Agile adoption

Launching SoundAgile Consulting

I've been involved with Agile with many different organizations now for over 12 years. In these years I've primarily been involved with being a contributing individual over a being an Agile coach.




Sr. Leadership however hasn't changed much, still managing in a large up front analysis budgeting process which creates a painful friction between fast moving product delivery teams and slow moving hierarchical management structures .

For those organizations who are being sold Agile as a product that will deliver 'x' benefits know this about what is occurring.  These organizations are finding people who have done 'some' to 'no' real Agile, meaning they haven't actually worked on an Agile team. Getting people who have the 'right' certifications doesn't provide those people with the ability to coach teams in the reality of Agile, only the theory of Agile and their current frameworks.



I've spent many years thinking about what I might offer from an Agile consulting perspective and I've come to the conclusion that any Agile 'consulting' work that I would want to engage in must include both Sr. Leadership down and the team level.

Another thing I have concluded is that successful organizations that want to become Agile, must do so with a much smaller footprint of coaching.  You don't need full-time coaches for a long period of time.  In relying on full time coaches you are asking them to be your organizational Agile cop over owning the change within your organization.  The most successful Agile organizations I've worked in never had an Agile coach. Let me repeat that, never had an Agile a coach.  Instead they owned the move to Agile from the top down.  They provided the opportunity for teams to be empowered and fail and were not afraid to change organizational processes when they became impediments to improving Agilty.





Top Down or Bottom Up - Large Scale Agile Adoption

So I've worked in both large and small organizations where we have gone through an Agile adoption or the phrase of the day, Transformation. Having seen both sides of the coin I started realizing that you have two paths to take when considering moving your organization to an Agile delivery methodology.

I use the phrase delivery, because I think at the end of the day that is what we are talking about.  Strip away the manifesto's goals of conversation over documentation, accepting change, etc...What are are really talking about is moving an organization from a Project delivery methodology to one that is Product delivery oriented.

What is the difference?  From a Management perspective actually quite large.

  1. Project Delivery - These have very strong controls which move people to a new project.  Budgets are set up for the specific time period of the project and then up front requirements and design are completed in order to ensure that the project is fully ready to be engaged.  Project Managers manage all facets of the project via extensive project planning and plans.  Management receives up dates as to the project progress on a regular schedule, usually weekly. Resources are assigned either in full or in part, yet no one actually monitors nor can they really manage whether or not someone is working 25% on a particular project.  Projects tend to focus on reporting and there is high pressure to ensure that individual projects are green, which drives teams to deliver on the easiest and often less valuable parts of the project first and only at the end of the project is the hard work tackled, which reveals itself as budget overruns or timeline delays (or worse delivery of reduced scope).  Project reporting is elaborate and management receives project reports that are often sanitized.  Value is typically not delivered to the organization until the end of the project.
  2. Product Delivery - The work that is done for a Product is centered around a value stream it delivers and the work is ongoing.  Teams are funded as a whole and are kept together long-term in order to maximize their productivity.  Work is planned out in short increments called Release Plans that span anywhere from 6-12 weeks, with 2 week sprints.  Management receives regular updates (2 weeks) but can access information radiators at anytime, transparency is the key and goal with Agile Product Delivery.  Teams commit to work in 2 week sprints and their commitment is key to building trust with Management.  As time goes by management can trust that both a teams abilities and productivity can be counted on.  Teams are focused on delivering high quality code to production every two weeks which brings value to the organizations investment in them along with the increased value in terms of new sales, reduced costs, etc...Feedback loops via Product Demonstrations provides management the ability to assess where they are going with the product and deliver not what was asked for up front (Project Delivery) but rather what is actually needed (Product Delivery).

So what does the difference between Project and Product delivery approaches have to do with Agile adoption, well everything.

Most Agile adoptions begin at the bottom of the organization with the teams tasked with developing new software.  These efforts are borne, as the Agile manifesto was, out of frustration with how software was being developed in their respective organizations.  Often management is aware of the issues these teams face but are unable or unwilling to make any changes to how things are currently working and why would they?  You learn very early in your career that rocking the boat is not something that goes over well with organizations, my first boss told me I couldn't by computers that weren't from IBM because you don't get fired if you buy IBM. The message is that if anything goes wrong you need to point to well-known names, processes, etc.. with which to blame or use as support.  To think that this doesn't go on today is to place your head in the proverbial sand.

Though we can have great success with bottom up Agile adoptions with respect to improved productivity within small groups/teams, the overall Project oriented organization is typically still in place.  Management still wants to see project plans, have things 'planned' out for up to an entire year, they aren't comfortable with the fuzzy feel of product roadmaps.  They want commitments, even false ones, so that when things fail they can point to the fact that they had all of their planning in place.

For Agile to really take hold, Sr. Leaders need to change the way that they manage both their people and the work.  It starts first I think in understanding that we have not learned how to speak to management very well yet from an Agile/Scrum perspective.

We need to understand what management is really concerned about and then center our product delivery efforts around that.  One of the problems that we face with some of our leaders is that they themselves don't always know what to be focused on, they are looking at multiple balls in the air but at the end of the day as a Sr. Leader I think I have just a few things I should be focused on:

  1. Growth - This is often related to sales, market and revenue.
  2. Profits - Tightly aligned with the first item, our ability to make a consistent profit is what helps us continue to reinvest in our company.  Ever increasing revenue or sales without corresponding profits will eventually lead a company into bankruptcy, money isn't free and it is not endlessly available, in spite of what we think we see with new technology organizations.
  3. Organizational Excellence - Because none of the above can happen unless you have a great organization.

Agile actually addresses all of the above, yet we spend more time talking about how we will improve our individual work efforts which causes us to  fail to tie this to the needs of management.  Management on the other hand often views the improvements that come from the bottom up approach as more of an anomaly rather than an organizational improvement worth adopting.

Trust is the missing component when it comes to conveying how Agile will make the entire organization better.

Agile isn't easy and it requires skills that frankly many of our Sr. Leaders lack or don't fully utilize and the politics of most organizations reward behavior that doesn't align with Agile principles such as transparency, open honest conversation and openly questioning the status quo.  We have people in power who got there by way of the non-Agile status quo and changing that means they have to learn how the new game is played in order to stay on top, it's much easier to keep things they way they are over learning how to navigate the new.

So how do we speak to our Sr. Leaders with respect to Agile?

  1. Better ROI - Talk to any Finance executive about what they look at when purchasing a piece of equipment that will deliver revenue and you will hear them talk about Net Present Value of the investment, Positive Cash Flow and Depreciation costs.
    1. We improve ROI in Agile due to our focus on only the most valuable items.  In non-Agile project work often are working on features/functionality that may be important to someone inside the organization yet will bring little or no value to the organization.
    2. When we are able to start talking about the value streams of our organization, be they revenue, cost reduction or improving our brand image we begin to be able to have a better ROI conversation with management.
    3. We also positively impact ROI via higher levels of productivity gained with dedicated teams.
  2. Flexibility - One of the most important elements that 21st century organizations require is the ability to be flexible enough to react to market forces or reactions.  Financing large projects far out into the future with the expectation of some level of return and no we don't really have great track records of predicting future ROI out very far into the future.  With Agile we provide the framework to identify the most valuable work for the business in small planning windows.
    1. Sr. Management needs to understand that this flexibility comes with an obligation to have consistent short term review windows as the team progresses so that we deliver what is actually needed and not what we thought we wanted.  You may have thought you needed a Ferrari when in fact what you needed was a mini-van, we provide the framework to course correct via Sprint reviews every two weeks.  If you plan all of your project up front for the Ferrari, we'll certainly try to make that happen, but in reality as the end of the project nears you will probably get the car but with a lawnmower engine and no brakes, it may look like a Ferrari but it won't operate like one nor will it provide the value the organization really needed.
  3. Predictability - Another key element that we deliver with Agile is predictability and accountability.  Your teams will be much more accurate in planning and delivering in short-term 2 week sprints with a planning horizon of 6-8 weeks.  What management needs to look for is consistent delivery of the committed work that the team makes, commitment is everything.  What Wall Street analysts look for is a business that can provide a solid ROI, react responsibly to their competitors or even better be a market leaders and provide predictable results year in and year out.

So the question at hand is what is better a Top Down or Bottom Up adoption?  My money for long-term success is on the organization that can consume what Agile really means, not just to their development teams but the organization as a whole.  You can't BE Agile if you don't make the paradigm shift from command and control to one of collaborative and collective delivery.

BDD Adoption - Taking time to get it right

Recently I've had the opportunity to speak with a broad range of Agile coaches and consultants who have consistently told me that they have not seen any organization successfully adopt BDD as part of their standard process of elaborating their User Stories. Luckily I have had the opportunity to work with several organizations that were able to successful adopt BDD and believe strongly in how this process can transform how you build and bake quality into your products.

I think most people hear the word BDD and they immediately think that it is an automation centric effort, though that is a great value add for BDD, leveraging BDD without automation can also lead to improved testing and quality.

Adopting BDD is so much more than automation (which I wrote about here) it's really about clearly defining the expected behavior of your system.

Why is this so important? Because as humans we all interact differently with the systems that we encounter.  As people who develop these systems we deliver based upon our experiences and understanding of the system we are building.

Language (Business Requirements) has been the manner and method that we have used to convey what we want a system to do to.  However with an international work force we don't all have a shared language.  In addition to this constraint we also interpret what we read differently based upon our primary language, life experiences and culture.  Given this, it's not surprising that when we build a system, it has many different interpretations attached to it, which negatively impacts both the functionality AND quality of our system.

BDD is a way to talk about how your system should behave not what it should do.  Yes we want our systems to have specific functions and features, but talking about how each of these will behave brings about a much richer conversation of what can happen in many functional situations the system and the people will encounter, not just the happy path.

There are two primary components of BDD:

  1. The Given/When/Then test setup
  2. The Example Table

Getting the first part of your BDD is the most important component because it defines the size and scope of what the User Story.  We do that by decomposing an individual user story into Test Scenarios.  One quick way to determine if your user story is perhaps to large or complicated is to evaluate the number of Test Scenarios you can define.  Keep your Test Scenarios to under 4 per each individual User Story so that you can more easily understand the expected behavior for that part of your feature or functionality.

Keeping the number of test scenarios small is also important once you translate your BDD into test automation which will keep your tests small so when something breaks it is much easier to find out where you need to address a fix.  Remember development teams should be consistently refactoring their code to improve code quality.  With high levels of automation we can quickly catch when refactoring unexpectedly changes the underlying behavior of our system.  This is where Quality is kept front and center in our organization.

The second part of building effective BDD is the Example table.  My training focuses on getting the first part clear and clean because the example table is an easier effort of filling in the expected results in each of your parameter columns.  As with the first section you can use the number of parameter columns as a means of determining if your test scenario is too large.  Try to keep the number of parameters to between 4-8, anymore will result in more brittle tests and more time debugging your automation code.

Adopting BDD as your primary means of decomposing stories may on the surface seem like a lot of work, but remember that you are only doing this level of detail for each 2 week sprint so the number of stories that you build out context driven BDD is relatively small.  Doing it every sprint means you get better at it every time and you will refine your ability to generate BDD much more quickly.

We should also remember that this is a TEAM oriented approach, don't relegate this to your QA team, you will miss getting all of the context needed to delivery high quality code and functionality.

Management and Agile - To Succeed or Not to Succeed

As more and more larger organizations look to Agile as a means of delivering software to their customers the one thing that keeps coming back to me is that for any of this to work there has to be transparency and acceptance that a move to Agile will change your organization, not understanding this will court almost inevitable failure. Agile in itself is an aspirational desire to change the way that we deliver software, one that does away with the project processes that evolved over the years from Waterfall.  I know that waterfall feels sound and safe with all of its up front business analysis, project planning, Steering Committees and that all important Change Management process, but in reality it really is more of a facade than foundation.

Having managed work and projects in both worlds I have seen how it all works.  Recently I was told (in an Agile organization) that Project Managers are responsible for delivery and it was at that point that my thoughts crystallized around my own journey, Project Managers don't deliver, Teams do.

At it's heart Agile is about everyone doing their part to make our product delivery better, whatever that looks like for your organization in that moment in time.  Agile by itself is not prescriptive, the Scrum/Lean techniques and processes that have evolved from our Agile journey may be a bit more prescriptive and become more so when we add things like Scrum certifications to people's palmares.  We need remember that one of the key reasons that the manifesto came into being was an intense desire to find better ways to deliver software, which means the journey has no end and certifications and such are merely ways for us to have a shared language.  Let me repeat, once you commence on your Agile 'journey' it doesn't have an end, you will always be evaluating what you can do better.

So back to the question at hand, to succeed or not to succeed in Agile, what needs to happen?

  1. Trust - First and foremost we need to begin to build trust between Sr. Management and our Product Delivery teams.  If we have a history of delivering late, with fewer features and cost overruns it is really hard for that same management team to flip the switch once you say you are Agile and trust the very teams who haven't delivered in the past.  Trust is a two-way street and the great thing about Agile is that once you begin to master the techniques and methods that successful teams utilize trust is almost a by-product of that.
    1. Commitments - In Waterfall we are making a 'commitment' to deliver a set of value/features in a specified period of time based upon a business requirements document as guidance for what the business/customer is asking for.  When we make a commitment farther out into the future we become less and less accurate with our plans, it is the nature of the unknown unknowns in life.  Things change, they always do, so to expect that our business and software development teams, in today's ever-changing world, can predict 9-12 months in the future exactly what they are going to deliver is simply living in delusion.  Manage reality or it will manage you.  Commitments in Agile are much shorter in time, basically every 2 weeks.  These commitments however are based upon the Vision that YOU management need to provide.  You say you can't plan for the future every two weeks I would argue you can't plan much further out.  By planning and committing in shorter delivery increments, management get an opportunity to change direction without causing massive pain from already planned out work.  We need to be able to change direction or refocus efforts on the things that are most valuable to our business, not what we made big plans for last year that we thought we needed.  Locking in feature development that doesn't meet customer needs, simply wastes money and loses market share.  When teams make and keep their commitments to you, they gain confidence and you gain trust.
      1.  Context - In most waterfall projects we end up asking for absolutely everything we think we might need, when in reality sometimes 70% of what we asked for (or even less) is more than enough to meet the needs we were trying to address.  Focus on the most Valuable things your customer wants and move on to the next highest value work, not diminishing returns on things customers may not value as much as we might.  Teams want to work on what brings the most value to the organization, development teams when provided the transparency of why we need to do something can do amazing things.
    2. Self Organizing Teams - This one really causes I think the most concern for management.  You in essence are saying that the teams that you currently manage are better able to make decisions about how to delivery our products.  Guess what, they are.  These are people who work in the trenches every single day, know every single issue, impediment, risk, etc... associated with your current product delivery processes.  And every one of them has probably said something to the effect of, 'If I was in charge I'd to do X to fix this'.  I've been a Sr. Manager for many years and have built several high performing teams and one of the best things I can do for them is to provide guidance and vision for what I'm looking for and letting them solve the issues that deliver the solution.  I'm a smart guy but I don't have all of the answers and if you are the type of manager who believes that in order to be 'respected' you have to be the one to manage how Agile will change your product delivery processes you will fail personally and the organization will suffer as a whole.  Teams of people can solve major problems much more easily than one person can, so let them have the ability to self organize and empower them with making the necessary changes to improve your product delivery.
      1. Context - With great power comes great responsibility.  By ceding some level of daily control to your teams you are also doing so with the expectation that they deliver on what they commit to..  If they don't then they must provide a game plan based upon the Retrospective on how they will solve their inability to hit their commitments.
  2. Investment - Agile won't come without an investment cost associated with it.  If like many large organizations you have a mess of legacy code mixed with attempts at migrating to newer technology stacks, business requirements and rules imbedded in code with tribal knowledge scattered through the organization.  Agile requires speed in your product development processes which translates into several investment areas:
    1. Automation - When we say automate we mean across the entire spectrum of the organization, if it can be automated you should probably evaluate whether it can/should be.  More specifically we want to automate:
      1. Unit Tests - Developers should be writing unit tests for everything they build, preferably using XP techniques such as TDD (Test Driven Development).  These are not really hard processes but if you are starting from scratch there is both discipline and framework that needs to be built-in order to get to a mature state for test automation.  Unit tests need to be executed with every build, because with that comes fast feedback if something broke, fix it early and you increase speed and profitability.
      2. Integration Tests - Probably one of the harder areas to get high levels of automation in, primarily because the organization hasn't invested in the appropriate product like test environments.  Be prepared in your Agile journey to spend heavily on getting the right environments in place and highly available.  Testing the performance of your system right before you deliver is a recipe for disaster and delays (remember time is money).
      3. Functional Tests - These are the tests management is probably most familiar with and may even have reviewed at one point or another.  These are typically the manual tests that QA will execute at the end of your waterfall project, where we are not baking in Quality but testing out defects.  Building high levels of automated testing at the functional level gets to what I call, Progressive Regression.  Instead of running a final full regression at the end of a 6-9 month project, why not do it every single night?  You will need to again invest in physical environments but also in people training as many in the QA world are not equipped to handle the new role of a Software Engineer in Test.
        1. Word of Caution - Don't rely only on Test Automation in your functional testing efforts, you still need real people with hands on testing capabilities because at the end of the day automated testing cannot always tell you when something is bad from an experience or product flow perspective.
      4. Deployments - One of the hardest things that teams fail at is planning for deployments to their environments.  Making your deployment process as frictionless as possible is a high value target for your organization.  Many organizations don't have a fully functional DevOps org and many in this field are still struggling to figure out how to operate in an Agile world.  Let them figure it out and provide them with the tools that will support automation of critical deployment processes and hold them accountable to doing it.  To many times we purchase tools and then never make the time to actually use them, invest and utilize, that is the key to your ROI.
      5. None of the above work comes without an investment in both hardware and people.  Current requirements processes will change substantially as you move to an Agile cadence.  People will struggle to find their way, some level of productivity reduction is expected in the beginning of an Agile transformation. You as a Leader need to set a clear vision of why the organization needs to change, make it clear that the teams have accountability to deliver the work that they commit to and that you as a leader have accountability to provide them with space to learn, fail and finally improve.  Successful Agile includes failure because without it we aren't really learning from our mistakes, rather hiding the truth.  Agile done right makes everything visible, especially who is accountable for what.
  3. Patience - Nothing great was ever built-in a day or a week.  Odds are good that this will take more time than you thought it would, but also make it clear to the organization that an Agile death march is not something that you are taking on either.  Agile is about accountability and commitment, use these values to your benefit and identify those that simply can't or won't work in an Agile environment.

From a management perspective you need to understand your role in the success of any Agile transformation, it must also change the way you look at and manage your business.

Agile isn't Easy

Over the years I have seen many teams and organizations who start on their journey towards Agile product delivery make the mistake of thinking that Agile is easy, promotes freely changing direction and worse will fix all of your issues and make everything better quickly and easily.  The truth couldn't be further from the reality. There is no such thing as a perfect software development delivery process.  Unlike production lines for things such as automobiles where you have the same pieces going to together each and every time and each piece has a specific functionality, tolerance and timing, software development is the exact opposite.

Software development is about meeting changing needs across the dynamic nature of business  For example - You wouldn't see an automobile company add anew feature to a car on their assembly line over a 2-4 week time period.  They need time to design the entire process and ensure that the production line is capable of accepting the new change.

Traditional software development tends to align a bit more to the automobile example and in fact there are times where this type of rigid, pragmatic approach to product delivery is actually the correct process (Agile isn't for everyone nor for every situation).

However for those that are going to move to Agile you need understand that the type of discipline that you might use in the automobile example actually needs to exist in your Agile processes, seriously you ask? Yes - You need to be able to deliver high quality, well-tested and fully functional pieces of software every two weeks. Now are you seeing how difficult Agile can be?

If you think Agile is easy, then you are already on the path to failure and unmet expectations.

It is very common for teams who are moving to Agile to take their interpretation of the Agile Manifesto to the unhealthy extremes, for example:

  • Working Software Over Comprehensive Documentation

Many teams I've worked with take this to mean NO documentation and that couldn't be further from the truth.  We value working software over the need for documentation but I've never believed that you can have long-term success with your product without delivering some levels of documentation.  Without documentation your software knowledge becomes tribal and when your tribe leaves the team or your organization, well so does their knowledge.

There are way for teams to build documentation as part of their daily Sprint development work.  Using the combination of user stories and Behavior Driven Development (BDD) acceptance criteria as the foundational elements of your work you are creating your documentation as part of the work needed to deliver quickly.  The great value in BDD is that the acceptance criteria is written in English syntax and then translated into test automation.

This process of writing stories with BDD is supported by Gojko Adzics book, Specification by Example and allows us to deliver light weight documentation during our sprints.  I often see teams adding a story to a future sprint to handle their 'documentation' requirements of their previous work but I haven't seen this work long-term.  Functional development, dealing with bugs, etc... will ultimately push these stories down into the backlog, never to be seen again.

The process described above is not easy, but it can be done and the teams that can get to this level of capability will succeed in driving value to your organization every two weeks.

One of the things that I consistently tell organizations moving to Agile is that it will highlight every current weakness of your product/software delivery methods.  Agile is a game changer, it requires a mind shift in how you look at your product, the work that supports it and how you see the visualize the value your product delivers.  If you are a leader who is going to be uncomfortable finding out truths about your organizations inefficient manner of product delivery then you need to think twice about moving to Agile.

Do you have TITL (To Important to Lose) people in your organization?  If you do, then you need to really look at how they influence any changes in your organization.  Do you need to get their approval, gain their support, etc....?  If so you will find more often than not that Agile will scare the hell out of them.  Successful Agile teams/organizations understand that self organizing teams take away the need for many of the day-to-day management decisions our middle management layer makes.  Agile speed comes when you remove the friction of management layers and provide teams with a clear vision of what you want them to deliver.

You must be prepared for the resistance that you will face from your product delivery teams, not everyone wants to go to Agile  We become comfortable with what we know and do in our daily work life and in that comfort comes stasis.  If you are not prepared to lose people, especially your TITL people, then you need to question if Agile is really for you.

I know it sounds heartless, but I've been working for over 30 years and one of the first things I learned right out of college was that technology was disruptive and if you weren't on board with how it changes how you work you would be left behind. At one company I worked for many years ago, I saw Regional sales managers who had been with the company for over 30 years and when we rolled out a sales force tracking/marketing tool (which I led) there were several who refused to even turn on the computer, they were all let go within months.  As employees we have the obligation to continue to grow and learn and continue to make ourselves valuable to our organization and if we don't, then you as a leader have an obligation to make tough decisions that ensure that the organization is continuing to grow and not stagnate with old processes.  It's not personal it's business.

As you move to Agile you also need to understand the investment that needs to be made in your technology stack.  Many organizations have decades old technology stacks which have been shoe horned into the future and though you get by you won't be able to become Agile until you have a strong Continuous Integration framework, high levels of Unit, Integration and Functional test automation.  Getting to this will take time (and using the stories and BDD disciplines mentioned above will help you get there).  You simply can't go fast if you don't have the technology backbone that supports it.

Agile isn't easy by any stretch of the imagination, it requires thoughtful introspection, focus on continuous improvement, disciplined delivery and a tenacity for value and quality that is never satisfied.

Delivery Management vs Project Management



What is the difference?



    1. Realization - 
    1. Realization -






You Know You Aren't Agile If

Thought I'd start off the new year and take a page from Jeff Foxworthy and use is famous tag line for Agile. Though intended to bring some humor to the question it really is something that every organization typically asks themselves. Please add more :)

You know your not Agile if:

  • Your Product Owner drops by once in awhile to yell at the team for not giving them what they wanted
  • Your Product Owner is entirely responsible for writing User Stories
  • Your Development and QA teams are separate groups
  • Your teams treat missed commitments like a Hollywood marriage
  • Your team writes user stories in the current Sprint
  • A daily Scrum looks like a bunch of stoners standing around
  • Your product backlog changes more than Kim Kardashian changes her cloths.
  • You think MVP was Kevin Durant last year
  • You think BDD is something you do in the privacy of your own home

We spend a lot of time talking about what Agile looks like, should be etc... but at the end of the day Agile is about addressing the issues that keep you from being great and dealing with them in a manner which focuses on the what not the who.

There is no finger pointing in Agile (just like there is no crying in baseball).

Finding out what stops you from succeeding is a fundamental element of achieving greatness at anything.

You know your not Agile if you are asking yourself if you are or not.

Agile Transformation - Coaching needs and requirements

Having been involved in Agile for over 10 years, and for most of these years I have  helped organizations switch to Agile, I have (I believe) a great grasp of what needs to happen when your organization decides to 'Go Agile'. Yes the larger the organization the more that the organizational change element is brought in to the mix, and for this post I want to focus on the elements of Agile coaching as it relates to these larger transformation efforts, which with SAFe is a hot area of growth for Agile consulting.

With the large Agile transformations I've been involved with I have identified what I believe are the three main types of coaches you are likely to come across in an Agile transformation:

  1. Those that have had experience in the trenches, who have led Scrum teams, built the products that are delivered to the business.
  2. Those that have primarily been involved with Agile 'transformations' at the management level.
  3. Those that have taken the necessary courses to 'become' Agile and may have been  a Project Manager in another life. (I'm not denigrating PM's as I was a PM who first experienced Agile from this perspective, I'm rather saying that there are coaches who haven't actually been involved with Agile, but have gone out and obtained Agile certifications, making them 'look' like people who have the right 'credentials' when people who don't know Agile are looking to hire coaches)

Let's talk about what each one brings to the table and what you need to look for when bringing on a coach to support your specific Agile transformation.

  1. Coaches from the Trenches
    1. Key Benefits- These individuals bring a wealth of experience with how to operationalize Agile. They get it, they believe in it and they now what works, how to make course corrections when something isn't working AND they have huge levels of creditability with technical teams.  They talk the talk and can walk the walk.
    2. Key Weaknesses - If there is one the weakness with this type of coach is that in larger scaled Agile transformations, there are very specific processes and formats that get rolled out to the entire organization so that everyone is doing the same thing.  Sounds right doesn't it?  This individual will want to work out what works for their team and not always align to the Transformation processes, causing frustration between the coach and the group leading the transformation.
    3. Things to think about - Agile is not like making cars where every production line making car X has to be doing the same thing so that you maximize the speed of the process and build in your quality and productivity INTO the process.  Agile isn't like that, rather Agile is a framework that should allow for each Scrum team the flexibility to determine WHAT works for them without being prescriptive.
      1. My Input When I am helping an organization move to Agile I like 'sprinkle' the framework and tenants of Agile to the teams and then let the teams iterate on the process that works for them.  I give them the things I look for to determine how they are doing, such as stable velocity, good backlog and effective and accurate estimation (which of course feeds the stable velocity).  The 'from the Trenches' individual is one who will succeed very will in this type of environment and not very well in an extremely structured Agile process.
  2. Coaches who were Managers - These individuals have typically seen their organization have success with Agile and have made the decision to move into an Agile career.
    1. Key Benefits - As with the from the Trenches coach, this individual does 'get it' and has an ability to gain creditability with upper management and can convey the higher level benefits to them.  This individual talks the talk of management and understands how to get in the head of management to help them understand their responsibilities in helping a transformation succeed.
    2. Key Weaknesses - So far I see way more of these individuals as coaches than I do the in the trenches coaches.  This can cause issues because they can sometimes tend to take a more hands off approach in working with their teams and don't have the experience nor creditability to work with the technical teams in a direct manner.  They simply don't have the technical and Agile chops to help the team grow and aren't as adept and making course corrections to the process.  Here you are seeing the effects of Top down driven Agile over bottom up (which I'm more a proponent of).
    3. Things to Think about - Consider having these types of coaches run more of the program level coaching, working more closely with upper management to help them mature in their thinking and protect the teams as they figure out how to be successful in their Agile processes.
  3. Certification Coaches - As I indicated these are the people who have been involved with software development for many years, perhaps in the project management career path and have taken Certified Scrum Master classes and maybe Certified Product Owner.  Though they understand 'software development' they don't, IMHO, understand Product Development and all that this implies in an Agile world.
    1. Key Benefits - Of the three types of coaches, these individuals probably offer the least from a benefits perspective if expected to lead an Agile transformation effort.  These types of individuals understand the basics of Agile and run teams from that perspective.  Not having worked in the trenches they haven't yet had the opportunity to deal with real world Agile and the challenges it presents.  This is not to say that these individuals don't have the skills, knowledge or capabilities to be great coaches but what I am saying is that if you have a large number of coaches fall into this group then your PD teams will be at a disadvantage and this individual will struggle to gain creditability with their Scrum teams and your Agile adoption will fail.
    2. Key Weaknessess - As stated above, these coaches tend to not yet have the creditability or depth of knowledge to be as effective as coaching types 1 and 2, they will need to be partnered with more experienced coaches to enable them to be successful and grown their Agile skills.
    3. Things to Think about - Look for people who can demonstrate servant leadership in their past experience, this is a key behavior of successful PM's, Tech Leads and Managers.  I believe my success in Agile is primarily due to the fact that I am a servant leader by nature.

When you go looking for coaches consider your organizations size, current development maturity and honest assessment of the problems you face with your current Product Delivery processes.  And I do mean HONEST, if you can't take honesty then Agile is not for you.  The Continuous Improvement element of Agile demands honesty and if you are an organization that doesn't want to hear that you PD teams have issues then you will continue to have a less efficient model of delivering value to your customers (and isn't that what ALL of this is really about?)

These will provide you insight into what you will need to move towards Agile.

Also try to avoid labeling your coaches when they come in such as that one is our BDD expert, that one is our blah blah expert. This will tend to keep other coaches from participating and sharing their skills for a specific area and ensure that you processes for that specific area of expertise will suffer ( I speak from experience on this one ).

Agile Planning - I have a need a need for speed


Disney is a largely creative driven organization (Not surprising) and because of this we typically had a disconnect between our creative (UX) groups and the Product Delivery teams.  The UX team primarily worked independently of the PD teams and as was the case when I arrived, UX would deliver a creative design that didn't align to our technical capabilities.  This is a common issue in today's web development environment.

Our first 'Release' Planing went very poorly and after a round of retrospectives we came up with a format that at first pass you would say wasn't Agile (trust me we used that phrase a lot in the early days of our becoming Agile).  But in the end this first step of Discovery ended up being what I believe is the most critical element of being able to go fast in Agile.

The basic process that we ended up with was as follows:

    • Process
      • Competitive Review - Another great exercise was to have the entire team go out and find competitive features that we either did or didn't like and describe why.  This helped the next phase of our Discovery process as we worked to define what our feature sets would ultimately look like
        • Outcomes -
          • User Story development was done during the Discovery phase and with it I was able to have a fairly accurate model to predict the number of stories at the beginning of the Discovery phase (typically between 100-120 higher level Epics, we strove for stories to be between 21-34 points in this phase as PD would start fairly quickly after the discovery phase 2-3 weeks) and how many that would translate into for a full project (typically 350 - 400).  This provided me with input as to how many BDD acceptance criteria would come out of this as we used a marker to determine when a story should be broken down - More than 7 variables in the BDD would be an indication that it's time to think about breaking down the story and more than 14 tests in a single test scenario would also trigger the conversation of whether to add a scenario to a story or create a new story.

I know this doesn't 'Sound' Agile (like the name of my company), but in my experience doing this small amount of work up front does provide teams the base to go really fast once the PD process begins.

I have used this process now for many years and when we do it right it's like writing a symphony, all of the moving pieces make beautiful music.  When it isn't done right, then all you get is noise.

This process probably does work for larger and more complex organizations over small organizations, but really would you start building a house with no blueprints and no idea of what you wanted?  If you had builders just show up and you told them I need a house to live in and I need it fast you will get that, but I doubt it will be anything that you want. And in reality it wouldn't be done fast as they probably wouldn't have the right materials scheduled to arrive at the right time.  I have my roofing supplies but the foundation company can't some for a month, see what I am getting at?


Agile - The Ugly Truth

If you are an organization that is considering moving to Agile, especially a larger one, there is an Ugly Truth that Agile consulting firms don't want you to know: You don't need coaches to come in full-time to help you on your journey......

Sure you can spend a ton of money on people who will come in and tell you how you should be doing standup, scrum, retrospectives, etc....Try to get everyone to do the same thing across your organization.  The Truth? In successful Agile organizations everyone can be different, that's ok.  Yes you want some consistency but doing things by rote doesn't get you where you want to go.

In the coaching world we talk about organizations Doing Agile who never get to Being Agile.  What's the difference??  Everything.

Yes the basics of Agile include things such as standup, retros, sprint planning and release planning, but those are the basics that can make you feel like you are Agile, but that's about it.

Agile IS transformative process and one that if you as an organization buy into, will receive great value from in the form of valued delivered in a more consistent manner.

I remember years ago when I was managing a technical project that required that I purchase some hardware and though I had found a better deal with a different vendor, my boss told me to buy the IBM hardware (at a much higher price) with the advice - 'You don't get fired for buying IBM'.

I think that many large organizations fall into this mindset and when trying to move to Agile  They fall into the mistaken belief that if you hire one of the large Agile coaching groups or hire Agile consultants, that you will ensure success or at the very least not get fired because you hired 'Agile professionals'.

Yes you do need people who can provide support in the important areas that Agile truly needs to have in order to bring the value you desire from it:

  1. Automation - Develop, implement and improve your test automation frameworks.  This includes unit, integration and functional areas.  You MUST make this investment and you need to get to high levels of automation, because without it you cannot go fast, time for testing will hold you back.
  2. Planning and Estimation - An area that is very much overlooked when moving your product development teams to Agile is the need for these teams to form a strong working relationship and learn how to plan in estimate in Agile.  The notion, especially for larger organizations, that you don't need to do some level of up front planning is a sure way to fail and fast.
  3. Organizational change - Probably more than anything you need to understand that your organization will change, significantly in many ways, when you move to Agile.  You need to prepare your managers to let go and let their teams own their deliverables (trust me if you give this to people they will own it).  You as an organization need to understand that your management group will change, you will need fewer managers (sorry folks that is a reality).  Though in reality many of your current managers were placed in these roles as more as a retention means over a true management track that the organization has defined.  These people need to move into your Tech Lead roles, they run their scrum teams, own the technical and architectural elements of their product code.  Managers will oversee several Scrum Teams and will be focused on larger concepts such as technical roadmaps, cross organizational planning and staff development.

So the Ugly Truth is that you don't need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on coaches who will tell your teams what to do.  Instead hire people who have been on the ground, who can help your teams learn the skills they need such as TDD, BDD, User Story Mapping and Estimating.

Start small and grow the process into the organization.  You need to get your processes working on a small-scale and then move outwards into the organization.  The people who are successful in your pilot groups become your sales people for the next groups.  Trust me, I listen to the people who actually do the work more than I ever do people who try to provide me basic information that I can find anywhere online.


The Agile Manager Conundrum

If your organization is moving towards Agile there are some specific elements you will need to be aware of from a Management perspective.

 Agile focuses on teams being self organizing and what that means for managers is that you need to give up some control, however that doesn't mean you are backing away completely.
Effective managers in Agile focus on these areas:
  1. Technical Vision - This is so lacking in most of the organizations.  Most organizations I've worked for have some higher level vision set in place, maybe some standards but at the execution level these tend to ignored in favor of getting 'it out the door'.  Teams incur substantial technical debt that costs real pain and money to organizations long term.  A good manager is able to set forth operational vision for the team.  Using Scrum processes such as Retrospectives, the manager can encourage the team to come up with processes that work for them that support the vision.
  2. Technical Excellence - The operational side of the vision again involves the team understanding what it takes to deliver high quality code.  Understanding how to ensure that code is refactored on a continual basis, that code reviews are not rubber stamps but should have a specific focus and structure designed to teach.  At one startup I worked for code reviews were taken very seriously and provided junior developers with an opportunity to get good feedback on how they were developing as engineers.  As a manager you need to ensure that the Alpha dog syndrome doesn't happen, good code reviews are educational not demeaning.
  3. Career Development - This is probably one of the harder areas for technical managers to be successful in because I think most organizations don't provide the right type of management training to their technical management staff.  Understanding what to look for and encourage is for me the most important element of being a good manager.  Career development provides the organization with employees who are happier, more focused, more dedicated and produce higher quality results.
No where in these areas do you see the manager handling problems with the teams project planning, etc...  Though you need to build confidence in your teams abilities to deliver, you also need to let the Scrum team and processes evolve so that they(the team) handle most of the day to day issues and keep you in reserve for the important ones that truly need management intervention.
You have plenty to do as an Agile manager, it's just not what you are probably doing today.

BDD - A team oriented activity

Probably one of the harder elements of Agile that teams struggle with is the art of collaboration. Our experiences over the years have taught us to treat functional groups such as BA's, Devs and QA as separate entities each with their own perspective and each distrustful of the others abilities to deliver.  How many times in QA do we hear the phrase 'Just toss it over to QA and let them deal with it'. 

We forget so easily that what we deliver for a customer is the sum total of our efforts, not just of individuals.  The Chicago Bulls were a good team with just Michael Jordan, but only when they were able to blend ALL of the skills of the team were they able to win championships.  Scrum is about team.
Getting your Scrum team to actually work as a team is one of the key efforts that everyone needs to make and BDD is a way that can help teams  work collaboratively to  build what I call contextually rich user stories.
You can't rely on just one or two people to write user stories and acceptance criteria as there is a limit to the context of what any one person can know.  With ever growing complexity in business and technology the more people who can collaborate the more context that is captured in the story.
Does it sound like heavy overhead?  It shouldn't.  I'm sure you have all spent hours pouring over Business or Product Development documents trying to glean enough information to build a design that will work for the next 6 months (which we know doesn't happen on any planet in this solar system).  We've always spent time trying to understand what is being asked for but in Agile we spend smaller increments of time on writing details that matter.
The most successful teams I've worked with have adopted this type of approach for building out BDD acceptance criteria:
  • Start of Sprint -
  1. During the first two days of the Sprint the QA lead and Product Owner work together to develop (and or complete) BDD acceptance criteria for the next upcoming sprint.
  2. By day three the development team should start delivering stories to QA for testing.  Additionally QA can begin their automation efforts via BDD examples with tools such as Cucumber, Fitnesse, Capybara....
  3. The engineering team needs to plan to complete all of the story development so that the last two days are open for them to  review the acceptance criteria and make changes/suggestions to the PO.  The team is also completing their designs for the upcoming sprint during the last two days and fixing any bugs that are discovered in testing.
BDD Planning Cycle v1.00
The key to this process is that before the team commits to the sprint they must all review and agree to the scope of the BDD acceptance test examples.  Without this discipline, the scope of the story and sprint will not be as precise.
As I've told my teams in the past, moving to writing BDD acceptance criteria is a mind shift in how you view both requirements and testing.  Both Development and QA can consume them for their individual efforts, but in the end, if they work against what is defined in the BDD they will both be on the same page functionally.
BDD takes the guess work out of what is being developed and that's a good thing.  For Sprints to go quickly and with high quality,  teams have to understand exactly what they are doing.  To steal from one of my favorite phrases from Bull Durham 'Don't think, it only hurts the ball club'.
BDD provides clarity for the entire team and makes demos go smoothly.
Ensuring that the team provides input, review and commitment to BDD acceptance criteria keeps everyone focused on doing just what is needed.

Agile and the Management Impact

You're a technology manager in an organization that has decided that they are going to adopt Agile. what? You've spent years becoming the high performing manager you are today, managing the day-to-day details of your team, holding things together, making decisions big and small....You are the leader, success of your team hinges on your ability to make decisions that impact the way the team works. Your team is successful because of your management efforts....Sound like you?

This Agile thing is telling me that my teams are now going to be 'self-organizing' and be able to make decisions on their own...what the heck am I going to do?

Managers who are asked to move their organization to Agile may often believe like they are providing the path to the doorway out of the company.  This resistance can be one of the primary impediments to successful Agile adoption and as an organization Sr. Management needs to be aware of this paradigm and provide support to middle managers that Agile is not about replacing them but truly about getting them into a position where they are focused in the truly valuable parts of their job - Strategic Planning, Employee Development..the bigger picture.

Stephen Covey teaches that successful managers are the ones who are able to remove themselves from the quadrant of activities that are Urgent and Important and focus on the activities that were Important but Not Urgent, meaning remove yourself from day-to-day decision-making over planning and strategy development.

So many of us can get sucked into the day-to-day minutiae of our teams that we end up ignoring the bigger picture areas which should be our focus.  Why?  Because dealing with Important and Urgent activities is an addictive feeling, you feel like you are making important decisions when in fact your team is probably more than capable of making them without you.

Agile provides your team with leadership opportunities that aren't found in more traditional process control organizations.  Step back and let your team grow.  I've been amazed how teams, when given the opportunity, can solve process issues and impediments to productivity that I would have never thought of.  The collective minds of your organization are capable of great things.

As a manager you need and want to embrace this power and provide support for you team.  Let them help you and help the organization deliver on the promise that Agile provides.

How can you help?

  • Understand that for your teams to succeed they need to fail, yes I said that.
  • Don't attend their ceremonies (standups, retrospectives)  Why?  The team needs to be able to speak openly and honestly about what is working and not working without you being present.
  • Use the working metrics available to you, velocity, burndown.  If your team says they are going to do 'x' story points and they do that consistently, what else do you need to know?
  • Don't force your opinions on what they 'SHOULD' be doing.  Have confidence that you have hired great people and they like you want to succeed.
  • Work closely with the Product Owner and Scrum Master to discuss any concerns you have.  Understand why things are working a certain way before leveling your judgement.
  • Don't act as a Scrum Master or Product Owner of the team. Why?  You manage their careers and it's highly unlikely that the team will receive the benefits of iterative continuous improvement if they don't feel confident that they can say when things aren't working well.
  • Don't believe that everything is great the way it is, anything can be improved.

Agile will provide transparency with respect to the areas of your organization that isn't working efficiently.  As a management team you will need to focus your attention on addressing these impediments as your Agile teams mature.  If these hurdles and impediments aren't dealt with you will reach a ceiling on the ROI that Agile can provide.  As with your teams, management needs to be honest with themselves about broader organizational issues so that a stronger and more effective organization emerges.

Agile isn't just about delivering software faster, it's much more than that.  Understanding that will make the transition your Agile smoother.

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