What’s the fuss for

We must make a fuss about, what we make a fuss about. Is the comma placed correctly? A short, yet convoluted sentence that, eh what?

Well, this is because the things one makes a fuss about, reveal something about the type of person one is. Is it the wilting rose on second plant in the slightly misshapen flowerpot? or the dangling participle? or the smudge on the windscreen? or possibly the demolition of that quaint, distinctive auditorium making way for the neat but ugly steel and glass office building sheltering blank faced, mindless, self-important yuppies. Or maybe the new education policy, which is a bit of a curate’s egg, but that is a different discussion.

So, even if we cannot always fuss over what others are fussing about, each of us can make a fuss about what oneself makes a fuss about! This is a path (not the only) to self improvement. What the newspapers hyperventilate and people focus on, while ignoring more important matters is a result of fussing over the insignificant. What we fuss about, is a reflection of what we attach importance to, and by default exclude much that could be a path to elevation.

I shall now, with a moderate amount of fuss, encouragingly point to seven other Friday bloggers: Sanjana, Padmum,  Raju, Maria, Shackman , Ramana and Conrad.  This week’s topic was suggested by Maria.

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Why my blog is named Ceezone

After many many moons I return to some writing. This was where I penned my views and analysis on matters ‘Scrum’. Those of you who have some familiarity with the sport Rugby (not that asinine imitation on the other side of the planet) this site will disappoint you, since Scrum is a software project/product development approach. But that was many moons ago. Now I shall write about this, that and the other; Pontificate on, pillory many and placate a few topics or people as the case maybe.

Originally CeeZone meant ‘C’- zone, and ‘C’, in turn stood for chaos.

or classically ‘Kaos’ the primeval Greek God, who preceded Earth (Gaia). Being something of a frightening mayhem, represented complete lack of order. So, to be avoided or at least wary of, in this oh so perfectly orderly world. Anyway, Chaos had some connection with the background theory of Scrum, and Rugby looks chaotic to the uninitiated.

Or beautiful, depending on your tastes.

But that isn’t all. Chaos theory is a fascinating interdisciplinary area with wide applicability and an offshoot of mathematics, where fractals are a manifestation of this theory, in some round about way. And it seems the Greeks were on to something, as order can arise from chaos (maybe another post later on). In general order and chaos can co-exist and as such need not be taken as a contradiction. A chaotic process can give rise to a beautifully ordered fractal. And so it came to be, that one of the more common fractal patterns was chosen as the logo of my consulting company. The Sierpinski triangle to be precise:

That's a fractal; if you take this into a good image editing software tool, and cut a smaller triangle, and then zoom in, you will see the full shape appearing again. Sort of wheels within wheels; you know, it's turtles all the way down.

But, as the years roll on, I see a various manifestations of complexity in the world, I think this title is apposite. So there! That is why.

I must thank Ramana for his kind encouragement to write. In this blog cluster, I see two of the three Rs of education represented exuberantly. So,I might, to attendant groans, occasionally fill in the third. But don’t let this put you off, I can only tangentially refer to mathematics, I will be changing this blog from a specialist to a generalist one.

The other seven bloggers, in some disorder, who write on the same topic every Friday are Sanjana, Padmum,  Raju, Maria. Shackman , Ramana and Conrad.  This week’s topic was suggested by Conrad. I’m sure there you will be a fine mix of entertainment, education and enlightenment.

Brave new world?

Organisations should be interested in Scrum adoption, because there is something to gain. Incidentally a reduction of pain, would be concomitant. So what are the common benefits?

The benefits are significantly better quality and productivity, but there  are a handful of other important benefits(possibly even more important):

1. Focus (reduced re-work/confusion, therefore happier floors)

2. Higher possibility of building the right product

3. Speeding up learning, which increases the rate by which previous benefit is accrued.

Coming back to the topics of productivity, I’ve personally helped teams increase it in the range of 30 to 60% and am convinced that those teams can do even better. So the claims of a 200% increase in productivity by some others are not necessarily codswallop. (However I’d caution against productivity becoming the MAIN/ONLY goal of adoption.)

It is surprising how few organisations are able to realise these benefits; this is often due to management not really holding teams (the WHOLE team) accountable, and, not creating an environment where quality is key and teams, SM and PO are empowered.

It’s a nice new world, if we can get there; Not simply the ‘brave’ new world.

(For those who haven’t read Auldous Huxley’s classic, ‘The Brave New World’ is a dystopian novel with prescient – I think – warnings on modern human societies, which are technologically advanced)

Do we need any manager at all?

“We” doesn’t include the manager set, naturally. After all managers need micro-management.

While closing the previous post, I referred to some of my acquaintances debating the need for the existence of the manager. Many seemed dismissive of the species and wanted it extinct, at least in the s/w development world. Before we go into merits of this view, please indulge me in a small digression I make into pop-psychology.

People who wish to get rid of managers, or like to have nothing whatever to do with them, suffered some traumatic experience in their third year of childhood (employment). They’ve had to weather that marvellous (in the sense of incredulous, NOT beholding a marvel) pointy-haired boss, who makes ignorance sound like a point of view. Having come across this wonder, as the initial disillusionment faded, they developed a deep-seated revulsion for managers in general. Personally I’ve been fortunate, all the chiefs I served under, with only a few fleeting abnormal blighters, knew their stuff and had my respect. However I’ve met and indirectly experienced a lot of unmitigated disasters in the past. My litany of woes would be substantial, as a consultant, one meets more than his fair share of ‘managers’. Truly, at least, in this country, we have a surfeit of this species who combine woolly headed short-sightedness, with self aggrandisement and superficiality. This is becoming something of rant, so I’ll take up a more constructive stance. Also to put the record straight, about one third of the managers, I’ve met, are reasonably knowledgeable, are able to tackle various problems competently and are positive contributors. What of the other two-thirds?

Coming to the Outrageous Q; “Why do we need managers in software development at all?”

Another line to take is that, in creative endeavours like programming, there is no place for a manager, and the teams who do the work must be self-managed. This is a pillar of Scrum. My observation is that much of programming activity in organisations, needs no more creativity than necessitated for the making of a Hollywood movie, or for that matter a Bollywood one. Of course if one doesn’t have much knowledge, and resorts to re-invent the wheel…However, retreating from this cul-de-sac and attempting to answer the original Q, some disinterested analysis is what the doctor ordered.

So we can just have self-management and get rid of managers all together?

Conceivably, yes, if you dance to the music of holacracy. Not even a long shot, if you happen to lap up the pearls cast around by management gurus. For the members of the former party I recommend “Simply managing” by that doyen of management Prof Mintzberg and for the latter Ken Schwaber’s “Enterprise Scrum”, Holocracy.org and “Maverick” by Semler. Naturally with my Scrum tinted glasses, I lean towards the latter party but make no mistake, Prof Mintzberg really knows what he is talking about, his articles/books are very edifying. Many people refer to Valve and Netflix as pioneers, but the ideas of self-management were implemented consciously much earlier in Semco Brazil.

Not everything happens in the LOO (private joke for the benefit of my friends).

If by any chance you are in the PMBoK boat  while also in the software dev boat, get out of at least one. One foot in either boat isn’t a good long term plan.

Let’s try to make another stab at understanding. It is more fruitful to separate the noun “manager”, from the verb “management”. Surely all right thinking men (or is that left leaning women) would agree management is needed, even if, for a moment we feel managers themselves are a waste of space. So the Q boils down to: “Can all management be covered by self-management?”. Stop and mull this over. It looks much less of a pragmatic option and more of a very long shot. However, it is also true (from my reasonably wide experience) that we have a lot of worse than useless managers in our industry, so why is that? Incompetent managers hire even more useless managers, who revel in their own power, however undeserved. Living in a bubble, they are unaware of various progressive views of project mangement, software development, culture, human relations, software process etc., instead such managers use a cliche driven, jargon supported approach to management.

[ True story: I’ve witnessed senior managers of a software services company describing the deletion of 10 or so source files in their entirety from the system as refactoring, BTW there was no other adjustment made in the retained code. Then adding injury to insult their teams couldn’t get the software to build. It beggars belief, but gets worse, they tell the client (who incidentally understands modern practices reasonably well) that the problem is “we can’t get back those files as they have been deleted, it’s going to take time to recreate those files ”. These wonders haven’t really met with version control. There is a version control system in place, but they understand it as well as they understand refactoring. I advice my clients to only hire bald males w/o heart conditions and low BP to oversee such vendors]

This is all a particular manifestation of a broader issue which Plato and many of his forefathers have been grappling with: “why is it that human systems result in so much travesty?”. Human organisations, by definition, will be subject to humans. So unless these humans are of unshakable virtue, all pervasive smoothness and light is but a pipe dream. BTW, even self-management is done only by humans. All very encouraging and invigorating, but then we need not lose hope, as self-management is surely a step in the right direction, even as it co-exists with other forms of good management. And for self-management to succeed it must be bounded, with opportunities for course correction combined with visible feedback, in other words an environment which encourages improvement.

In fact the only way forward is more education and transparency; both for the team members and managers. (When was the last time a senior manager spent a week learning something new in depth?) These enable better understanding and slowly induce better behaviour, at least on the average. It is a slow road, the human race progresses all the way dancing a peculiar slow dance, two steps forward and one step back.

In conclusion, we need self-managing teams who are consciously under managed from the outside, while complementary management is done by others (maybe, managers of a particular breed) keeping long term goals in view. This upper management should be continually challenged to provide a lovely work environment where everyone is in the game of doing better still than yesterday.

 

Interesting Links:

Prof Julian Birkinshaw talking about management  This may come as something of a unsettling surprise to managers in India

 

Steve Denning on Radical management

 

Incidentally both the gentlemen are part of the Stoos network(so am I)

 

Why do we need self-organisation when we have micro-management!?!

Good question!

I’ll try to explain, while avoiding a close coupling with Scrum, though some tangential references may well slip through. Let’s start by considering something which is going to be familar to the gen-X managers: Pseudo-code, a key step in structured software development (or defined s/w dev processes). As the design phase is winding down, the last level of detailing was being filled in by way of pseudo-code. Pseudo-code: a detailed description of steps of a computer was supposed to execute, but not in a programming language. This was to be simply translated into code, by a worker bee (programmer) into a computer language, viola, ofcourse we have a flawless system. The need to write pseudo-code for someone else (the worker bee/mule) is, an admission if only latently, that we are hiring dimwits. If we follow this train of thought, another conclusion looms: usage of psuedo-code is a strain of intense micro-management, and a failure to understand the real nature of programming (at least programming in the small). As an aside: devotees of big-upfront design may have diagnosed correctly, that programming in the large, brings about its own set of problems; However they have unfortunately taken the wrong pill. They can detoxify, by reading Jack Reeves thoughts on software design. BTW, the gentleman, has nothing to do with the agile jamboree, just a very clear sighted (an endangered species) thoughtful, software developer. There is nothing wrong with a limited amount of upfront design, as long as we don’t try to develop the ‘perfect’ solution, while keeping in mind that this upfront design is just a draft, which can only be final, when the software works! (testing time, anyone!?!). So, unavoidably, we have to grapple with all sorts of detail, where the devil is hiding. So who is going to do all that grappling?

This brings us nicely to consider micro-management of teams. Serious software development takes place in a far more complex and fast changing environment than ever before. The work is highly interconnected with frequent changes (and surprises) streaming in. Many competencies are involved, with many things having to come together for a a successful result. It is impossible for one manager to do all the basic thinking and detailing. Much of the simple software has already been built, and most worthy teams are left with the implementation of involved software solutions. Therefore, the manager in question has to continually re-issue instructions to the team as events occur, surprises spring, lessons knock hard and the real target (software we need, as opposed to have wanted some time ago) reveals itself. It is, I’m afraid something of a losing battle.

Instead, the manager must work more as a facilitator, who ensures that the necessary resources and tools are provided to the team, and that impediments to team deliverables are removed. Having done this, it is best for the manger to get out of the way. It is not the manager’s job to order the team around; rather, it is the team that decides on how much to commit and how to deliver (from the top of the product backlog).

Breathing down the team’s neck and micro-managing it from the outside sends a signal that the team is not responsible. It then becomes the manager’s job to commit and then worry about how to get things done. This limits productivity, innovation and creativity in the team, chokes communications and, in time, results in disengagement and apathy. Actually this state of affairs is so widespread that it is the new normal.  That is why, we should encourage self-management.

If ownership firmly rests with the team, there is greater focus, sense of responsibility and motivation to perform. Let the team manage itself. The manager’s job is to keep the focus on the bigger picture and help if the need arises. At the same time—and paradoxical though it may seem— the manager must not lose sight of the critical details (important when teams are dealing with the rest of the organisation).

So, get your team together, emphasise goals, facilitate learning, offer to help, make it clear that you are watching and then,…let go! You should rather be spending your time to prepare for a role at an n+1 level than get bogged down with the details at n-1. Potentially a depressing corollary, is that one circumstance micro-management could succeed is where the project on hand is relatively straightforward! So, maybe, that project you are so successfully micro-managing, is just a run of the mill work, where low intelligence finds a comfortable home. It would also be interesting to know what you think of the BBCs advice on micro-management. Actually if you think about it, many managers cannot even really micro-manage, but try to give the impression that they are on top of things. A waste of energy, time and in acute cases, even space.

Therefore, in general, I advise eschewing micro-management, but hold your breadth, further flutters await you….

Some thoughtful birds in my circle of acquaintances, debated over the need for managers at all (in all shapes and forms !?!). I’m all set to write about that as well, in a day or two.

Management 7.0

You might have heard of management 3.0 or was it 4.0 !?! … in these inflationary times, I just have to bring you the latest.

The trigger for this post was the panel discussion at India Agile Week (IAW), 2014 event held in Bangalore last week. I was part of the panel discussions, sharing space (and the mike) with Mr . Tathagat Verma (aka TV), Mr Manish Mishra and Mr Raj Stanley.

We discussed a variety of topics and issues. The exchange was interesting and informative. At some point,  the role of  managers came up and TV remarked that managers are rewarded for doing (more of) the same tasks/activities. They do not have an incentive to innovate.

TV could not have put it better. This is how it is. This view of the manager’s role is so trite, that such a mode of working and the resulting work environment is seldom questioned,  let alone overturned.   Nevertheless a more mature view of management (and one that Scrum espouses) is that “Managers are not there to make the inevitable happen”. A well- written explanation of the manager’s role is at http://www.goodagile.com and much material on related ideas can be gleaned from http://www.stevedenning.com

At the conference, there was a comment/question about the lack of conclusive answers as to how team appraisals can be conducted as well as redefining the role of  managers . In such a case, due consideration must be given to long-term  planning and changes  needed in “agile”.

Lack of time precluded a detailed explication. However, the Scrum community has had some well- formed answers to these Questions for sometime. Briefly,  appraisals are team based (with 360 degree feedback) with the manager providing a conducive environment for self-organised teams to flourish. Long- term planning is done based on an aggregation of current team capacity to deliver working software increments. Each of these can be the topic of a post in itself, and I intend to share my views and information in the coming weeks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Story points story

For sometime there’s been debate on the use, or even the need of story points. Hmmm…. There are  multiple needs to consider:

1. Short term estimation, so as to commit for a sprint.

2. Prioritisation decisions

3. Release planning

Though controversial there may be another reason:  Productivity gauge (caution advised)

In this discussion I’m assuming you are executing projects using Scrum or some other short cycle iterative approach.

The two matters to consider are:

1. Do we need to do any estimation at all?

Well, unless you seldom have to prioritise a work packet over another, or have very large capacity you need to estimate (not exactimate) items. So for a vast majority, the answer is yes.

2. Should we switch to story point estimation?

If the current method of estimating is able to handle relatively small packets of work (enhancements/change requests)  taking into account the whole cycle from analysis to delivery (to staging) with reasonable reliability, there is no need to change to story points. However most projects don’t find themselves in such a happy state and story point estimates is a good approach. There are many reasons why story points are a superior choice (at least at the team level);

But finally the only good circumstance in which we can avoid estimating altogether is if we can always break items (or user stories) into small uniform sized pieces of work (taking just about a couple of days to complete). Then all we need to do is look at the business benefit for every story and count the number of stories. The velocity is given simply by number of stories done in an average sprint. This uniform and consistent division is not usually easily achievable.

Event report

A bit late, but I did attend the event  mentioned in the previous post. It was time truly well spent. So here is the report, with a bit of opinion thrown in.

The highlights were the talks by Dr Wintersteiger and Mr Tathagat Verma.

Dr Wintersteiger gave a very interesting talk on the landscape and development of this whole Agile business, around the world, including India. One of the key points is how the management approaches are still very 20th Century, while the behaviour as well as aspirations  of organisations, teams and indeed the younger generation of people is very different. How seating and office ambience is very different. This got some people thinking and there were questions during the panel discussion I’ve mentioned Lynda Gratton’s recent book. This discusses the changing nature of work and makes some predictions (not all of them brand new) and offers a sane way forward. Worth a read, even though I think the LBS fraternity generally tends to provide examples from large pedestrian and traditional companies. Q n A session at the end of Dr Wintersteiger’s talk was absorbing (yours truly asking many questions)

Tathagat’s talk was very interesting. Generally when people talk about/of Agile, I tend to go into an semi-slumber, often punctuated by mild irritation and sometimes dislike.  For a change it was a an enjoyable and informative talk. Excellent examples, context setting and explanations. Not common at all these days. I even learnt something very useful. He (With help of Linda Rising) explicated what is meant by mindset and what a mindset constitutes of. This word is used commonly but without a lot of understanding (A bit like ‘agile’, eh?) .  He compared the fairly opposing mindset of companies/people. This understanding is actually very critical. I hope everyone is better for this.

The rest of the conference was fairly decent, with Mr Nitin Dhall giving a very nice talk and honest (hence useful) QnA at the end. I’ve not attended a lot of other talks (which may very well have been wonderful) as I was busy talking to people whose interests overlap with mine.

Ciao

 

P.S: I’m about to give a talk at an internal conference and have half a mind to report on this as well.  But then I think enough of general reports, I’ll see if I can write on a particular problem/area soon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interesting Event brewing and opinion

Disclaimer: I normally avoid pure opinion, but here goes.

 

There is a conference brewing in Delhi. On 29th Jan, Unicom is hosting a conference on “Agile in Business“. It promises to be interesting, particularly the first two sessions of Wintersteiger and Verma. I’m certainly curious about what will be presented on the Indian Landscape-past, present, future.

Curious I certainly am, since my first real immersion in XP in 2001 in Ireland (one of the first larger XP projects in Europe),  it has taken a really long (about 10 years) time before any of these new wave approaches have gained currency in India. Only a couple of mid sized companies in India, even into the late naughties, did anything like what we did back then. I still meet far too many people here (India) who do Scrum badly and then say “oh we know/do Scrum”. Fortunately there is a minority which is interested to really learn this well. Now most people have heard of these methodologies…

However, the point is, at least as far as Scrum is concerned, far too many people are all too ready to say they do it. Most organisations gravitate to ‘scrum-but’ all too readily. The last couple of years has seen much dilution in the in-depth understanding of scrum. More and more discussion takes place around how Agile adoption fails, or how to do “Hybrid” or some such. All this at some level assumes that teams and organisations really understand how to use Scrum as a framework for delivering the best possible results in projects. There is no such evidence. I think Ken Schwaber’s estimate that only about 30% of teams will learn and use Scrum to achieve success. I’d say here in India the percentage  is smaller still.  I look forward to these sessions and hope to report later on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reverse Viennese Syndrome

Happening to read this, I was struck by how many people (within ICT industry)  in India have the reverse problem. As a Viennese resident remarks- “If you live here all the time, you have nothing to compare it to – and you don’t know how good you’ve got it.” or to paint a picture for a reverse problem “…. and you don’t know how bad you’ve got it.”!

I relate to this due to a similar personal experience on my first visit to foreign shores (London) when a local remarked how polluted London was. Arriving from Bombay (Mumbai), I remember thinking the poor fish lacked sense of any sort. But maybe it was me who lacked perspective.

What has all this to do with Scrum? Many, many people have no idea of how a well chosen and tended team can feel, perform and delight all. So many projects are in a death march mode or in an apathetic semi-daze for so long, that such a state seems normal! Just as the Viennese are inclined to overlook how well off they really are in their city, the s/w dev teams here are not exposed to how well (comparatively) things can be run.

Is this a plug for Scrum? Partly, but mainly it is an attempt to show that there are much better means to live within a software development project.

Is this relevant to the times? Yes, in spite of  all the huge numbers of people claiming to use Scrum, the percentage who do it properly is very small indeed. Scrum-but will not make your life better, Scrum will.

I’ll attempt to provide a sense of how one can help people see a brighter horizon. Most software development teams are under pressure to deliver on very optimistic estimates of poorly thought out functionality. On top of this teams will quickly settle into a habit of creating poor quality functionality.  All this leads to continuous rushed activity that results in comparatively little progress.  This is why people spend late nights in office. How they use their time in office is another story.  However too much overtime over extended periods will be accompanied with lower mental efficiency and strong tendency to make mistakes. Why do you think in competitive sports each team tries to put the other under pressure? To encourage mistakes of course. What are managements doing when they put pressure most of the time?

First thing you need to realise is that a normal day needn’t be tense and rushed. It can be comfortable but purposeful. Good planning to deliver a reasonable amount of functionality will provide best results.

A cross functional team results in testing being done very close to development, which means that we get a lot of feedback within a sprint. Also multiple perspectives help in detection of mistakes earlier.

More importantly we get serious external (customer/customer-representative) feedback at end of every sprint. Therefore we come to know how we are doing from a very early stage. At every step of the way we have a chance to improve at a reasonable pace. This is almost a dream in a waterfall project. Everyone pretends they are already very competent or even perfect. Then at the end, when they all are floundering, and then it doesn’t end….

Where as in a a well tended team, the support every one gets  is very enabling,  a good ScrumMaster is there to see to it. It provides a high level of ‘safety’. This supports people to very quickly get better, be open to learning from their mistakes. These may or may not be mistakes of individuals, but a culture of blaming one another is strongly discouraged.

To summarize: A good project delivery structure (delivery and feedback every sprint), a supportive cross functional team and picking up a reasonable amount of work per sprint will together result in a steadily productive, yet comfortable feel for Scrum projects. Do it properly and you’ll then realise how badly you’ve been having things for so long.