Disciplined Agile

This blog posting has been replaced with Risk-Based Milestones.

You may also be interested in How Disciplined Agile Teams Address Risk.

We are often asked why Disciplined Agile (DA) has a team lead role instead of  Scrum master or project manager.  The answer is three-fold: different types of teams require different types of leaders, leadership responsibilities vary based on the type of team they are leading, and DA strives to be agnostic wherever possible.  Let's explore the implications of this strategy.  

Team lead is what is known as a meta role.  What we mean by this is that there are different types of team lead depending on the situation, as depicted in Figure 1.  Think of team lead as a place holder for a more specific type of lead.  So, a scrum master is a team lead of a Scrum team, a project leader is a team lead of a project team, a sales manager is a team lead of a sales team. At times, the team will choose to stick with the name “team lead” for the role due to their way of working best fitting that description. 

Figure 1. Types of team leads.

As I said above, there are three reasons for taking this approach with the team lead role:

1. Different teams require different types of leads.  A Scrum team needs a scrum master, or better yet a senior scrum master, as team leader. Similarly, a project team needs a project manager or project leader.  A finance team or a sales team need a function manager such as a chief financial officer or a sales manager respectively as the team lead. Each type of team needs a team lead that is fit for purpose. Because all these teams (and many more) are part of Disciplined Agile, we cannot prescribe a single type of team lead.  
2. Leadership responsibilities will vary across teams. The responsibilities of team leads will vary depending on the type of team they lead. For example, when leading a team a project manager takes on different responsibilities compared to a scrum master.  Similarly, a sales manager leading a team would have responsibilities around educating business leaders on the sales strategy that a project leader typically wouldn't have.   
3. Being agnostic.  Let’s imagine for a moment that it made sense to have a single set of responsibilities for the team lead role. Which one should it be? Adopting the scrum master role would only fit Scrum teams. Similarly, adopting the project manager role would only fit project teams. In the end, either choice ends limiting the applicability of the Disciplined Agile tool kit. Remember that DA is a hybrid approach that opens your options by combining great ideas from a wide range of sources: some agile, some lean, and some traditional. Ultimately, leading teams appropriately to a better way of working.  

The end result is that you may see some DA teams with a senior scrum master as the team lead, some DA teams with a project leader as a team lead, some DA teams with a functional leader in the role of team lead, and some teams with someone who is simply the team lead. Just like your way of working (WoW) should be fit for purpose, so should your approach to roles and responsibilities.

A common question that we get from customers who are new to Disciplined Agile (DA) is how do you aggregate, or "roll up", metrics from agile teams into a portfolio dashboard?  A more interesting question is how do you do this when the teams are working in different ways?  Remember, DA teams choose their way of working (WoW) because Context Counts and Choice is Good.  Even more interesting is the question “How do you aggregate team metrics when you still have some traditional teams as well as some agile/lean teams?”  In this blog we answer these questions one at a time, in order.

Note: We’re going to talk in terms of a single portfolio in this article, but the strategies we describe can apply at the program (a large team of teams) too, and then the program-level metrics are further rolled up to higher levels.

How Do You Aggregate Agile Team Metrics Into a Portfolio Dashboard?

Pretty much the same way you aggregate metrics from traditional teams.  There tends to be several potential challenges to doing this, challenges which non-agile teams also face:

1. You can only aggregate metrics with similar units. You do need to be careful with some measures, such as team velocity, because the units vary across teams.  It is possible to enforce a common way to measure velocity across teams, but this tends to be more effort than it’s worth in practice. Sometimes there are metrics which you think you should be able to roll up but you discover (hopefully) that you really shouldn’t.  One example of this is number of defects by severity.  You can roll this metric up when the severity of a defect is determined in a consistent manner across teams, but this isn’t always the case in practice.
2. Sometimes the math gets a bit complex.  Aggregating metrics isn’t always based on simple addition.  Many times you will need to weight metrics based in terms of time, size, financial impact or combinations thereof.  Interestingly, although some metrics can’t be rolled up because they are measured in different units, you can often roll up the trends of those metrics.  For example, acceleration is the change in velocity of a team.  Given an appropriate weighting formula you can roll up an average acceleration figure across teams.
3. Some people believe you can only aggregate the same metric. Basically, when a common metric is captured across teams (for example Net Promoter Score (NPS) or cyclomatic complexity) then you can easily (albeit with some “complex” math in some cases) roll them up to a program or portfolio level.  In the Govern Team process goal we refer to this strategy as consistent metrics, an option of the Provide Transparency decision point. This strategy works well when teams actually collect the same metrics, but in when teams choose their WoW this isn’t always the case.

How Do You Aggregate Agile Team Metrics Into a Portfolio Dashboard When the Teams Choose Their WoW, and it’s Different For Each Team?

When a team is allowed to choose it’s way of working (WoW), or “own their own process,” the team will often choose to measure itself in a manner that is appropriate to it’s WoW. This makes a lot of sense because to improve your WoW you will want to experiment with techniques, measure their effectiveness for your team within your current context, and then adopt the techniques that work best for you.  So teams will need to have metrics in place that provide them with insight into how well they are working, and because each team is unique the set of metrics they collect will vary by team.  For example, in Figure 1 below we see that the Data Warehouse (DW) team has decided to collect a different sent of metrics to measure stakeholder satisfaction than the Mobile Development team.  The DW team needs to determine which reports are being run by their end users, and more importantly they need to identify new reports that provide valuable information to end users – this is why they have measures for Reports run (to measure usage) and NPS (to measure satisfaction).  The Mobile team on the other hand needs to attract and retain users, so they measure things like session length and time in app to determine usage, and user retention and NPS to measure satisfaction.

Figure 1. Applying consistent metrics categories across disparate teams (click on it for a larger version).

Furthermore, the nature of the problem that a team faces will also motivate them to choose metrics that are appropriate for them. In Figure 1 we see that each team has a different set of quality metrics: the DW team measures data quality, the mobile team measures code quality, and the package implementation team measures user acceptance test (UAT) results. Although production incidents and automated test coverage are measured by all three teams, the remaining metrics are unique.

The point is that instead of following the consistent metrics practice across teams by insisting that each team collects the same collection of metrics, it is better to ask for consistent metric categories across teams. So instead of saying “thou shalt collect metrics X, Y, and Z” we instead say “Thou shalt collect metrics that explore Category A, Category B, and Category C.” So, as you can see in Figure 1, each team is asked to collect quality metrics, time to market metrics, and stakeholder satisfaction metrics but it is left up to them what metrics they will choose to collect. The important point is that they need to collect sufficient metrics in each category to provide insight into how well the team addresses it. This enables the teams to be flexible in their approach and collect metrics that are meaningful for them, while providing the governance people within our organization the information that they need to guide the teams effectively.

So how do you aggregate the metrics when they’re not consistent across teams?  Each team is responsible for taking the metrics that they collect in each category and calculating a score for that category.  It is likely that a team will need to work with the governance body to develop this calculation.  For example, in Figure 2 we see that the each team has a unique dashboard for their team metrics, yet at the portfolio level the metrics are rolled up into a stoplight status scorecard strategy for each category (Green = Good, Yellow = Questionable, Red = Problem). Calculating a stoplight value is one approach, you could get more sophisticated and calculate a numerical score if you like.  This is something the governance body would need to decide upon and then work with teams to implement.

Figure 2. Rolling up metrics categories (click on it for a larger version).

From the looks of the Portfolio dashboard in Figure 2 there is a heat map indicating the overall status of the team (using green, yellow, and red again) and the size of the effort (indicated by the size of the circle). Anyone looking at the portfolio dashboard should be able to click on one of the circles or team stoplights and be taken to the dashboard for that specific team. The status value for the heatmap would be calculated consistently for each team based on the category statuses for that team – this is a calculation that the governance body would need to develop and then implement.  The size of the effort would likely come from a financial reporting system or perhaps your people management systems.

How Do You Aggregate Team Metrics When Some Teams Are Still Traditional?

With a consistent categories approach it doesn’t really matter what paradigm the team is following.  You simply allow them to collect whatever metrics are appropriate for their situation within each category and require them to develop the calculation to roll the metrics up accordingly.  If they can’t come up with a reasonable calculation then the worst case would be for the Team Lead (or Project Manager in the case of a traditional team) to manually indicate/enter the status value for each category.

Parting Thoughts

For the consistent categories strategy to work the governance people need to be able to look at the dashboard for a team, which will have a unique collection of widgets on it, and be able to understand what the dashboard indicates. This will require some knowledge and sophistication from our governance people, which isn’t unreasonable to ask for in our opinion. Effective leaders know that metrics only provide insight but that they shouldn’t manage by the numbers. Instead they should follow the lean concept of “gemba” and go see what is happening in the team, collaborating with them to help the team understand and overcome any challenges they may face.

Related Links

• The Governance Process Blade
• The Measure Outcomes process goal
• The Organize Metrics process goal

In Time Tracking and Agile Software Development we overviewed why teams should consider tracking their time.  Primary reasons include:

• You’re billing your customer by the hour
• Your organization wants to account for CapEx/OpEx
• Your organization wants to take advantage of tax credits (typically for R&D work)

A secondary reason to track time is because the team wants to measure where they are spending time so as to target potential areas to improve.  This is more of a side benefit than anything else – if this was your only reason to track time you’d be better off simply discussing these sorts of issues in your retrospectives.  But if you were already tracking time then running a quick report to provide the team with intel likely makes sense for you.

So what are your options for recording time?  Potential strategies, which are compared in the following table, include:

1. Automated report from an agile management tool. The basic idea is to extract data from an agile management tool (JIRA, TFS, LeanKit, …) and load it into your time tracking system.
2. Manual input by team members. Each team member, typically once a week, inputs their time into the time tracking tool.
3. Manual input by the Team Lead. The Team Lead (ScrumMaster) inputs the time for their team into the time tracking tool.
4. Manual input by a Project Manager/Coordinator. A PM or Project Coordinator, often in a support role to the team, inputs the time of team.
5. Don’t track time at all. ‘Nuff said.

Table: Comparing options for tracking time.

This blog posting was motivated by a conversation that I had with Stacey Vetzal on Twitter.

Related Reading

• Time Tracking and Agile Software Development
• Agile Software Development and CapEx/OpEx

One of the interesting trends that we’re seeing within organizations taking a disciplined agile approach to solution delivery is the preference for stable teams. Stable teams, also called stable product teams or simply long-term teams, are exactly as they sound – they remain (reasonably) stable over time, lasting longer than the life of a single project. This blog explores the differences between project teams and stable teams and then overviews the advantages and disadvantages of the stable team approach.  We also explore the issue of how stable teams evolve over time.

Stable Teams

As you can see in the following diagram, with a project team approach we say that we bring the team to the work. What we mean by that is that we first identify the need to run a project, perhaps to build the new release of an existing solution or to build the initial release of a new solution, we build a team to do the work.   Once the work is done, in this case the solution is successfully released into production, the team is disbanded and its team members move on to other things.

The stable team approach is a bit different. In this case we first build an effective team then we continuously bring valuable work to the team to accomplish. In this situation the work never really ends, but instead we replenish the team’s work item list (or work item pool depending on the lifecycle being followed) regularly. The team stays together and continues to produce value for your organization over time.

Of course the term “stable team” is a bit of a misnomer as they do evolve over time. For example, many people like to stay on a team for a couple of years and then move on to another team to gain new skills and perspectives. This is good for them and good for your organization as it helps to keep your teams fresh. Sometimes you will want to grow or shrink a team. Sometimes you will discover that two people aren’t working well together and you need to split them up. The point is that there are very good reasons for your stable teams to evolve over time.

We wouldn’t be disciplined if we didn’t explore the trade-offs involved with stable teams.

The Advantages of Stable Teams

There are several advantages to stable teams:

1. Lower management overhead. There is clearly less “resource management” to be done because you’re not constantly forming and disbanding project teams. In fact, this lower need for resource management activities is one of several factors why agile IT organizations need managers than non-agile IT organizations.
2. Easier team budgeting. The annual budget for a stable team is incredibly straightforward to calculate: Multiply the number of people on the team by the fully burdened cost of an IT person for your organization. Once again, less management work required for this.
3. You build better teams. When you build project teams you tend to take the people who are currently available (often referred to as sitting on the bench). With a stable team approach you’re motivated to build your teams with the right people, and very often its best for the team to build itself by inviting others who they believe will fit in well.
4. There is greater opportunities to build trust within the team.  It takes time to build trust within a team.  Greater trust leads to greater willingness to work together in a more streamlined manner.  As Stephen Covey insightfully points out, trust enables speed.
5. There’s a greater opportunity for safety.  It takes time to build an environment where people feel safe. In safe environments there is a much greater chance that they will share ideas and be willing to try new things because they don’t fear being thought less of or even punished.
6. There is less overhead from team formation. You’re forming teams far less often with a stable approach compared to a project team approach, hence there is less overhead in total for your organization.
7. Better team performance.  Consider the analogy of a train.  Just like it takes time to bring the train up to cruising speed it takes time for the team to jell.  Bringing work to a seasoned team that works together well is like jumping onto a train going at full speed: it’s faster in both cases because you don’t have to get going from a full stop.
8. You have more efficient utilization of staff. With this approach it is far less likely that someone will be “sitting on the bench” because they will instead be an active member of a team. When someone is hired it is directly into a team. Throughout their career they will move from team to team as appropriate. The only time that they might not be utilized is when their on vacation, sabbatical, or if you purposefully disband a team. The first two reasons are something you still have with the project team approach, and the last reason should happen a lot less often.
9. Your teams are more likely to improve. When a team knows that they will be working together for a long time, and particularly when they are responsible for the entire delivery lifecycle from beginning to end, they are more likely to streamline their work so as to make things better for themselves.

The Disadvantages of Stable Teams

There are several disadvantages to stable teams:

1. Teams can become too stable. A real danger of stable teams is the potential for groupthink – everyone on the team starts to think and work in a common way, thereby being in danger to common blindspots. Luckily people still want to move to other teams for career management reasons, offering the opportunity to bring new viewpoints into other teams. In the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit we have the continuous improvement process blade which supports sharing of ideas across teams so that can also lessen the chance of groupthink. And, as mentioned earlier, some people may need to be motivated to move on to another team for interpersonal reasons.
2. You still may need to do projects. Sometimes your business team makes promises to their customers. For example, in a software company a sales person makes a big sale and promises that by a certain date your solution will have additional features that the customer needs (in immature organizations they’ll even make such promises without first negotiating this with the delivery team). Another example would be a financial institution that needs to fulfill new industry regulations that require changes to existing solutions. In both of these cases there is a large amount of work to be done that needs to be delivered before a certain date, and this may motivate you to treat this work as a project. You would still bring this work to the appropriate stable team(s) to accomplish as you normally would. However, you would also track the performance of the work to ensure that it is delivered in its entirety as appropriate. The implication is that projects may not completely go away

Evolving Stable Teams Over Time

Stable doesn’t mean stagnant.  Of course you still have basic people management issues such as people wanting to expand their skill set by working on something new by rotating to another team, people leaving the organization, and new people joining the organization.  So the team itself may go on for many years even though the membership of the team evolves over time.  Ideally these membership changes are not too disruptive: It’s not too bad adding a new person every month or so, or losing people at a similar rate, but gaining or losing several people in a short period of time can be painful.

Our Recommendation

Start experimenting with stable teams if you’re not already doing so. For most organizations the advantages clearly outweigh the disadvantages. In fact, you can see this in the Longevity decision point of the Form Initial Team goal diagram below.