Lean Startup Concepts
The Lean Startup movement is moving around the world and I have done a number of presentations at my work at Scanjour to establish a common understanding of the concepts. We have also started to look into how we can utilize Lean Startup thinking in our product development to create more data driven validate learning. It will be really great, and I expect we will get very good results from that approach.
The presentation I did at Scanjour can be seen below (it is continiously being improved based on feedback).
Distributed Scrum and Agile
At ScrumForum.dk events in Marts 2012 I did a presentation about Scrum and Agile in a Distributed setup. Find the Prezi presentation below.
Check-in with the kids
I started a practice with my daughter, Silja, last autumn, where we did a check-in and reflected on the day and what had happened in school. After she started in first grade, the typical answer when I asked how school had been was: Fine… When I asked her what she had done in the school, she could not remember specific events.
In the beginning of first grade, she had used a practice a couple of times, where the teachers showed the kids to evaluate different activities by rating them on 1 to 5.
So we extended that practice and I started to ask her how the day had been on a scale from 1 to 5 (she likes to have 1 as the best possible and 5 as a really bad day). Then I ask her what should have been different if it should be a better rating and she starts to talk about events during the day that she did not like. Suddenly we have a conversation about events during the day that I did not hear about in the past and it feels much easier for her talk about them. Often it only takes a couple of minutes and we do the talk when time feels right and we can just have the 1:1 conversation. I don’t judge the events but let her talk about the different experiences during the day.
A typical conversation would happen like this:
- Me: Silja, have has you day been today.
- Silja: : <thinking> I would give it a 3
- Me: Okay, and what should have happened for it to be a 2?
- Silja: <thinking> I god sad in the morning because of … and when we had the break this happened… and after lunch we did this … that was not fun… <etc>
- Me: <silent> okay, and if the day should have been even better be a 1, what should then have happened?
- Silja: <thinking> then we should have done this … and this …
It is amazing how this simple talking protocol has established a way where Silja and I can reflect on her day at school.
I have used similar reflection practices with agile teams and it can be a very powerful tool to focus the reflection.
If you have kids, try some of your agile thinking not only at work but also home.
User Story Mapping – book from Jeff Patton
This week I watched the follow up User Story Mapping slidecast from Jeff Patton (UIEpreviews). On one of the last slides I could see the picture (to the left), where a book about User Story Mapping is expected to be available in winter 2011 (by Jeff Patton). This is so great. Last week at the ALE2011 conference in Berlin I talked with Rachel Davies about Jeff Patton and he should write a book on this subject. I can’t wait to dig further into this area, since I have seen it is a valuable way of working with User Stories. It creates the model that different roles can discuss, test and understand before starting implementing the stories.
ALE2011 – Hansei
The ALE2011 Unconference was last week, so now it is time for some Hansei.
The week before the Unconference, I got an upset in the back, so I had to have some intensive chiropractic treatments on Monday and Tuesday, before I could fly to ALE2011. At the Unconference I had to go to my room and lay down with my “Ice Pack” a couple of times during the day, and when I did a talk about Offshore Software Patterns, I was a bit afraid to move around on stage.
But the Unconference was GREAT. So many people from all over Europe with energy, passion and just wanted to share and discuss. I would not have missed it.
It is amazing how the teams have organized this event. Thanks!
What was good?
There was so many things that was great at this Unconference, some of the highlights that comes to my mind are
- The was an Unconference
- The combination of talks, open space and lightning talks, was a great blend
- Dinner with a stranger, was a great way to meet new people and have time to know them better
- 3 great keynotes, especially the one from Dave Snowden was inspiring and started a lot of reflecting
- An amazing retrospective with about 200 people
- All the sharing and discussions in between sessions, at lunch time and at the bar etc.
- A lot of great people with interesting stories from all over Europe
- All participants with deep practical experience in Agile
What should be reduced?
- People with larger egos talking about what they have done and how good they were (there was only a few J)
- I should have use the “The Law of Two Feet” and not staying at Open Space sessions when I felt it would be more valuable to go to another one
- Some open space sessions where more “One man talking”, not people sharing and discussing
How could the Unconference be even better?
- More sharing and stories related to Lean areas, since Agile was rather dominating
- The retrospective round from each of the 8 groups (about 200 people) took a long time and the energy was going down. Rather we should have jumped directly to the “Remember the Future” exercise.
- Have all the rooms at the same floor, so people are more co-located
- More sharing of cases from different companies
- Have more talks with pair-speakers from different countries
What did I bring home?
- A lot of energy
- Inspiration to start doing more writing
- New friends from the ALE Network
- A couple of new books to get on my Kindle
- A nice PairCoaching mug, the right size for a double espresso (using it right now)
- I want to learn more about the Cynefin model from Dave Snowden. It has already been on my reading backlog for a couple of years, but now I moved it up
- I want to learn more about Beyond Budgeting and how it has been used in different companies
Whats next?
- We will now boost the ALE|Denmark group even more and the goal for next meeting by end September is to create ideas for a product.
- @HansBaggesen and I will do some Ale2011 Sharing sessions at Fujitsu DK
- More reading, writing, sharing
13 Advices from ALE2011 for Software Offshore
At ALE2011 I did a open space session with Alexey Krivitsky about “Share your stories and advice for not building walls in Software Offshore”. There was a lot of interesting stories from people both working onshore and offshore in different organizations. Without filtering or any additional comments, I will list the 13 advices that where suggested by the participants (I hope I got all reasonable correct).
13 Advices for not building walls in Offshore Software
- See at your offshore teams as your own developers
- Have the offshore teams working on projects and products and not only simple tasks
- There have to be a change agent in the onshore organization on all level to facilitate the offshore setup
- Have a Offshore coach to help the offshore team(s)
- Have a very good Product Owner that understand working with agile and Scrum
- Have small offshore teams
- The Product owner must visit the offshore teams on a regular basis
- Make sure everybody understands both the onshore and offshore culture
- Hire a local agent to work offshore with same background as the offshore team
- Involve the Offshore team before going agile
- Do complete financial calculations before starting offshore
- Build motivation and domain knowledge by showing the offshore teams how their software is used (the software they are developing)
- Find a good offshore partner to have a long term relationship
Alexey is also capturing ideas, concepts etc. on http://www.scrumoffshore.net/ and I will start do some structured writing about “Offshore Software Patterns” for building a global system at http://blog.lean-agile.dk/offshorepatterns
Some years ago I made the picture with the “Right Thing” and the “Right Way” to describe to focus and role for the ScrumMaster and Product Owner. The Product Owner must focus on what to work on and make sure the Team are working on the Right Thing in the best possible order where the ScrumMaster must focus on how things are being worked on to make sure it is the best possible way.
I have often seen this to be difficult, because traditionally it is used to be handled only by the Project Manager. Now it is split between two different roles (people). During the last couple of years I have especially seen this challenge in hybrid setup with more focus on traditional project management mixed with different agile practices. In a number of different organizations I have worked with teams (and projects), where the there is a project manager, who is trying to make sure the right thing is done in the right way. Very often with the result of more waterfall driven process either focusing on the right thing OR the right way. Most often it is in the red area in the picture. If they try to adopt Scrum, they often have a large gab in Product Owner role and need skills to be developed in this area.
The picture shows the 4 different scenarios:
1. Slow Failure
When both the ScrumMaster and Product Owner are doing a bad job, the wrong thing will be implemented in the wrong way with the result of “Slow Failure”. It will take some time to see this problem in the organization.
2. Shore Term Success
A good Product Owner making sure the right thing is being worked on by the Team, but it is not being done in the right way (ScrumMaster). In this scenario I have often seen technical debt increasing when not considering areas like agile architecture and implementing features too fast.
3. Fast Failure
Focus on using the Scrum framework and by doing this, many problems with is uncovered. In this scenario, there is a limitation in the Product Owner role to make sure the team is working on the right thing. I have seen this scenario with many new Scrum teams, where there is no one to fulfill the Product Owner role. It is a painful state to be in for a longer time.
4. Long Term Success
In this scenario the Product Owner is making sure the team is working on the right thing and the ScrumMaster is making sure it is done the right way. This is the most ideal setup for the team that can focus on making deliveries high value and with long term success. I hope this will be the most common scenarios for Scrum team in the future.
Based on my practical experience, I think we are getting better on the way of working (ScrumMaster), but the Product Owner role is still a weak area.
Why can’t we get better on making sure we are working on the right thing?
It has been one of my passions for years to optimize my personal incoming work and use minimum amount of time to progress each item. I have been working with Personal Kanban boards in both electronic and physical versions and also done some teaching and talks about this (see fx here). The list of inspiration is long and covers Pomodoro technique, GTD, the work from “Stephen R. Covey”, many Lean principles/practices etc. I have been using many different advanced setups in MS Outlook, (tagging, tasks, flags, add-ons), MindManager, post-it notes apps and many different GTD apps. But my current setup is very simple.
One of the main input streams has always been all the mails (especially in my current job) and I have been experimenting with many different practices to optimize the flow. It is a long journey, and this post will only briefly explain the current stage today, and I expect it will continuously be improved in the future.
Today is my first day back on work after two weeks of vacation and my inbox was not exploded. I must admit that I also left for vacation with an empty inbox but also my current strategy has reduced my mail progressing time dramatically. The above picture shows how I currently organize my inbox and the Inbox will show zero items after next time I progress new items.
My current strategy
- Only using Outlook (until recently I combined Outlook with MindManager to manage larger tasks, but now I only use Outlook)
- Focus on zero items in my inbox
- Pull items when I have time and have NO notifications at all
-
Work with 3 Queues, an archive and a list for mail notifications
- Indbakke (Inbox): All new items
- 1-Action: Requires some more time to answer or work on
- 2-Hold: Currently waiting other people to answer or I need to follow-up later
- 3-Archive: All archived mails and tasks
- Notifications: Auto mail from different sites that I have subscribed to
It follows the below workflow
After starting using this strategy I use most of my time in the “1-Action” queue working on larger items and I am not distracted by a lot of other mails in the inbox.
Some additional hints
- Some of the folders in MS Outlook (what I consider as Queues) are showing number of items in the folder (green number) and not number of unread items (blue number)
- The 3 queues (1-Action, 2-Hold, 3-Archive) is also synchronizes on my mobile phone, so I can progress items when only having my mobile phone
Next step
- I think my next step will be to add rules so I can post tasks directly to the “1-action” queue from any mail client
Offshore patterns
Working with a distributed setup can be a challenge and many problems are harder to solve. Since 2004 I have been working in different companies with focus on establishing a global effective delivery structure or improving existing structures. I also have had the great opportunity to work with many different companies either helping them getting started with distributed development or solving some of their many problems. It has been with larger teams (up to 100 people) and smaller and high effective teams with just 2-3 people. I have been working with interesting cases and got many stories and learning with focus on countries like India, Bangladesh, Ukraine, Russia and Pakistan.
It has been a continuously changing journey with many experiments and trying an amazing number of different things to improve the systems and understand problems later to be solved. After some years I have started to see the same challenges across different customers, different offshore locations and different type of work. I started to analyze and reflect on all the data end experiences, and tried to formulate some patterns on what need to be in place for an effective global delivery system to work better. The first result was 8 related patterns and a number of recommendations and some years ago it was extended with a pattern about “Management System”. One could argue that it could (should?) be part of the “Global Structure”, but my experience has been that seeing the whole Global Structure as one system is not that easy to follow for many people. Especially not from a traditional management point of view.
The 9 patterns (also in the picture), are:
- Global Structure and Processes
- Global Rhythm
- Global Requirement Management
- Global Communication Protocols
- Global Technical Infrastructure
- Global Development Practices
- Global Domain Knowledge
- Cross Cultural Understanding
- Management System
For the last 10-15 years I have been a strong advocate of Lean and Agile thinking and used many agile practices in different companies (also before someone coined them with a specific name J) and I have been inspired by Lean Principles and Systems Thinking. I have worked quite a lot with processes from CMMI, RUP, APLN, ITIL and my experience is that even though they are based on some kind of best practices, very often they are too detailed and used by people as the “one truth”. In companies having very prescriptive processes I see that often people see it as the one standard cut in stone they need to follow without thinking, or they don’t follow it at all.
Since 2006, Scrum practices and the thinking behind those have been a huge part of my daily work. The patterns have been created and continuously improved base on my own experience and a blend of Scrum, Agile Principles and Practices and Lean Thinking.
I will start to write posts about each pattern, so stay tuned.
Going offline
After some very busy weeks before Easter with a lot of different work in progress, I went completely offline during the Easter vacation. That was interesting to not read mails, tweets not being on Linkedin etc.
I spent a lot of time with my girlfriend and kids, spent a lot of time in the garden enjoying the amazing weather (and doing some gardening), I did running and sailing kayak and a I got lot more energy by doing this.
I spent time reading on my Kindle and the many books I had in the queue.
So reflecting on this, I plan to improve this small step in the future
- To prioritize doing running and sailing Kayak much more frequent and going offline as a proven action
I also did improve my different techniques on managing incoming items in different queues and processing them in the optimal order with limited effort. I did some improvements on both the process and tools supporting this. More on this in a future post.
