Guest post by Michael DePaoli

If your development team or manufacturing team is considering moving to using Kanban vs. Agile Scrum, one of the biggest decisions is choosing the right agile development methods for the job. Let’s discuss the realities of implementing Kanban and some of the fundamentals that hold back both Kanban and Scrum implementations.

On paper, Kanban is certainly easier to kick-start from a change management perspective because you can leave current roles and processes largely intact; you just need to get commitment from the business to adhere to three basic principles:

1. Provide a high degree of visibility/transparency of the state of all work queued and in progress
2. Establish and respect WIP(work in progress) limits in the value flow
3. Commit to execution in a ‘pull-based’ manner from the prioritized work queue

Yeah, just get commitment and practice of these three things… Much easier said than done in my experience because they are frequently outside the circle of influence of those driving the change to implementing Kanban!

Usually it isn’t that the agile software teams are unable to execute under Scrum; the fundamental issue is that the business isn’t willing to accept a “pull-based” execution model (required for Kanban and Scrum).

Businesses continue to make irresponsible commitments to customers and investors. This only perpetuates crystal-ball thinking, fixed-date, fixed-scope and fixed-cost projects. It’s the classic sales-driven model we see all too often where the sales arm doesn’t respect the capability of its product development group to produce predictable value for the customer in a timely manner, and with an agreed-upon level of quality. After all, quality is a business decision.

This irresponsible action ends up causing organizations to be unpredictable in their delivery, have lower quality, and to burn out their teams. These outcomes in turn destroy brands, ruin company reputations on Wall Street, increase the percentage of each investor dollar serving up technical debt (in lieu of adding new value to products), and causes instability in the organization’s systems due to turnover.

Bottom line, if an organization can’t make the commitment to respect their product development system’s proven delivery capability at the current level, neither Kanban nor Scrum will provide predictability. But even in the face of this dysfunction, agile methodologies like Kanban and Scrum can still provide faster learning to teams, which allows them to test their assumptions faster and provide more value to their customers by delivering what they actually need.

In conclusion, I leave you with this advice: ignore the myths and hype about Kanban. Before you can make any decisions on the Kanban vs Scrum debate, you must first evaluate:

• Your organization’s product development and sales culture,
• The nature of the demand for service from product development,
• The competency of your organization to plan and execute change, and
• The degree to which you’re willing to face the truth

Only then can you choose the best agile software tool for the job.

Michael DePaoli Bio

Over his 26 years in IT, Michael DePaoli’s experienced has included serving in different
traditional roles in highly respected companies. The roles have included analyst, software
engineer, quality engineer, development manager, project manager, Director of Engineering,
VP of R&D, CTO and Consultant in companies, such as American Express, Sprint, Deloitte
Consulting, Sapient, Knowledgepoint, Adobe Systems, AOL, NetApp and VersionOne. Michael
works as an agile / lean coach and product consultant with the VersionOne services group.

I am very grateful to New England Agile (and Ron Verge in particular) for videotaping my presentation. For those of you who haven’t heard me speak about culture and adoption, I believe this is a crucial message for anyone acting as an Agile change agent. Enjoy.

Agile Culture and Adoption Survival Guide from Agile New England on Vimeo.

P.S. I am actively working on an eBook for those who prefer print. Drop me an email if you want to help review it before it comes out.

P.P.S Slides are here.

Are you tired of mediocrity and interested in doing really great work?

Identify your heroes to find out what really matters to you.

I was reading Focus (which is a great book and I’ll blog about sooner or later) and there was a bonus chapter about How to do Great Work that totally rocked my world. It was a simple question:

Who are your heroes?

At first I thought, I don’t have any heroes. But then my mind started wandering. My first hero surprised me. A lot.

But the really interesting part is why they are your hero.

I am sharing this exercise because it can help you discover who you really are and what is important for you. For me this short activity was profoundly insightful. YMMV.

#1 Conan the Barbarian

I imagine that at this point many readers are having a hard time relating to my hero or are perhaps even begin to wonder about me as a person. I was mystified myself until I thought about what attributes of Conan make him a hero for me:

Strength of mind, courage, and for doing what is right. Conan strictly adhered to the warrior code and would often get into all kinds of difficult situations for doing the right thing no matter what the cost. Conan spent much of his life as a wandering mercenary – I finally seems to have found a path as a consultant in the guise of an Agile Coach.

At a young age, Conan was taught what was best in life: “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of the women.” Metaphorically, I see this aligned with the Good To Great management practice of getting the right people on the bus.

#2 Mahatma Gandhi

He is my hero for selflessness, courage and wisdom. Gandhi believed in a cause and purpose greater than himself. So do I. My mission is to make a difference in the lives of the people and companies I work with.

“Be the change you want to see” is a famous statement from Gandhi and is central to how I think about myself and my work. Whether at home with my kids or working with clients, the better I am at modeling useful behaviours, the more effective I am in helping others.

One consequence of this is that I am very dedicated to not only learning useful tools (communication, facilitation, etc.) but more importantly mastering my inner game and developing myself as a human being. Like Stephen Covey says, victory begins at home.

#3 Captain James T. Kirk

 I’m 42 and I watched a lot of Star Trek when I was a kid.

The aspects of Captain Kirk that I admire are leadership, ingenuity, boldness and passion.

Leadership: Kirk pursued his objectives with a single-minded purpose. He was caring and supportive of his crew and yet could make difficult decisions in times of great need.

Ingenuity: Perhaps creativity captures what I mean. With laser-like focus on a goal, there were no holds barred in how it was achieved. I get goosebumps when I think of Kobayashi Maru – a demonstration of changing the rules of the game (literally) in order to win.

Passion: Kirk brought energy to any situation he was involved in. He lived life with a vim and vigor, one day at a time.

#4 Sarwan Sahota

I was startled and perhaps even alarmed to find my dad on my list of heroes since I am still working through the usual stuff that goes on in families (See Brene Brown’s Gifts of Imperfections).

When I started to think about what I admired in him, I realized I admire him for doing the right thing and having a strong code of ethics.

My dad was raised as a Sikh. The religion – designed to help people to survive via fighting prowess – says to always carry a weapon (Kirpan); never cut your hair so that long beard and hair demarcate you as a Sikh. I learned the attitude – to quote Rodney Dangerfield – “I don’t take shit from nobody.”

My dad has a strong sense of ethics that would often put him controversial situations with those less concerned. One simple example: I remember as a kid when we visited his office and would use the photocopier (when prepping to play one of a myriad of games) he would have us keep track of the number of copies and pay the cost into petty cash. I still think about this today – when I am at a client site and use a printer, I make sure to offset the cost.

Sacrifice. When if came to doing the right thing, my dad was prepared to make whatever sacrifices were needed. He put his job and career on the line to fight for what he thought was best for Ryerson University (where he worked) and his coworkers.

Deep Insight – what defines me

When I look at my heroes, I see they have a lot in common that define how I see myself and what I value. Heroes are what drive our behaviour.

Do the right thing regardless of personal cost.

This is what defines me. It is a chilling and profound insight.

The scary part is that it explains why I have cared more than others around me for doing what is best for the people, for the team, for the company. It explains why I have swum so hard against the current to the point of rupturing relations and employment. And my own personal cost has been high.

Finding Balance

I am fortunate that in the last year, I have found balance.  Flawless Consulting helped me learn to ask clients what problem they want solved and to focus only on that. So I am doing better than ever staying aligned with those around me.

I do not have a guardian angel like Conan and Kirk, so I remind myself to pause and reflect on my personal safety in potentially risky situations. I am doing a better job, but it’s hard not to be distracted by doing the right thing.

Who are your Heroes?

I encourage anyone interested in self-discovery to do this short exercise. And for those who are particularly courageous, to share them and link back here.

Last week I presented Agile Culture and Adoption Survival Guide at Agile New England. My message was around needing to understand corporate culture before undertaking Agile adoption or Agile transformation. The message resonated really strongly with participant and I received many personal thanks from people afterwards. The purpose of this post is to share additional data from that session.

Agile Failure

I did a hand vote to see how much failure people had seen with Agile adoption they were involved in. See photo on the right: most of the group rated their experiences with Agile success at 3 out of 5.

The results were pretty much consistent with the other times I have  run this: about 50% failure. I guess we can call this one – Agile is heading for the trough of disillusionment. But I haven’t given up – it’s time to up our game and turn this around.

Culture at Participant Companies

 Participants were worked in small groups to discuss what was the dominant culture at their company using the Schneider Model.  The photo below shows a histogram of the dominant culture. The peak is 30 participants identifying a control culture. It is interesting to note the relatively high 16 for Competence culture (vs. previous workshops) that represents the high density of hard-core engineering companies in the Boston area.

Closing Thoughts

Maybe the 50% failure is because 50% of the companies are control culture. Probably not entirely true, but this may be a helpful meme that allows us to change our approaches and behaviours to succeed.

Here is the latest version of my talk that I will give at Agile New England – minor updates and tweaks since the Agile Tour Toronto version last month.

I am really excited about my upcoming methods & tools article on culture and have been getting some great feedback from reviewers. Two comments requested clarification around supporting analysis for my thesis that Agile, Kanban and Software Craftsmanship have a cultural bias.

Here is what I said:

These results (Agile fits better with some cultures) have been validated through group workshops where participants performed the same activity after having an explanation of the culture model.

Workshop Format

1. Handout the  Schneider Model to everyone.
2. Form into groups of 4 to 6 people.
3. Each group selects a handout with either Agile Manifesto, Agile Principles, Kanban Principles, Software Craftsmanship or Declaration of Interdependence.
4. Groups draw Schneider grid on a flipchart.
5. Each principle is written on a sticky note and posted in the most appropriate quadrant.

Results

The following results were from an XPToronto User Group session earlier this year. I also ran this at SoCal LeanKanban and got similar results, but my camera sadly wasn’t working so I have no evidence.

Kanban

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The results here are pretty clear – Kanban is centred around Control culture. So two groups with strong agreement with the proposed model.

Software Craftsmanship

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The group on the left suggests that there is slightly more emphasis on Cultivation culture while the group on the right assigned the most items to Competence culture.

What support is there to the claim that Software Craftsmanship promotes Competence culture (as based on the manifesto)? In this case, I would say it is partially supported by the results.

These results indicate that language is not precised and that the experiment would need to be repeated several times with discussion and reconciliation of results to get a clear outcome. 

Agile Manifesto and Principles

When I ran the workshop in Toronto, no group picked this, so we did a large groups swarm where40 people just wrote out an item and posted it. That’s why there are duplicates. There was a little bit of clustering like items.

The diagram shows Collaboration culture as dominant followed by Cultivation. The term “working software” appears in both competence and control. In my analysis, this terms was ignored because it doesn’t have a strong fit with any of the cultures.

This result supports the claim that Agile is about Collaboration and Cultivation Culture.

Declaration Of Interdependence

The results of this have been written up in an earlier blog post - DOI? Cultural Shotgun

Conclusions

These results provide some support for the hypothesis that each of Agile, Kanban, and Software Craftsmanship have a cultural bias. It is worth noting that this experiment suffers from method bias in that participants were using the same analysis process of assigning attributes from manifesto to the culture model. An alternate workshop/experiment (just invented) would involve having participants brainstorm what are the most important values and then map them to the culture model.

I am very excited to share some learnings over the last 6 months on culture and transformational leadership. Here is the presentation I am giving tomorrow at Agile Tour Toronto and in Boston (@Agile New England) next month. Enjoy.

I have seen a recurring pattern in large organizations – there are large-scale projects that span many separate functional groups, departments and geographic locations. These projects often perform poorly and are difficult to manage effectively. In most cases, Agile is not the most valuable approach to get these projects on track.

At Agile Coach Camp I convened a session to explore this problem and identify some compensations to improve the situation. Many thanks to all the contributors – this is a group work product.

The Problem

Some of the common problems notes by participants were:

• Groups working in silos with missing, slow or broken feedback loops – lot’s of little disconnected pieces
• Incompatible vocabulary between technology and business
• The environments register high for “complexity of self”
• Staff in overload and multi-tasking
• Low visibility, awareness, priority

Please refer to the poster notes for full details.

Compensations

I use the word compensation, to indicate an action that can be taken to mitigate the problem. As there are systemic and widespread challenges in these environments, we did not discuss solutions.

Here are some of the key compensations:

• Draw a project map – who is where, what skills, what % on the project, what component
• Recognize and articulate feedback loops and flow of value
• Create a war-room with kanban boards for all groups
• Measure working software AKA running tested features and “definition of done”
• Conduct a project chartering session including clarification of business value
• Find someone to play the role of project lead (e.g. Toyota Chief Engineer)
• Make sure everyone has tooling for distributed communication

Contributors

• Paul Boos
• Dante Vilardi
• Pascal Pinck

Ooops. I can remember who was there. Please remind me by sending me an email so I can add your name here.

At Agile 2011, I was very fortunate to attend David Chilcott’s session on NonViolent Commuication (NVC) for Agile Coaches. NVC is a very powerful communication toolkit that has already helped me. I wonder how I ever managed without it.

At it’s very simplest form it is about explicitly considering your (and other’s) feelings and needs. The following diagram outlines the key elements of NVC for coaches.

Observing

Observing is an important skill for an Agile Coach. In NVC, the goal is to observe without evaluation, judgement or analysis. The idea here is that when we focus on observable data (I see, hear, etc.), we can operate and reason about what is actually happening rather than the filtered, distorted version that our brains typically serve up to us.  In the workshop we practiced distinguishing observations from evaluations and practiced removing the evaluation to focus on observable properties.

Of course, you can also practice observing with my fun Coaching Skills Dojo.

Feeling

People’s feelings shape the conversation. They can uplift and energize or take you down a rabbit-hole. Here is an inventory of feelings that you can use to understand what’s going on with people.

Needs

Needs are the place where feelings come from. Positive feelings come from needs that are met. Negative feelings come from unfulfilled needs. Here is an inventory of needs that can help you identify what’s going on.

Know thyself!
As a coach, it behooves us know where we are so we can help others.

First, get an understanding of your feelings and needs in a particular situation. This will allow you to more effectively communicate and manage your internal state.

Second, consider what you client is experiencing in terms of feelings and needs. If you pay attention to facial expressions, tonality and words, you will be in position to ask clarifying questions to understand what’s going on for them.

Exercise to find balance

The best part of the workshop for me was the following exercise:

1. Sit in a chair with your eyes closed and think of a situation.
2. What are your feelings in this situation?
3. What are your needs in this situation?
4. Stand up, open your eyes so that you leave the situation in the chair.
5. Look at the chair and imagine seeing yourself in that situation.
6. Now coach the person in the chair. Say an appreciation. What else will you say to them to help them?
7. Sit back down in the chair, close your eyes and integrate.

At Agile 2011, I spent a lot of my time in the OpenJam running sessions on StrategicPlay® with Lego® so that people would have a chance to experience what I see as a strikingly powerful technology.

What follows are some of the models and deep insights that were developed about Agile and how it is experienced at companies. Even though I know a fair bit about adopting Agile, I still find I learn a lot hearing these stories.

Scrum Alliance Leadership

See related post Scrum Alliance Leadership – Models for Success