Slowing Down

Last week I led a session at Agile Open Northwest called, “Slowing Down”. The idea for this session was inspired by my own struggles with becoming quite over-committed to a variety of things (my job, my hobbies, etc.) and the resulting stress and crisis it has created for me. You see, the funny thing about it all was that even though I was perfectly aware of what I was doing by over-committing like crazy, I couldn’t seem to stop.

The Introduction

So I came to this session, not as an expert selling a solution, but rather as a novice seeking help. Since I really didn’t know where things were going to go, I simply started with the session title. I wrote “Slowing Down” on the whiteboard and introduced myself to the small group of people who had joined me for the session. I started with a story of my own. It was a bit like what I imagine an Alcholics Anonymous conversation starts like, “Hi, my name is Tom and I can’t slow down…”

Fortunately for me, many in the audience had a similar story. Since we are a bunch of software development types, it didn’t take long for the concept of sustainable pace to be mentioned. Of course we all knew full well what sustainable pace means. It is a term that I originally encountered in Xtreme Programming. I could ramble on for hours about the importance of keeping the pace and duration of your work under control so that you can sustain your creative energy and not burn out. Easy. But I can’t seem to do it worth a damn. That’s the interesting bit. Why? Why is it that, even knowing the importance of maintaining a sustainable pace, I and others like me seem to struggle so hard with it?

Why?

A few interesting ideas for why we get sucked into this dynamic were suggested during the session:

Ownership – Feelings of ownership can make it hard for people to let go of tasks and delegate them to others. For example, it is very easy for project leaders to feel a very strong sense of ownership and commitment to the success of projects that they are working on. This can be quite normal – often our organization want this kind of commitment from us. However, like many things, this can go too far. The undesired dynamic plays out as a feeling that you and only you are personally responsible for the success or failure of the project (what happened to the team?). When challenged, people who struggle with ownership issues will often look with incomprehension when asked to give up some part of a project, “If I don’t do it, who will?” I think that in some cases this inability to give up ownership can also manifest as heroism (ownership + adrenaline junkie). Perhaps at its heart, ownership issues are tightly tied to ego. They seem to manifest as a very selfish view of project success or failure.

Bad Habit

Habit – We form all sorts of bad habits that contribute to the stress in our lives. For example, I’ve gotten into the habit of checking my email compulsively throughout the day. Often even when at home. Habits like this that tether us to the office and constant communication serve to raise our overall stress levels. Other examples include habitually taking home the laptop with you every night and carrying the work phone with you wherever you go.

Culture – One major reason for difficulty with slowing down is the work culture you live in. People shared many different stories of how the expectations at work made it hard or almost impossible for them to escape the pressures of the office. Everything from evil bosses that demand attendance over performance to co-workers who make snide comments when a colleague dares to leave the office at 5:00. Some places even provide rewards for those who make decisions that put work above any other activity. Examples of these sorts of influences in the workplace abound.

All of these influences are very common reasons why people find it hard to slow down. It is no wonder that there are many who struggle to maintain a sustainable pace of work at the office. Understanding why you are feeling that pressure is critical to understanding what strategies to use to manage the problem. The strategies where where we ended up going next.

Strategies

As we moved along in our discussion, people identified strategies that could be used to deal with slowing down and establishing a more sustainable pace. We captured and expanded upon those strategies as we wove the narrative of slowing down.

Setting Boundaries

The first strategy that came up was setting boundaries. Setting boundaries is fundamental to establishing control over your own schedule and pace. Fail to do this and all the rest really doesn’t matter. People told many stories about how they managed to establish meaningful boundaries in their work lives that helped them to keep a meaningful sustainable pace. Some made their 9 to 5 work hours non-negotiable. They never offered the longer hours that many fall into. You get me for 8 hours a day, and the rest of my life is not for sale. It was remarkable to hear the strength of some of these voices. Others refused to take work home or turned off the cell phone after 5.

Basically, what I heard were people establishing a service level agreement for their participation. One benefit that I noticed from this sort of boundary was that it made visible to everyone just what they could and could not expect from you. Visibility is a strongly held value in the agile community and it struck me that making my boundaries more visible would be a uniquely agile way of dealing with the issue (I’m closing the door now…). Another way of making my boundaries and limits visible would be to use a personal task board mechanism like personal kanban in order to not only make my existing commitments visible, but also to review them myself and keep tabs on how the work load is balanced (or not).

Reflections

Diana Larsen did a great session last year at Agile2012 on personal retrospectives. As team facilitators, we are pretty well versed in running team retrospectives, however I never do them by myself. That is exactly what Diana proposed: do self-retrospectives on a periodic basis in order to reflect on your progress toward your goals, and where you want to go next. I think this would be a useful tool for many, whether it is only at the end of the year or much more frequently. I know that my own responsibilities feel like they have changed quite dramatically in the last year. Stopping to assess those changes might just give you the opportunity to recognize stressful trends and start to do something about it. You can start to do it now, or wait until a crisis imposes that reflection. Your call.

This is just my summary of what I saw and heard during our talk. Looking at the sheer number of topics that we covered it’s quite apparent to me that we covered a broad number of subjects. Many of them are worthy of deep investigation. Perhaps, as the mind map suggests, we have created a map of the terrain of the topic of slowing down. Others may have different take aways. I certainly hope so. I appreciated everything that the group brought to the conversation and I hope that I was able to serve as a reasonable scribe for what was said.

XP2011 Day 4

Sessions

Silo Busting w/Tom Perry and Lourdes Vidueira

Yeah, that’s me. It was our big session. And just for the record, we rocked the house. In fact, the people attending our session made so much noise that people in sessions in the rooms adjacent to us complained about all the noise. What did I think? I think that means I’m doing a good job as a facilitator. Especially given the fact that there were only 10 people in the session. It was awesome! The feedback we received was nothing short of phenomenal. I’m extremely grateful to those who participated.

I was pretty exhausted after running the session. 4 hours seems like the equivalent of running a 220 yard dash. It’s not a sprint and it’s not a marathon. You have to keep things moving fast and you can’t lose your focus. We went out on the town afterward in Madrid and had a grand celebration. I had seafood that would give Louisiana a run for its money, and the people were just as friendly, if not more so.

The conference has been a good one. I’m probably too tired to do a decent recap of everything that happened today, but I’ll give it a shot tomorrow. Signing off from Madrid.

XP2011 Day 3

Conversations

What can I say? The restaurant open bar last night was epic. Actually I wasn’t saying very much at all to anyone this morning…

Sessions

Keynote: What Forms of Work and Life Make Sense for Us? w/Brian Marick

As usual Brian’s keynote was eccentric, enlightening, and above all else, unique. At about the halfway point he actually had the entire room stand up and he gave a tango lesson (which was no surprise, he had been talking about it on twitter for weeks). Still, there were a lot of European men arm-in-arm dancing with each other. Perhaps not so unusual. The talk itself covered some interesting subjects.

First he talked about gift economies vs. money economies. The way I understood it, he described the agile team as using a gift economy. Favors are exchanged freely with no exchange of money. However outside the team and especially within the corporation at large, it is a money economy. I think the point was to suggest that we need to be conscious of the different economies at work and adjust our expectations and behavior accordingly.

He also talked about the influence of context on behavior, basically debunking using assessments like Myers-Briggs for any predictive purpose. Instead, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that context matters much more when it comes to predicting people’s behavior. So, my take away from that is that we need to create the right environments for people to be successful.

Grumpy Old Agile Coaches w/Rachel Davies

This was a fun session with Olav Lewitz, JB Rainsberger, Kati Vikki, Mike Hill all sitting on park benches and Rachel Davies acting as moderator. While the conversation was good, I have to agree with some of the participants, that the grumpy old agile coaches looked pretty happy for a bunch of grumps! I was interested to hear about the lonely-coaches-sodality google group which I definitely want to check out.

Agile at Scale

Apparently this was another fishbowl – I enjoyed it and jumped right in with the big fish. It was fun to bounce some of my thoughts off the group and get their perspective. Mary Poppendieck was a hoot and provided some lively conterpoint and tough questions of her own. Jutta Eckstein was the moderator and did a great job.

After Hours

It’s a quiet evening for me. I have to give my Silo Busting tutorial tomorrow morning, so it’s early to bed.

XP2011 Day 2

First a brief note on the important things:

1. The breakfasts: While I don’t think anyone is going to beat last year’s xp2010 hotel in Trondheim for its extravagant breakfast buffet, it’s hard not to love having a churro and coffee for breakfast. Mmmm…churros!
2. The timing: Just for the record – having your presentation take place on the last day of the conference sucks. I know, somebody has to draw the short straw, but I hate all the waiting. I just can’t relax and enjoy myself until I get it done.

Conversations

Met some of my favorite coaches again – you know who you are…and Nils I owe you a beer…

Sessions

Keynote: Still no Silver Bullets – Esther Derby

In multiple sessions this conference Esther has been talking about a model for finding and managing polarizing behaviors in organizations. It seems to be a way of visualizing and identifying ways of managing based on a systems thinking approach (a la Peter Senge). One of the failure modes that she identifies is the oscillation between polar behaviors or states in the system. This oscillation can disrupt the flow of value through the system. The solution seems to be to put in feedback mechanisms that serve to mitigate the oscillation. That’s really a lot of four syllable words to toss around (which is usually an indication that I don’t understand something well). I think I like the model she uses, but I need to try and put it into practice and see how it plays for me. Then maybe I can explain it using one or two syllable words…

One other model that I took away from her talk was that there are two kinds of knowledge that need to be shared in an organization: Contextual Knowledge – the kind of knowledge that CEOs and management have, and Day to Day knowledge – the kind of knowledge that teams have. I think there is a lot of focus on making the knowledge that the team have transparent, however I think there needs to be an equal focus on making the contextual knowledge that executives have transparent too. I’ve realized that I may have been focusing on only one half of the equation. Thank you Esther!

No Silver Bullets. Now What?

This session seemed to be an effort to explore different polarities and examine how to put appropriate feedback mechanisms in place for them. I didn’t feel like it went very well though. I personally found it hard to identify polarities. Furthermore, I wasn’t really all that familiar with the model, so I felt like I was having difficulty making a contribution to the discussion. Still a little thrashing can go a long way toward understanding, so perhaps it was useful in the end.

The Purpose of Leadership and Governance – Jurgen Appelo

Wow! I’d heard good things about Jurgen’s book and I’m here to tell you that they are all true…

Decision Making (Lightning talks)

Man, leave it to xp2011 to make even lightning talks boring. Congrats guys…

After Hours

Conference Dinner

I saw things no sane man should see. After I describe what I saw I will promise to poke my own eyes out with broaches. Or at least have a beer before getting on the plane…One or the other. Right now I’m leaning toward the broaches. Send me email if you feel differently…

XP2011 Day 1

The first day of XP2011 got off to a good start today. As your roaming reporter I think I will break down my experience of day one into the following categories: Conversations, Tutorials, & After hours.

Conversations

Starting your own conference – Beer in hand, I stumbled into a conversation about holding a future XP conference in Vienna. What a fabulous idea! I’m currently playing a small role in helping with site selection for a conference in the pacific northwest, so I’m particularly interested in this topic. Setting up a conference is a very complicated affair. It involves many different factors that I’m only now coming to appreciate: site location, catering, services (wifi, etc.) atmosphere, organization type, and the list goes on. The more I get to know people who take on this challenging task, the more I respect them and the work that they do.

On a related note, I see small conferences as a critical part of the overall conference ecosystem and a vital source of originality for the overall conference system. I see ideas get introduced and developed (0r killed) in small conferences that then evolve into the new ideas that pop up in the larger conferences. So I think we need to encourage more small conferences.

ALE Network – Those crazy Europeans are at it again! Being an American I didn’t participate, but I really like the energy that I feel behind this movement. I wasn’t in the super secret meeting, but I wholeheartedly support whatever those wacky Europeans come up with! Apparently they are going to take over the world with LEGOs. Let’s see if this movement has momentum. I know my kids are on board.

Vegetarians starve in Madrid – Yes, this is my exclusive scoop for the conference. I spoke with a few vegetarians tonight. Apparently there are no vegetables in Madrid. None. The poor bastards are starving. It’s quite sad. A moment of silence for the vegetarians please. The good news for the rest of us carnivores: vegetarians are really very tasty.

Tutorials

Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams w/Jutta Eckstein

This topic isn’t a new one for me. In fact, this session was one of those where you come to realize that you know quite a lot on the subject. Then the hard part is to balance letting the speaker talk with your own desire to contribute your own point of view. I also felt like there were some key points that I really needed to explore in much more detail, but perhaps that wasn’t as relevant to others in the room. I think Jutta did a great job in presenting a comprehensive overview of many of the key issues to address in working with distributed/dispersed teams. She obviously has a lot of experience in the domain and has written two books on the topic.

However…this topic is insanely complex and I think it deserves even more attention than it currently gets. The real questions that I encounter with distributed teams are wicked hard and they don’t give way to simple, stock agile answers. Strangely enough, when she addressed trust the conversation started to sound a lot like the introduction to my Silo Busting tutorial – so I invited her to come! I think trust is a very important and under appreciated topic for inter team communication.

The Other Session

I have a confession to make. I saw myself in the second session today and I felt more than a little uncomfortable. The speaker was skilled – he really had a talent for speaking to a crowd, but you could see that the ideas were still being worked out. I saw a bit of myself in that speaker today and quite frankly, it made me feel awkward. I will not criticize – to do so would only be to criticize myself. But at the same time I wanted so badly to jump up and help out. Sometimes the hardest sessions to attend are those where the potential of the speaker and the subject are the most obvious. I’m still processing my feelings on this one. Perhaps this is more about me and less about the speaker. Hmmm…food for thought.

So I took a nap.

After Hours

Welcome Reception

Well, after the obligatory speeches from boring people you’d rather not listen too, the beer poured freely and the tapas kept coming. It was a relatively small crowd as these things go, but it kept going for a good three hours. It was nice to drift in and out of some very engaging conversations. I talked about everything from basketball, to ice hockey, to Madrid weather, to sessions held today, to the future of the Agile Manifesto (I think we agreed that after 10 years those particular stone tablets should be smashed). All in all, not a bad way to spend an evening with a drink in each hand.

The Fractal Beauty of Process

There is something about a well designed process that I find mesmerizing. It really doesn’t matter if it’s XP, Scrum, Lean, or Kanban the end result is the same: for some brief period I find myself seeing the patterns of the process everywhere I look. For example, a few months ago I finished reading yet another book on Lean (Poppendieck’s latest or something like that). There I was in the kitchen washing the dishes after dinner and wondering…

…why I always did the dishes in such large batches?

…and what would happen to our dish throughput if everyone washed their own dishes? Is that one piece flow?

…and would my family understand the benefits that would accrue from such a change? Would an experiment back this up?

…should I use a kanban board to reflect my weekly dishwashing progress?’

And so it goes. Sometimes it’s like a fever. Process Geekitus. I guess for some folks a process has the allure of helping to explain how the world should work. That’s a pretty seductive proposition when you stop and think about it. What’s wrong with being passionate about your work? Nothing! I can think of some great examples:

1. Personal Kanban
2. GTD (Getting things Done)

These are examples of processes that people have incorporated into their day to day lives. They’ve managed to take a process that works for groups and make it work for individuals or vice versa. I’ve seen it done both ways and I find it equally compelling. Patterns within patterns. It’s really rather lovely.

How Others See Us Is Important Too

I was having a conversation once with an executive sponsor who was frustrated by friction between competing organizational silos. One silo adopted Agile, the other stuck with more traditional plan driven development. Each side mocked the other’s “head in the clouds” or “lost in the past” approach to projects.

When I was asked what I thought about the situation I found myself saying something along these lines,

“We (the Agile teams) have become very good at being open and collaborative with each other. We have created these marvelous cross-functional teams and have done a great job of breaking down the walls that used to exist between team members. From an insiders perspective on any given team we have made dramatic improvements to the way we work.”

“However, from the outside we don’t look that much different. In fact from the outside, we still react with hostility when provoked and we don’t offer much transparency into our work beyond using a handful of project tracking tools. It’s just not enough. I have high expectations of an Agile development team. I believe that an outsider who works with an Agile development team should come away from the experience feeling like they were welcomed, informed, and energized. I want a team using plan-driven methods to welcome an Agile team, because they will be that much more likely to succeed. The experience will be one of openness and a general willingness to work together.”

“But that’s not often what we get. Instead we get fear, hostility and resentment on both sides. Some of that is human nature. Some of that is silos. And some of that is because we focus too much on the process. I think we should leave the process out of it. Working on a project is a chance to make friends and meet new people.”

“What I need are people who are friendly, open and honest. People who smile when I walk into the room. People I can crack jokes with. If I lead with friendship, I can make more ground than if I lecture them on Agile practices. People should feel at ease when they work with my teams. They should know that they are safe.”

At this point in the conversation I was:

1. out of my chair
2. pacing the room
3. and gesticulating wildly

The first two meant I was feeling emotional, the last one meant I was talking. I was surprised at the heat of my own passion on the topic. In writing it down, it even sounds naive. But here’s the thing: I’ve worked with enough Agile teams to know that they can be real jerks to outsiders…and that is a shame. I would have hoped that all of that vaunted openness and transparency would make that go away, but it doesn’t.

If Agile in whatever form is ultimately to be successful, then both people inside and outside the team need to feel safe and respected. If you are starting a new team, please realize that getting things working smoothly within the team is critical, but don’t forget to look at how your team interacts with others to – in many ways it’s just as important to the success of your team – perhaps even more so.

What I Learned From My Daughter’s First Grade Classroom

The new school year is beginning and my daughter is starting first grade. I had an opportunity to go to her elementary school open house the other day. A word to the wise: never let an Agile development geek into a first grade classroom. I thought I had died and gone to information heaven. I took a camera with me and took some pictures of the kinds of information that they put on the walls in a children’s classroom. It was amazing! In the meantime, my wife fervently denied that she was with the dork taking all the pictures of the walls. Here’s what I discovered before I was escorted from the building:

The first grade classroom is the prototype for a learning environment. These folks are the undisputed masters of the information radiator.  Everywhere you look there is information being displayed. The variety of different kinds of information displayed is amazing! The density of information here is incredible! In one corner of the room I see the following information:

• Monthly calendar
• Weather graph
• Password(???)
• The alphabet
• A tally of how many days they’ve been in school
• Numbers from 1-10
• Days of the week
• A chart of all numbers from 1-200
• A list of who has lost a tooth (Try that on your team! If the number is greater than five, you may be working in a biker bar)
• And a few other things I can’t quite interpret

What else can we see going on here? Well for one thing, there is LOTS of color. It catches the eye, calls attention to certain details, and livens things up quite a bit. It’s like an interior decorator went nuts in the place. Next, you may observe that much of the information is presented using multiple modalities. Multiple modalities? OK, they use pictures AND words AND color AND shapes. A lot of effort is being made to transmit information in a variety of different ways. Now, just for giggles, what if you were going to put together this exact same board for your team at the office? What would it contain? Here’s how I might do it:

• Monthly calendar – team vacations, releases, events, barbecues
• Release graph – How many releases per week are we doing?
• Word of the day (“Spurtle” – yeah, it’s a word)
• A quick reference containing all of the major Ruby commands (pick your API/Language, etc)
• A tally of how many days they’ve been working on a project/sprint/release
• Numbers from 1, 0 (hey, it’s computer science, you only need two numbers!)
• List of major business holidays (they always sneak up on me)
• A chart of all error codes used in our project
• A ladder of World of Warcraft names/rankings

Hmmm. That’s actually not a bad list. Give it a little color, play with the “modalities” and I just might have some pretty compelling information there. I wonder what else the first graders have to teach us? How about this:

I see at least three things here that I could try out with my team back at the office. First, there is information about today: we have the date, and then  below it is the day’s schedule. Now, I don’t know about you, but back at the office, I don’t have anything like a daily schedule posted on the wall with my team. We all have outlook, and perhaps some would say that’s enough, but for me it’s not quite the same. Outlook reflects MY schedule, not the team’s schedule. And there are significant team events that could use some advertising: Planning meetings, releases, retrospectives, reviews, scrum of scrums, and so on. I know that where I work, everyone is left to their own devices to manage these things and show up or not. Nothing wrong with that, but what if we had a daily schedule, a reminder if you will, that sat next to our task board at our standup meeting? Frankly, I think it might be useful. As a scrum master, it might be a way for me to rather subtly remind the team of the big commitments for the day. Or not.

Let’s move on from the schedule stuff. What’s up with the bottles of ketchup, mayo, and mustard? OK, it may be a little cheesy, but if you look at the image closely you will see that these are clever little symbols for “Catch-Up”, “May Do”, and “Must Do’s”. Do you track Catch-Up work on your team? No? Me either…wait a second…we do keep a list of technical debt. Isn’t technical debt a kind of  Catch up work? So keeping that list of catch up items makes a lot of sense to me. Also, the “May Do’s” and “Must Do’s” make a lot of sense to me as well. I think that defining work as “Must Do” will help the team prioritize the work that is most important (assuming you don’t abuse it) and the “May Do’s” gives the team the ability to identify the things that are available to be pulled on their own initiative. Adding may do and must do to a team’s daily activities would certainly be interesting to try out. I can see pros and cons to doing it. Maybe we could even use these criteria to categorize our backlogs? It’s a possibility…

How about the noise level trumpet off in the corner there? In the wonderful Agile Open Space that you work in, do you ever have issues with noise? Here is your answer! I wonder how well that actually works in a room full of first graders? OK, I’m not going to give them grief for this – it’s probably an experiment.

Here’s another gem that I captured before being chased out of the room by a rather menacing looking old battle axe with a broom (where DO they get these people?):

Would you look at that! They use the “Fist of Five” in first grade too! I was wondering where that technique came from! I need a copy of this poster for my team!

Ooh! Look here! They are graphing their moods over time! Cool! I’ve seen other teams do this, but I’ve never tried it myself. It seems like an idea with some real merit. It certainly makes sense to track the teams mood. It would be very interesting to review information like this at team retrospectives. It would certainly provide an interesting metric to compare against recent “improvements” or other team experiments. One other thing I want to point out here: these teachers seem to think that these information radiators are so important that they will try and cram them just about anywhere! Anyplace is game: the backside of a bookshelf, the side of a locker, the face of a cabinet – any place they will fit. Look around your office. Are you using all the space you have available?

Here’s a quick challenge: So what do you think this is?

Well, as my daughter ever-so-patiently explained to me, this is their “Job Wall”. I like the beehive image – after all we Agilista’s like to “swarm” don’t we? It seems that everyone has regular tasks that they are responsible for. These are tracked here. I like the way it makes responsibilities explicit for everyone involved. It makes me wonder where the teachers get all this stuff? Of course if I were to show up with this silly little beehive, I’m pretty sure that the team would laugh me out of the room. Of course that never stopped me in the past…

You know, if they ever  lift the restraining order and let me back on school property again, I’m definitely going to take some more pictures of the classroom walls. How come more offices don’t look like this? Why aren’t the environments we work in as information rich as the ones that children work and play in? I presume that in the office we are learning too, right?

Day 1 of Agile Roots Conference

This conference has an awesome speaker lineup for its relatively small size (~200). It’s really great! Great first day. Lots of notes. I’ll have to take some time to try and synthesize some of it and share. My presentation is tomorrow, so I’d better get my beauty sleep!

I’ll be speaking at Agile Roots 2009!

I’ll be giving a tutorial, “Impediment Hunting” at Agile Roots 2009! This is a fantastic tutorial and I’m really excited to have been selected as a presenter for this conference. They have done a great job lining up some terrific speakers for this conference – hey, they got me, right? But in all seriousness, I’m really looking forward to seeing this group of speakers in action.