LeadingAnswers: Leadership and Agile Project Management Blog

Free PMI-ACP Webinar

Please join me on Wednesday May 2^nd for a free webinar on “PMI-ACP: Adopting Agile into the PMP World.” This is part of Rally Software’s webinar series and we already have >2,000 people signed up. The session runs on Wednesday May 2^nd at 7am (PT) / 10am (ET) and then again at 1pm (PT) / 4pm (ET) You can sign up here. 

In the webinar I will be talking to Juie Chikering about the exam’s content, who it is aimed at, it’s positioning in the industry, and how it has changed since the pilot last year, amongst other things. There will be interactive poles and questions from the audience, so it should be an interactive and informative event.

I will be presenting the webinar from the RallyOn Conference in Boulder, CO where I am also speaking about agile PMOs and on a panel with Dean Leffingwell, Johanna Rothman, and Alan Shalloway about the future of agile. I am really looking forward to it and also spending some more time in Boulder which I especially enjoy.

PMI-ACP Book Discount

I picked up a copy of my PMI-ACP^SM Exam Prep book on a visit to RMC Project Management over the weekend. It was good to see it printed up for the first time, and with all the exercises and 120 sample exam questions, it was thicker than I expected at over 350 full-size pages.

The extra weight also comes from the case studies of agile projects I have worked on over the years and the additional materials I included to link the exam topics together. These items that are not in the exam are clearly marked so you can skip over them if you want. However, I am sure some people will find they add value by making the ideas more real. These additional materials also supply useful information to allow readers to fully understand the topics, rather than just memorize the information for the exam.

I am very grateful to the staff at RMC for pulling together my thoughts and ideas into this book, and for the people who reviewed it. Alistair Cockburn and Dennis Stevens were particularly helpful, and after reviewing it, they wrote the following quotes for the cover:

“As one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, I am delighted to see this book by Mike Griffiths. It is great that such an exam guide was prepared by someone with a deep understanding of both project management and Agile development. Personally, I hope that everyone reads this book, not just to pass the PMI-ACP exam, but to learn Agile development safely and effectively!”

– Dr. Alistair Cockburn, Manifesto for Agile Software Development Co-Author, International Consortium for Agile Co-Founder, and Current Member of the PMI-ACP Steering Committee.

“This is a VERY enjoyable book to read, due to Mike's firm grasp of the underlying concepts of Agile, and his articulate and entertaining writing style. My favorite part is the fact that it is organized into a framework that helps all of the Agile concepts hang together, so they will be easier to recall when taking the PMI-ACP exam.

But Mike's book is more than just the best PMI-ACP prep book out there. It is also the best consolidated source of Agile knowledge, tools, and techniques available today. Even if you are not planning on sitting for the PMI-ACP exam in the near future you need to buy this book, read it, and keep it as a reference for how to responsibly be Agile!”

– Dennis Stevens, PMI-ACP Steering Committee Member, PMI Agile Community of Practice Council Leader, and Partner at Leading Agile.

Thanks to you both, working with you over the years has been a blast. I would also like to thank the visitors of my blog here, too, for reading my posts and submitting insightful comments that kept me motivated to write. RMC has provided me a limited time promotion code that gives readers a further $10 off their currently discounted price for the book. If you follow this link and enter promo code “XTENMGBD”, you can get the additional $10 discount up until May 18th 2012. This is a 25% reduction on the retail price.

Unlikely Origins

Forbes ran a nice article a couple of weeks ago on how agile is the next big thing for management, but its unlikely origin in the software industry may hamper its adoption. The article provided some nice analogies:

1)    When the British government, in 1714, offered a prize for determining longitude at sea, of £20,000 (£3M in today’s money), a Yorkshire carpenter called John Harrison eventually solved it, but the scientific community refused to believe that a carpenter could have solved the problem that had thwarted the best scientific minds. In 1773, when John was 80 years old, he received an award of £8,750 but not the actual prize. A Yorkshire carpenter was the wrong person to have solved the problem.

2)    In 1865, Gregor Mendel, an unknown professor created a theory about gene inheritance after studying pea plants. It answered inheritance issues that had stumped the finest scientific minds. The paper was ignored by the scientific community for the next 35 years until people eventually realized that Mendel had indeed come up with the solution. His theory later became known as Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance. His work had been ignored; a researcher on peas was the wrong person to have created the theory.

3)    In 1981, Barry Marshall, a pathologist in Perth, Australia, came up with a bizarre new theory that ulcers were caused by spiral bacteria. No one believed him so in 1984 he drank a batch of spiral bacteria and sure enough developed ulcers. Eventually in 2005 he received a Nobel prize for medicine for his work, but it took that long to be accepted. An unknown pathologist from Perth was the wrong person to have made the discovery.

So then we come to agile; for decades management had struggled to balance execution with innovation. How do we simultaneously get work done yet still drive improvements without one factor stifling the other? Now we know agile methods do a great job of balancing delivery with improvement.

Agile methods also provide a framework for sense-making and managing ambiguity when there are significant gaps in our understanding of requirements, approach, or technology. These uncertainties have a habit of stalling plan-driven approaches that struggle to reach escape velocity from the process of gathering requirements and planning. Agile methods instead choose to build what we know, evaluate, gain consensus on where to go next and iterate to a final solution.

The credibility problem we have is that software people, those weird IT geeks with poor communication skills are the wrong people to have proceduralized a complex communication and collaboration process. It should have been some management professors at the Harvard Business Review or Sloan School of Management at MIT. How can that IT crowd, who some believe have trouble making eye contact and describing an issue without resorting to techy speak, have figured out a way to collaborate and communicate on unique problems with unprecedented solutions?

Agile Interruptions

By Mike Griffiths

“My team has stopped talking to me, and I like it!” This may sound like heresy since agile teams are centered on face-to-face conversation, but as with most sound-bites it is missing context and clarification. A more accurate description would be: “We are replacing some face-to-face conversations with other communication channels and this practice seems to improve flow.”

Like all good stories I have started in the middle, let’s back up and examine the full picture. “Flow” is the quiet and highly productive state of work when you are really “in the zone” and making real progress on a topic.

In the book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains what makes an experience genuinely satisfying and how people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement in their work when in this state of flow.  We experience flow when work is challenging enough to provide a reward of problem solving yet not too crazy difficult that it is frustrating. So, not too easy, and not too hard, but a perfect “Goldilocks” rating of “Just-Right.”

Shimon Edelman, a cognitive expert and professor of psychology at Cornell University, offers some insight in his book “The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life.” He explains it this way: “Flow is the enjoyment derived from being engaged in an activity that is challenging, but not frustratingly so. Evolutionarily, we are selected for being good at certain kinds of things. You’re not challenged if you’re not tested, we get rewarded incredibly with this feeling of well-being and excitement.”

Enjoyment and Productivity are self-reinforcing factors that give rise to high performance.

The befits of flow on productivity are so significant Tom DeMarco and Anthony Lister in their book “Peopleware” recommend designating two hours a day as “Quiet time” with no meetings or interruptions. Programmers need sufficient quiet time to get into this productive mode, and as Alistair Cockburn observes, it takes only a minute or two of other conversation to disturb it.

This is the flow / communication paradox, on the one hand we want to get to a state of flow, on the other we want a collocated team environment with lots of high bandwidth, face-to-face communications to get questions answered quickly. There have been a few suggestions strike to balance . In the “XP Applied: Playing to Win” book Ken Auer suggest the “Caves and Common” idea. Caves are quiet rooms to work in, Common is the common work area where we learn via osmotic communication and get our questions answered quickly. People can go an work in the quiet “caves” when they need to focus and return to the common area to share and learn when they are done that high concentration task.

Why my team has stopped talking to me, is because they now use instant messaging. So instead of them coming over and asking a question mid way through my angry birds, status report, instead I get a little pop-up at the bottom right hand side of my monitor for me to reply to. The key difference is that this is not so interrupting as having someone physically come over. I can continue with my chain of thought, reach a convenient checkpoint and then type a reply.

Working this way flow seems to be less interrupted, it is no longer a cold reset of re-establishing where I was in my work and getting back into the groove, the interruption was less obtrusive and flow returns quicker. Perhaps because we decide the exact moment when to reply, allowing us to reach a better checkpoint/return point.

When team members who sit 6 feet away started sending me messages rather than talking to me I dismissed it as the poor communication skills of today’s younger workers, the product of text messaging generation, and generally a cop-out of having a meaningful conversation.

Now I realize that many quick questions are not worth the flow interruption penalty of a full face-to-face conversation. So items do however, if we think there is a problem, or need for a direction change then a full stop and discussion is exactly what is required, but for perhaps 5 times as many questions an electronic ping gets the answer without the interruption of flow.

I am not disputing the advantages of face-to-face communications, we will always benefit from the emotion and body language we lose electronically. However, given the value of flow and being in that productive zone, if we can keep that speed going for longer with less disruptive questioning, perhaps the overall business value delivered can go up with fewer face-to-face interruptions?

Likely this is very environment dependant, some projects will be constrained by their rate of learning and more face-to-face communications would help. However other projects, or perhaps the same project at a later phase, could be constrained by productive flow and better served by less intrusive Q&A. Balancing flow and feedback will always be dynamic.

What do you think, does technology help us here in balancing flow with being informed? How are you managing these competing demands? I would love to hear alternative solutions to this widespread issue.

(Note: This article first appeared on Gantthead.com here)

PMI-ACP Book Coverage

I finished my PMI-ACP Exam Preparation book a couple of weeks ago and now it is with the publishers for reviews and final edits. It turned out larger than expected, but I think better for the extra exercises and sample exam questions.

When designing the PMI-ACP^SM exam, we needed to base the content outline on existing books and resources so that candidates would understand what the exam would test them on. When choosing the books, we went back and forth on our decisions of which books to include, since there are so many good resources available. And while we recommend that people learn as much as they can, we also had to recognize the need for keeping the exam content—and the preparation process for the exam—reasonable. In the end, we selected the following 11 books:

1.    Agile Estimating and Planning, by Mike Cohn
2.   Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products, Second Edition, by Jim Highsmith
   
3.   Agile Project Management with Scrum, by Ken Schwaber
   
4.   Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen
   
5.   Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game, Second Edition, by Alistair Cockburn
   
6.   Becoming Agile: ...in an Imperfect World, by Greg Smith and Ahmed Sidky
   
7.   Coaching Agile Teams, by Lyssa Adkins
   
8.   Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility, by Alan Shalloway, Guy Beaver, and James R. Trott
   
9.   The Software Project Manager’s Bridge to Agility, by Michele Sliger and Stacia Broderick
   
10.   The Art of Agile Development, by James Shore and Shane Warden
    
11.   User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development, by Mike Cohn

Reading all of these books takes some time, since the 11 books add up to more than 4,000 pages. The books also cover a lot more material than you need to know for the exam. From each book, we extracted the portions that best covered the exam content outline topics, and the exam questions were then targeted at those specific sections.

Timebox Alternatives

By Mike Griffiths

The Mayans may have had the first timeboxed project. They had a strict 2012 timebox cut off with little room for extension since the world would no longer exist. Although agile methods have been preaching the benefits of fixed timeboxed schedules since their creation, it still raises concerns with many stakeholders.

The triangles diagram from DSDM created in 1994 shows the shift from fixed Functionality (vary resources and time) to fixed time and cost (vary functionality).
 


So, instead of fixing functionality (scope) via the signoff of a specification document and completing all of this functionality (hopefully within the time and budget specified), instead the resources and time are fixed and as much of the functionality as can be completed is done before the time and money runs out.

This sounds a bit like time and materials, but there is an understanding that the core functionality, the Must Haves, the Priority 1’s, or whatever you want to call them, will be delivered. In fact 80% of the outlined functionality should be delivered and it is the last 20% that is up for replacement with late breaking changes that could add even more value.

So, the best of both worlds then? All the important features and an opportunity to swap out low priority elements with things that might crop up as we go. However this is not how many stakeholders view it. Projects typically have three stakeholder groups: Sponsors who commission and fund projects, Users who, well, use them to do some work, and the Project Team who builds them. While at the 30,000 feet level all the these stakeholder groups want the same thing, a successful project, when we dig a little deeper other priorities emerge.


 

Agile Productivity

SMEs, SM0s and the Deluded Developer Day

We all want Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), but what happens if we get a Subject Matter Zeros (SM0s)?  How does that impact your schedule, and what about team members who have “other project commitments”? Before you know it, that 6 month schedule that looked pretty comfortable, is looking like a fairy tale.

I recently attended a great presentation by Lee Lambert at my local PMI conference and while he was not talking about agile per say, his commentary on SMEs and part time resources struck a chord, which I would like to share.

The role of the customer, the business, the Subject Matter Expert (SME) on agile projects is vital. They not only help provide requirements, but also clarify details, validate prototypes, perform UAT, tell us about business changes, articulate the goal, prioritize, the list goes on. Great SMEs are like great multi-disciplined developers who can do BA work, architecture, development, and QA – they can just make projects happen. It is rare to get these mythical beings, but I have been fortunate to work with a few.

More commonly we work with SMEs with limited time who have a preference for one or two areas of work, such as providing requirements or testing increments of software. We obviously want the best SMEs we can get, but the best people are always busy since they “get-it” and can crank out work – so who wouldn’t want to engage them?

When SMEs are not available we can assign proxy customers, where perhaps a BA plays the role of the customer, or we get someone more junior from the business who may be less experienced in the role than ideal. These are just the realities of working in companies today and as the Rolling Stones said, “You can't always get what you want, But if you try sometimes you just might find, You get what you need”. When this happens we just need to be sure we understand the consequences to our schedule.

The other factor is team member availability, ideally this is 100%. This makes face-to-face meetings easy, resource leveling a breeze, and a one day task often does actually get done in one day, imagine that! “You, you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one”, many project schedules are planned this way even when commitments for support and other projects take availability from the project.

Overall Task Duration is dictated by the productivity of our resources along with their availability, as follows:
So if a task was estimated at 8 hours (one day) for our SME & Dev combo, but we did not get the SME we wanted and instead got a SM0 who, lets optimistically assume is 50% as productive as our SME. Also the developer is not 100% committed to the team, but split across 2 projects and also providing production support for those projects, then their true availability for new development on our project might be only 25%.

Using these figures for our 8 hour task we get: 
This result can be surprising, we instinctively knew it would take longer since the business involvement was not perfect and the developer had other work, most PMs factor in 3-4 times longer, maybe 5-6 times, but it is rare for the full 8 times longer to be properly incorporated.

This is why ideas like Yesterday’s Weather (gauging performance based on previous results) and measuring team capacity via Velocity are often better predictors of completion rates.  The other point it illustrates is the impact and significance of suboptimal resources and non-dedicated participants.

As always the best time to influence project durations and success factors is when selecting the people for the project. It is a too easy to overlook the true impact of a few small compromises and not properly explain the consequences that then accumulate to make projects late. We can use the Task Duration formula to illustrate this or rely on the Beatles “Help, I need somebody; Help, not just anybody, Help…”.

 

Bio: Mike Griffiths is a project manager who seriously needs to update his music collection. He has served on the board of the Agile Alliance and the APLN. Mike is a contributor to the PMBOK v5 Guide, the Software Extension to the PMBOK Guide, the PMI Agile CoP, and the PMI-ACP Steering Committees.

 This post first appeared in Gantthead.com here.

Agile PMO Slides

I have uploaded the slides from my “Agile PMO” presentation and they can be accessed from the link below . I presented them last week at the Calgary APLN meeting and this week at the PMI-SAC Professional Development Conference. My session was well attended and I received good feedback; some of the slides are pretty sparse and really just visual reminders for me to tell a story about something. In the upcoming weeks I hope to post some more thoughts on the topic.

At the conference I attended some great sessions by Ed Merrow, Lee Lambert, and Jeremy Gutsche amongst others, that inspired some new directions of learning that I hope to write about too. Unfortunately release demos, and 2012 road-mapping sessions at my day job preventing me attending all the sessions I would have liked, but the event was very worthwhile.

Download The Agile PMO

Using ANT to Measure Project Success

What is project success? Is it just on time, on budget, with required functionality, and to a high quality standard? Or is there more, some missing X factor, a good after-taste, or resonance that we just know is great?

I did some training for a client recently who is interested in measuring project success. The traditional constraint measures of on budget, on schedule, happy stakeholders were not cutting it for him. They were missing this unknown element he was really more keen to measure. We talked about other measures of success including how people feel about the project and the act of leaving a valuable legacy.

There are plenty of examples of projects that might be judged failures by the constraint measures of on budget, on schedule, etc, but successes in terms of how people felt about them and the act of leaving a legacy. They include the Apollo 13 mission, the Titanic Movie, Shackleton and the Endurance, and the Iridium Satellite Network. I wrote about how these “failed” by constraint measures were successes by other measures in a post a couple of years ago.

This still was not satisfactory and these measures were often only apparent long after the project was done. They were too late and retroactive, my client wanted something he could use right now to get a better handle on projects. It turns out what he was looking for might be better explained by Actor Networks with Convergent and Divergent behaviour, (but I did not know that then, so back to the story.)

Bothered by not fully answering his question, I attended the Agile on The Beach conference in Cornwall, UK. I flew into London, where I worked in the 1990’s at Canary Wharf and saw the Millennium Dome being built. Seen in films such as James Bond: The World is Not Enough, the Millennium Dome project that, while on schedule, has been widely labeled as a failure. The white elephant that hardly anyone wanted, and struggled to attract or please visitors. I was even a little surprised to see it was still there, since I knew it had been left empty for a while, used as a temporary homeless shelter, and other things.
 

PMI-ACP Value Stream Mapping

I have been away attending the excellent “Agile on The Beach” conference recently, but when I returned I had an email waiting requesting some PMI-ACP study help on Value Stream Mapping. So here is quick outline of the topic.

Value Stream Mapping – is a lean manufacturing technique that has been adopted by agile methods. It is used to analyze the flow of information (or materials) required to complete a process and to determine elements of waste that may be removed to improve the efficiency of the process. Value stream mapping usually involves creating visual maps of the process (value stream maps) and progresses through these stages:
1)    Identify the product or service that you are analyzing
2)    Create a value stream map of the currant process identifying steps, queues, delays and information flows
3)    Review the map to find delays, waste and constraints
4)    Create a new value stream map of the future state optimized to remove/reduce delays, waste and constraints
5)    Develop a roadmap to create the future state
6)    Plan to revisit the process in the future to continually tune and optimize

To illustrate lets optimize the value stream for buying a cake to celebrate passing your PMI-ACP exam with a friend. Let’s say this involves choosing a cake, waiting at the bakery counter to get the cake, paying for the cake at the checkout, then unpacking and slicing before enjoying the benefit of the process (the cake).

Value Driven Delivery

(This post, a draft sample from my upcoming PMI-ACP Prep book, takes a look at the “Value Driven Delivery” domain.)

Value, specifically the delivery of business value, is a core component of agile methods. This concept is woven into the agile DNA with its inclusion in the Agile Values (“Working software over comprehensive documentation”) and the Agile Principles (“Working software is delivered frequently” and “Working software is the principal measure of progress”). The focus on delivering value drives much of the agile activities and decision making on a project, and it manifests itself in many of the Tools and Techniques (T&T) and Knowledge and Skills (K&S) used. The focus on value is such an essential component of agile methods that the “Value Driven Delivery” domain has the most T&T and K&S of any of the 6 domains. This means we are starting with the biggest section early in this book.

What Is Value Driven Delivery?
Let’s start by defining value-driven delivery. The reason projects are undertaken is to generate business value, be it to produce a benefit or improve a service. Even safety and regulatory compliance projects can be expressed in terms of business value by considering the business risk and impact of not undertaking them. If value then is the reason for doing projects, value driven delivery is the focus of the project throughout the project planning, execution, and control processes.

It is the big picture view, the wearing of the sponsor’s hat when making decisions. By the project manager and team assuming this viewpoint, there is an opportunity to incorporate unique technical insights, such as technical dependencies or risk reduction steps, into the selection of features for a release that the sponsor may not be aware of. However value driven delivery remains a guiding vision for much local decision making, the selecting of choices that maximize the value delivered to the business or customer.

Risks as Anti-value
Risks are closely related to value. We can think of project risks as anti-value, i.e., things that can erode, remove, or reduce value if they are to occur. If value is the heads side of a coin, then risks are the tails side. To maximize value we must also minimize risks, since risks potentially reduce value. This is why the Value Driven Delivery domain addresses many risk reduction concepts and techniques.

Agile Outside of Software

Agile adoption outside of software is nothing new--it dates back very close to the origin of today’s agile methods, predating the term “agile”. However, what is new and noteworthy is the rate and scale of non-software agile adoption being witnessed today. Now--as more companies than ever are exposed to agile methods in their IT practices--these methods are being employed beyond the regular IT domain.

The key to understanding the applicability of agile outside of IT is the concept of the “knowledge worker”. Knowledge workers are people with subject matter expertise who communicate this knowledge and take part in analysis and/or development. This not only covers the IT industry, but also engineers, teachers, scientists, lawyers, doctors and many others employed today. In fact, knowledge workers have become the largest segment of the North American workforce; the so-called Third Wave of human socio-economic development after the Agricultural Age (land based) and the Industrial Age (factory based). In the Knowledge Age, value is based upon the ownership of knowledge and the ability to use that knowledge to create or improve goods and services.

Knowledge worker theory and agile theory are a little like twins separated at birth, growing up independently. As the agile community was determining the best way for software teams to collaborate, knowledge worker researchers were establishing ideas like Human Interaction Management--which asserts there are five principles characterizing effective knowledge work:

• Build effective teams
• Communicate in a structured way
• Create, share and maintain knowledge
• Align your time with strategic goals
• Negotiate next steps as you work

If you think this list sounds a lot like how we manage our daily stand-ups, prioritize the backlog and work in iterations, then it you are not alone. The two camps are very similar, and the ways to effectively collaborate when manipulating bits and not atoms (information not materials) are now widely taught. However, not all our guidebooks or practices embrace the subtleties of knowledge worker environments and many Industrial Worker relics remain. In the industrial age, after product design was complete, work was relatively predictable with only breakdowns, human error and raw material defects to content with. Change rates were relatively low and uncertainty can be largely planned out of a process through a management focus on process. In the knowledge worker environment, high value often comes from combining information from new or unlikely sources. Levels of uncertainty in job execution can be high, and management focuses on people rather than process.

This “Uncertainty and Management Focus” spectrum is shown below:

Agile Prioritisation

A uniting thread through the variety of different agile methods is the fact that they all employ work prioritisation schemes. While the terminology varies--Scrum for instance has a “product backlog”, FDD a “feature list” and DSDM a “prioritised requirements list”--the concept is the same. The project works through a prioritised list of items that have discernable business value.

Prioritisation is required because it enables the flexing of scope to meet budget or timeline objectives while retaining a useful set of functionality (Minimum Marketable Release).


 

Prioritisation also provides a framework for deciding if/when to incorporate changes. By asking the business to “Tell me what it is more important than?” and then inserting the new change into the prioritised work list at the appropriate point, it is possible to include changes.

 

It is worth explaining that while agile methods provide tremendous flexibility through the ability to accept late-breaking changes, they cannot bend the laws of time and space. So if your project time or budget was estimated to be fully consumed with the current scope, then adding a new change will inevitably force a lower priority feature below the “cutoff point” of what we expect to deliver. So, yes, we can accept late-breaking changes…but only at the expense of lower-priority work items.

A single prioritised work list also simplifies the view of remaining work. Rather than having separate “buckets” of work for change requests, defect fixes and new features, by combining them into a single prioritised list, people get a clear, complete view of all remaining work. Many teams miss this point to begin with and retain bug-fix and change budgets. This muddies velocity; a single prioritized list of work-to-be-done regardless of origin offers better transparency and trade-off control.

Behind Every Scheme is a Schemer
How we go about prioritisation (and the prioritisation schemes used) varies from method to method--and sometimes project to project--based on what works for the business. A simple scheme is to label items as “Priority 1”, “Priority 2”, “Priority 3”, etc. While straightforward, a problem with this is that there is a tendency for everything to become a “Priority 1”--or at least too many things are labeled “Priority 1” for the scheme to be effective. It is rare that a business representative asks for a new feature and says it should be a Priority 2 or 3, since they know that low-priority items risk missing the cut off. Likewise, “high”, “medium” and “low” prioritisations fall victim to the same fate. Without a shared, defendable reason for what defines “high”, we end up with too many and a lack of true priority.

DSDM popularized the MoSCoW prioritisation scheme, deriving its name from the first letters of its labels of “Must…”, “Should…”, “Could…”, “Would like to have, but not this time.” Under MoSCoW, we have some easier-to-defend categories. “Must-have” requirements or features are fundamental to the system; without them, the system does not work or has no value. “Should have’s” are important--by definition, we should have them for the system to work correctly; if they are not there, then the work-around will likely be costly or cumbersome. “Could have’s” are useful net additions that add tangible value, and “Would like’s” are the “also-ran” requests that are duly noted--but unlikely to make the cut.

An approach I have seen work well is giving sponsors Monopoly money equalling the project budget and asking them to distribute it amongst the system features. This is useful for gaining general priority on system components but can be taken too far if applied to question perceived low value-add activities like documentation, so keep it for the business features.

If you do not have any Monopoly money available, the 100-Point Method originally developed by Dean Leffingwell and Don Widrig for use cases can be used instead. It is a voting scheme where each stakeholder is given 100 points that he or she can use for voting in favor of the most important requirements. How they distribute the 100 points is up to them: 20 here, 10 there or even all 100 on a single requirement if that is their sole priority.

The Requirements Prioritisation Model created by Karl Wiegers is a more mathematically rigorous method of calculating priority. Every proposed feature is rated for benefit, penalty, cost and risk on a relative scale of 1 -9 (low to high). Customers rate the benefit score for having the feature and the penalty score for not having it. Developers rate the cost of producing the feature and the risk associated with producing it. After entering the numbers for all the features, the relative priority for each feature is calculated by considering the percentage of the weighted feature desirability to each feature. (For more details and link to an example, see Karl’s outline First Things First: Prioritizing Requirements; also, for more analysis on mathematical models on requirements prioritisation try this US-CERT paper.)

No Scheme as a Scheme
At the end of the day, it is the prioritisation of features and not the scheme we need to focus on. Sometimes refereeing the schemes themselves can detract too much time from meaningful discussions. For this reason, I am personally a fan of simply asking the business to list features in priority order. No category 1,2,3s; no high, medium, lows; no must haves, etc,--instead, just a simple list (whether this is in Excel or an agile requirements management tool). This removes the categories that people tend to fixate upon from the debate and leaves the discussion around priorities.

 

Conclusion
By all means get creative and try different schemes to engage the business in the prioritisation. There is no single best way to always prioritise; instead, try to diagnose issues arising in the prioritisation process, be it “lack of involvement” or “too many priority 1’s”, and then try approaches such as Monopoly money, MoSCoW or a pure list to assist if the problems cannot be resolved via dialogue. The goal is to understand where features lie in relation to others as opposed to assigning a category label. By maintaining a flexible list of prioritised requirements and having opportunities to revisit and reprioritise, we maintain the agility to deliver the highest value set of features within the available time and budget.

(I wrote this article originally for Gantthead.com and it appeared in April 2011 here)

The Washboard Anti-Pattern

Washboarding is an instability that occurs when vehicles move on dirt roads. What starts off with a small bump turns into a whole series of small bumps as vehicles travel the road. Washboard roads are more dangerous than smooth dirt roads and have to be driven at lower speeds. All these bumps are a pain in the rear (literally) and make you go slower.

We see the resourcing equivalent of washboard roads in projects too. Traditional projects staff early with business analysts to do the bulk of the requirements gathering and then bring in developers and finally QA people. These peaks and valleys of specialization not only look like a washboard road, but they have the same effect, they are a pain in the rear and make you go slower.

 
Because the BA’s, devs, and QA’s are not used evenly throughout the project, they are brought in for a short period and then transferred to the next project. People try to share BA’s, QA’s and other roles between multiple projects and pretty soon most people are working on multiple projects. This is very difficult to schedule efficiently because projects rarely sync up exactly or stay on plan. Worse, task switching between multiple projects is time consuming, prone to errors, less satisfying, and a slower way of working.

Just as preventing washboarding on a road is difficult once it has started, breaking the resource washboard anti-pattern can be difficult too. A concerted effort and decision to staff whole team projects needs to be made. Acknowledging that it is impossible (or at least extremely unlikely) that all the final requirements can be captured up front, keep the BA’s around. Engage the QA team early so they hear from the business firsthand what they should be testing for, and encourage developers to work with the BA’s and QA’s beyond coding. Whole team staffing breaks down silos and prevents throwing things over a wall to another group that is inefficient and error prone.
 

Bringing the whole team together at the beginning of the project allows them to work collectively on vertical slices of the solution through to completion. Multidisciplined teams can help each other to minimize resource constraints and since the team swarms around solving small increments, there is no task switching penalty when asking for help.

Just as the advantages of smooth roads over washboard is clear to everyone, so too are the benefits of dedicated, collaborative teams. Dirt roads and small bumps lead to road washboarding, as specializations, functional groups and matrix management leads to resource washboarding.

Executive management are the best bulldozers, they can mandate the change and pave the way as it were. If you do not have that level of commitment, break the bumpy cycle on the projects you can control. Recruit combined BA/QA staff and keep them throughout the project, get all roles in the design sessions, and business discussions, resist task switching and prioritize projects. Then see how much faster you can go.

Agile as a Solution for "Miscalibration Errors"

Malcolm Gladwell (author of Blink and Tipping Point) was in town a couple of weeks ago and I enjoyed a great presentation he gave on what happens when we think we have complete information on a subject.

The Problem
Gladwell asserts that the global economic crisis was largely caused by “Miscalibration Errors”. These are errors made by leaders who become over confident due to reliance on information. Those in charge of the major banks were smart, professional, and respected people at the top of their game; who, as it turns out, are prime candidates from miscalibration errors.

People who are incompetent make frequent, largely unimportant errors, and that is understandable. They are largely unimportant errors because people who are incompetent rarely get into positions of power. Yet those who are highly competent are susceptible to rare, but hugely significant errors. 

Think of the global economic crisis where bank CEOs were seemingly in denial of the impending collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market. (I don’t mean close to the end when they were secretly betting against the market while still recommending products to their clients, but earlier on when they were happy to bet their own firms on “AAA” rated derivatives that they knew were really just a collection of highly suspect subprime mortgages.)

Anyway, this phenomenon of educated, well informed leaders making rare, but catastrophic errors is not new and unlikely to go away soon, it seems to be a baked-in human flaw. When presented with increasing levels of information our perception of judgement accuracy increases when in reality their judgement may be very suspect. Let’s look at some examples:

Agile Contracts - Part 2

Part 2 of my article on Agile contracts has been published on Gantthead.com. Part 1 reviewed the existing agile contract samples from the DSDM Consortium that speaks to “Fit for business purpose” acceptance criteria and “Passing Tests” rather than meeting specifications. Part 1 also examined the CoActivate Community sample Fixed Price agile contract and Jeff Sutherland’s suggestions on early termination and functionality swapping.

Part 2 highlights some of the ideas Jesse Fewell presented on agile contracts at the PMI Global Congress last year. These include Graduated Fixed Price and Fixed Price Work Packages as building blocks for creating agile contracts.

Clearly these contract options are not panaceas to possible engagement woes, but they do offer some examples of how organizations and suppliers have been able to utilize the flexibility of agile for mutual competitive advantage. 

Training in New Orleans - Updated: Now Full

The next occurrence of my Agile Project Management class will be in New Orleans on February 28 and March 1st (Feb 18 Update: and is now full ). After that there is:

Savannah, GA - April 11, 12
Dallas, TX  - October 26, 27
Anaheim, CA - November 7,8

I enjoy delivering these courses and people enjoy attending them too, here are some feedback comments:

"Mike delivers an exceptionally well reasoned and effective presentation of agile. Thoroughly appreciated" - Bill Palace, El Sugund, CA
“The best PMI class I have ever taken.” - Scott Hall, Marriot International
"This was a very well executed course. Instructor (Mike Griffiths) was very engaging!" – Ameila White, Boeing
"The instructor was very knowledgeable, class well organized, content at the right level of detail and very comprehensive. One of the best classes I have taken regarding PM topics" – James Bernard, Scottsdale
"Excellent course with great information" – Tom Gehret, JNJ Vision Care
"Excellent facilitator. Mike is respectful and knowledgeable" - Nghiem Pauline, San Diego, CA
"The course was fantastic " - Kimberly Kehoe, San Diego, CA
"Mike is an excellent instructor and I really appreciated his organized and clear, well researched presentation. His domain and project management experience is evident from his talk. Also I appreciate his exposure/experience to multiple approaches like PRINCE2, PMBOK, Scrum, DSDM etc." - Sarah Harris, OpenText
"Great content and delivery" – Andrea Williams, Fed Ex
"Great Stuff!, Really enjoyed instructor and real-world examples" - Don Brusasco, Northridge, CA
"The instructor did an excellent job of keeping the pace, - clearly explaining topics and providing practical applications" - Cathy MacKinnon, Schering Plough Corp
"Excellent!" – Peter Colquohoun, Australian Defence

All of these classes sold out last year so if you want to attend I suggest you book early; I hope to see you in New Orleans!

Agile Project Wins PMI Award

This was a regional competition, not the national one, but I am really pleased to report that the IPS project I managed for the last 3+ years won the PMI-SAC Business & IT “Project of the Year” award at last week’s PMI Gala and Conference.

The Integrated Pipeline Solution (IPS) manages about a third of Canada’s heavy oil transportation. While you may think tracking oil moving through a pipeline sounds pretty simple, like anything, the devil is in the details. Husky has about 30,000km of pipeline and complications such as blending products, forecasting production, optimizing capacity, custody transfers, billing, accruals, etc and the fact that billions of dollars are at stake mean that the rules, regulations and complexity adds up pretty quickly.

We had an amazing team and engaged, savvy business representatives – these were the real reasons for success, not the methods we followed. However, there were lots of challenges too and our approach helped us here. We “inherited” the project $1.1M behind budget after an outsourced vendor doubled their estimate following a year of analysis. They were asked to leave and the project was brought in-house, but with no adjustment to the original budget.

Agile methods excel at fixed budget projects providing the sponsor is willing to flex functionality. This is what occurred and we actually ended up delivering more functionality that originally scoped within the initial budget.

The PMI Awards assess projects on a variety of criteria and asks for submissions in a specific 10 page format. I will spare you the 10 page version and instead list a quick summary of the benefits:

• Enhanced Business and IT relations – against a backdrop of varying degrees of business / IT co-operation, the project stood out as an example of completing a long and challenging project through close cooperation. The stakeholders were practical and pragmatic about decision making and priorities. The increased trust built on this project has been useful for launching subsequent projects.

• Business Benefits – the business benefits of creating a single, integrated pipeline system are numerous. User configurable calculations, better data quality, faster calculation speeds, and improved reporting are just some of the tangible benefits.

• Improved resilience and support – The IPS project moved the Pipeline group from a set of unsupported, legacy systems to a new platform of state of the art .Net and Oracle 11g solutions. User developed spreadsheets with questionable data integrity were also replaced.

• Project Objectives met – The project delivered all the requested functionality within the defined project schedule. This functionality was delivered to a very high level of quality, and while there have been some changes and minor fixes since April 2010, there have been no production outages. The project finished just under the $6.1M budget frozen in 2006 despite having to incorporate late breaking business changes in 2009.

Aligning PMOs using Game Theory

Does your PMO Produce Multiple Obstacles for your project or Promote Many Opportunities for success?

A Project Management Office (PMO) can act as an obstacle to agile projects. This can take the form of asking for inappropriate planning detail by not recognizing the likelihood of changes; or asking for conformance to templates that are not even used on an agile project. For these reasons PMOs often get a bad reputation on agile teams, but it need not be that way, they can also add tremendous support and be a great help.

First let’s look at what a PMO actually does (or what they should do, since implementations and services vary). In the September 2010 issue of the Project Management Journal (the PMI’s research publication) there was a nice definition of PMO roles:

1.    Monitor and control project performance
2.    Develop and implement standard methodologies, processes, and tools
3.    Develop the competency of project personnel, including training and mentoring
4.    Multiproject management, including program and portfolio management, coordination and allocation of resources between projects
5.    Strategic management, including participation in strategic planning and benefits management
6.    Organizational learning, including the management of lessons learned, audits, and monitoring of PMO performance
7.    Management of customer interfaces 
8.    Recruit, select, and evaluate project managers
9.    Execute specialized tasks for project managers (e.g. preparation of schedulers)

This definition is good because it speaks to the “supporting” and “developing” roles a PMO should provide and moves beyond the “conformance” and “compliance checking” functions that many teams think of when they consider a PMO. However, when taken with a rigid, traditional-only view of how projects should be run, the PMO can lead to the Produce Multiple Obstacles issue:

5 Things to Think about After Stand-up

Following my post on 5 Things to Think About Before Stand-Up, it is only right that I follow it up with the 5 things I think about after Stand-up.
 
1) Issues – Anything that was reported as a blocker, impediment, or issue to making progress needs removal or avoidance. Agile employs a “constraints view” of production systems similar to Eli Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints where the role of the manager is to remove impediments from the process. The impediments or blocker issues reported at stand-up should become the project managers To-Do list to ensure their resolution.
 
2) Velocities Deviations – We know the task estimates so when a 2 day task has taken 4 days and is still going with no end in sight, it is time to investigate. If there is time in the stand-up it might be appropriate to ask if there are any problems? Alternatively it might be better to follow up afterwards and determine the issue. Was it a poor estimate, a wicked problem, or sign that perhaps someone else should take a look? In isolation these occurrences are common; however repeating delays in work areas or with team members might be signs of deeper issues. Likewise overly high velocity (all the 4 day tasks being burned through in a day each) might be signs that we can re-evaluate our iteration goals. Just make sure “done” really is “done” and the tasks are all passing QA and user acceptance before booking the end of project party a month early.
 
3) Emotions – Consider what was said and what perhaps was not said. Was anyone upset or angry, were there tensions that need to be understood, a bubbly person abnormally quiet? All might be signs that a quick chat could be in order. These are impediments to progress just as much as reported problems. Some we may not be able to solve, but perhaps just enquiring and listening to what they have to say is a useful step towards resolution itself. (Thus allowing the worker bee to then produce more code... Buwahah!)
 
4) Questions – Perhaps we did not fully understand some progress or issue discussed at the stand-up. If a quick clarification during the meeting did not help then likely some follow up questions are required. (I used to be a developer and understood technical things, now I sometimes have to explain that I am a project manager and you have to speak slowly to me. If that still does not work I explain that I am actually a PMP certified project manager and so you will have to speak really s-l-o-w-l-y). We cannot fix what we cannot understand and while many things remain the domain of the technical team, when escalation and impediment removal is required (i.e. my job) I need to fully comprehend the issue so I can best resolve it. 
 
5) Recognitions – All work and no play makes for a dull week, month, or project. Look for opportunities for some kind of recognition, event or milestone to celebrate. We want to maintain motivation so people have the energy to blast through obstacles not run out of steam at the first hurdle. A great way to do this is to frequently recognize progress and contributions. This can be a simple thank-you explaining what people did that was useful and how it helped the project, or a team lunch, or gift. These events can make all the difference between a death march and rapid team progress.
 
Again these are my Top 5 today, on a different day I may include different things like the skills fit for selected tasks, resource load balancing, or if we are mitigating the remaining project risks, but these are currently not as high priorities on my team. What about you? Please share what you consider following stand-up?

5 Things to Think About Before Stand-Up

Stand-up meetings are familiar to agile teams and as the saying goes “familiarity breeds contempt” or at least complacency. It is all too easy to drift into a daily routine of holding a stand-up meeting without getting the full set of benefits out of it. So this led me to consider: what are the 5 most important things to think about as a project manager before stand-up?
 
(If you are using Scrum and have a Scrummaster role that is distinct from the project manager, then I would suggest these are things the Scrummaster should be considering)
 
1) A View of the WIP – A view of the work in progress is critical to understanding the items reported from the team. If you thought invoicing was a focus right now and no one mentions it, chances are we have an issue somewhere! Appreciating the work areas helps oversee new work selection, areas that might be falling behind, or where extra help may be required.
 
2) Yesterday’s issues – What did people report as issues yesterday or earlier? Have these issues been resolved now, or do we at least have an update on the resolution plan. It is pretty disheartening for people to report impediments to progress day after day and not have them worked on. It does not show much respect for their concerns or our valuation of their time. So, what is the news? Are there any follow-up items that need to happen?
 
3) Team View – Projects are more than tasks and schedules, they are networks of collaborating individuals. We need to understand the people elements of the team to build a shared commitment to a goal. Show an interest, recognizing a birthday, or upcoming wedding or vacation. Know what is going on with your team as it will colour their behaviours and provides a good opportunity to demonstrate an interest in them. If some people dial-in, try to follow the headlines there so you can ask them about the heat wave, giant sink hole, or whatever it is that is happening, this also helps them feel more integrated.
 
4) Areas of Spin and Churn – not all issues are reported specifically as issues or blocks to progress, some are more subtle, perhaps dragging anchors that slow progress rather than road blocks. Are there any tasks that have been going slower than anticipated, perhaps people are struggling to get traction (spinning) on a new task? Be especially attentive to the discussion of these items during stand-up. If things are moving again now, then great, here was a potential for micro-management interference avoided. A fact of project life is that some tasks will take longer than anticipated. If however team members are stuck on a task for a couple of days or flip-flopping on decisions or approaches (churn) then perhaps it is time to suggest a fresh set of eyes to pair on the problem or help move things along.
 
5) What you are going to say – just like the team members who we expect to have a list of accomplishments, planned tasks, and any impediments ready to report; it is important to have the same items to describe. I report on my progress on impediment removal and since I believe in transparent project management, run through the main project items too. While my issues may not be of as much relevance to the technical team, a review of any budget, hiring, and steering committee items is generally welcome (or at least politely tolerated!)
 
Obviously there are many other things to consider (shared commitment, vision, energy), but I am interested in understanding what you think the Top 5 are? If you have suggestions for items to replace any of these 5 please leave a comment, I would love hear your thoughts.

Agile Communications

Why so much Communication?
“We work with bits not atoms”. This phrase speaks to the distinction of IT projects from physical construction. Our tools and processes manipulate ideas, concepts, and models, not steel, concrete, or plastic. Given the intangible nature of software, it is no surprise we need more focus on communications, collaboration and information sharing to keep everyone informed and aligned towards a common goal.

Agile methods recognize this increased need for communication and provide a variety of tools and checkpoints to help avoid the classic project mistakes of mismatched expectations and confusion. In the absence of a visible physical product to point at and measure, we need to be constantly confirming understandings and aligning ideas against increments of the final solution. Otherwise we get the “That’s not what I asked for” or “That’s not what I need” of yesteryear’s IT projects.

Why So Often?
Daily Stand-Up meetings are common on agile projects, not because IT folk are more forgetful than other workers and need to discuss work goals and results more often; but instead because the potential for misunderstanding is higher when working on novel, hard to describe problems. Stand-Up meetings keep the team informed of work and issues that change quickly and also provide a forum to raise obstacles to progress so they can quickly removed before they unduly impact performance.

Why So Many Demo’s?
Software projects typically contain a lot of uncertainty. You would have to be clairvoyant to accurately predict the final business requirements of an organization 18 months out into the future in today’s rapidly changing business environment. So agile methods accept some requirements are likely to change and rather than have a change control process that should really be called a “Change Suppression Process” they welcome new ideas and then seek priority within a backlog of requested features. Obviously changes cost money, but if it is more important than some previously discussed item, then why not incorporate it and deliver some late breaking competitive advantage?

Agile methods promote the frequent demonstration of software for a couple of reasons. One, to get feedback and make sure it is fit for business purpose. Quite often it is not until we see something that we can better articulate what we really need, now with reference to a visible prototype. Another reason is that it is often during these demonstrations we learn about business changes and new requirements. Many times I have heard comments along the lines of ‘Oh, and for product ABC we will need to way of entering X” when this has been news to us. That’s OK, visual demo’s tap into the right hand side of our brain, not used much in analytical, left brain list making and requirements gathering. It is the combination of lists and visual cues that frequent demo’s provide that create our final views of what the system should encompass.

Agile Preservation or Progression?

Back in 1994 when we were defining DSDM, I remember our experiment of getting the user community engaged in the application architecture. (Not a successful experience!) It was at Data Sciences in Farnborough, UK and we were working on a project for a government client called ECGD. Following ideas from Enid Mumford on Participative Design we were testing how far the benefits of closer business engagement went and discovered a limit.
 
For us at least, having the business closely engaged in scope discussions, screen designs, and planning was extremely positive, but having them engaged in our architecture sessions was a net negative experience. They leapt to implementation ideas, disregarded IS strategy, and did not know enough about the architectural issues to be helpful in the discussions. We got frustrated, they got frustrated, and no body seemed better off.

So we discussed it with other DSDM Consortium members and agreed business involvement should not extend to architecture. The DSDM framework was updated and we carried on with our experiments and evolution of the method. For me this was a transformational moment, it was my first time of witnessing a failure and adaptation of a process within DSDM and how we learn and adapt. We just changed the methodology; there was no sacred cow, just good old scientific experimentation.

Business involvement in GUI design: Good
Business involvement in architecture design: Bad.
Therefore, involve them in GUI design, but not in architecture.

Decisions: Delayed, Dated, or Done?

Decision making is both analytical and emotional. We need to make decisions to move forward beyond the forks in the road, but when exactly is the best time to make them? Agilists have the automatic response of “At the last responsible moment” drummed into their heads so often that you may think they are drones rather than free thinking individuals.

Delayed
Agile and Lean gurus have explained the benefits of delaying decisions until the last responsible moment for many years. It prevents us from committing to potentially harmful decisions too soon and instead enables us to gather more information and then make a better decision when we actually need to. It keeps design options open, enhances agility, and allows agile teams to be more responsive to change than teams who have locked into a defined approach early.

Dated
Real Options adds some math to the picture. It supports the same general idea of decision delaying and providing some dates and values for our decision making calendar. This could be reassuring for people left feeling a little uneasy by all the “up in the air” decisions. Now, it is not that we are just putting them off, but instead have agreed that there is an optimal time to make each decision and when that arrives we will make them.

Done
I recently read the excellent “Rework” book by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37 Signals and it was refreshing to read about their thoughts on Decision Making. They say: “Decisions are progress. Don’t wait for the perfect solution. Decide and move forward. You want to get into the rhythm of making choices. When you get in that flow of making decision after decision, you build momentum and boost morale. You can’t build on top of “We’ll decide later”, but you can build on top of “Done”.

Plus, you don’t have to live with a decision forever. If you make a mistake, you can correct it later. It doesn’t matter how much you plan, you will still get some stuff wrong anyway. Don’t make things worse by overanalyzing and delaying before you even get going. Long projects zap morale. Make the call, make progress, and get something out now – while you’ve got the motivation and momentum to do so.”

I like this a lot. We can often get caught up in the analysis of the perfect moment to make a decision and forget the very real motivational impact of not deciding. Decisions are emotional and our emotions impact our productivity. Yes it might be marginally better to decide on that reporting tool at the end of the month, but if everyone is non-committal until then or only 90% focussed, perhaps not sure on what will happen, then what is the real cost of this Real Option?

People’s ability to deal with ambiguity varies from person to person. However many people find it disconcerting to work with little bits of their commitment parked at each of these delayed decisions. It is foolish to try and schedule being happy on Thursday at 2pm, likewise it is foolish to assume delaying decisions comes without motivational penalties.

Like most things, we can’t live by a single mantra such a “Delay decisions to the last responsible moment”, instead we need to balance the analytical benefits of delaying decisions against the emotional costs and remember that, as Rework goes on to say: “Momentum fuels motivation. The way you build momentum is by getting something done then moving on to the next thing.” Rework keeps it real, and for that is a great read.

“…we need to balance the analytical benefits of delaying decisions against the emotional costs …”

PMBOK v5 – Raise a Little Hell

If you don't like
What you got
Why don't you change it?
If your world is all screwed up
Rearrange it

The PMI is calling for volunteers to help write and shape PMBOK v5 Guide Link. Here is your chance to inject more recognition and support for agile methods. I was involved in The PMBOK v3 Guide rewrite and got two small changes accepted in 2004 when agile methods and the PMBOK were hardly being talk about and I was a bit of a lone voice at the party.
 
If you don't like what you see
Why don't you fight it
If you know there's something wrong
Why don't you right it
 
Since then the tides have changed and now the PMI Agile Community of Practice is the largest and fastest growing PMI community. In the last PMI Network Magazine sent to members there were two full articles on Agile project management. Of the PMI’s 340,000 members an estimated 65% are in IT and the demand for agile guidance that has proliferated in other disciplines of IT (development, analysis, QA) is very apparent to the PMI, who need to serve their members.

In the end it comes down to your thinking
And there's really nobody to blame
When it feels like your ship is sinking
And you're too tired to play the game

Agile Pendentives

A “Pendentive” is an architectural converter that lets you fit a domed roof on a square base. The pendentive shown in the image on the right is the yellow part.
 
When working in a traditional project management setting we often need agile pendentives that let us fit agile practices onto a traditional base. Here are some examples:

Traditional to Agile
1.    WBS –>  Prioritized Backlog. When asked to show the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) sponsors and PMO are likely looking for a breakdown of the project deliverables. Traditional project management approaches recommend creating a WBS early in a project lifecycle after gathering requirements and defining scope.

Agile projects acknowledge this upfront design is likely to change and so deliberately go a little lighter on these definition activities, preferring to invest the time in building portions of application and arriving at agreement of functionality through feedback.

2.    Detailed Gantt Chart –> Release Plan. Detailed Gantt charts are another example of a detailed upfront design deliverable that is likely to be brittle and changing too frequently to warrant the update effort in project environments that have high levels of requirements uncertainty or technology uncertainty. It is not that we cannot create Gantt charts for agile projects – I do for some stakeholders. Rather that the time and effort required to update them is probably best used elsewhere in gaining agreement of the true business requirements.

So, instead of producing detailed Gantt charts that list tasks and do not survive contact with the reality of software projects, release plans that layout iterations and release timeframes are a more robust planning tool.

Starting an Agile Project within a Traditional Framework

Agile methods typically don’t cover the early stages of projects very well. They often assume you are ready to start gathering requirements as user stories, or that you even have some candidate features or stories magically ready to go. This is shown by the scope coverage diagram below.
 

 
 

Yet for all but the smallest, most process-light organizations, there are stages of envisioning, feasibility, and setup that happen before we are ready to jump into requirements gathering. This is where many companies come unstuck with agile. Either they jump straight to stories and miss out the early project stuff and suffer disoriented stakeholders and disengaged project offices. Or they go too heavy with the upfront chartering and scope definition, create brittle plans and lose some of the advantages of adaptation and iterative development.

The following diagram is a good place to consider starting from. It combines some of the bare necessities from a traditional approach that will satisfy the project office. Yet it does not go too far into Big Design Up Front (BDUF) to create problems or consume too much time that could be better spent working directly with the business to determine their requirements via collaborative development.

 
 

The overall duration is short, just 15% of the likely (guestimated) project duration, but yields lightweight versions of the key deliverables familiar to the PMI process police. We get stakeholders informed and engaged, the project office placated, and the bulk of the project duration dedicated to iterative development. 

Instead of a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) I would recommend a candidate prioritised Feature List or prioritised Story list.

 

Kick-Off meetings using the Design The Product Box exercise, or Shape the Poduct Tree are a great way to start identifying candidate features and then follow them up with Feature Discovery Workshops. The length and number of feature workshops will vary depending on the size and complexity of your project. A three month web project with a team of three people might be scoped in a day or two. Yet a three year project with 30 people will take longer to drive out all the candidate features.

I am actually quite a fan of the early project deliverables like Project Charters since they explain important W5+ (What, Why, When, Who, Where + How) elements of a project, but believe these documents don’t have to be verbose or costly to create.

Instead cover the basics, get people onside and the whole endeavour will go quicker than if you try to start without these things and have to catch people up later.

2010 Training Courses and Events

2010 is shaping up to be a good year for training courses and events. I have the following public enrolment courses available through the PMI.


March 10-11 Anaheim, CA

April 13-14 Scottsdale, AZ

September 15-16 Las Vegas, NV

November 10-11 Scottsdale, AZ

December 15-16 San Diego, CA

 
My private courses are available year round, see here for a list and course outlines, and I am also hoping to head back to Alaska this summer to teach a class for the PMI Alaska Chapter there again.

As normal I’m keeping the bulk of the summer free to take full advantage of the short, but fantastic hiking and mountain biking season we get here around Calgary. I was hoping to attend the Agile 2010 Conference in Nashville, but the dates August 9-13 clash with the TransRockies Mountain Bike Race August 8-14 that comes right through my backyard of Kananaskis and is too good to pass up.

Instead of the Nashville agile conference, I hope to attend another agile conference in the fall, perhaps the Agile Business Conference in England again, or a Scrum Gathering event. Then of course there is the PMI Global Congress conference in Washington, DC in October. With the PMI Agile Community of Practice now the largest PMI community with >1700 members there will be a large Agile contingent attending and many great agile sessions to go to. Once again so many events and so little time!

Six Project Trends Every PM Should be Aware Of

As we start 2010, the second decade of the 21st century, project managers really should be embracing 21st century technologies and approaches. While developers and other project members have been benefiting from improved communication and collaboration via new technology in the last 10 years, project managers have been slower to adopt them.

The plus side of being a late adopter is that most of the kinks get ironed out before you experience them and all the features you may need have probably already been developed. So, time to get with it. Perhaps it can be a New Year’s resolution to at least examine these tools and approaches if you are not already using them on your projects.

The World Has Changed – Why Haven’t Your PM Tools and Approaches?
In the last 10 years many changes have occurred in the world of managing IT projects, yet we still see the same tools and approaches being employed. Is this because they are classic and timeless? Are the traditional PM approaches so successful that they do not need to be dragged here and there following trends and immature technology fads? No, I fear it is more that people are creatures of habit, and the usually more mature project management community, are worse than most at evaluating and adopting new approaches.

Also, project management is a largely individual activity, teams of developers and business analysts are far more common than teams of project managers, so peer-to-peer learning and tool support is almost nonexistent for project managers. Plus, project management can often be a reputation based market and to some people fumbling around as a beginner in a new approach is very uncomfortable to them. Well it is time to get over it, this is how we learn anything, and if you are concerned about looking foolish, just imagine how foolish you will look when everyone else has moved with recent trends and you are in the last stand of dinosaurs.

Project Progress, Optical Illusions, and the Simpsons

My last post was on modifying Parking Lot Diagrams to use the area of boxes to show the relative effort of differing parts of the system. The idea was that while traditional Parking Lot diagrams are a great way of summarizing progress at a project level, the customary approach of giving all the feature groups the same size box may lead people to believe these chunks of functionality are of equivalent size or complexity.

In the boxes below, the number in brackets describes the feature count, but this requires people to read the numbers and then consider the relative sizes. My goal was to create a new graphical summary that depicts the relative sizes via box area to make the summaries easier to understand.

So a standard Parking Lot diagram like this...

becomes a scaled Parking Lot diagram like this...

In the second example we can quickly see the relative estimated sizes of the areas of work, with for example, “Enter Order Details” being three times the size (in area) of “Create New Order”. In this example to keep things simple, I am using feature count (15 vs 5) to depict effort and area. Most projects will use development effort in points or person days as the scaling factor.

Anyway, I have been using these scaled Parking Lot diagrams on my projects for a while, created quite laboriously in Excel and PowerPoint, and I was hoping that someone with better skills than I have could help me streamline the process. Well, in typical fashion, soon after posting I learned that:

A)    I may be asking the wrong question
B)    My invented solution has already been done before and far more elegantly
C)    It has been done on the Simpsons

Oh, the joy of the internet! Actually this is of course a great thing and now I can progress from a much firmer foundation, and far quicker than my slow evolution was taking me...

Parking Lot Diagrams Revisited – Using Area to Show Effort

Parking Lot diagrams are a great way of summarizing an entire project’s progress and status onto a single page. They illustrate work done, work in progress, work planned and identify what is behind schedule.
 
In this example we can see that “Stock Search” in red, is behind, it was due to finish in November. “Create New Order” shown in green is complete, the boxes in yellow are ‘in progress’ and those in white have not been started yet. I have posted previously about their use and examples of how to produce them.

However, they miss an important element, the relative sizes (usually in terms of effort, but could be cost or risk) of the functional areas. So, in the example above, the fact that “Enter Order Details” might be 3 times the development effort of “Create New Order” is likely lost on the stakeholders reviewing the chart. Sure they can look at the number of features 15 vs 5 and likely surmise “Enter Order Details” is more work, but upon first impression, this is not immediately apparent.

So, bring on Scaled Progress charts, the box size represents estimated development effort. I have been using these with my current Steering Committee for a while. I meet some of these people infrequently and these charts provide a nice reminder of the overall project scope and where the project progress right now.

Agile Business Conference 2009

I attended the Agile Business Conference in London this week and presented on Tracking Project Performance. I missed this conference last year and so it was especially good to catch up with people again and hear what they have been doing. Also, after working in London for six years, but then living in Canada for the last nine years, it is always interesting to see how things have changed since my last visit. This year it was video screens replacing all the paper billboards going up and down the escalators on the Underground that caught my eye.

 

The conference was very good, and had the general theme of “Agile Grown Up”, focussing on the organizational impacts of using agile. This may not have been as much interest to technical people, but was right up my street. On Tuesday there was a great session about agile at Nokia where 1800 software developers are using agile to develop the Symbian mobile phone platform. They are using a version of Dean Leffingwell’s “Agile Train” approach for scaling agile to such a large team and most agile practices, but not pair-programming or emerging architecture. However, the main emphasis was beyond the technical process scaling and more on the ongoing coaching, mentoring and training that is required for such a large undertaking. In a discussion with the presenter Simon Buck after the talk I learned that they aim for one full time coach/trainer for each set of 5 Scrum Teams (each about 7 people). Quite the undertaking.

PMBOK v4 and Agile mappings

For the attendees of my recent Las Vegas course, below is a link to the PMBOK v4 to Agile mappings we discussed. My previous course material mappings were based on PMBOK v3, and before that the 2000 edition, which are out of date now.

 

Quite a lot changed from the PMBOK v3 to v4; all the processes were renamed into the new verb-noun format. Six of the old processes were merged into four new ones, two processes were deleted, and two new ones added. So it seemed like time to redo the mappings and post them online this time.

 

Cautions

Process guidelines and templates are not an acceptable replacement for common sense, thought, dialog, or collaboration. A fool with a tool is still a fool, but can be especially dangerous since they give the impression that they have a potential solution to tricky problems. Beware of simply following any project guidelines that seem counter to your objectives.

 

So, why would you want to be mapping the PMBOK v4 to Agile techniques anyway?...

Project Success?

What defines project success? On “time and budget”, or “to specification and quality requirements”, maybe all of these? No, we are missing some less tangible, but critical components; how do people feel about the project once it is done.

On May 12 the PMI-SAC Awards for the best projects and the best project managers will be held in Calgary and Captain James Lovell, Commander of Apollo 13 will be giving the keynote “Apollo 13 – A Successful Failure”. This year I am a judge for the awards ceremony and in reviewing the applicants I have been thinking about what constitutes a successful project which prompted the recollection of some famous projects...

Apollo 13
Let’s consider Apollo 13. The third manned mission by NASA intended to land on the moon that experienced electrical problems 2 days after liftoff. An explosion occurred resulting in the loss of oxygen and power and the "Houston, we've had a problem" quote from Lovell (that is widely misquoted as, "Houston, we have a problem".)

The crew shut down the Command Module and used the Lunar Module as a "lifeboat" during the return trip to earth. Despite great hardship caused by limited electrical power, extreme cold, and a shortage of water, the crew returned safely to Earth and while missing the main moon-based scope, it was a very successful rescue, allowing future missions. “A Successful Failure”

Titanic
(The 1997 film not the original ship). This film was six months late, massively over budget and finished with a bloated 194-minute running time. Seemingly not a good performance given the original schedule, budget and scope requirements. Yet the film turned into an enormous critical and commercial success, winning eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and became the highest-grossing film of all time.

Batch Size and Velocity Fluctuations

I recently wrote a post on Velocity Signature Analysis and have been looking at how undertaking large chunks of work as a complete team impacts velocity. We are currently three quarters of the way through a major (4 months long) piece of functionality and velocity is finally rising. This seems a pattern; for the early portion of a new area of work we spend a lot of time understanding the business domain and checking our interpretation using mock-ups and discussions. Velocity, in terms of functionality built and approved by the business is down during this time since many of the team members are involved in understanding the new business area rather than cranking out code.

As project manager I can get jittery, did we estimate this section of work correctly? Our average velocity for the last module was 60 points per month and now we are only getting 20! Weeks and weeks go by as whiteboards get filled, designs get changed, but the tested story counts hardly moves. Compounding this Discovery Drain phenomenon is the Clean-up Drain pattern. During the early portions of a new phase, fixing up the niggling issues hanging over from the last phase seems to take a long time. This makes perfect sense, if they were easy they would probably have been done earlier. It is always the difficult to reproduce bug, the change request that necessitates a rework of established workflow or multiple stakeholder collaboration that seem to bleed into the next development phase. While there may only be 3 or 4 bugs or change requests hanging over, they take a disproportionate amount of time to resolve.

PMI Agile SIG Getting Ready For Launch

The PMI Agile SIG is gathering speed. This Special Interest Group (SIG) is set to be launched later this year and is very timely. While currently the interaction between agile and traditional project management approaches in most organizations may be small.

This intersection is set to expand. The agile community knows that interest and adoption of agile is on the increase. We need only look at the attendance figures for the major agile conferences over the past few years to see how usage and interest is on the increase.

    

Yet, at the same time the PMI is seeing dizzying growth too. Fueled by demands for tighter controls and better governance, along with a seeming insatiable demand for the PMP certification PMI membership has seen strong growth over the past 10 years.

The PMI Agile SIG will be a group made available to all PMI members who want to learn, contribute, and discuss using agile methods. It will examine the best ways to manage such projects and should be a powerful voice for driving agile related practices into the PMBOK Guide and other PMI standards.

As both agile and PMI adoption increases we will see far more overlap and iteration on projects.

Agile methods are being used increasingly beyond the software domain and rather than dismiss traditional approaches as not applicable I think it is better to work with them and help shape a better set of standards for the future.

I have written on introducing agile into the PMI several times before (here, here, here) and often end up discussing the IP concerns of working with the PMI with people. My take is that I'd rather be on the inside trying to make changes rather than outside taking shots. That's why I present on agile at the PMI Conferences and teach an agile project management course for PMI SeminarsWorld.

So, for those that want to help change the world of project management, the PMI Agile SIG is a good place to start. We are actively looking for members, anyone interested in joining can send an email to PMIAgileSIG@LeadingAnswers.com

Just what the PMI Agile SIG can do will be limited only by the enthusiasm of its members. I do know that there is a PMBOK Extension for the Construction Industry published by the PMI. It is for people in the Construction industry wanting to use PMBOK processes in their unique domain. Rather than the name suggests of just extending the PMBOK it actually says: "if you are in the construction industry, forget these processes from the standard PMBOK and instead replace them with these ones…" Longer term, a PMBOK Extension for the Software Industry that removes static planning and substitutes some agile methods would be very useful.

A Better S Curve and Simplified EVM

“S Curves” are great to track project spend. They are simple to interpret and quickly let us see if we are over or under budget.

  

However, we could be doing fine spend wise, but behind from a schedule perspective. This is where Tracking Gantt charts come in and show schedule.

 

Yet, Gantt charts lack the spend component. Pretty soon most projects get ahead or behind in spend and time and so trying to gauge the overall project health becomes difficult.

This is why Earned Value Analysis (EVA) and Earned Value Management (EVM) were created, combining both spend and progress variables to produce a comprehensive set of project measures and metrics. However, there begins the problem.

What’s Bad about Earned Value

EVA is beyond most project stakeholders -

Most people who are not using EVM every week do not understand the terms. “Is a negative Schedule Variance good or bad?”, “What’s the difference between BCWP and EV?” (Answers: it is bad, and they are the same). Despite its usefulness, the confusing terms and heavy use of math puts off a large percentage of the population.

Debates digress beyond numerical accuracy - More challenging still is when several people do understand EVM and start debating which versions of the formulae to use and everyone starts obsessing on the math instead of the project. “Should we use EAC = BAC/CPI, or EAC = AC + ETC, or EAC = AC + [(BAC-EV)/CPI ?” Geez people, the developers probably pulled half of these estimates out of the air and we are applying advanced math to them?

What’s the value in tracking progress against a flawed plan? - EVM compares actual project performance to planned performance at a point in time. So, if our initial plan is wrong we could be effectively trying to do the equivalent of tracking our progress on a road trip from Calgary to Salt Lake City on a map of France! The quality of the baseline plan is a critical success factor of EVM. In agile projects we acknowledge initial plans will likely need changing and so the basis for effective EVM is quickly eroded with evolving plans.

Where’s the Quality?  - We could be on time and on budget, but building a horrible product that the business does not like or is low in quality. We should be aware that cost and schedule are not the whole picture. EVM and agile alternatives are just a part of the picture.

What’s Good about Earned value

It is a Leading Indicator - Perfect rear vision is not of much use to people. At least EVM tries to predict completion dates and final costs. Imperfect leading metrics are always more valuable than perfect trailing metrics, since they give us options to re-plan and change our approach.

It is visual - It is easy to forget the EVM graphs and focus on the numbers, but at the heart of the process are some useful graphs. Visual is good because it engages the right-side of the brain and helps us draw on more mental power to understand, interpret and plan appropriate responses. Visual things are also better to discuss and collaborate on since we can point, annotate and extrapolate easier than with words or numbers.

Agile Alternatives
So how can we maintain the Leading and visual components of EVM and reduce some of the down sides? Well "Double S Curves" are a good start.

 
 
In this graph we have a familiar spend line shown in green tracking to the dollar scale on the right hand axis; and also a feature based line shown in blue tracking against the points scale on the left. 

The gradient of the blue line indicates project velocity. Where it rises steeply we got a lot of points developed in a short time, where it is flat, progress was slow.

 

Adding a background on the graph can be useful to show functional areas. Here we can see that the “Configuration” and “Stock” components of the system have been built and we are currently in the “Sales” piece of functionality at just over 1000 points worth of functionality completed.

Also, at the end of 2007 the step in the background image shows where the scope of the “Sales” portion of the system was increased, shifting the remaining functional areas out by the new work amount. Yet we are still missing projections and a sense of if we are ahead or behind from both spend and schedule perspectives. This is where predicted values come in.

  

Now we can see how we are comparing against our projections. In this example we are overspent and a little ahead of progress currently, but the trends in velocity do not correlate with the continuing velocity improvements predicted.

As a replacement for Earned Value Management, these graphs are all you need. We can get the same metrics and indices right here.

 

Traditional EVM metrics like Schedule Performance Index (SPI) and Cost Performance Index (CPI) can be easily translated into Agile terms. For example, if we planned to complete 30 stories this iteration, but only completed 25 then our SPI is 25/30 or 0.83 (we are working at only 83% of the rate planned). Likewise, CPI is the Earned Value (Completed Features Value) to date divided by the Actual Costs to date, in the example above $2.2M / $2.8M = 0.79. This means we are only getting 79 cents on the dollar compared to what we had predicted, (but of course, who is to say what we predicted is correct.)

Cruel Irony
I find it ironic and amusing that “Earned Value” is a traditional project management term and agile projects often track progress in nebulous “Points”. This is backwards. Agile projects deliberately relate things back to real business value, and yet many traditional project track progress against tasks that add little or no business value and call the process “Earned Value”.

Creating a detailed requirements document that formalizes an incomplete, premature view of requirements that should change as details emerge and business continues to evolve is not earning much value at all. Yet prioritizing features by business value and tracking progress against the business oriented features is an excellent example of real “Earned Value”.

Next Steps
I have uploaded the example spreadsheet used to produce these graphs so you can get started with your own if you are intersted. The Excel “tricks” are as follows:

1) To get the two graphs on the same chart use the ‘Line – Column on 2 axes” graph option. This is on the “Custom Graphs” tab in old versions of Excel, In the Vista version of Excel, add a secondary axis to a normal line graph, by Formatting the data series, then click “Secondary Axis” on the Series Options tab.

2) Create a background image with bands that vary in height corresponding to their points estimates. E.G. a project with two phases one 300 points and one 200 points, would have background image with two bands, one, say, 3cm high the other 2 cm high. Just as long as the proportions are correct the image will be scaled to fit the graph region appropriately. I simply use PowerPoint to create my background images, but you can be as fancy as you like.

3) In Excel format the axes and adjust the Min. and Max values from 0 to you budget amount and points estimate for the project. If these number change, create a new background image and reset the scales.

Download graph_examples.xls

Tool support

I try to keep up with the agile PM tools, but as far as I know, Rally, VersionOne, Target Process, Mingle, XPlanner, etc do not produce these graphs yet. I hope they do soon and calculate the EVM numbers too. I talk to many organizations who want to apply EVM type analysis on agile projects or work with PMO’s that ask for these stats.

Discussion on when it is appropriate to use straight line extrapolation to calculate Estimates At Completion (EAC) and the impacts of updating plans will be the subject of a future post. In the mean time you can also read a research paper on the topic written for the 2006 Agile Conference.

Download rp2_cabri_griffiths_agile_and_earned_value_reporting.pdf

Print Your Own Planning Poker Cards

Local APLN member Edgardo Gonzalez, has kindly offered a Planning Poker card template for readers to download. (No longer are we tied to the decks generously given out by Mountain Goat Software at conferences; now we can print our own!)  Based on the Fibonacci sequence, these cards print on standard Avery stationery and can be used by team members to estimate story points. (Post on Agile Estimation Techniques)

Thanks Edgardo for your gift to the community.

Download Planning Poker Cards.doc

Agile Project Leadership and More on Accreditation

Last week I taught the “Agile Project Leadership” course with Sanjiv Augustine in Manchester, UK. The course went really well and we were looked after by Ian and Dot Tudor our hosts from TCC Training and Consultancy. They have a number of training facilities around the UK and ours was Aspen House, a converted church that retained all the arched doorways and high vaulted ceilings you would hope for.

It was a rare treat to teach in such nice surroundings and the church setting made evangelising agile all the more fun. In truth we were “preaching to the choir” as most of the delegates were already familiar with the benefits of agile and were looking for practical tools and more leadership techniques to move their organizations to the next level.

Agile Project Leadership Training Course

On February 4-5th I will be co-instructing with Sanjiv Augustine our new “Agile Project Leadership” training course in Manchester, UK. Sanjiv is the author of the excellent “Managing Agile Projects” book and fellow APLN board member.

This is a fast paced, practical focussed course that covers agile project management, leadership, and avoiding common agile project pitfalls.

You can find further details including a course outline at here.

Top 10 Estimation Best Practices

I have written a few posts now on estimation and so I thought it was time for a summary. Also, I am planning to create a series of one page best practice summaries / cheat-sheets for agile and this seemed like a good candidate.

(I am a real fan of one-pagers; there is special value in getting everything visible and presented on one page that brings unique scope comprehension and clarity.  Toyota and other lean organizations make heavy use of A3 reports, a one page summary of an issue, its root causes, countermeasures, and verification steps to summarize problems and planned solutions - they are powerful tools.

Incidentally, when I first started work I had a wise and cantankerous project manager who was full of oxymoronic proverbs. One I remember was “If you cannot summarize it on only one page, you need to go off and learn more about it!” An astute paradox.)

Anyway, here’s the summary; if you want more explanation on any of the points, refer to my previous posts (Upfront Estimates, Estimation Techniques, Estimate Ranges) on agile estimation.

Software Estimates - Managing Expectations via Ranges

Customer: How much is that parrot in the window?
Pet shop owner: Somewhere between $200 and $250
Customer: Erm, OK, I’ll give you $200 for it then!

To some people providing estimates as a range of values seem a strange and unsatisfying way of conducting business. They just want to know how much something will cost, not how much it may or not cost. This is reasonable if the object or service is ready for use, but not if it has yet to be created. The more uncertainty involved in the process the more likely there will be some variability. Now consider this conversation:

Customer: How much will it cost for a taxi ride from the library to the airport
Taxi driver: Probably between $20 and $25, depending on traffic
Customer: OK, that sounds fair, let’s go

It seems more reasonable, we understand the variability of traffic. Unfortunately not all stakeholders understand the variability caused by evolving requirements and changing technology often associated with software projects. However the uncertainties of software development are real and we have an obligation to report estimates as ranges to help manage expectations.

Agile Estimating – Estimation Approaches

In the last post we covered the importance of engaging the right people in the estimation process and the need to use more than one estimation approach. Today we will look at some examples of team based estimation approaches and practical ways to combine estimate result sets.

Estimation approaches (agile or traditional) can be divided into Heuristic (expert judgment based) and Parametric (calculation based) approaches.

Heuristic
• Comparison to similar systems
• Expert Judgment
• Activity Based (top down)
• Task Based (bottom up)

Parametric
• Function Points
• Use Case Points
• Object Points

Both sets of approaches have some merit, but they are also have their limitations and are open to misuse and over reliance too. For instance Activity Based (top-down) estimating is the most commonly employed estimation approach, but has been found to be the least accurate. Capers Jones in his book “Estimating Software Costs” instead recommends task based (bottom up) estimating approaches that tend to yield better results by encouraging a more thorough investigation into the likely tasks.

Involving many stakeholders
We should ask the people who will be doing the work how long they think it will take. Not only are they closest to the technical details and therefore theoretically in a better position to create a better estimate, but also because of the psychological benefits also.

If someone just hands you an estimate for your work and tells you it should take two weeks, you can either comply and try to get it done in two weeks or rebel and either finish it early or explain why it will take much longer to illustrate the poor nature of the estimate. Even complying and doing the work in two weeks can be a problem; given two weeks work will expand to fill the time. If a solution is found early time will likely be spent finding a better solution or refining the existing one. We do not get enough of the early finishes to cancel out the late ones. As Don Reinertsen observes in “Managing the Design Factory” in engineering we get few early finishes.

Calgary APLN Planning Session

Last week we had the planning session for the 2007/2008 Calgary APLN Chapter. The goal was to create a prioritized list of topics to explore this season and demonstrate some of the values and practices of agile project leadership along the way.

We started by using the Speedboat game in small groups to identify impediments and propellers towards our goal of “Connecting, developing, and supporting great project leaders”. Speedboat is a group exercise for “Issue” and “Enabler” brainstorming that can be used with any group. It helps people to clarify goals, air their concerns, and suggest options for avoiding risks and moving forward. My colleague and co-host for the session, Janice Aston, wrote up these useful notes on using Speedboat and the outputs from the group.

Download Speed_Boat_Instructions.doc

Download Session_Results_10-17-07.doc

I previously wrote an account on Speedboat and other Innovation Games in an earlier post.

Following the Speedboat exercise we brainstormed presentation topics for the upcoming year. The thought process was: “Given the issues and enablers you just identified with agile leadership, what are the topics you would most like to see presented and discussed this year?”

Each group wrote ideas on sticky notes and we then posted them on the wall. Went through an affinity grouping exercise that sorted them into themed groups and removed duplicate suggestions. We all then went through a dot voting exercise where we assigned three votes among the topic suggestions. The topics and votes counts (shown in brackets) are shown below:

Right-Brain Project Management

Last week I attended an excellent presentation on “Right-Brain Project Management” by Dr Michael Aucoin. I attend lots of presentations during the course of a year, mainly at North America events but a sprinkling of international conferences too, and few presentations stand out as being excellent. This one was exceptional from the content (that connected some loose ends in my Agile-Leadership-Project Management mental model) to the materials and delivery.

So, what was so good about it and what does it have to do with Agile Leadership? Well it outlined a parallel view of project management that supports and reinforces agile leadership and fills in some gaps along the way.

Michael started off by talking about today’s Stretch projects. He defined a Stretch project as a project that causes traditional project management challenges. They are characterized by:

• Schedule challenges and resource challenges
• Ambiguous specifications
• Dealing with new technology, new groups, new people
• Dispersed teams
• Many mid-project scope changes
• Challenging people issues

In these circumstances the old project management approaches that are good for predictable projects break down. Michael did not use the words Traditional and Agile, but he might as well have been giving an agile presentation because through his research he had arrived at the same conclusions, but interestingly, offered additional insights.

Why Does Project Management Fail?
Many people are frustrated by the mismatch between project management theory and its application on real-life projects. This is due largely to trying to employ approaches designed for predictable projects on today’s Stretch projects and seeing them come up short.

Yet, in many walks of life outside of project management, people succeed in unpredictable environments everyday. Doctors, farmers, and teachers all work in difficult to predict environments yet, on the whole, are successful. So why do project manager’s struggle with stretch projects? There are three main reasons.

1. Mismatched project model and environment
2. Projects lack emotional involvement
3. Personal challenges created by stretch projects

Let's look at each in turn...

Agile Exception Processes – What to do when bad stuff happens to good projects

When caught by a fire or other urgent situations it is useful to have emergency equipment on hand and know how to use it.  The same goes for Project Exception Processes, if something untoward happens then that is not the best time to be creating new processes to deal with the event and explaining how to use them. Emotions are high, people respond to bad news differently, and it is better to practice an agreed to procedure than figure out new rules.

Project tolerances and exception plans provide an agreed to emergency plan for when bad stuff happens to good projects. They act as guardrails to help prevent us going off track and provide a mutually understood and agreed to resolution process. So, just as during an emergency is not the best time to collaborate on improvising a rope ladder, nor is during a major project scope change the best time to define a resolution process between project stakeholders.

We will look at the two components (Tolerances and Exception Plans) individually and then examine how they work together. Project tolerances are the guardrails, the upper and lower boundaries the project stakeholders are willing to tolerate for a given project metric. Another way to think of it is how much slack rope we have as a project team to do our own thing (or hang our selves with). Tolerances can be set on a variety of metrics and the degree of variation will depend upon the individual risk tolerances of the collective stakeholders. Some projects might be very time critical, others more concerned with budget, or user satisfaction.

New Agile Project Leadership Training Course

In September I will be co-instructing with Sanjiv Augustine the new course “Agile Project Leadership”. Sanjiv is a fellow APLN board member and author of the excellent “Managing Agile Projects” book. I’m really excited because a) we have an excellent course that will stretch attendees while engaging them, and b) co-teaching with Sanjiv will be a blast since he is such a knowledgable and personable expert.

Our first course offering will be in Manchester, UK on September 10-11th. You can find further details including a course outline at Agile University here

Agile Interfaces - PMO Integration

I spend a fair portion of my time working with Project Management Office (PMO) and Project Support Office (PSO) groups helping them integrate agile methods. One simple concept I’d like to outline today is the idea of Agile Interfaces.

Agile methods provide a great feature delivery engine, they iteratively feed on features from the backlog and produce tested functionality of high business value.

To external stakeholders this also represents a daunting and unfamiliar process to connect to. Its cyclical, seemingly never ending process is about as appealing to interact with as putting your arm in a washing machine while running. However there are a couple of friendly, safe interfaces that can alleviate mid-cycle arm twisting (how we normally extract information from the team.)

As mentioned, while agile methods focus on delivering features, they often do not provide the information required for PMOs, PSOs and other supporting groups. They typically do not encompass the entire enterprise lifecycle omitting important pre-project work and beyond delivery activities, as shown below.

The Pipelining Anti-Pattern

If you have analysts working ahead of development, or have testers working significantly behind development, then you may have “Pipelining” problems.

Pipelining is the term used to describe the situation when business analysts are working ahead on the requirements for a future iteration; the development team is working on the current iteration, and the test team is engaged on a previous iteration.

In some circumstances analysis may be several iterations ahead and testing several iterations behind. To some people this may seem an efficient use of resources with each group running at their optimal speed, unfettered by the co-ordination constraints of different groups. However from an agile and lean perspective this is problem, a bad-smell that needs fixing.

Here are the problems with pipelining:

Three teams not one – in a project where pipelining is occurring we do not have one cohesive team we have three teams (or more). It is hard enough co-ordinating the members of one team towards a common goal aligned to business benefits. When there are three teams it is just too easy for people to claim that they did their bit and problems lie with other groups. Yet, the fact remains that if the software does not meet business satisfaction then it is everyone’s problem.

Increased Work In Progress (WIP) – Requirements whether they are in the form of user stories, use cases, or formal specifications all represent work invested that has not delivered value to the business. The same goes for code, until this functionality has been tested to the satisfaction of the business it is not valuable. As the time increases between capturing the requirement and finishing the last test two problems occur. The first is classic accounting, money have been invested for no return yet and there is a risk associated with future returns. The second is that requirements decay; the longer we keep requirements around for, the higher the likelihood that they will no longer be required or will have to change.

Increased time from defect injection to defect remediation – the cost of change increases the longer a defect goes undetected. In a pipelining project, defects introduced by faulty analysis could take months to be detected in testing or user review. Fixing the problem after this period of time will entail refactoring far more code (for the work happening in the interim) than if it was detected earlier, and will increase technical debt...

The True Role of a PM on Agile Projects

So, what does the PM do on agile projects? If the team self organizes and selects their own work from the prioritized feature list, should the PM just buy pizza and keep out of the way? Well they are short changing the team if that is all they do. Rather than a fear of role erosion, PM’s should be maximizing business value delivery and looking to broaden their skill set with more leadership practices.  This post outlines four core roles and ten core principles managers of agile projects should practise. 

Working in Parallel
Before we start, the transition to agile does not happen overnight. There will be a long and sometimes awkward transition period as all the project stakeholders adopt a more collaborative and empowered approach to work. Some people will be quicker than others to make the transition and the PM often has to continue with traditional PM activities, behind the scenes, to ensure no balls are dropped on the project.

Ideas not new to agile, just a renewed emphasis
The Agile PM traits of a downward serving model and Leadership rather than Management were not invented by Agile guru’s. Instead agile teams found that the management styles that favoured people over process, collaboration over command-and-control worked best on agile projects. Leadership that moves the emphasis from doing-things-right to doing-the-right-things is a better complement to agile methods than the detail oriented task management popularized by modern project management. Interestingly, project management (emphasising achieving things through task control) is a relatively new phenomenon based on Fredrick Taylor’s Transformation View of task decomposition (1900). Whereas Leadership (emphasising achieving things through collaboration and shared vision) is as old as human collaboration itself. "When the best leader's work is done, the people say, We did it ourselves." - Lao-Tzu (604 BC)

Agile PM Role 1: Obstacle Removal