Disciplined Agile

In my experience in running dozens of process tailoring workshops, over several years, with of teams of every shape size and experience level and in different organizations, the most recurring comment is that the workshops “revealed all kinds of options we didn’t even realize were options!”   Although almost always a bit of a hard sell at the outset, I have yet to work with a team unable to quickly grasp and appreciate the value of these activities.

I had to do quite a bit of experimenting in order to get the timing and content of the workshops right – and learned over time that success is also predicated on knowing whom to include when. My first attempts were gruelling, close-to-full day affairs with entire teams in attendance, held at or close to project kickoff. Though transparent and inclusive, to my surprise this approach was actually deemed a waste of their time by many team members, especially those whose contribution would occur primarily in the construction phase. First lesson learned – A technical team lead, architect or senior developer can actually stand in for most of the developers in the early stages. I find it helpful to always bear in mind what George Dinwiddie (http://www.velocitypartners.net/blog/2014/02/11/the-3-amigos-in-agile-teams/) dubbed “the 3 amigos” in determining who needs to attend a process tailoring session. Be it at inception, construction, or even in transition, you need to tailor not only the processes, but also the attendance of the workshop in order to ensure you have the right mix of people, with the right collaborative mindset, to cover issues pertaining to 1) the business problem being addressed  2) the potential technical solutions to that business problem and 3) the processes (both team and organizational) that will enable the work to be carried out.

My second lesson learned pertained to the format and presentation of the process blades themselves. I found that simply working from the published process maps was insufficient, as we ran into onerous issues around how to best record the WoW choices teams were making. I eventually reproduced the entire process blade library in a spreadsheet format, with columns for comments. This seemingly innocuous administrative step quickly ushered in the third lesson learned – the sessions can be used not merely to document an immediate WoW decision, but also to identify future, more “mature” aspirational choices which the team can set as goals over a specified time period.

A fourth lesson learned, and one that was also enabled by using a simple spreadsheet tool, is that it became far easier to Align with Enterprise Direction. By “locking down” enterprise-level process choices across all the blades where applicable, a lot of potentially fruitless (at that point in time) discussion was saved for many a team. No use in discussing test automation strategies to death for instance in divisions still completely relying on manual tests, or at the opposite end of the spectrum, teams endowed with high-performing, well-integrated CI/CD environments. This is a large part of what DA calls self-organization within appropriate governance.

The fifth and final major lesson learned was to never start from a blank slate if at all possible. I would typically show up at a team’s first process tailoring workshop with a pre-filled version from another team facing somewhat similar challenges (the identifying data being scrubbed so they could not identify the previous team). I would then challenge the new team to reflect on the choices and determine whether they made sense for their own context. This also saved time and effort, as there are recurring themes and common challenges within organizations that all teams face.

Here’s an important note on determining participation – Ultimately, the teams themselves are the best arbiters of who should attend the sessions at varying stages of advancement. Allowing this will typically result in a bit of initial over participation, followed by under participation (especially is the pressure is on to get “real” work done!) – the key as facilitator is to coax the team back into balanced participation, and to lobby the organization for the necessary support in freeing people up. The support will become easier and easier to obtain as the benefits of allowing teams to choose their WoW become apparent.

Finally, be prepared for surprises. I once ran through the Program process blade with a team, only to have them come to the realization that … they weren’t really a Program! Which was actually a good thing as it helped avoid introducing a considerable amount of overhead, particularly in the area of program-level KPIs.

A stakeholder is someone who is materially impacted by the outcome of the solution.  In this regard, the stakeholder is clearly more than an end-user: A stakeholder could be a direct user, indirect user, manager of users, senior manager, operations staff member, the “gold owner” who funds the project, support (help desk) staff member, auditors, your program/portfolio manager, developers working on other systems that integrate or interact with the one under development, maintenance professionals potentially affected by the development and/or deployment of a software project.  To simplify the definition of stakeholders, we’ve adopted Outside In Software Development’s four stakeholder categories:

1. End users.  These are the people who will use your system, often to fulfill the goals of your principals.  They typically want systems which are usable and enable them to do their jobs more effectively.
2. Principals.  These are the decision makers who ultimately pay for and then put your system to use.  This includes gold owners, senior business management, and purchasers of the commercial systems.
3. Partners.  These people make the system work in production.  This includes operations staff, support staff, trainers, legal experts, installers, application hosting companies, and application developers on external systems which integrate with yours.
4. Insiders. These are members of the development team and people who provide technical and business services to your team.  This includes enterprise architects, database administrators, security experts, network experts, toolsmiths, marketing experts, and sales staff.

So why does DAD use the term stakeholder instead of customer?  Although customer is a perfectly good term, it’s very popular with agile adherents, we’ve found that many agile teams will inadvertently limit themselves to considering just end users and principals to be their customers and miss the partner stakeholders and sometimes even the insider stakeholders.  Granted, you’ll often work with some insider stakeholders as a matter of course throughout the project so it’s hard to miss these people, although both of us have seen core agile teams neglect working with their organization’s enterprise architects in the name of “having the courage to worry about tomorrow’s problem tomorrow.”  Our experience is that although the term stakeholder is a bit more formal than the term customer, in practice it seems to lead agile teams to a more mature strategy.

One challenge with the term stakeholder, which customer also suffers from, is that it reinforces the “them vs. us” mentality prevalent in many IT departments.  When we use terms such as “the stakeholders” or “the customers” or “the business” they imply that we see ourselves as a group set apart from them.  The reality is that it isn’t the business, it’s our business, that we’re all in this together.  It’s important to be careful with terminology.