Disciplined Agile

Terraforming is the act of making an environment suitable for human habitation.  Terraforming has been popularized in science fiction as the act of evolving a planetary ecosystem, but in our context terraforming is the act of evolving your team’s physical workspace to make it more habitable for you to work.  Doing so in an important enabler for improving your way of working (WoW).

The Evolve Way of Working (WoW) process goal, the diagram for which is shown in Figure 1, involves several decision points that are pertinent to terraforming. In Disciplined Agile (DA) our philosophy is that teams should choose and evolve their WoW over time as they learn, and an important aspect of doing so is to recognize that you should be able to evolve your physical as well as virtual workspace.

Figure 1. The Evolve Way of Working (WoW) process goal diagram (click to expand).

As you’d expect, you have choices available to you.  In Figure 1 there are three decision points relevant to terraforming:

1. Organize Physical Environment. There are many options for organizing your physical environment.  A key issue is that you want people to be as close to one another as possible – the further away you are from someone the less likely you are to interact with one another, and the harder it becomes to share ideas and information. Ideally you want your team to have its own work room or at least be in a common open area together.  Having said that, it’s still useful to have “caves” or separate collaboration areas where people can escape to as needed to focus their efforts.
2. Choose Communication Styles. Some people are leery of work rooms or common workspaces because they’re afraid that they won’t be able to concentrate due to the noise.  There has in fact been numerous studies that show that productivity drops when people are forced to work in open work areas or worse yet “hoteling” desks.  Yes, this is definitely a problem.  However, it is vitally important to differentiate between the noise generated by people who aren’t working on your team and the information/discussions generated by those who are. In short, I want to hear what my fellow teammates are saying but not what the stranger beside me is. When your office is organized in an “open” manner we’ve found that you should strive to have everyone on your team is sitting together.  Furthermore, erect sound barriers (such as sound-proof whiteboards or moveable walls) between you and the other teams near by to provide further focus.  And speaking about whiteboards, you can never have too many.
3. Choose Collaboration Styles. The more flexible your physical workspace the greater your ability to collaborate with one another in an effective manner.

We’ve found that a great strategy for a company is to make physical things such as furniture and whiteboards readily available to teams.  Something as simple as a room full of (currently) unused furniture that a team can simply take from, or contribute things they’re no longer using into, goes a long way to providing flexibility.  And of course allowing teams to buy what they need, when they need it, is also crucial.  Smart organizations realize thatone of the best investments they’ll ever make is to spend a few thousand dollars on furniture and whiteboards to enable a team of people earning five or six figure annual incomes to improve their WoW.

Ideas for this blog was adapted from the book Choose Your WoW! This book is a handbook overviewing hundreds of agnostic techniques and strategies that agile and lean teams may decide to experiment with to see how well they work in the situation that they face.

Mark and I are lucky enough to spend a few weeks in India this March.  In addition to speaking at Agile India 2019 we’ll also be running several Disciplined Agile workshops and a user group presentation one evening.  Here is our schedule in both Pune and Bengaluru.

Pune:

• March 16&17.  Workshop – Implementing Disciplined Agile Delivery.  Delivered by Mark Lines.  This is our new workshop that works through how to use the DA toolkit to choose and then evolve your way of working (WoW).  You’ll learn how to break out of “method prison” if you’ve hit the limits of Scrum or SAFe, and more importantly how to take an agile approach in an enterprise-class setting.  This isn’t “purist agile” but instead is pragmatic and agnostic.

Bengaluru:

• March 19. Conference Presentation – Choose Your WoW! How Agile Software Teams Can Optimize their Way of Working. Presented by Scott Ambler.  This presentation goes into how your team can implement kaizen improvement loops effectively by taking a guided continuous improvement approach through applying the DA toolkit.
• March 20. Conference Presentation – Agile Transformations: The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly. Presented by Mark Lines and Scott Ambler. We’ve been helping organizations to improve their way of working (WoW) for years.  In this presentation we’ll share our experiences regarding what works and what doesn’t work in practice.
• March 20. User Group Presentation – Choose Your WoW! How Agile Teams Can Optimize Their Way of Working. Hosted by Mark Lines and Scott Ambler. This presentation goes into how your team can implement kaizen improvement loops effectively by taking a guided continuous improvement approach through applying the DA toolkit.  Get your questions answered for how to break out of the “method prison” you likely find yourself in with Scrum or SAFe.
• March 23. Workshop – Disciplined Agile in a Nutshell. Delivered by Mark Lines and Scott Ambler.  This is a quick overview of Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) and the DA toolkit.  This is a great way to come up to speed on DA and to prepare for the DA certification test.
• March 24-25. Workshop – Implementing Disciplined Agile Delivery. Delivered by Mark Lines and Scott Ambler.This is our new workshop that works through how to use the DA toolkit to choose and then evolve your way of working (WoW).  You’ll learn how to break out of “method prison” if you’ve hit the limits of Scrum or SAFe, and more importantly how to take an agile approach in an enterprise-class setting.  This isn’t “purist agile” but instead is pragmatic and agnostic.

If you’re based in India we hope you can make it out to one or more of these events.  If you have colleagues in India please pass this along to them as this may be a great chance for them to learn about DA from the source!

Choosing your way of working (WoW) isn’t just a one-time event, instead it is an ongoing effort.  Figure 1 shows the workflow for choosing and then evolving your WoW.  In our previous blog, Choosing Your Initial Way of Working (WoW), we worked through the left-hand side of Figure 1.  In this blog we explore how a team evolves their WoW via a series of experiments, hopefully ones that are guided by the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit.

Figure 1. The workflow for choosing and evolving your WoW.

As you can see in Figure 1, evolving your WoW is a two-step process at a high-level.  First, you identify that you have a potential issue with your current WoW and second you experiment with one or more potential improvements that you believe will address the issue that you’ve identified.  And of course you repeat this strategy whenever needed.

Identify Potential Process Issue

There are various ways that a team can identify a potential process issue:

1. Retrospectives. Retrospectives are a strategy for a team to reflect upon what is working well for them and what isn’t working so well. Some teams, particularly agile ones, will choose to hold a retrospective at the end of each iteration/sprint whereas lean teams tend to hold them on an as needed basis.  Regardless, one of the outputs of such a working session is a list of one or more potential issues the team wants to address.
2. Someone recognizes there’s an issue. Sometimes it’s as simple as someone saying “Hey, I think that X is a problem. Is there anything we can do about it?”
3. Someone from outside the team points it out. It can also be as simple as someone from outside of the team – one of your stakeholders, a colleague on another team, a leader within your organization, or others – identifying a potential issue.

The point is that there are multiple ways that potential issues are identified.  So what are you going to do about them?

Experiment with Potential Improvement(s)

For any process issues that you believe you can address, the next step is to experiment with one or more potential solutions. Experiment?  What?!?!?!?!  That’s right, experiment. Any given practice works well in some situations but not in others.  Just because a technique worked well for another team, maybe even one that you’ve worked on in the past, that doesn’t mean that it will work well for your team in the context of the situation that you currently face. There is no such thing as a best practice, regardless of the endless marketing you may have heard telling you otherwise.

What you need to do as a team is to identify ways that you can potentially address an issue, narrow down your options, and see how well a given technique works for you by trying it out in practice.  In other words, you need to run an experiment.  Figure 2 depicts a continuous improvement loop, also known as a “kaizen loop,” where you choose a technique to experiment with, you try it for a sufficient amount of time to determine whether it works for you, and then you decide what aspects of the technique (if any) you should keep and which you should abandon.  And if you’re enterprise aware your team will share your learnings with others.  Guided continuous improvement takes this one step further by employing the DA toolkit to help identify potential new WoW for you to experiment with that is more likely to work for you, thereby increasing your team’s rate of improvement.  Better decisions lead to better outcomes.

Figure 2. Guided continuous improvement.

An Example

Let’s consider an example.  We’ve been working together as a team for several months, have released the initial version of our solution into production, and have been working on our next release for about a month.  Our Team Lead has informed us that we’ve coming to the end of the funding for the team.  When we formed the team we received funding for a 6-month project, following our company’s fixed cost approach to funding solution delivery teams.  Our team expanded in size so that we could become a complete, whole team, and a side effect of that is that after a bit more than 4 months we’ve run out of money.  This is a problem that the team needs to address.

Terry, our Team Lead, gathers the team to work through the issue.  The first thing we do is discuss whether this is an issue that we can even influence.  The Team Lead believes that we can because our organization’s leadership is very happy with our work and can see the value in the product that we’re working on.  Because they have been receiving advice from an Executive Agile Coach they are beginning to realize that the way that they fund teams needs to evolve. Terry believes that our team is in a position to suggest, and then experiment with, a new approach to funding.

As a team we discuss what we need to do, realizing that there are really two issues commingled here: First, we’re funding a project, not the actual team.  Second, we’re taking a fixed-price approach. Carlos, our Agile Coach, suggests that we review the options captured by the Secure Funding process goal, the goal diagram for which is shown in Figure 3. It indicates that both project-based funding and fixed-price funding are the least effective options for agile teams, and more importantly it also indicates that there are better options available to us.  We look up the trade-offs associated with the options in our copies of Choose Your WoW! and after a bit of heated discussion agree that we should suggest to our management team that we adopt a stage-gate funding strategy for a product (long-lived) team.  Several of us wanted to push for a time-and-materials (T&M) approach, but we felt that would be a future improvement that we could experiment with once we’re successful with stage-gate funding.

Figure 3. The Secure Funding process goal diagram.

Terry, with the support of Polly (our Product Owner), manages to convince our senior managers to experiment with a new approach to financing.  Terry and Polly were able to describe the trade-offs associated with both the existing approach to funding and their suggested new approach. Interestingly, their suggestion was whole-heartedly supported by Florinda our finance officer.  She’s been concerned for several years about the way that IT projects have been funded, and is eager to move from a cost-based funding model towards one focused on investing our company’s money wisely. Our team was given the go-ahead to try the new funding strategy.

Sure enough, we run the experiment with stage-gate funding of a product team and it works well.  Our “stages” were three months in length, and after two rounds of such funding we successfully experimented with a T&M approach as we’d originally hoped.

A fundamental philosophy of agile is that teams should be allowed to own their process, to choose their way of working (WoW). In Disciplined Agile (DA) we take it one step further with the idea that teams should not only be allowed to choose their WoW, they should be supported and enabled in doing so.  In other words, let’s help teams to be awesome.

Figure 1 depicts the workflow for how a team can choose and then evolve their WoW. The workflow shows four key activities that a team will iteratively work through as they need. In this blog we focus on initially choosing your team’s WoW.

Figure 1. The workflow for choosing and evolving your WoW (click to enlarge).

When adopting your initial WoW, the first thing to do is to identify whether you team is allowed to choose its WoW or whether one has been chosen for them. Let’s start by exploring how you would proceed if you’re allowed to choose your own WoW.

Tailoring Your Initial WoW

When a team is allowed to choose its own WoW the first step is to select the appropriate lifecycle given the situation faced by the team. Lifecycles, in some ways, are “methods” in that they show the high-level workflow for a team. They are the glue that combines detailed techniques/practices into a coherent whole (more on this below). Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) supports several lifecycles:

1. Agile. A Scrum-based project lifecycle.
2. Lean. A Kanban-based project lifecycle.
3. Continuous Delivery: Agile. A Scrum-based lifecycle for long-standing product teams.
4. Continuous Delivery: Lean. A Kanban-based lifecycle for long-standing product teams.
5. Exploratory. An experimentation-based lifecycle, based on Lean Startup, for exploring marketplace needs.
6. Program. A lifecycle for a large “team of teams.”

Although the focus of DA is on agile and lean ways of working, DA recognizes that in some cases you may still decide to adopt a waterfall/serial lifecycle. DA doesn’t explicitly support waterfall, but as you can see in Figure 2 we do recognize that in very low-risk situations a traditional approach makes sense.

Figure 2. A flowchart summarizing how to choose a lifecycle (click to enlarge).

Your lifecycle will of course evolve, either incrementally via normal evolution of your WoW or because your team explicitly decides to adopt a different one (once they’ve learned more about themselves as a team).

Once your team has chosen an initial lifecycle, the next is to select the detailed techniques that you’re going to follow as a team.  This is typically done as a series of process tailoring workshops where the team works through the appropriate goal diagrams to identify how they want to work together.  Figure 3 depicts the goal diagram for Secure Funding, you can see how it walks you through the decision points that you need to consider and potential techniques for addressing those decision points. Don’t worry, if you’re not familiar with all of the options they are described in the book Choose Your WoW!, with a description and the trade-offs associated with each technique summarized in tables. Knowing your options, and the trade-offs associated with them, enables your team to make better process decisions (which in turn leads to better process outcomes). This is something we call guided continuous improvement.

Figure 3. The Secure Funding process goal (click to enlarge).

In theory it’s possible to do a single “big bang” process tailoring workshop when a team is in initially formed, but we’ve found that leads to process bloat because the team has to guess at too many things all at once.  Unless you’re in a regulatory environment requiring defined process descriptions up front, it’s usually better to tailor your WoW in stages on an as-needed basis.

Adopt Existing Method or Framework

In some organizations teams are still not allowed to choose their WoW.  This may happen for several reasons:

• The organization is new to agile.
• Your organizational leadership wants every team to follow the same process (this is a spectacularly bad idea because context counts). This is often because they don’t understand that you can have a consistent governance process without inflicting the same process on all the teams.
• You’ve hired coaches that only know one method or framework.
• Leadership still has a command-and-control culture or they don’t trust your team to do this (either because you don’t have the experience required on your team or because you’re not using something like the DA toolkit yet).
• You’re in a regulatory environment (e.g. medical device development) and don’t realize that you can choose and evolve your WoW in any way that you like, as long as you remain compliant and document what you do (yes, that’s annoying).

The problem with forcing a team to follow an existing method or framework, no matter how popular it is, is that it rarely fits the situation faced by the team. It might be a great method, but it’s the wrong one for the team – context counts, every team is unique and faces a unique situation, so should be allowed to choose and evolve their own WoW to enable them to be as effective as they can be. Think of it like this: If a team is competent enough to build a solution for their stakeholders, surely they must also be competent enough (perhaps given a bit of help) to choose their own WoW?

Regardless of whether you were allowed to choose your initial WoW or had one forced upon your team, this is only a start. Your team will still want to evolve your WoW as you learn and as your situation evolves. More on this in our next blog.

MORE INFORMATION

For more information about how your agile team can choose and evolve its way of work, we recommend our book Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working. If you want to succeed at enterprise agile you need choices, not prescriptions.

In Continuous Improvement Through Experimentation we described how a team could improve their way of working (WoW) via the strategy depicted in Figure 1.  In Better Decisions Lead to Better Process Outcomes we showed how you can increase the rate of improvement by identifying potential improvements that are likely to work in your situation.  In this blog we describe how to accelerate your team’s improvement by running multiple improvement experiments in parallel.

Figure 1. Running an experiment to evolve your WoW (click to enlarge).

The strategy is exactly as it sounds.  Instead of running a single process improvement experiment at a time you run several at once.  You may decide to do this for one of several reasons:

• You want to compare several strategies that potentially address the same process issue you hope to resolve.
• You have several process issues that you hope to resolve at the same time.
• Your team is currently running an experiment and feels it has capacity to take on another improvement experiment.
• Techniques are dependent on one another, such as automated regression testing and continuous integration (CI).

Although this strategy will help your team to increase its rate of improvement, there are two fundamental challenges with it.  First, it is harder to assess the effectiveness of an individual technique when multiple experiments are being run in parallel because they can interact with each other.  For example, you decide to experiment with holding stakeholder demos and with active stakeholder participation at the same time (you weren’t doing either one until now).  When you see improvements in the quality of stakeholder satisfaction with the product you’re developing, is that the result of one of the practices but not the other or both of them in combination? If can’t definitively answer that question, it will make it hard to assess the effectiveness of each technique.

Second, you only have so much capacity for experimenting with new WoW. It can be hard enough, sometimes, to convince your organization’s leadership to allow you the time to experiment in the first place.  Getting time to run multiple experiments is even harder.

Our point is that running an experimentation-based approach to evolving your way of working (WoW) makes sense.  In some cases running multiple experiments in parallel can be even more effective.

MORE INFORMATION

For more information about choosing and evolving your WoW, we humbly suggest that you consider reading our book Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working. If you want to succeed at enterprise agile you need choices, not prescriptions.