Why you need to change your way of working

Thanks to the Agile@Work team, you can watch now a recording of my Keynote in Bolzano delivered on December 4th, 2015. It is available on YouTube or just here below.

Some of the most advanced technical practices allow you to get sustainable and effective benefits only if you use them properly. Unfortunately the inertia in adapting the way of working to the changing needs can thwart any technological advantage.

In this talk, I discuss the reason why an appropriate change of the way of working is a non-postponable need. I also present some methods and indicators to help you adapting your way of working to the product’s needs, your company’s culture and the technical practices.

Here the accompanying slides from SlideShare.

agile42 listed by Focus between the fastest growing companies in Germany

agile42 has been listed in the TOP 500 Fastest Growing Companies in Germany in years 2011-2014, according to a survey prepared by FOCUS magazine in cooperation with Statista, and at number #14 in the specific category of Fastest Growing Consulting Business.

Cover of Focus special issue Certificate from Focus special issue

 

Starting up a company may succeed for some, but how do you turn a Start-Up into a ever-expanding company? Who are these growth champions?

The research company Statista compiled a list of the top 500 companies for FOCUS magazine that have had particularly high revenue growth in the period from 2011 and 2014. This list includes both private and publicly traded companies. The minimal requirement were that the company acted independently and was not a subsidiary of another company. The company had to based in Germany and had a turnover of at least 100.000 Euro in 2011 and 1.8 Million Euro in 2014.

Statista compiled their list of potential candidates by researching business databases as well as by evaluating business competition and press publications. From the 1.5 Million companies registered, there were 13 500 companies with very high growth. FOCUS and Statista then invited these companies to enter into the Growth Champion competition.

 

From Focus: agile42 listed between the Fastest Growing Consulting Businesses in Germany

 

You can contact [email protected] for further information.

 

Meet: Marion Eickmann

A special guest in the “Meet the Coach” space, we interview Marion Eickmann who knows a lot about Agile coaching. Based in Berlin, she is the co-founder and CEO of agile42. The agile42 Connect event just ended was a personal goal and also a celebration of the path that the company has walked in nearly ten years. We checked to discuss the agile42 approach to Agile.
What is your professional background and how you ended founding such a peculiar company as agile42?

Marion EickmannBeing a marketing and business development person I got the chance to work for a company who developed software for software developers. You can imagine that it was quite difficult for me to write articles or press releases about SW-Development topics without a technical background. The funniest question I asked myself in the very first week of this adventure was “What the hell does a bug do in the software.”

It took me nine months stressing all my colleagues at the time to understand what requirements are, how UML is supposed to help and why projects are often out of time and budget, just in order to write my first article about software development. While my insights in the topic grew I understood that the biggest issue existing in product development is the communication between customer and developers. At the same time I saw that the creative job of a developer was not really recognized as such.

And then I met Andrea. We had the same idea of working, of collaboration, of fighting and standing for principles and we had the same vision that work should be fun, motivating and should enable people to be successful. Both of us have seen many environments and we just wanted to make a difference. This was 10 years ago and that’s when agile42 was “born”.

You always stress that agile42 is a coaching company, what is coaching at an enterprise level from your point of view?

Coaching means to help people to get the best out of themselves. To enable them to learn and change and not to fear to ask or doing mistakes. It does not matter if we are talking about an enterprise or a little startup, creating a work environment which is based on trust and transparency will support the success of every organization. I believe that the Agile Principles are a very good base to build such an organization. On the other hand the reality is that we all learned to work and act differently. Coaching helps people to change and if they change personally the environment and the culture changes with them.

Obviously you spend a lot of time talking and writing to clients or potential ones, what is your opinion about the adoption of Agile in Germany and the rest of Europe?

From what I see the Agility has different phases. The first phase is about doing the practices. Scrum for example looks easy so many companies just try it out, which is good :-) Still at a certain point they realize that doing Agile by the book does not really help, that there are issues they can not fix. Sometimes it’s just about having the feeling that this could be better, but they do not know how.

A bigger organization tries in this phase to train all teams and putting an Agile Process-Plan together… Unfortunately that does not work. Agile works, but only if an organization (of any size) is able to move to the second phase. And this phase is about culture, about people and about change. Goals like efficiency, higher productivity, faster time to market can be reached but it requires a different way of working and Leadership.

In the past year agile42 has expanded in Turkey and in South Africa (through the merger with the well-known Scrum Sense team), which are the next markets you see for the company?

agile42 cannot grow as fast if we would like to. The reason is simple, we are able to make a difference to our clients because we have very experienced people and we have a high level of quality regarding our services. People who have the capability to become a good coach are rare. Still, we want to grow and we are open to new challenges. We do not have concrete plans for next year, but we have already some ideas which are too fresh to publish yet. :-)

Dear project manager… you’ve been framed!

 

“Fast, cheap or good? Pick any two!” We’ve all heard this before. The project triangle (also known as the “triple constraint”) is one of the basic project management axioms. It presents us with a tradeoff between three dimensions, a zero sum game where improving in one dimension degrades the other two. This frame of thinking teaches us that we can reach an optimal solution only by carefully maintaining balance between scope, schedule and cost.

Project triangle

If we look at this setup objectively, it actually seems somewhat counterproductive. By accepting the perspective of the project triangle, we agree to work within its paradigm. Is it possible that the project triangle limits our thinking? Have we, in fact, been framed? Are there other paradigms that offer us a different perspective, and better chances of winning?

The three Scrum roles offer one such paradigm. For the purposes of this blog post, we are not going to dig into the actual details of the roles. Suffice it to say that one role is in charge of customer value, another handles quality, and a third looks after efficiency.

 

Scrum responsibilities

This setup provides us with a much more constructive paradigm. Improving one dimension will not destroy the other dimensions, but will instead strengthen them! Rather than causing friction and tension, people in different roles now have incentives to collaborate and help each other! How is that possible? Let’s investigate the linkages and dependencies between the three dimensions.

First of all, efficiency and quality are pretty much symmetric. A high-quality product is easier to work on, and you can work faster and more efficiently. Similarly, efficient teams won’t accept inferior quality in their product — they just can’t afford to work with shoddy tools on buggy software. Investing in one or the other will slow you down momentarily, but the improved velocity will quickly start to give more customer value per time unit. There is no conflict or tradeoff between these efficiency and quality: they simply reinforce each other.

As an aside, we can note that small, step-by-step improvements are extremely useful here. Being small and quick to complete, you get rapid returns on the investment. They compound on each other, resulting in exponential improvements over time. And the risk is low: you lose only a small amount of effort if you have to revert to whatever you had before.

Customer value requires some explanation. In essence, by creating customer value in the right way, teams take delivery pressure off the table. This gives the developers time to to improve their tools and work methods, and create high-quality products. Let’s explore this idea for a moment.

Many organizations believe that increasing customer value is somehow equal to “implementing more requirements faster”. This leads managers and Product Owners to remove all slack time and pressure the team to work harder. The team, trapped in the same belief, finds it difficult to defend themselves. Work queues pile up, shortcuts are taken, quality suffers and people work overtime just as they have always done. The key to solving the problem lies in understanding that customer needs are not equal. Two pieces of work of equal size can easily differ in value by several orders of magnitude. By working smarter — focusing on key customers and implementing the most useful features first — a team can deliver more value faster. This is not exactly rocket science.

What seems to be rocket science, however, is constructing a backlog that lets you be agile. Product Owners with little experience of creating agile backlogs often fall back on methods they have used before. The resulting “backlogs” are thinly disguised technical specifications or work breakdown structures, often containing long and obscure dependency chains. Even worse, multiple such chains may be needed to complete a shippable feature. This not only increases the amount of up-front work, but makes it difficult to rearrange the backlog items, increases the likelihood of bottlenecks, and slows down the release cycle.

A good PO will instead construct backlogs so that each item is as independent as possible. There are many good techniques for this, including impact mapping, feature injection, story mapping, patterns for story splitting, the hamburger method, the INVEST criteria and countless others. Focusing on customer value this way and working smarter has the side-effect of allowing the team to set high quality standards and spend time on improving their efficiency.

This wraps up our discussion on the agile paradigm. The tradeoff problem of the self-limiting project triangle cannot be solved from within. We must question the triangle itself, and replace it with a new, constructive and self-sufficient model that is restricted only by the laws of physics — the value-efficiency-quality model. This model has been tried by thousands of Scrum teams over the last two decades, and found effective and workable. Try it out — you might even like it!

 

Talking at Agile@Work

I am extremely happy to be able to deliver the keynote at Agile@Work in beautiful and multi-cultural Bolzano on December 4th. It is a a full-day conference about real world experiences on applied Agile methodologies, DevOps principles and Cloud infrastructure transformations. It includes practical workshops, training sessions and talks of case studies.

Agile@Work

My talk is titled Why you need to change your way of working, I will explain how some of the most advanced technical practices allow to get sustainable and effective benefits only if you use them properly. Unfortunately the inertia in adapting the way of working to the changing needs can thwart any technological advantage.

I will discuss the reason why an appropriate change of the way of working is a non postponable need. I also present some methods and indicators to help you adapting your way of working to the product’s needs, your company’s culture and the technical practices.

Why People Are Turning to Agile

From using ½ day sprints to delivering some of the most complex and critical hardware and software products in history, iterative and incremental delivery is, quite literally, rocket science1, used to manage risk and maximize learning in the most challenging situations.

Agile methods are the most recent incarnation of iterative and incremental methods, gaining acceptance over more traditional, sequential methods, as a result of a changing paradigm for software delivery. In today’s development environment, product development teams are battling five significant trends that directly impact the work they are doing:

Product Complexity: Products that 10 years ago were relatively simple, mechanical devices (e.g. door locks or thermostats) are today digital and connected machines. Even the most basic products are now designed, simulated and stress-tested in virtual form, on computers, and the mass manufacturing of them is deeply embedded in complicated logistics networks running on interconnected pieces of ERP software. Complexity both within and between products makes controlling dependencies and interactions harder and harder to do.

Technical (Environment) Complexity: Driven by the adoption of internet technologies in the 90s, environments and technology stacks have proliferated as technologies become more mature and more specialized. There are many more technologies to choose from, some of which can be swapped out very quickly. The rise and fall of a specific web technology, for example, may nowadays be measured in months. Change is inevitable in this space as specialization and fragmentation continues.

Business Complexity: Companies can no longer rely on finding the employees they need in their local markets, or spend decades on growing internal experts. In order to deliver the products and services customers want in the timeframe they want them, companies must now set up new offices around the world, join existing ecosystems or form new partnerships. This is enabled by new communication technologies that allow high-bandwidth collaboration between timezones and continents. Unfortunately all your competitors — and indeed a lot of companies that you didn’t know were your competitors — are also rushing for the same skilled employees and ecosystems.

Consumer Market Change: Most markets change very rapidly and changing with them is critical to modern business success. Demographics change, as our local 60-plus age bracket get healthier and wealthier than ever before. Former bottom-of-the-pyramid markets are opening up in Brazil, India and China (aka “BRIC”) as well as in sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, product trends come and go with depressing regularity. What makes a good product today is different than what made a good product a year ago, so product development cycles that take years to get from inception to the customer find that the needs and expectations of the user have changed. Iterative releases allows the product to adapt with the users’ needs and wants.

Impatience: Perhaps the most debilitating mega-trend is the increasing expectations of consumers for continual change and improvement. Today’s consumers change cars every 2-3 years, phones annually, clothes continually. Nothing is sacred, and this places the advantage squarely on the companies that can provide rapid upgrades, without sacrificing design or technical quality. Just as the environments companies work in are getting more complex and harder to manage, the pressure on businesses to perform has never been greater.

This increasing complexity drives a number of strategies for survival, including crowdsourcing or co-creation, rapid product development iterations, mass tailoring, and fast customer feedback. To guide this process and keep control over what they are doing, companies increasingly use agile methods; in fact, agile methods are often assumed to be the starting point for customer-centric product development, rarely mentioned as a foundation for success (see, for example, one of the three tenets behind The Lean Startup or Scrum/XP teams delivering releases in SAFe). Agile methods are robust at both creating and handling change, resulting in higher levels of success in delivering large projects, seen both as fewer failures and more successes. Further, employees positively enjoy being part of a well-working team and having a proper balance of authority and accountability.

The business benefit of iterative and incremental methods is driven primarily by a much shorter time-to-market with the same or better quality. While the volume of features delivered over time may not necessarily increase, the frequency with which customers can get new functionality, coupled with the advantage of rapid feedback from real, paying customers, creates an environment in which the penalty for being slow to market can be terminal. Conversely, the rewards go to the companies that embrace business agility, and use shorter cycle times to validate requirements with their customers, increasing customer satisfaction while maximizing return-on-investment. A win-win for all concerned.    

 1. Iterative and Incremental Delivery: A Brief History, Craig Larman & Victor R. Basili, IEEE (2003) ↩︎

 

 

Celebrating Ten Years of “Don’t Panic” at agile42 Connect

In December 2005, the concept for the company you know today as agile42 was discussed for the first time. Our vision was to make a difference to how work gets done for people, for teams and for whole organizations by creating environments based on trust, transparency and collaboration. Now, nearly 10 years later, we are proud to reflect on the many awesome people we met and challenging projects we realized with our clients.

We thought it was the time to share, to give back some of the many things we’ve learned over the years. Many of our clients have asked about an agile42 conference, bringing together them, our coaching team and some agile thought leaders, and this year we made it happen.

Marion Eickmann and Andrea Tomasini with Dave Snowden

This is why we invited a small number of clients and friends for the first edition of agile42 Connect last week in Berlin at the Pirates event location near the beautiful Oberbaumbrücke. We started our event with a full-day workshop by Dave Snowden (see photo above) one of the leading fig­ures in the move­ment towards integration of humanistic approaches to knowledge management. The workshop focused on User Requirements as a “radical beginning of the Agile Journey”.

The second day has been devoted to shared presentations by our clients and friends, with sessions that allowed an exchange of information between Agile practitioners that have a common language thanks to the coaching of agile42 but different backgrounds: small teams, large teams, established companies, startups.

To kickstart the discussions, a presentation by Andrea Tomasini co-founder of agile42 and the keynote offered by Richard Sheridan of Menlo Innovations that explained how it’s possible to create an intentional team culture focused on the business value of joy and unleash the human energy and the results you always knew were possible.

Andrea Tomasini at agile42 Connect

And since fun it’s always been an important part of the agile42 way of learning and working, we have linked the two working days with an evening of dinner and party, topped by the comedy, cabaret and music double-act Carrington Brown.

You can read more on our agile42 Connect section of this site, where we also view the resources the presenters have kindly shared with us, and check the online comment on Twitter with the hastag #a42connect.

Looking forward to a future, larger edition. And we keep on repeating our company motto, the one sewn on our towels, always “Don’t Panic”!

Burning Agile

On August 31th the Burning Man festival begins in a temporary city in the Nevada desert.

This one week event started in 1986 and as an experiment in community, art, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance. The evolution of Burning Man inevitably led to principles, rules and regulations. Still, after almost 30 years, the event has been able to maintain its original spirit while scaling from a few to 60,000 people.

One can find interesting similarities in what happened and is happening to the Agile “movement”. Unfortunately things are not going so well in the Agile world. People are getting hurt.

This is starting point of my talk Burning Agile – Individuals, Interactions, Scaling and Illusions which I will present in Florence, Italy on November 16 at Better Software 2015, an eclectic conference talking about management and innovation from every possible perspective.

Talking about self-organization at the Berlin DoSE 2015

I will present a talk Why self-organization might not work, and what has that to do with the company organization… in Berlin on November 11 as part of Berlin DoSE – the Berlin Days of Software Engineering.

On the way toward becoming more agile, we often stumble on issues which are sometimes simple in hindsight, but when we are at it, they seem impossible challenges. We might start with an agile team, probably following the Scrum framework and having quite some fun while learning and delivering more value with our colleagues. At a certain point though the expected “hyper productivity” that some folks in the agile world are talking about doesn’t seem to be something achievable at all, and we comfortably think, that must be just marketing, or even the effect of the Chinese Whispers.

We reflect ourselves on it, and we have the courage to look deep and understand why things aren’t going the way they should, we come to learn a lot, and question such as: “By the way, why do we still have Team Leader in a self-organizing team?” or “What is the role of a Tech Lead in a Scrum team?” up to “Why are we still estimating and planning upfront if we are doing agile development?” inevitably pop up. Is it a trust issue is it a cultural problem or is it an organizational design issue?

Maybe the answer, as many times happen in complex situation is simply maybe all of them or neither. Explore together with me what implication these dimension have on the way teams will develop or not, and also how to other companies around the world relate to this challenges, and maybe what can you learn from that…

Video interview with Andrea Tomasini

Last week, agile42 sponsored the Manage Agile conference organized in Berlin, where our senior coach Andrea Tomasini delivered a keynote, “Stop scaling… start growing an Agile organization”. On the sideline of the conference, the Manage Agile team also conducted a very nice and insightful interview where Andrea talked about Agility not being a destination but rather a means to achieve the goals of the organization and the challenges found when transitioning an organization to an Agile and Lean way of thinking.

The interview is in English and can be found on YouTube. You may notice in the video the extra accessory Andrea carries with him: our own little piece of company culture, the green towel that says Don’t Panic.