Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Is Estimating a Wasteful Practice?

Mike Bria has been following the trend that’s emerging in the agile community to stop estimating user stories and adopt a pull based system, Is Estimating a Wasteful Practice? The idea that you don’t estimate but focus on a low variability analysis technique such as the use of a user story template like the one Liz Keogh recently proposed as an adaptation of Tim McKinnon’s original, is becoming more popular. It seems to work particularly well with pull system like Kanban or Naked Planning.

Mike wrote to me in email today. So I’d like to remind everyone of the blog posts that started all of this off - from March 2005. These posts were based on observations emerging from the XIT team at Microsoft. The case study was later published at the TOCICO conference that fall.

March 15th 2005 - Stop Estimating
March 17th 2005 - Agile Estimating

At the time, stopping estimating was considered just another heracy from the mad Scotsman, FDD guy! Three and a half years later, folks as respected as Joshua Kerievsky, J.B. Rainsberger, Arlo Belshee and Amit Rathore have all been publicly saying something very similar. Perhaps, I’m in danger of becoming mainstream [Update: Karl Scotland has blogged his thoughts on how this was handled at Yahoo! in the UK.]  Technorati tag: Agile+Management, Lean, Kanban, David+Anderson, InfoQ, Mike+Bria

Future Directions for Agile (from Agile 2008)

My main stage speech from Agile 2008 is available on InfoQ. It a 90 minute video with the powerpoint slides simultaneously displayed. This talk was aimed at the Agile community and pulled no punches about what I see as the failings within the Agile Alliance. It has attracted a lot of attention - most of it positive. Here are some of the comments…

I’ve just watch your presentation at InfoQ (Agile2008 - Future Directions…) and have to say that your ideas about the agile movement are like an island of wisdom in a sea of resistance for changing and adaptation (mainly at the enterprise level). We really need some fresh ideas like yours.

Your topic on organizational maturity, and the role it plays on a group’s preparedness for new methods of thinking and working really resonated with a few of us and we are looking to get closer to some of the latest thought on the topic. Also, your encouragement to look for ways to improve your effectiveness 10-fold seems simple, but immediately helped me recognize some of my own blinders. Raised very good points. Excellent ideas. Insightful.

Will be interesting to see cmmi & kanban evolve. ... real options seem very complementary

Thought provoking stuff

Refreshing honesty about prejudice in agile community and how this hurts adaption and growth to “cross the chasm?”

Great talk, David. There’s no reason CMMI & Agile can’t coexist. We need to open to new ideas, even if they’re old.

This was the presentation I was looking for and hadn’t found in the conference so far. Compliments!

But there are always the dissenters. They represented about 15% of feedback. Here is a sample…

Very, very boring session

This seassion was a sales pitch for “Kanban” and Agile + CMMI (Dave’s agenda) I have serious doubts on many things Dave tries to sell, regarding how well he really understands them. I think he is 80% fluff

As for that last comment, I let my work do the talking. If I don’t understand CMMI why was I invited to co-author the official SEI Technical Note on CMMI + Agile and why is my book one of only two that the SEI endorses and allows to be sold at their SEPG conference - the other one if Boehm and Turner’s Balancing Agility with Discipline? Meanwhile, the body of work that Corey and I have published on Kanban can be judged on its own merits and through the adoption we’re seeing around the world. Anyway,... If you haven’t seen it and have 90 minutes of your precious time to spare, check out what I had to say about the Agile community and what I would like to see in its future. I have made the presentation available here as a PDF for those who just want the slides.  Technorati tag: Agile+Management, CMMI, Lean, Kanban, David+Anderson, Agile+2008, InfoQ, Software+Engineering, Project+Management

Retrospectives considered waste when…?

I wanted to return to Dave Laribee’s post from the weekend, Introducing Kanban at Xclaim. I’d like to bring your attention to discussion below involving Derik Whittaker, Steven Harman, and Dave concerning retrospectives. For a long time I’ve not found project and iteration retrospectives particularly useful and until I read this I’d failed to articulate why that was.

It was this comment from Steven that triggered my epiphany…

I can totally see how the retrospective can be viewed as wasteful in the context of Kanban - where every developer has the ability to Stop The Line the minute they detect a problem.

Steven is pointing out that a Stop The Line approach encourages root cause analysis of special cause variations (or issues external to the process (as designed by the manager or team)). I teach that issue management is a crucial skill for successful agile teams. Issue management is what keeps things flowing. I emphasize this much more than typical agile authors do. For me, issue management goes beyond simple flagging of impediments. Often with teams I encounter, I find that team leads or scrummasters are good at impediment removal when the impediment is internal to the process or the team or is under direct control of the lead/scrummaster. When an issue is external, the process is often undefined and is ineffective. The result is that teams often struggle to complete work blocked by something external. This affects their productivity/burndown and the net result is under-delivery of scope for the iteration. Hence, I coach issue management and resolution and make it a responsibility of the project manager.

For basic maturity, raising issues, logging them, tracking them, assigning them and resolving them is essential. But the resolution can be tactical. It can be just enough to keep things moving. It can be a work-around. For higher maturity, I expect to see root cause analysis and elimination of the problem so that it doesn’t re-occur. Interestingly, the CMMI sees it the same way. Basic issue management is hidden in the Risk Management (RSKM) process area that appears at Level 3 and advanced root cause analysis, Causal Analysis and Resolution (CAR) is a high maturity Level 5 behavior.

In addition to issue management, my agile management technique emphasizes the use of an organization level, operations review every month. This was described in my book, written 6 years ago. The chapter on operations review was considered sufficiently differentiating that Prentice Hall released it as the sample chapter to promote the book. You can find it here on my site.

So, Steven’s comment on Dave’s post inadvertently gave me the epiphany that when you have a regular operations review to look at the organization’s performance along with a strong culture of issue management that matures into a Stop The Line culture, then you have both common cause and special cause process problems covered. This leaves very little for a project or iteration retrospective, and hence, I don’t find them terribly useful.

[I should point out that I don’t actively discourage teams from holding project retrospectives. If the team recognizes them as waste and discontinues the activity that’s fine. But if they want to hold a retrospective and find value in it, then I encourage this. All opportunities to reflect and adapt are valuable in my opinion.]  Technorati tag: Agile+Management, Lean, Kanban, David+Anderson, Dave+Laribee, Software+Engineering, Project+Management

Blogging again

Regular subscribers will have noticed that I’m blogging again! :-D Agilemanagement.net has been in transition. We’ve moved it over to be hosted with the Modus Cooperandi servers and web site. Since, its inception, agilemanagement.net was hosted by my old school friend Alan Laird at his likk.net facility which from time-to-time has been in a garage in London and a back bedroom in Tokyo. I’d like to thank Alan for all his hard work maintaining the servers and providing hosting space for more than 5 years.

We’ve moved the site over to a professional facility and as a result, service to you the readers, will be better. There shouldn’t be any more outages of more than a few minutes. Murphy’s Law had a bad habit of striking likk.net. Alan would go on a vacation to a location without Internet connectivity and while he was on the plane outbound the servers would fail. Most recently a nearby house in Tokyo was stuck by lightning and the router was taken down. The outage was 3 days and the failover to an old server in London left me with a 2 year old version of the site and a problem with FTP that meant I couldn’t republish the latest version. After 2 weeks of struggling with GoDaddy to transfer control of the site, we finally have agilemanagement.net back up and running.

So I can finally blog again reliably. I have a wireless aircard for my laptop. So long as I am in the USA I can blog. When I am out of the country, I can blog as long as I have a connection at a hotel or WiFi at a conference. So expect a lot more casual blogging from me - for the first time in a long while. I’ll also be doing some heavier pieces on new material that I’ve been storing up for the last year or so.

Expect a redesign of the site this fall. I’ve got Interactive Space who did the branding for Modus Cooperandi working on a new design. I’m also planning to migrate the site from City Desk to Expression Engine. Until then I’m going to leave the design as is. And while every page says “Hosted by likk.net” and it is no longer true. I feel Alan deserves the credit for helping out for all this time. Technorati tag: Agile+Management,, David+Anderson

Kanban Implementation in Brazil

It’s official! There are kanban implementations on at least 4 continents now. Alisson Vale has written up [in portugese] his experience implementing kanban at Phidelis in Brazil. This seems like a very complete implementation. Alisson has a physical board, some classes of service in different colors, a closeup explaining the detail on the cards, and an electronic dashboard version on a big flat panel display. What is clear to me from this case study is that despite the lack of a book about kanban, Corey and I have published enough material that others can replicate it on the other side of the planet without direct contact with us and get similar results. More and more I’m looking forward to my trip to Brazil in October. Technorati tag: Agile+Management, Lean, Kanban, Alisson+Vale, Software+Engineering, Project+Management