I saw many industry colleagues and re-connected with folks like Lyssa Adkins whom I hadn’t seen in a year or more.  I attended a number of sessions and I had two favorites.  One was on removing impediments with drawings, see: http://www.scrumalliance.org/events/610-las-vegas-#program003 where I will do a write up on that session in a later blog post.

My other favorite will be the focus of this blog post.  It was the keynote session by Jeff Sutherland, PhD and co-Creator of the Scrum framework.  The topic was called Scrum: The Future of Work

The thing that caught my ear about his talk was his concept of moving to a 20% funding model for new product development teams (see slide number eight here: http://scrumlab.scruminc.com/gallery/slideshow/album-104).  That is to say, stop funding projects at the 100% level.  Instead, businesses can quintuple down their business bets by investing 20% of their money across five different projects. The portfolio managers, Uber POs, business stakeholders can stop incrementally at the 20% stage of the budget cycle to re-evaluate and re-organize teams by examining the business delivered between the five separately funded projects.

The POs of each individual project will be re-evaluated based on value delivery and predictability at only a 20% timeline. At the end of each release or budget cycle – the individual POs can re-request additional money based on the value delivered not on how ‘busy or efficient’ we are keeping individual team members – which in turn keeps prod dev teams continuously pushing hard because they only get 20% of their funding.  It also tests the long held 80/20 rule which states that you can deliver 80% of the value in 20% of the time.  Because the teams are developing vertically your sol’n are ready to get pushed into production at the end of the 20% budget cycle for immediate customer feedback.  If you have a predicable team doing the work you will know how much value you will deliver well ahead of the release and as a portfolio mgr you can make adjustments to your five bets based on that metric not on whether Bob or Sally seem busy today.

• Stable cross functional teams with known velocities.  You won’t compare velocities of the team (that’s bad form), but you can compare their relative increases against one another as part of your funding decisions.  From there – you can compare relative velocity growth to the costs of your team to get a cost per feature metric which can then be evaluated against your Earned Value or Agile EV Metrics.   If you aren’t doing this – please do consider calling CollabNet so I can help get this set up for you and your teams.
• A FOSS based software environment that compliments the elasticity of Cloud Deployment strategies.  A non FOSS environments means having enough commercial licensing in place to meet the demands of autonomous teams using elasticity to map to continuous deployment strategies.  This doesn’t work in most regulated industries so be careful if you have external compliance here.
• Building in vertical slices so that we can push to deployment and leverage (b) above.
•  Having the ability to measure ‘business value delivery’ vs. saying ‘efficiency of individuals’ – see the EVM stuff in (a) above.
• Your accounting team / source of financing needs to be able to re-evaluate investments more often than a yearly budgeting cycle

If you don’t have these prerequisites in place work on getting those in place before trying the above.

Happy scrumming.

A few weeks ago I came across a story by Steve Hartman of a man who rowed his boat from Alberta, Canada to New Orleans, Louisiana.  Dominique Liboiron went from Medicine Hat, Alberta to New Orleans, Louisiana by canoe.  This eight month journey totaled over 3,300 miles.  Unbelievable right?

Why would a rational man do this? It was his way of honoring his best uncle Mitch who had recently passed away unexpectedly at the young age of 42.  You see, Mitch loved New Orleans.  After only a single visit to the City in 1992 Mitch reshaped his life around the New Orleans culture.  Dominique wanted to honor the memory of Mitch and realized after his passing that he needed to seize the moment and make his ‘someday’ visit to New Orleans today.  So, he got into a boat and rowed 3,300+ miles to see for himself what New Orleans was all about and deliver some of Mitch’s ashes to the city.

Today, after reading this think about what you are doing to inspire others around you? Would others follow you on twitter or would they row a boat for eight months to get to a place where they thought you were happiest in life to share the moment again with your spirit?  When trouble comes in business will your network walk away from you or will they put you on their back and help you get through troubled times?

For more on this unbelievable story – click on the video from CBS below.

Interestingly enough many social commentators (e.g. Dan Pink, Tony Robbins) now believe that making progress against a goal that is bigger than you brings happiness.

Over dinner, in Tokyo at the regional Scrum Gathering Cope,Julia, Kotaro and I had a great conversation. The premise was on the old saying, “you are either cheap or available.”   Basically, the concept is that if you or your services are cheap, then you are never available.  If however, you are available, then indeed you are expensive and valuable.

When I brought up to Cope that we need to be available he said that when he was with customers he was more than available.  Probably going back to some Emmanuel Lévinas theory of “the responsibility to the Other” Copewants to become one with his customers, to eliminate the a priori  instinct to separate the ‘us vs. them’ and to take on the being of his customers.  He can only do that when he assumes their organizational identity.  And once assumed he is totally emerged into being more than available.  I am sure his customers have benefited greatly from that.  More so then a conf. call from 5,000 miles away trying to spit advise into an unknown situation.

All to often over the past few years I haven’t prioritized my own work life around being available to those that matter most.  Looking back on it, I have, unfortunately, lived an interruption driven work life.  While running Danube, I was usually being interrupted by the crisis of the day or I was under the daily financial stresses.  It didn’t feel great.  Today – I probably take too many phone calls and am in too many conversations that don’t matter that much.  In addition, it’s easy to fool myself into thinking that I am adding value to meetings and conversation threads where my opinions are neither valued or innovative.   For an alternative, maybe I should try what Jurgen Apello does (could any one else get away with this?)

The side effect of being less available is that I can’t do what I want or need to do (e.g. being in a state of flow) or that I push off meaningful, yet less urgent conversations or thoughts, to tomorrow knowing that very well tomorrow may never come.

This year I think I am going to make a promise to myself to do less, but be more available to the customers, employees and friends that matter most. I will give more of myself to less things in an effort.

Is this just wishful thinking? What do you think? I would love to hear from you.

I’ve been talking with some Scrum trainers who’ve been working on a new definition of Scrum.  While Scrum already has a few simple non-prescriptive rules, the trainers are falling into the trap of converting their usual preferences into overly prescriptive rules.  For example, it is often beneficial for the team to include the Product Owner in the Sprint Retrospective Meeting.  There are also several circumstances (particularly when we’re first switching from traditional command management to Scrum) where this might not be the best thing to do.  After nearly 100 posts in the discussion, one esteemed fellow stated the root misconception:



All the objections that have been brought up seem to me to be trying to work around the rather obvious impediment of someone acting badly.

1. It is normal human nature to overestimate what we are able to perceive about a situation.  We never grasp the full extent of this because we lie to ourselves about the fact we lie to ourselves.
2. As Keith Johnstone (the father of theater improv) also observes, there are no status-free transactions among humans.  None.  (By the way, learning theater improv is an exciting way to learn how true collaboration really works.)
3. 99.9% of organizations designate material power to some individuals over others.  I’ll call them “bosses” and “subordinates” instead of the various euphemisms.  While most bosses don’t enjoy this, they are burdened with deciding which subordinates will be retained in the event of a layoff, which subordinates get promoted, who gets to work on the new sexy projects vs. maintaining the turkeys, etc.  (Some bosses tell me they really hate doing performance appraisals.)  The 0.1% exceptions (maybe Valve?) are probably past the point they need Scrum rules anyway.
4. The people with the vision, authority, business acumen, and maturity to be good Product Owners are also often burdened by the organization with some boss responsibilities.
5. It is human nature to assume others are feeling the way we are.  For example, once before I ran a retrospective, a team member told me it was not necessary to waste time on a safety check because they were all very comfortable with each other.  I did one anyway (anonymously, using a hat), which revealed some team members felt quite unsafe.  Confident people overestimate the comfort of others.
6. Combine all the above and you get the “invisible gun effect.”  THE INVISIBLE GUN EFFECT HAPPENS EVEN WITH THE NICEST BOSS IN THE WORLD.  It’s not caused by the boss’s actual actions, it’s caused by the way subordinate behavior is naturally distorted around bosses.  It’s normal human nature, not something Scrum Masters can “fix” any more than they can fix gravity.  It’s most visible to the lower-status people (which might include newhires, people with less impressive job titles, etc.), less visible to higher-status people (perhaps including senior developers, socially confident people, people with better technical skills than social perception skills, and Scrum consultants), and practically invisible to bosses who haven’t done an A/B test yet.  Nearly everyone in the discussion had reduced awareness of the invisible gun effect due to spending the past few years in relatively high-status occupations: trainers, expert consultants, senior developers, Product Owners, business owners, authors, etc.  The fact that all 104 messages in the thread were written by men might also suggest some blind spots.
7. There is also what my wife calls the “chirping bird effect.”  I once read that when a male bird is around, a female bird will feign incompetence at something she’d normally be able to do.  My wife brought this up when I asked her how she was able to solve a problem with her computer — something she’d been bugging me to fix — while I was on a business trip.  This effect is gender neutral: when she’s gone I have no problem with things I seem less able to do unassisted when she’s home, such as finding my car keys or preparing food for our kids.  In class we sometimes get groups that keep asking the trainer for more detailed instructions, or help manage another team member.  That’s often a good time for the trainer to leave the room!  We can talk about self organization until we’re blue in the face, and they won’t really get it until we leave them alone — temporarily — to let them do it.  I heard a story of one Scrum coach taking a nap under the table to get a team to step up more, and of Ken Schwaber standing outside the door of the team room during a Daily Scrum.  I’ve seen teams have breakthroughs in self management when the person traditionally responsible for managing them left the room.  I am inspired by the breakthroughs Scrum led to, especially among the lower status team members who aren’t well represented in this discussion.  Team expecting micromanagement?  Try management by leaving the room — temporarily.  Of course we always hold the team accountable at the Sprint Review Meeting.
8. Facilitators need to learn that when safety is low, smaller breakout groups often work better.  For example I’ve noticed some people in Finland aren’t inclined to talk in front of a larger group (especially in English), but liven up in small groups.  Once they’ve discussed some things in their small groups they’re more comfortable sharing with the larger group.  The paradox here is that appropriate and temporary boundaries can actually increase transparency.

It seems inevitable that the new Scrum definition will include a rule requiring the Product Owner to attend the Sprint Retrospective, and maybe this will turn out to be a good thing on balance.  The new definition should warn about the downsides of requiring the Product Owner in all circumstances, and offer suggestions to mitigate them.  For example, it should mention safety check procedures and breakout groups.

–mj

(Michael)

To learn more about invisible guns and safety checks, see the free Sprint Retrospective Meeting e-learning module:

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