Easy in theory, difficult in practice

When Dr. Stephen R. Covey's wrote his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People®, it was used by individuals for self-improvement but the same habits could also help teams in their journeys to greater agility.

Be Proactive®

Dr. Covey wrote "The proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it instantly, correct and learn from it.". Just as individuals should blame everything on others, agile teams need to own the mistakes which arise from their behavior. Empowerment by senior leadership to self-organize increases a team's sense of autonomy but with this comes the responsibility for the team's actions. Covey's quote also highlights the importance of transparency and ongoing learning. Whenever there is a setback, someone on the team should have the perspective to ask "What have we learned from this?".

Begin with the End in mind®

This habit underscores the importance of knowing what we are building towards. Without that shared understanding in a project or product vision, it is easy for a team to get distracted by quick wins or by new backlog items which provide short term gratification but won't deliver the overall value expected by stakeholders. Whether it is a vision statement, a vision board or a formal project charter, the time spent in crafting it and reviewing it regularly will give team members the confidence needed to challenge misaligned or low value work items.

Put First Things First®

There will always be more work to be done than a team's ability to complete it. This habit reminds Product Owners and other team members to focus on what's most important at that time which means saying "no" to lower value work. It also means that teams need to be aware of their own capacity and to not over extend themselves by working overtime or by accepting an unhealthy level of multitasking.

Think Win-Win®

When working in large organizations, there can be a natural tendency for teams to focus on their own objectives, optimizing their work but potentially sub-optimizing the whole. When they have to rely on other delivery or support teams, it can easily become a finger-pointing "us and them" situation. Success in an enterprise context requires agile teams to take a system-level view and work effectively with others to ensure organizational success. This also aligns well with the Disciplined Agile principle of Enterprise awareness which encourages teams to consider the needs of the overall organization and not just their own team's.

Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood®

This aligns well with two key ingredients of a high performing teams, effective communications and psychological safety. By missing what others within or outside of the team are saying because of our own assumptions, biases and agendas, we can erode trust and collaboration. This habit can also be a caution for those who support agile teams to truly understand why something ight be happening before providing guidance or solutions. 

Synergize®

The word "synergy" comes from the Greek words "Sun" and "Ergon" meaning to work together. Agile teams need to collaborate which is making the whole greater than the sum of the parts, but this habit also encourages exploiting diversity within our teams rather than striving for conformity. Pair programming and other types of non-solo work are opportunities to put this habit into practice.

Sharpen the Saw®

This habit is about renewal and investing in one self. At a team level, we embrace it by looking out for one another, working a sustainable pace, taking the time to learn and grow as a team. Ceremonies like retrospectives are explicit opportunities to do this, but this also happens through "in the moment" support and recognition for each other.

"If we keep doing what we're doing, we're going to keep getting what we're getting." - Dr. Stephen R. Covey

Remote teaming is not a new concept but physical distancing restrictions have forced many project managers who had never previously worked with teams of dispersed team members to quickly adapt. While this transition might create a few hiccups with a well established team it will be much more challenging when we are working with teams whose members have never worked together. In such situations, the forming, storming and norming phases can take much longer than it was with the "old normal" but your key stakeholders are unlikely to accept prolonged delays in the team becoming productive.

Culture is defined by all of the individuals who make up the team but what you do as their leader will heavily influence how team development goes.

And this starts with an effective kick-off meeting. If you had run kick-off meetings as a mere formality before, their importance is much greater now.

An effective kick-off meeting helps by:

• Giving each team member a good understanding of the purpose behind the project. It can also be an opportunity for them to ask questions to help them understand how the project's purpose can connect with their own. Remember that working on activities in an isolated manner without having a good idea of why we are doing this will reduce intrinsic motivation.
• Providing a chance for team members to get to know one another. Ice breakers are one way to do this, but a kick-off meeting is also a good chance to ask everyone to share their fears, uncertainties, doubts and assumptions about the project. This sharing will be a good first step towards building psychological safety within the team.
• Helping the team to develop an initial set of working agreements. Remote work amplifies misunderstandings and missed perceptions. Making decisions such as when to meet, how they will keep you in the loop as to what is going on, how they will work through interpersonal issues will be dealt with and how feedback will be provided won't eliminate conflicts but it will provide the team with some self-defined guardrails to guide them.
• Learning each team member's development objectives. Well-run projects provide a great opportunity for personal growth and if you have some idea of what each of your team members is interested in learning, then you can help them by aligning project activities with these learning goals.
• Modeling behaviors you expect other team members to practice. This means focusing more intently on what is being said than you might have with an in-person meeting. Put your phone away and close all other applications on your computer - be mindful, and be present.
• Walking team members through the use of the normal communication tools including appropriate usage and what should be used for communicating in which tool.

Building a new virtual team won't involve doing something radically different or new compared to what you would have done with a new in-person team, but you will need to focus more effort on certain activities.

(Many thanks to Scott W. Ambler for his tweet which inspired this article: "The experiment failed successfully!")

One of the many traits associated with business agility is the frequent running of experiments. Experimentation might be related to assessing the market viability of a new business offering, determining if a proposed solution will overcome a technical uncertainty or understanding whether a specific practice such as pair programming can improve delivery outcomes.

Most of us studied the scientific method during our formative years, but as a refresher, it can be distilled into the following four steps:

1. We define a hypothesis
2. We design an experiment to test that hypothesis
3. We run the experiment in a controlled manner
4. We study the resulting data and determine how to proceed based on that data

The application of this process within a business context requires certain factors to be present which we tend to take for granted in the scientific context. And the absence of any one of these means that we might be building a house of cards that will collapse under scrutiny.

So what do we want to confirm?

• An openness to receive data which refutes our hypothesis. The individuals running the experiment might be content knowing they need to go back to the drawing board, but will the stakeholders supporting them be equally open-minded? This requires both a sufficient level of psychological safety within the group that is conducting and sponsoring the experiment but also a lack of ego tied to the hypothesis itself.
• The willingness to take the time required to define a good hypothesis. If we don't spend some effort defining what the problem is and creating shared understanding within the team on what we are trying to prove or disprove, then we may not know how to proceed when we get to the final step of the scientific method.
• An appetite for designing a minimally sufficient experiment. This is the Achilles Heel of many MVPs. The hypothesis related to market receptiveness is well understood, but stakeholders are unwilling to trim product scope and solution approach to the minimal level required to run an experiment. While they might still gather valid data, the cost of delay tied with learning something valuable is much greater.
• The integrity to construct an experiment which might disprove our hypothesis. Stacking the odds in favor of a desired outcome will yield positive data, but it won't help in the long run. An example of this is when a leadership team wants to assess whether an adaptive approach might result in a higher degree of success than a predictive one. If they staff this team with the "best of the best" the results will likely be better than with prior projects but this is as a result of the people more than the process.

John Lasseter - "With science, there is this culture of experimentation, and most of the time, those experiments fail."

While checking my LinkedIn feed this morning, I saw an update indicating that there are over 2,000 job postings for remote project managers on just one North American employment site. While this is encouraging news for those who have been laid off due to the economic impacts of COVID-19, the number of job seekers has also increased dramatically over the past two months.

If you are looking for a new role, a job as a remote project manager is ideal given the current circumstances but without actual experience leading dispersed or distributed teams, how can you compete with other candidates?

This challenge is a good example of the difference between interests and positions.

If the recruiter or hiring manager is focused on a position of needing someone with recent, demonstrable remote project management experience, you will want them to reveal the specific interests they have. You might not have the former, but if you can make them feel confident that you can satisfy the latter then they might be willing to take a chance with you.

Here are three categories of interests they are likely to have:

Team 

• How will you engage and inspire remote team members?
• How will you go about forming a high performing team from a group of individuals when there won't be an opportunity bring them together?
• How will you surface and respond to conflict or performance concerns with remote team members?

Key stakeholders

• How will you keep me in the loop?
• How will you align key stakeholders towards a common set of project objectives?
• How will you influence or persuade remote stakeholders who wield significant power over the project?
• How will you ensure key stakeholders such as the customer or project sponsor remain engaged and are providing timely feedback?
• How will you ensure decisions are getting made in a timely manner?

Monitor & control

• How will you gain an accurate understanding of project status?
• How will you know if scope creep is happening and how will you deal with that?
• How will you manage issues when everyone is dispersed?
• How will you know if critical risks are about to be realized?

Depending on the context of the project you should be able to identify other specific concerns. Updating your resume and cover letters to include examples of how you addressed these in the past. During an interview, ask probing questions to understand what are the top pain points the interviews is are worried about and try to allay their fears by providing specific examples of how you have addressed these in the past.

Is this guaranteed to work?

Of course not, but the more you can do to help them realize that your past experience is relevant to their current needs, the greater your chances of getting a call back.

Good luck, keep calm and stay safe!

Ontario has the second highest number of cases of COVID-19 within Canada but it lags all other provinces in terms of testing when measured on a per capita basis. This concern has been raised multiple times by members of the press and finally, this week, the provincial government appears to be treating this issue with the same urgency they have been giving to the procurement of sufficient personal protective equipment for front-line healthcare workers and first responders.

There are many reasons why our testing volumes have lagged behind other jurisdictions, including having limited quantities of the reagents required for the tests, continuing to follow the WHO's protocols for testing which seem to take much longer to provide results than antibody-detection tests, and the use of a high risk-based approach to determine who needs to be tested. This is in spite of the evidence from other countries which seem to have been relatively successful in reducing their elapsed time to hit the peaks of their first wave of infections through rapid testing of as many of their citizens as possible. Enforcing self-isolation of those who are showing symptoms helps, but this doesn't address those infected people who might be asymptomatic and might still be venturing out for groceries or other essentials.

Rather than proceeding with the assumption that only those who appear to be sick or those in higher risk situations need to be tested, a better assumption might be that we don't know who is sick and who isn't, so let's make it simple to test everyone and not just once, but repeatedly until a vaccine becomes available or herd immunity (assuming that applies to this virus) develops.

Cities, states or countries can be considered a complex adaptive system and COVID-19 has proven itself to be a somewhat complex, adaptive pathogen so it is reasonable to assume that traditional, testing strategies might not be effective in addressing the interactions between them.

When dealing with a sufficiently complex solution, traditional manual, test-after approaches don't work. Emphasizing a test-first strategy, leveraging automation and embracing a continuous testing approach might be the only ways to gain confidence that the solution is continuing to meet stakeholder requirements as its capabilities evolve. And just as it will be much harder to implement such testing strategies the more dispersed or larger the population of a geographical jurisdiction is, if we wait to improve our testing capabilities after a solution has gone through a few releases, it will take that much longer and be that much costlier.

Pay me now or pay me (much more) later.