me.andering

I read in several places that systems thinkers tend to keep their work to themselves, and that stories work best to get more people to do it.

So, here is a story with a diagram of effects - want more traffic? .

Context: Last week, Marc Evers and I were working on a quote for a community website, based on a request for proposal we got. We made the diagram to clarify our interpretations about the clients ‘business’ - a not for profit foundation supporting a community of practice.

I’m involved in a number of websites, e.g. to support my business, conferences and as of recently wyrd web - a budding company to support more of that. The diagram helped me understand this client, and some of my other contexts involving a community and its’ website(s) - e.g. systems administrators don’t always see why uptime and responsiveness provides business value to a community of practice (which if done well supports a thriving eco-system).

We decided to send the diagram to the client, and then I posted it. The diagram itself is isomorphic with part of its message: quality content drives traffic, which in turn drives quality content. The post attracted a nice comment, which helps me to write more about this topic .

We’ll see in the coming weeks whether this diagram helped the clients’ contact person in sharing our understanding of an effective website’s value with the not-for profit’s board.

Tomorrow and the day after sees Agile Open California come to life. With a strong theme “Sustainable Agility: Thriving in the Mainstream” , and a good number and variety of participants, it looks like an interesting addition to earlier Agile Opens in Europe and Agile Open Northwest.

To me (agile) software development is about delivering business value to the customer (by as little software as possible), and doing what works in practice. Today I’m writing a bit about routine versus variable cultures in organisations.

A current project, recent writings by Marc Evers and Nynke Fokma and upcoming sessions on organizational cultural patterns (based on Gerald Weinberg’s work) inspire me to write a little about… routine , so I can explain what the session is about, and evolve my understanding beyond what’s in the book. I’ve been using variations of this model for quite a while now, so it is about time to write about it

My mentoring/coaching clients fall roughly in two categories: those doing some form of chaos development, and those who supposedly have a bureaucratic, routine based process.

Digging deeper, my clients fall into one category: those who have some form of chaos development…

I’ll explain my digging along two lines:

1. Routine processes are uninteresting strategically
2. Routine processes are not focused on results. They only (seem to) work, because result-oriented people find a way to work around it and don’t tell anybody…
3. Routine is boring

Routine software development culture :
“We are developing software - follow The Rules”

Routine processes are uninteresting strategically

As Marc Evers writes in Keep on failing (in the small…):

“Predictable projects are not interesting, not in a strategic sense. If it’s predictable, there’s probably someone who has already done it or even created a product or service for it. Most interesting, strategic IT projects are in the complex space, where cause and effect are only coherent in retrospect and do not repeat. Best practices, recipes and step-by-step methods don’t work here. You need to steer based on feedback instead, through a cycle of probe, sense, respond”

So, if you want to create an entirely new market, you have to work based on feedback, if you want to go somewhere with an innovative product, you have to dance to the beat of life, and create your own beats

Routine processes are not focused on results

Because, to get anything done in a routine environment, you have to bend the rules. “The Rules” are usually made to prevent change of any kind, and “The Rules” have a tendency to grow in volume. As they grow in volume, they inevitably start to contradict themselves. Therefore, my clients only fall into one category

Now, as an investor or product owner, if you start a new project, you might feel tempted by the false idol of “The Rules”. It is easy to find IT suppliers who happily work with “The Rules”, making big, fixed-price contracts and maybe even using some form of Model Driven Architecture / Design, which is a translation of working by “The Rules” in software development terms. . .

As Nynke Fokma writes in Great innovations that help the world

“The intention of MDD, model and routine driven developments, is to make software work routine. It is a focus on the tool rather than on people”

So, why do routine-oriented people get scared when you mention agile. They hear a transformation from:

“We are developing software - follow The Rules”
to:
“We are developing software”,

which would be a Variable culture.

The mental image of a Variable culture for someone in a Routine culture looks like this:

“Variable Expansion”

If you remove “Follow the Rules”, Routine people can’t see the safety net. A Variable culture doesn’t have a safety net, so we don’t want to go there from routine.

However, as a mentor, a Variable culture is a much more pleasant state to start than a Routine culture - there are no “The Rules” to unlearn…

People in a variable organisation know that they are developing software, which makes them more aware than people in an oblivious culture:
“Are we developing software, really?”
“Oh, no, this is not software, It’s just some macro’s I made in Excel and Access” (never mind that these macro’s are the only things that are keeping track of millions of euros worth of business, as I saw in a moderately large manufacturer).

Clients in the variable space are usually a lot of fun for me. They are results oriented, and often have delivered software recently. They know they are developing software, they hire me to do better.

Usually, when they get to the point to hire a mentor or go for training, they know they have a bit too much chaos development. They already have some areas for improvement in mind, maybe some practices too, and with some creative questions, maybe a small retrospective, we collectively find some more.

We keep the results focus and the fun people are having at work, and add just enough process to make the team(s) more productive (deliver less defects, more business value).

What that looks like? I’ll leave that for an upcoming post…. There are loose ends here, some intentionally…

I’m not saying you don’t need any _routines_, which is differently from having a routine culture. Appropriate routines create a stable basis on which you can build and experiment. On the other hand, as nynke says: if you are in control, you are not going fast enough…

Credits:

The beat of life photo by ♥ Cherie ♥

“Variable Expansion” photo by Andreas Kollegger.

Gerald Weinberg, for his work on organisational cultural patterns

Nynke Fokma and Marc Evers for blog entries and discussions.

I’ll be co-hosting exploring the agile space at the Agile Business Conference (October 2 and 3 in London), and it seems at xp days London as well - People vs Process: Cultural Patterns of Software Organisations both with Marc Evers. I also recommend you check out the continuous integration and testing unconference - CITCON Europe 2007 in Brussels, October 19 and 20.

Making someone responsible to be a product owner, might make a development team feel absolved for ‘customery’ things. For a long time my gut feeling has been that the whole team (product owner, developers etcetera) should place themselves in the customers’ shoes. Attending presentations on product ownership in the eXPerience reports track at Agile 2007 confirmed that feeling.

Getting everyone to ‘crawl in the skin of’ their users creates simple to use products that do what they must and no more. Sometimes with amazing, simply beautiful interfaces.

There were presentations by:

• the BBC - Effective product ownership within a multi-component project by Mike Lowery and Marcus Evans,
• Yahoo - Less, Never more; Launching a product with critical features, and no more by Gabrielle Benefield and Scott Gatz, and
• Oxygen Ript (TM): Innovation and Collective Product Ownership by Ken H. Judy and Ilio Krumins-Beens.

The BBC story was on using the time of product owners wisely, I hope to write about that in a separate post.Yahoo’s and Oxygen’s stories are both about strong product ownership, focus on essentials, and last but not least: crawling under the skin of users. In the case of yahoo those were college students, in the case of oxygen women who are planning something, e.g. a home (re-)decoration or a wedding.

Both stories reminded me of ‘The Knowledge Creating Company’ by takeuchi and nonaka (1995). There is a chapter on how Panasonic created the first bread-baking machine. The chief engineer on that project had tried to understand bread baking from reading a book, and failed. Then he went to take lessons with a master baker in an Osaka hotel. He then tried to explain the bread-making and -baking process to his colleagues, and failed. Eventually groups of engineers would do internships with the master baker to get a ‘gut feel’ for breadmaking - this eventually helped them to resolve the myriad of constraints on a breadmaking machine.

Looking through the agile2007 proceedings, the written version of oxygen’s experience report actually mentions the knowledge creating company, I did not see that in the presentation.

If you are interested in product development, and haven’t read the knowledge creating company yet, I strongly recommend you do so. It is not an easy read (quite thorough), but you’ll come back with a more thorough understanding of product development.

The book also has good tips on how to collect knowledge and share it from one project to the next (or at the same time) - collecting and condensing knowledge takes time and concentrated effort - this gives project managers something to do with the spare time they get once their teams start to self-organise…

At Agile Open, I have heard rumours that there is going to be a Guerilla Open Space @ XP 2007. Today I have heard a rumour that the Agile Alliance is going to sponsor it.

I heard good stories on the Open Space being run last year at XP 2006 in Finland - Many attendees, extra rooms needed etc…

This year, the conference organisers decided not to have an Open Space. Charlie Poole, who facilitated it last year, offered to organise it again this year. He heard nothing from the organisers for a long time. At the last moment they said they are not going to have an Open Space. Does the word ’stonewalling’ sound familiar?

Question: Why would a conference organisation not support a part of the conference that was highly succesful last year??

So, if you are in Como for XP 2007 or otherwise (for the guerilla open space you probably will not have to register), I recommend you check out whether this Guerrilla Open Space rumour is actually true. Quality is guarenteed by the passion of the people who choose to be there ;).

(Answer: the ‘acadamic paper’ programme at xp200* is weak and people spontaneously apply ‘the law of two feet’ - they go if they can learn or contribute more somewhere else).

I’m proud to announce the next

XP Days Benelux 2006

16-17 November 2006

Mechelen, Belgium

This year, even more than in previous years, we have a program that is balanced along the lines of the agile manifesto, a fairly equal dosis of individuals and interactions, working software, responding to change and customer collaboration.

Quoting xp days london, it truly is more than eXtreme programming, more than one day… Given the amount of interactive and experiential sessions I’d be more inclined to call them eXPerience Days :). I’m also very happy to see a growing number of sessions around coaching, facilitation (with many highly qualified facilitators) and management. There is a mix of introductory, intermediate and advanced sessions, and we arranged the schedule so the beginning of the conference contains more introductory sessions, facilitating new participants to join more advanced sessions during the conference.

Official conference blurb follows:
XP Day Benelux is a two day international conference about agile software development, intended for software development and business people from all walks of life. It provides a good opportunity for exchanging ideas and sharing experiences and is suited for both experienced participants and beginners in agile software development. The focus of this conference is on practical knowledge, real-world experience, and active participation of everyone.

The number of participants is limited to 120, so we can keep sessions small and highly informative.

Some photo’s from last year (you can see and read more about last year here and here) to get a flavour of what’s to come.

I see Emmanuel is puzzling on why people take pictures at conferences. I take them, not to provide people with shortcuts, but to serve my and other participants’ memories and to give people who haven’t participated in the event (or a particular session) a flavour of it, so it hopefully encourages them to come next time (and that works as I heard for instance from someone who went to the second agile open after seeing the photos from the first). As for safety, I usually ask people for permission before taking photographs, and I don’t publish the ones where people don’t look good . Most of the time, experiential sessions are lots of fun, so that gives photos of smiling, active people - I don’t think there’s many people that object to seeing a happy picture of themselves (and if they would, I’d remove it, but I never had such a request).

So I hope when people see their own picture, it helps them re-live the fun they had when doing the session.

In the agile alliance board we’re ruminating on evaluation results of agile2006. Ron Jeffries has put up a page with his puzzles and ideas, and requests your feedback:

The Agile 2006 conference was very good, and the reviews from the attendees are mostly favorable. I’ve got some concerns and issues, and I’m soliciting feedback, input, ideas from people who have them. As an Agile Alliance board member, I might be able to get some things done. Tell me what to do.

(from Ron’s conference thoughts )

I’m sharing Ron’s puzzles. I’m also puzzling on direction for xp days and other agile conferences in Europe. So feel free to e-mail me or Ron, or leave a comment right here.
(I may type more later… injured a wrist swimming yesterday, strange but true)

A friend of mine says:

Question for your agile coach certification :

What do you do if your colleague does not want to write unit tests, because he believes that really good programmers don’t need unit tests?

Correct Answer:

Give your colleague a copy of John Bentley’s Programming Pearls. 100% ‘agile’ free content, and for real programmers only. It is chock full of cool algorithms, bitmanipulations and other stuff real programmers love.
Let him read it, and I doubt that he’ll still say that real programmers don’t need unit tests.

(For the un-real programmers: programming pearls is eXtremely Pragmatic, and full of advice on testing, debugging, asking the right questions to understand the problem, when optimizations are useful and when not etc. There are also many examples of problems that seem simple to program, with implementations that are surprisingly error-prone.

I read this book because someone else on the panel for ‘a good read‘ at next friday’s minispa recommended it.

I don’t often read ‘real programmers’ books anymore, and I’m glad this one was on the list - really good. I hope to see you next friday at minispa in London)

The drawing carousel Marc and I ran at agile2006 did not run as expected (in a good way) I called Vera Peeters, who originally designed the workshop, to tell her how it went. So far every drawing carousel we have ran is interestingly different in some way, we are puzzling on causes, so we can get more people to experience the flow resulting from promiscuously pairing in short episodes.

We had a somewhat smallish audience, so we assembled one team. Team dynamics were great. After strictly facilitating iteration reviews and standup meetings the team started to self-organise these. The team started to quickly decide pair rotation, and many decisions were taken through osmosis - as pairs rotated, information was spread around, so not everything needed to be discussed at the reflection and standup meetings.

One of those things, as we discovered during the session debrief, was that the team did not deliver a drawing, but more of a collage made of cutouts. We asked how that had happened, because we had been present at all of the iteration reflections and standups, and we were still surprised by the result. Cutting was not mentioned during the meetings (or at least, we did not notice…). The team said consensus on cutting was reached within the first three iterations, solely through pairing.

The team also asked difficult questions before the first iteration (I won’t mention the questions here, as that may spoil a future run…). Having one or more experienced testers, who are skilled in looking for holes and asking critical questions, in the team present at the first planning meeting helped in preventing rework early on.

The team had gotten into the zone / flow, where the team operated as one.

Factors that may have contributed to this:

• good mix of experienced agilista’s and ‘newbies’ - getting the ‘innocent newbie questions’ often expose holes in product and process - it also makes the debriefs easier to facilitate, as what happens in the simulation is,through the questions, easier to tie to real life
• Running it with only one team gave Marc and me ample time to discuss facilitation strategies during the drawing episodes. We were also able to pick up more keys from observation.
• Lynne Azpeitia was in the room as well, mostly observing, that gave us even more information to steer the session.
• There was no competion on resources with other teams (if there are more teams, the limited number of scissors, glue sticks and sticky tape rolls leads to resource competition and wait times - teams are not allowed to change tools while drawing, only after the standup and before restarting drawing.).

In hindsight, I did get a key for the team making cutouts. At one point, the team ran out of scissors. We had about five pairs, and four scissors… If they were mainly drawing, they would not need that many scissor.

pair drawing

switched pairs

drawing and cutting a prototype

standup

standup with list of tasks on the flipchart in the background

Editing the task list

drawing signed with business cards (some business cards were created on the spot with mini-index cards)

The team proudly presents their result

See also Other entries about drawing carousel, mainly photos from previous runs.