’ve had and the theory of culture types and MBTI temperaments. In a control organization where the change sponsor has an ST function paring (SJ for example), selling him/her “Agile” as a set of values and principles and creating a learning culture or Agile mindset might not be as effective as selling “Agile” as a set of processes and practices with tangible benefits.

These pieces started coming together during Don Gray’s ‘Reading the River: Understanding Organizational Currents to Get You Where You Want to Go‘ session.  It helped me understand how to find leverage points and how to ‘speak the language’ of change in the right way to the right people.  If you have a deeper understanding of organizational currents, you can use the knowledge of that organizations culture and people to help take you through the change more effectively than swimming against the current by using “Agile Transformation” approaches when an “Agile Adoption” approach may be a better choice.

To wrap up, no culture is ‘better’ than another, same for type and temperament.  Agile-ists will often say “once size Agile doesn’t fit all” and I believe the combination of organizational currents, organizational culture and type/temperament of the influential people in the organization are the keys to figuring out how to work through a change more effectively.

This year I haven’t figured out what I want to get out of AYE.  There are so many great sessions and so many areas of personal improvement I see that I haven’t widdled it down yet.  Blogging is therapeutic for me so I’m hoping I’ll figure it out before the end of this post.   As a consultant, I’d end up in more ‘coaching skills’ type of sessions to help me be a more effective coach.  This time around I’m going to be a bit more selfish and find sessions that are more personal to me.

I think the biggest area of improvement I want to make this year is figuring out how to be a more effective communicator.  I have a tendency to bottle up my thoughts until they explode and sometimes I won’t really say what’s on my mind because I’m worried how the message will be received on the other end.  Then, of course, the blow up happens. PSL helped a lot with that, I feel I want to do some fine tuning though.

Jerry’s session on handling “awkward situations at work” also looks interesting because as a “resource” I have to integrate more deeply into the existing culture which I do not do very well sometimes.  As a consultant it was much easier, you kind of expect to be fired at any point and you’re being hired to disrupt the status quo.

As I was typing this, my co-workers wanted to chat about what to expect since it’s their first time going.  I told them a couple of stories from the last 2 I went to and hopefully didn’t spoil anything.  I remember not knowing what to expect and being nervous and excited at the same time so I hope they experience that same feeling.   It was funny when one of them asked about the credentials of the hosts and what he should expect to learn!  I think he’s in for a treat!

I think that helped me shape my goal this year.  There are a couple of great sessions about change, organizational mapping and navigating organizational currents which I am fascinated by.  We’ve been going through many big changes over the last few months and anyone who knows me knows I’m not shy about stating my observations so it’s nice to be a real employee and see the outcomes of some of the jiggles that have happened here.  Usually as a consultant you try and help and organization, they do or don’t listen and you’re gone before you really see the outcomes of the change(s).  I have the benefit of seeing this change and experiencing it.

I’m rambling.  Shocking, I know.

This year I want to bring back skills for better integrating into existing cultures, for me personally and also to help others understand culture and temperaments and how to adjust to complex adaptive systems.  I strongly push back against the status quo which isn’t always the right thing to do and sometimes come across as a know-it-all because I am never satisfied with doing things the way they’ve always been done.  Historically that approach has alienated me as an employee and I get fed up and leave feeling like I don’t fit.  Perhaps what I’ll learn is that sometimes I should just shut-up!

Either way, I’m really looking forward to going back and catching up with some old friends and meeting new ones!  Look for the usual post-AYE, uh, posts and check out my other posts from previous conferences if you’re interested.

That got my attention.

I’m a raging introvert so when I won’t shut up, it’s usually about something I’m really passionate about or something I think I know a lot about. One of the objectives I set for myself at PSL was to learn how to be a better listener. I felt I accomplished that, or at least made substantial progress, and rewarded myself with the muzzle award for knowing when to shut up.

I don’t want this post too be too long so I’ll skip the examples where I channelled the image of Johanna pounding her hand on the table to keep me in line. Needless to say, I was more aware of my disposition and sense of knowing when to shut up than I was before.

Over the last few weeks after coming back from Agile 2011, I felt like I ‘gave up‘ a little.  In retrospect, I started to slip back into old habits of telling and not listening which wasn’t really helping me or the people in my life.  

My boss had reflected this back to me during a recent one-on-one so I’ve had some time to digest the feedback. More specifically, I thought about our one-on-one conversation and how much of it was us talking ‘at‘ each other instead of communicating.  We started well and I gave up my new listening skills early on which I think was the cause. Having said that, it was a productive chat, I feel it could have been better if I had channelled Johanna’s table-pounding image in my head.

I started looking deeper and another lesson from PSL started becoming clear. If you want to change anything, start with yourself.  I started thinking about bad conversations (work and home) and what problems I was facing and what of my behavior or lack of listening was contributing to those problems.

Today I set out to take those lessons and apply them. During my first meeting I caught myself interrupting someone 3 times. I caught myself early which I was proud of. I also used what I learned from Declan and Bryan’s ‘Pull conversation’ session at Agile 2011 to have better conversations with the people in the meeting.  I hope it helped, I felt better. I suppose I could ask them tomorrow.

Here’s how I would sum up what I learned with what I tried today (and what I like to preach to others about!)

• It’s not about them, it’s about you. Once you understand yourself better, you will be able to interact with people better. I found MBTI very helpful in this regard.
• Change starts with you first. You can’t, nor should you try, to control or influence people. I am using ‘influence‘ in the negative sense of ‘tricking‘ people, not ‘influencing‘ in the sense of persuading people that your idea is the best.
• People are good and are doing the best they can with what they have, whether that be skills or external forces (ie: is a co-worker who you think is an asshole just somebody who’s a really passionate person or maybe they’re going through a divorce. You don’t know whats going on in their head)
• Listen to people by reflecting back what they are saying. Use questions like “I’m not sure what you mean, can you describe an example?” or “I interpret that as ABC, is that what you mean or did I miss the point?“. There are many ways to ask “pull” questions but the point is that you may process information differently than the person who is transmitting, try and understand where they are coming from so your ideas and thoughts can converge.
• I find this helpful, prepare for conversations ahead of time, especially if you are introverted. I need time to process information so my emotional response comes out first if Johanna doesn’t pound the table quick enough.
• Find a technique that will help you stay focused, like my example of Johanna pounding the table.
• Stop a conversation at the sign of trouble. I am still learning how to do this because dammit, I’m right and I have to prove to you that I am right! This is probably the weakest area of conversation skill for me.

Before this meeting I made a conscious effort to be aware of my state and how I was engaging in the conversation.  I also set some mental pointers about specific things I wanted to improve on.  One of them was not interrupting.  The other was staying engaged by making a note of my physical posture.  When I felt like I was dis-engaging, my body language gave me queues and I corrected it.  I’m sure this probably sounds nuts, but I ended up thinking “posture matters, sit up…” in my mind.

I’ve been struggling with a closing paragraph for a good 15 – 20 minutes.  If I could share one last thing from this post it would be that you are responsible for your personal development.  If you’re unhappy with the status quo, remember, It doesn’t need to be this way.  Change yourself first, you’ll thank yourself when you realize how good it feels.

I managed to go to a few sessions and spent most of the time in the hallways and Coach’s Corner. I love talking to people to see how they’ve implemented Agile, what challenges they’ve had and how they over-come them. I was super-excited to finally meet Lisa Crispin as we have been trading tweets for the last year or so!

My boss asked me yesterday what my one take-away was. After the first day attending Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory’s session titled ‘Yeehaw, we’re Agile testers, now what?‘ and David Hussman’s and Tim McCoy’s session titled ‘Integrated Product Development‘, my takeaway was clear.

Culture is important.

Let me explain. When I was new to Agile, I attended a local event a couple of years ago the panel at the meetup were unanimous in their opinion that companies with the right culture can really leverage the benefits of Agile. Lisa and Janet’s session, while on the testing track, were about the effects poor culture and structures have on testing outcomes. An example they used was a discussion around issues attendees had with “QA keeping up”. The discussion at my table was with people in larger companies (although I’ve seen the same effect in smaller ones) and they had similar problems:

Given the discussion at my table it was clear there were severe system related problems contributing to this outcome:

• whole team doesn’t participate in planning – a ‘lead’ and/or ‘managers’ plan the sprint and hand it over to the ‘team’.  The reasons at the table were because “it’s a waste of time to have the whole team in planning, they should be doing real work”.  Oh that’s a beauty, I’ve seen that in every organization I’ve worked in.  That’s called the 100% Utilization Trap.
• The testers are 9 timezones away because it’s cheaper to hire point/click testers offshore
• Organizational structure that prevents cross-functional team creation and optimization (IE: functional silos with different objectives and purpose.  The job of development is to push changes out, the job of QA is to be a ‘gate’ to those changes and the job of IT is to prevent anything from changing)

I could go on, but I think that frames the problem(s) nicely.  So you are left with what I consider ‘Agile Adoption‘ and not ‘Agile Transformation‘ or  ’Tactical Agile‘ (Thx Michael Spayd for the definition).  In my session I talked about how your organization size, culture, structures and people affect your Agile implementation.  Organizations with more rigid process/politics and top-down pushed initiatives will not understand Agile values and principles.   When you hear people in the Agile community talk about organizations  that “don’t get it” I will bet this is the type of organization they’re referring to.  You’ll hear managers in these organizations say things like “we can’t just have people do whatever they want” or “that can’t possibly work here” or “we can’t do that because…”    These organizations also tend to have strong functional silos and people are more concerned with their title than delivering value.  One person at the session had actually removed all titles and people were considered ‘team members’.

Agile Adoption may be more suitable in this case because Agile may be seen as a set of processes and practices and not a mindset.  On the flip side, Agile Transformation is more about evolving a new mindset that is based on Agile values and principles.  I have another post brewing about that since it was the gist of my session.

If you’re interested in learning more about culture, check out The Re-Engineering Alternative by William Schneider…after finishing reading my post by the way.

David and Tim’s session on Integrated Product Management was a bit more subtle.  My takeaway from that was “Product Driven Outcomes over Process Driven Outcomes“.   Again this speaks to culture.  Process driven outcomes generally follow a pattern where you are ready to release and there’s no technical reason for not releasing other than you can’t figure out how to push it through your process.  That’s just an example.  I’ve experienced the joy of working in a product driven outcome focused team twice in my career, the energy and culture is drastically different than companies I’ve worked in that follow a process driven outcome process.

That may be confusing, here’s a better explanation.  Organizations that want to know ‘how Agile they are’ or how closely they are following Scrum likely have a more process driven approach because of the structures in place (hierarchy, functional silos etc).  These structures have been created by management and they are extremely hard to change because these structures have been setup to enforce the behaviour you’re getting.  From my experience, organizations tend to put more structures in place to try and circumvent the poor outcomes they’re getting as a result of creating these structures in the first place.

Never was this more clear than when I was talking to a fellow who was asking me how they could start using Agile, in particular Scrum, in their organization.  You can read the details here and I can tell you that his department was one that “got it”.  They are actually leveraging the benefits of Kanban and have a ‘Kaizen’ (continuous improvement) mentality.  Of course the mechanics needed some work, but they really seemed to understand The Agile Mindset based on what he described.

To make a long story short when I hear phrases like “one Agile size doesn’t fit all” and “agile is hard“, I don’t find them helpful.  It took me years to start to begin understanding why it’s hard and with each step a new door of learning opens. It’s exhilarating and depressing all at the same time!  There are so many factors that help shape what you think Agile is and how you can incorporate Agile into your organization.  Everything from the type of business you are, what types of products or services you offer, your size, culture, people, state of technology and more.  Once you can learn how to understand your organization, you’ll be in much better shape to figure out how to shape your path to more successful outcomes whether it be via Transformation or Adoption.

I told her that she needed to be back upstairs in 20 seconds or I’d eat her snack.  She paused for a couple of seconds and then took her snack and drink with her.  I didn’t bother counting to 20.

Since I’m a bit of a nut, I wanted to see how my 6 year old son would manage that same problem.  The first thing he did was freak out.  ”You CANT eat my snack Daddy!”.  I could see him struggling with what to do.  He wanted to go downstairs but he wanted his snack too.  I could feel his anxiety building and it took him about a minute to figure out what he wanted to do.  He decided to go with shovelling his entire snack in his yap before he went downstairs to “get something”.  Just in case he got lost, enough crumbs were falling out of his mouth to leave enough of a trail to get back.

When I break down how they both reacted, both got what they wanted.  The ‘thing’ from downstairs and their snack.  My daughter experienced very little stress under the same system constraint while my son was visibly frazzled.

If you are trying to adopt Agile, whether you’re just getting started or in process of transitioning, there are many systemic forces causing people in your organization to react differently to the same set of conditions or contraints.    Come to my Agile 2011 session and learn more about what you need to understand about yourself and your organization to get started with Agile.

Let me explain.

Agile events tend to be more ‘fluffy’ feeling in my opinion, which is great, I learn a lot at those events but often they don’t dive deep into how to apply the techniques.  Lean seemed to be more rational and fact based and talks about explicit processes and practices that you can use while Agile is more about just letting the people figure it out.  Perhaps Agile and Lean can converge at some point, which is largely what I think is starting to happen now.

Some of the things I learned that stuck out the most:

Leadership Matters….a lot: Well isn’t this the obvious statement.  The success case studies about Corbis from David Anderson’s book (session hosted by Dominica DeGrandis) and Alan Shalloway’s talk both had wildcard factors.  In the case of Corbis, David joined as Director.  While, according to his book (which is brilliant by the way), he didn’t impose his will onto the teams, his leadership and deep subject matter knowledge clearly allowed Corbis to transform.  Same for one of Alan’s case studies from his talk about having dynamic feature teams.  All of the people in this department (50+ from memory, likely more), rolled up into one Director so there wasn’t a need to cross organizational boundaries which is quite difficult.

Again, this sounds obvious, however from my experience most organizations don’t have strong enough leaders to take the risk of Lean transformation.  Organizational politics and functional silos are extremely difficult to navigate without support from strong leaders with clout.

Organizations are Complex Adaptive Systems: Simply stated, organizations are too complex to think you can define a process once and stick with it forever.   Organizations that can embrace change and understand that people are not linear have a greater chance for success.  You don’t want chaos (no process) or strict control (rigid rules and processes that don’t change), you want a balance of the two.  Create a system, with contraints, that empower your people and understand that people will behave based on these constraints.  Also understand that your system will evolve and a process that may have worked 3 months ago might not make sense now.

Targets are Helpful, Metrics are Not-So-Much Helpful: I am biased against all metrics.  Give me a metric and I’ll find out a way to game it, as I’m sure most people can.  I am in favour of targets that help influence the right behaviour and I had many conversations with people about this and many speakers talked about this same thing.  A quote that stuck out was “once a target becomes a metric it fails to be useful“.   Trying to figure out black and white metrics in complex adaptive systems (or more plainly stated, in today’s software world) is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do.

Go to the GEMBA! The best way to improve your organizational efficiency is to make your processes explicit, monitor the progress and use that data to drive better decisions. I posted about an “Agile Maturity Model” last year stating the same thing.  Using data to drive decisions takes emotion (or most of it) out of decision making.

Kaizen takes Discipline: I find that Lean is much more explicit about how to build a Kaizen-focused culture than Agile is.  Lean provides processes, practices and tools for building a Kaizen culture whereas, IMO, Agile does not.   Agile seems to drop Kaizen into a blackbox and talks about how the people will auto-magically make it happen.  Lean talks about specific practices and processes that lead to Kaizen.  For example, most people are aware of the value of retrospectives.   In the Agile community I find there isn’t really much information about how to actually execute on the outcome of retrospectives.  It’s left to the people.  This is fine if your people have specific temperaments and your organizational culture supports this.  What I find is missing is that Agile doesn’t help managers understand that improvement work is just that.  Work.  Lean, and Kanban in particular, specifically talk about using capacity allocation for improvement work.  David Anderson’s book has some great examples about how to deal with this.

What’s it Called?  It Doesn’t Matter What it’s Called! “I learned how to think in my own context”  This was a statement from Benjamin Mitchell during the “What do we mean by Lean?” panel discussion.  I find people and organizations focus on conforming to a process or set of practices and determine how effective they are by how well they are doing these practices (Nokia test, Shore graph etc).  While these are great checklists to point you in the right direction if you’re not getting the results you thought you’d get, focusing on doing the practices right is less important than focusing on outcomes and strong leadership is needed to support that line of thinking.

Alan Shalloway shared a case study about how a large department created ‘dynamic feature teams‘ .  The reader’s digest version is that multiple teams were working on products and they would pull the work from the backlog and staff the work with the people who were capable of doing the work.  Some items needed people from multiple teams, some items could only be done by specific teams.  At the end he said he didn’t know what to call that process, it’s not really Lean or Agile or Scrum or Kanban, it just seemed to work.  At the end of the day, isn’t that what matters?

Ok, this was a bit longer than I had hoped and I really only touched on the more important things I learned.  As far as feedback on the actual conference itself (in case any LSSC co-ordinators are reading this), here goes:

• the keynotes were all fantastic.
• the venue was fantastic, I liked the food so I dunno what people were complaining about!  Lots to see and do around the hotel.
• the “visibility track” wasn’t very visible since it was on the first floor away from the rest of the tracks.  I had about 50 or so people in mine but there wasn’t much visibility into those tracks compared to others.
• the program book, website, mobile version of the website made it hard to know which talks were in which tracks and where they were happening.  It would be helpful to just have a big VISIBLE list in the main conference area with all talks and what room they are in.   Maybe there were just too many different ways of viewing the schedule, especially since  the Crowdvine site used colours which were different from the colours in the program book.  Maybe it’s just user error on my part.
• not many leaders (organizational leaders) were there.  Next year’s proposed Management Track may help.

All in all I learned a lot, met some brilliant people and was happy to get my first major speaking event under my belt.  I hope folks that attended thought it was valuable and I am looking forward to seeing you in Boston next year!

Special thank you to everyone involved in the planning, volunteering and execution of the event!

Anywho, onto the position paper:  You’ll notice these are high-level points, that’s the point of Coach Camp.  The goal is to share experience and gain feedback from the Agile community.

Title: A Recipe for Enterprise Agile Transformation

Background and Challenges:

• large department within large organization
• tall hierarchy, great deal of office politics
• heavily silo’d organization
• complex product portfolio
• mix of full time, contractors, outsourced developers and teams
• limited people with Agile experience in the organization
• no recognized Agile champion

Speaking and Presentation topics I plan to share:

• transitioning focus of functional managers and other roles
  • there is much confusion about ‘where does my role fit’?
• breaking down silos between multiple groups
  • having to prove you are worthy of being trusted
  • demonstrating and sharing success and failures
• portfolio and team organization
  • how to structure your teams with the right skills for the project
• techniques for handling ‘specialist’ groups
  • how these groups interface with teams
  • how these groups share information gained from working with multiple teams
• cross-project knowledge sharing (technical or process related)
  • getting people together to talk about experiences.
• How PMO and process teams evolve
  • more teaching and coach, less command and control
• spreading Agile culture
  • making it about the organization, not the coaches
  • teaching the organization to think for themselves

The above topics will be accompanied by some fancy diagrams I’m working on for an experience paper and due to the format of Coach Camp, if my paper is accepted and put into the plan, the topics discussed with likely be determined by what my peers want to hear about.

I am still planning on writing and experience paper I had hoped to have finished by now where I can share more details.  Interested in your thoughts and experiences!

I’ve been staring at this one line post for about 10 minutes wondering how to better explain my euphoric state right now and “wow” seemed like the right word to start with.

Much like other folks who came here, I had heard great things about AYE and the notion was always that if you can only make one conference, make it to AYE.

First I’ll start with day 2 since I was far too mentally exhausted yesterday to post. Well, maybe the swim, hot-tub and beer had something to do with that exhaustion.

After Day 1 I realized I had discovered what I wanted to take away from this conference so I attended the more tactical sessions from Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby.  Johanna’s session was about portfolio management and Esther’s was about a manager’s role in self-organizing teams.  Both of these sessions hit home for me and I gained some valuable tools that I know will help given my current environment.

Johanna’s started with a brief introductory chat followed by a simulation with a twist that produces a great “AHA!” moment for me.  I felt I participated much more in this session and it helped me gain more confidence in how I can apply this learning in my day to day work life.

Esther’s session was fantastic.  Folks broke out into groups and talked about advantages and disadvantages of self-directed vs management directed teams from the manager’s and team’s perspective.  The groups then compared notes and the lesson I learned is that there needs to be a balance between what the manager’s do and what the team does.  The more a manager does for the team, the less things the team will do for themselves.  The key is to identify what activities the team can contribute with and how manager’s can foster and nurture that learning.  This topic is particularly interesting given my current work environment so I was pleased I chose this session.

Today started off with Steve Smith’s session on how to sell an idea to management.  The class broke into 4 groups and each group had a “Star”, manager, coach and observer.  The goal was to take a real life scenario for the “star” and play out a scenario where the star wants to ask the manager for something.  I was the observer for one group and after each interaction between the manager and star, the whole class would debrief on observations and feedback from the observer, manager and star.

After round 1 the coach would help the star improve and we’d repeat the exercise by either simulating a second meeting or starting over.  This was my favourite session of the conference and Steve provided very valuable insights for how to effectively communicate with a manager when you are asking for something.  Gil Broza also provided some insights on human behaviour that provided more value to everyone.  All in all because there were 4 groups, and therefore 4 simulations, there was a wealth of knowledge shared and I learned the most from this session.

Today finished off with Don Gray’s session on a personal retrospective which helped me digest the knowledge presented to me over the last 3 days and it was very low-key and quiet.  I had a brief chat with Don afterwards and talked about my experience at AYE and he provided more insights that gave me a great deal to think about (and a free book!) to take back with me.

Since I finished early I wanted to see if there were open slots for Johanna’s or Esther’s 1-on-1 sessions.  I felt terrible for interrupting  them both to ask how I could sign up but Esther was gracious enough to find me when her other session was done.

I was initially speechless.  I’ve read her Retrospectives book and blog posts so I will admit it was quite intimidating at first but I do realize it was all due to my insecurity.   I explained my conference experience and asked some specific questions about challenges I’m facing and she was more than happy to answer those questions and provide me with some ideas that would help.

The single greatest piece of advice was about an approach to take when I get back.  Ask the team about their week, don’t make my returning to work after a week off about me.  Absolutely share information when they ask but make sure that the organization and team know it’s about them, not me.   Once I’m presented with a situation that requires it, I have a new set of tools to help them with their problems.

To wrap up the conference all I could muster was wow.  I have never experienced a social interaction such as this before.  I would absolutely like to thank Jerry Weinberg, Steve Smith, Don Gray, Esther Derby and Johanna Rothman for their dedication not only to improvement of the Agile community but simply for being wonderful people.  Their willingness to dedicate time between sessions, after sessions, at lunch, dinner and being so approachable was truly inspiring and I am grateful for the new set of tools and knowledge they all shared.

When is registration open for AYE 2010?

The sessions being presented at AYE seemed much more relavent to me at this point in my life and career.  I also felt these experiences would help me meet some great people, share some ideas and help with me with challenges I’m experiencing at my current company.  Of course it doesn’t hurt that it’s sunny, 30 degrees and the resort is just fantastic!

The toughest part about day 1 was actually selecting which sessions to go to.   As I mentioned, I didn’t really know what to expect so my choices today were based on exploring and trying to figure out what I really wanted to get out of this conference.

Morning Session: Managing Change: Knowing When, Knowing How (Steve Smith)

We started off with everyone doing a quick introduction and each person also answered how they felt about change.  Personally, I love change.  It’s challenging, exciting and it gives me the opportunity to help make something better.  I also enjoy helping people cope with change, in the context of adopting Agile,  so I was particularly interested in Satir’s Model.

Steve gave us an article on Satir’s Model and then we started an exercise that would take our “star” ( which was a randomly chosen attendee) through the model.  The attendees were split into 4 groups and each group assumed either Status Quo/Resistance, Foreign Element, Chaos, New Status Quo.

Each group had an objective and I’ll paraphrase, but if you’re not familiar with Satir’s model, I’d recommend reading this.

Status Quo: keep the “star”  in his comfort zone and resist change

Foreign Element: an insertion of some element that causes disruption, something that tried to pull the star out of status quo

Chaos: create chaos for the star

New Status Quo: inject an idea and create and complete the change

This exercise was extremely creative and each group came up with fantastic ideas.  I was in the status quo group and we built a physical wall out of chairs, people and tablecloths to keep the foreign element out and tried to create a soothing atmosphere for our star because based on our interview, we felt it would keep him with us.

Our plan failed miserably!  The Foreign Element group was extremely disruptive and there was actually some pushing and shoving at some point and the Chaos team actually mentioned that the Foreign Element group created all the chaos so there wasn’t much for them to do.

It’s difficult to describe the entire exercise, it was something you would need to experience to truly understand what we went through.

While the exercise might have been chaotic and, at times, frustrating, the message I interpreted was loud and clear:

Try as you may, change cannot be controlled.

There are certain ways of helping and coaching people at various stages of Satir’s model but by and large, change will happen and you probably do not know where the end result is or how to get to there.  I was able to tie this into much of the training classes I deliver where people just want the answer.   Sorry, there is no user manual for implementing Agile.  It will be disruptive, it will be chaotic, we probably won’t know exactly how we are going to get to the end goal but we do have the tools and knowledge to help us work together towards the solution.  The key is motivation and the desire to change.  I cannot help you if you don’t want to accept my help.

Afternoon Session – Saying No That Really Means No

This one was a session I really wanted to attend.  After experiencing this session I was satisfied to learn that I already knew this.  I seem to be asked similar questions we talked about in the session during my training classes.  The most frequent comment seems to be “we just don’t say no around here“.  My reply is usually along the lines of  “so how’s that working out for you?”

It’s pretty simple, if you can’t say no when you mean no, your yes is meaningless.  There is always an alternative so look for the solution and it’s never as simple as yes or no.  Regardless of the “we have no choice” mantra that seems to plague most companies I’ve worked with, there is always a choice it’s just a matter of figuring out the solution.  There’s not much else to comment about on this session other than Jerry Weinberg is simply brilliant and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to his stories.

Event BOF (Birds of a Feather) Session: Re-inventing Yourself

This was an extra, optional session hosted by Johanna Rothman.  There was no description but the title was enough to get me to sign up along with 30 other folks.

Our goal was to create a career timeline and try and identify our own patterns so we could re-invent ourselves and prevent us from repeating those patterns.  Simple enough, if you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting.

I’ll save the details of my pattern for a later post, but the next step was to pair up with someone and talk about your patterns and answer a few questions to come to some type of realization.   This helped me a great deal and I immediately connected with what Johanna was saying.  She did give us homework of writing out what 1 day of a perfect job would be like and then offered a follow-up session where we will come up with an action plan to get there.

Summing it Up

Sorry for the long post, provided you’re still reading of course, but this was a great first day.   It was an eye-opening experience and coming in I knew there was a great deal that I don’t know but after today I realized I knew more than I though I did.  Today’s sessions re-assured me and also helped set my focus for the rest of the conference.