Friday 25 January 2008

successful transformation

I am a firm believer that successful organizational transformation needs two things: sufficient momentum generated from the top and a supporting structure within the organization to reinforce the concepts and propel the artists forward. Topside momentum must be established by Sr. Mgmt with substantial vested interest in seeing the organization transform and meet their goals.

This doesn’t happen if the changes are isolated to IT. IT is a service bureau. It is a Cost Center, there to create the tools by which the rest of the business can create value. No business ever made more money now and into the future by having a more effective automated purchasing system, BUT an automated purchasing system has allowed businesses to more effectively turn their AP into Cash (providing substantive value).

If we teach and preach at the “C” level, then we address high level issues and concerns and create business value there. At that level, there is more of an understanding of value and therefore a higher willingness to pay on a value-priced schedule, rather than for an hourly lowest-cost provider. I have been working with “C”s and VPs along this line almost exclusively for the past couple of years and have been quite successful – basically assessing what their real issues are (some RCA) and then stating what I can help them with (if anything – referring them elsewhere if necessary), and then tailoring solutions to fit within their cultural constraints. It is a rare luxury where I am able to also address the second point – tuning their organizational structure to reinforce the transformation.

With respect to efforts I have coached in the past; Segway was successful because we were able to tune the organization. Borland was less successful, but since we were able to tune the compensation system to align the teams with achieving what the company needed to have done – we effectively reduced the transformative process from years to year.

Wednesday 9 January 2008

How to set up an Agile PMO to best support the transformation

The instantiation of an Agile centric PMO at the outset of an agile transformation can help bolster the depth and breadth of the changes. Many practitioners reiterate that agile is a very experiential methodology and that there is a fair need to suspend disbelieve while trying the first agile project. Accepting these sentiments, it makes sense that the creation of a support mechanism simultaneously with the initiation of the transformation would be of great value.

In similar veins, we also state that the best way to inculcate the new methodology is to have one or more experienced mentors on the team, constantly able to bolster individuals when doubts arise. If this is appropriate for the team members, why not for the project managers too? By establishing a PMO made up of a mentor and some or all of the project managers working on agile projects, both a support network and an oversight board are created. Their responsibility remains to provide check and balance to the agile. The recommendation is to choose a period that is at least as large if not larger than the maximum iteration length amongst the teams participating (monthly, perhaps). The rationale for this is to be able to review the previous iteration and any issues that were present there and make recommendations on handling them in the future. By setting up the periodicity this way, there will always be at least 1 entire iteration to review and projections on the next to consider.

Establishing a peer group gives the PMs an informal network from which to seek help outside of the PMO reviews while helping them all mature and learn from each other’s experiences. Once the peer group gets large enough, the actual PMO review responsibility can be rotated through the group with the mentor and several different PMs being responsible each time.

The actual content of the review becomes simply reviewing the trendlines for the Burndown and Burnup charts and asking for explanations on anomalous behavior on either. If the charts imply confidence of meeting the business’ expectations, then the review is short and sweet. If either adequate explanations can not be put forward or leading indicators belie satisfactory conclusions, then a longer discussion is entered into in order to help the PM identify interventions that will change the course of the project. It remains the PMs responsibility to steer the team, but as with any retrospective, independent view points often help make the path more obvious.

Sunday 6 January 2008

So, what's the problem?

It is becoming more and more recognized that iterative development, specifically those using agile methods, offer a significant advantage to those companies trying to achieve both higher throughput in their project organizations and better alignment with the business organizations. Historically, these types of methodological shifts have been initiated by either the business or director levels within the development organization. Many times, these individuals can initiate an entire organizational transformation with the graces of senior management by referring to successful case studies documented in industry literature . Overcoming the immediate concern that Agile is merely cowboy development with barely more controls than the loose code of conduct rules that go with the cowboy activities, IT has begun to embrace the methodology principally because it has indeed been able to deliver on its hype.

The collection of these documented success stories are swelling and are driving Agile into the mainstream of software development. However, in the past several years, we have also begun to see an interesting phenomenon whereby successful transformations begin to devolve fairly rapidly, even to the point where projects begin to slide and even fail. We are also seeing a number of companies contracting in services to re-enable their agile transformation with the hope of recapturing their early successes and perhaps making the transformation stickier this time around.

Thinking back to 9th grade brings to mind the old Newtonian adage: things in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. Although it is certainly possible that in any of these situations where the transformation has deteriorated there may be active resistance to the change that acts as the outside force, but typically a process change is not deemed successful until there is consensus amongst the team members. This suggests that active resistance would have been weeded out prior to declaring the methodological shift successful. If we throw in to this mix another adage, this one from my early university aspirations, I think we can begin to understand what the crux of the issue is. From thermodynamics, we understand that entropy suggests that systems deteriorate into disorder if there is no continuous containment forces. Thought of like this begins to offer some clarity to the forces at work (or not). Clearly there are outside forces that are causing the transformation to slow or even stop – if we believe that at least one of these forces is entropy, which makes sense, can it be reversed?

Continuous containment is an odd term to use with a process or even a methodology, so let’s take some liberties here and refer to is as encouragement or positive reinforcement. Do the agile projects in your organization get positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, or neither? And, what form does this reinforcement take, if it exists? In most Development and IT organizations, there is a responsibility that belongs to the Program Management Office (PMO) to provide checks and balances on each project. They offer an independent review of budget and schedule for senior management as well as a periodic critique for the project managers. It is this critique that is the reinforcement, the containment force, for the transformation.

Saturday 5 January 2008

Earned Value Behaviors

In companies that use traditional ‘plan-driven’ methodologies to execute their projects there is usually a check and balance system put in place with the intention of providing independent review of project status and progress. Called the Program Management Office (PMO), this group becomes the most influential force in the organization with respect to both the execution of programs and the approach by which they are undertaken. In the classical sense of you-are-what-you-measure, when the PMO requests that the Project Manager come to the review prepared to discuss budget, progress, and work performed to date – the essential variables for earned value calculations – PMs begin to focus their work and their teams on these measures. These critical aspects thus get passed on down to the team and so everyone begins to worry about where they are as versus where they anticipated being. Interesting as well, this course of measurement only represents lagging indicators, telling the team how well they have done, not leading indicators, suggesting where they will end up. Ultimately, the result of this is we can tell the business how well or poor we performed to date, but we can not accurately tell them how things will turn out.

This lack of leading indicators for the project force us to continuously rely upon the original plan for guidance as to where we want to end up, progress-wise. As the project itself wears on, deviation from the plan tends to increase and the use of the original plan as a barometer becomes more and more invalid. Stepping aside from this deficiency to forecast, projects tend to get graded on how close to the plan their progress to date lies. In an Earned Value environment, the significant measure is BCWP or budgeted cost of work performed. As it states, this is a measure of how close to the planned cost you were able to execute the work completed. Note several things, however:
  1. The project is seen as successful as long as it is meeting the plan’s budget, regardless as to whether or not the plan is viable
  2. Since the measurements of task completion and their costs are asynchronous, partially completed tasks tend to be viewed as proportionally complete to their elapsed time to date (in other words, a task is 70% done if its team has billed 70% of the task’s estimated effort).

These two realizations produce a set of behaviors in the Project Manager and subsequently in the team. Basically, since team all wants to be seen as successful (even more so than they want the project to succeed), there is a desire to meet the plan and to be able to correlate work completed to budgeted costs. As long as these objectives are somewhat ambiguous, then clearly the teams can claim success – producing another behavior, one of obfuscation of completion status.

All in all, the age old complaint is that the teams and the team’s management end up finding ways to ‘game’ the system and even though the PMO goes through these monthly evaluations to assess progress, even they know it is a sham. Only once delivery milestones are met or missed does the business really understand the entirety of the situation. This ultimately ends up as to why we continuously hear of projects being canceled after significant funds have already been spent with no clear path to success .

Thursday 3 January 2008

Metrics, Part 1

The objective of lean is to eliminate wastes, as waste is seen as the barrier to efficiency and in turn, loss of efficiency reduces throughput and hence profits. Certainly, profit, throughput, and efficiency are terms at least one abstraction beyond what many software development teams are trained to understand. Even the ranks of Project Managers are thin in their understanding how corporate and division profits vacillate given the vagaries of the throughput of their projects. Honestly, even efficiency is a measure that is both more abstract and subjective than most of us are able to clearly understand as a factor of project success.

Therefore, rather than take a top down view at this problem, we can swing around and use Shingo’s bottom up perspective and look simply at the 7 wastes. If we accept his successes at Toyota as validation of Lean, then we can accept that the elimination of these wastes will yield substantive improvements on the bottom line. Induction then states that objective measurements against these wastes become a reasonable view on how to assess progress against the goal of improvement.

Simply stated, if we measure how we are doing in each of Shingo’s 7 Waste categories, we will have sufficient metrics to track our projects both on their own (the lower the waste, the better the project team is able to perform) and against corporate standards.

I do want to note that when comparing a single project against a corporate standard or norm, the team and the process improvement staff must all be of consensus that dramatic aberration (that outside of the statistically acceptable variation) is neither really bad or really good, but rather indication that immediate detailed review must be undertaken. When a project starts reporting data way above the norms most organizations understand intuitively that something is amiss, usually they focus on insufficiencies or inabilities of the team. More likely, variation above the norms means that the team is either (or both) not sufficiently trained in the approach or the domain, or the project objective is not well understood (i.e. it is substantially more complex than the team initially understood). This type of aberration becomes an early indicator that the assumptions made in the project charter are no longer valid. Equally, when a project starts reporting way below the norms, then review is still necessary. Mostly, this type of aberration occurs when the team has over simplified the requirements and the project runs substantial risk of not meeting client expectations.

Wednesday 2 January 2008

Structure for an Agile Organization

Part 1 - Values

When we look at an organization that is successfully agile, we see one that has been able to shift tactics as their business needs change and continually move their hyperbola of focus to where ever is first strategically aligned and second producing the most value. To do this well, they must have a set of values that they have internalized to their core – that both their corporate execs and their rank and file all believe and follow. Often, actually stating these values is hard work as they are not easy to define succinctly and the effort to develop them from the organizational leaders is seen as too new-agey to be seen as a serious endeavor by modern captains of industry.

Unfortunately, most of the time when I urge organizations to develop value statements, they either leap immediately to their mission statements and hold them up as values or co-opt someone else’s values as their own. Both paths lead the organization to peril because the mission is usually more of a vapid marketing statement than actual values that anyone truly holds and other people’s values are just that – other people’s.

Since most organizations I work with are focusing on agile methods, they tend to co-opt the values from the Agile Manifesto which, though still someone else’s, are not a bad place to start. When they do that, what I try to do with them is deconstruct the value statements and tailoring them to the organization at hand. For instance, the first value – Individuals and interactions over processes and tools – is a commonly co-opted one; however, not one that is usually internalized. The way I transliterate this value is that the company must genuinely feel that their people are individuals and not resources and that the most valuable tool is not some computer program but personal interaction. This too borders on touchy-feely and is usually met with stares and eventually the statement that it can not scale. I try to counter with the addition that with proper processes, it does not need to scale, but by then, I know I have lost them. I do not know why modern business feels they can not be modern and efficient without dehumanizing their internals.

Tuesday 1 January 2008

Higher Goals

At first review, my higher goal is to teach.
There are several things I teach different peoples, some I do better than others. Business wise, I seem to principally focus on teaching organizations how to first begin to understand what their real objectives are and then how to achieve them. Sometimes, the host organization never wants to recognize their real objectives and instead prefer to focus on simpler, more straight forward goals - like making more money now and into the future.

I used to think that that goal, as stated, was the quintessential objective of any organization - if all activities were aligned correctly, then this is what would be achieved. I have more recently come to believe that there is a more crucial path that must be followed. I believe that there is a social consciousness that the corporate entity must have in order to just be viable and then it needs to adopt a holistically optimized fiscal policy in order to really succeed. Basically, a company whose executives are hell bent on making as much money as possible for themselves and/or their shareholders on the shoulders of a second class within the organizations (the workers as versus the executives) is doomed to failure, as it drives towards local optimal. Ricardo Semler has had some interesting ideas that he has put into practice and succeeded with. He was a contemporary with Goldratt's original work, and though I can not find any indication that they knew each other or of each other, but I find early Goldratt and early Semler rather complementary.

Bottom line is that I am really tired of corporations - large or small - taking advantage of their workers. We should train and support and mature them - like a medieval guild. It does not have to be compassionate, but if it does not take care of its workers, then they will not be able to continue producing work that provides value to the company and its clients. Think of it as a symbiotic relationship more than anything else! If my higher goal is to teach, I would like my highest goal to be to teach this message, and perhaps show the world, one industry at a time, how we can make our society a better place by symbiotically respecting and supporting each other. The final finesse would be to put it into a worldly perspective such that this whole process fits within the greater flow of the river of life, such that our actions and results seek to reach a holistic global optima, fitting in with nature rather than replacing it.