Managing agile from technology to business

 This how I tend to look at management ownership in agile development (see previous blog entry for more on the alternate views of agile):

Where:

• The CTO owns technology and most often engineering teams.
• The Engineering Manager may be an inwards looking CTO and also own technology and engineering teams, but is often less owning technology and more owning agile processes and engineering teams.
• The Product Owner owns the team's product vision and possibly the customer strategy. She/he is a member of the development team or has a representative that is part of the development team.
• The Technical Product Owner owns the customer view of technology, may be a full fledged product owner, or may be a support member of a larger product owner team.

Individuals become more and more key enablers as your product and technology base become more advanced. A Servant Leader is then a manager (e.g. engineering manager) that helps individuals contribute in independence yet within orchestrated flows. This figure illustrates where the servant leader provides critical guidance (the red corners!):

Here, from the central diagonal outwards:

• The team iterates a technology and product development and review cycle, again, and again.
• In parallel, the team learns and explores productivity and innovation. Product does the same with their customers and market segment.
• Productivity issues are monitored. In a physical model of agile processes 'high momentum' is high productivity. Servant Leaders help monitor for issues such as unsustainability, diverging focus, low or over capacity, and help teams and product avoid or resolve these issues.

 My experience is:

• Product Owner and CTO have too much "skin in the game" to be effective servant leaders. Therefore engineering managers and technical product owners (when they have only partial ownership) have a critical servant leader role to play to help all deliver better.

All original content copyright James Litsios, 2022.

Agile from business to technology

This is how I scale agile towards business and towards technology.:

Where:

• In the center we have an agile process that blends team process and product process.
• To the right we have a business process that ties into the product process.
• To the left we have a technology process (expertise process to be general) that ties into the team process.

To be honest, this is my minimal theoretical business to technology agile process. In practice, a specific agile process is chosen, with process steps and process artefacts. People like to say that agile is about people, not process. Yet people need to communicate, and the common vocabulary for that is given by a process.

Deepening in to the product business view (right side above):

Where:

• The core agile process (blue) delivers features and deliverables that are part of a product and business goals.
• These deliverables are picked-up by customers
• The features and deliverable sustain (or not) the customers competitivity within its market segment
• The product owner (in scrum terminology) is the expert that guides the product with regards to the customer needs.

We can do that also for technology/engineering (left above):

Where:

• The core agile process (blue) includes experts within the team.
• The experts enable/produce the technical/engineering needs of the features and deliverables.
• The expert individuals may be experts in different domains.
• Coordinating technology/engineering frameworks allow experts to work both as individuals and in coordination (within their team).

Many domains of technical expertise are possible. Above are the ones closer to my experience.

Note:

• The complete process above needs to coordinate at least SIX streams.
  A minimal agile process only presents three streams (team vs product vs customer). 
• Each of these (six) streams will naturally be driven at their own different rate!
• Your job, as CTO / engineering lead is to work with individuals, teams and product to pace work within these different streams to achieve an optimal throughput!
•  Think laminar flow! Productive is as fast as you can go before things become turbulent!

I wrote this up as a (much longer) slide deck, and am always happy to share my experiences!

All original content copyright James Litsios, 2022. 

Agile keeps you from being stupid

Have you noticed that people can make sense of what does not make sense when they do not understand it? That is the "soft" and "analogic" property of our brain: we can make sense out of nonsense,  and this is ok, when we do not know it is nonsense!
A waterfall process will take nonsense, and then often spend the money while delivering nonsense.
Agile process will take nonsense, and fail iterations, and... just go on, spend your money, and  delivery nonsense, or...,  recognise the stalling as a failure to deliver the requirements (e.g. sprint stories), and then force the requirements to be rewritten for the next development iteration. The next iteration may fail, but again the requirements will need to be rewritten. Yet if you are truthfully applying an agile process, each failed delivery will again attempt to reformulate the requirements to be achievable and in the end what was not understood and is blocking you becomes understood and you either stop the project, or you understand how remove the blocker.

Bad scrum, good scrum and trust

Years ago I switched my development team to scrum. Or at least what I thought was scrum: we had teams, product owners, we carefully followed the sprint and stand-up process. Then we carefully sized our stories and we carefully worked to produce average work. of decent quality. It was scrum, but now I would call it "bad scrum".
It was bad because we had built ourselves a straight jacket, and none of us dared to step out of line with the risk of blowing the sprint. Arguably, there were attenuating circumstances: the teams were walking on eggs, working on a large C++ program that few us understood. Still I have seen this behavior elsewhere. It is a behavior of risk aversion, sustained by worries of the whole team.

So you might ask, "What is then good scrum"? Good scrum is when you follow the process but stop worrying about it.But most importantly, good scrum is when you have managed to build a liberating trust among all members of the team. All too often developers are suspicious of other people's work, or worse they have the "not invented here syndrome" where they need to make their mark in the code or the design for it to be acceptable. Strangely enough this type of behavior is more destructive in an agile process than a waterfall process! In an agile process like scrum, a lack of trust will amplify the risk aversion of the team, and this will kill your productivity. Remarkably, the notion of trust is rarely mentioned and yet it is fundamental. Take the size of a scrum team; Some people say 5 members, some say 7 or 9, or even 11 in certain domains; And yet you could even have a scrum team size of 21... if you manage to get the whole team to trust each other! A team of 5 often works better than a team of 9, simply because it is easier to build trust among 5 than among 9!

So you might ask me, how to build trust? If you are like me, you have spent years building mathematical models of processes and people, you see trust as a process. But if you are not, then the simple rule is to show others that you trust them. You need to show it with your words but also in your actions. Then, if you are the scrum master, be a trust policeman! Anytime you see someone behaving in a manner that goes against trust, you stop them gently and bring the conversation back to trusting relation. Finally, you eliminate people who really cannot play the game, or if they are "the chosen ones" you ring fence them, which usually means you give them a babysitter to keep them from damaging trust relations (a painful job).

Having said all this, I am sure you have heard of catastrophe theory, which can visually be seen as moving from a continuous regime to another as a single event. Here is the insight: what do you think happens when you over trust your scrum team, and they over trust themselves? They can hit a wall, fall completely apart, and lose their trust (and yours too!). The magic then of a the good manager is to understand how complex the projects you give to your teams can be; And that my friend, is a very difficult task!