Tag Archives: complexity

Agile Dialogs Recap

This will be a short recap of the Agile Dialogs unconference held yesterday.  We discussed ways of predicting value production with and without estimates.  Over the next few days I’ll blog more of what we uncovered, but this will be a simple post on how the unconference was approached.

We had a good mix of people that were passionate, though no one was at I’d say fully at each end of the spectrum. The big takeaway was that both sides are right in many ways and wrong in many ways.  The idea of not using estimates of time, money, and/or story points can be done and is highly context dependent. As with any approach it may nor may not work in your context; it depends, or YMMV.  The best you can do is try it as an experiment and see whether it works for you.

What we did at Agile Dialogs was –

  • register with one side or another along a continuum (how strong we felt on the issue),
  • post the types of things we estimate,
  • tell our stories of both our successes and failures on both sides – with and without estimates
  • explore our objectives for either using or not using objectives and the techniques we use for each side
  • Explore the assumptions used when using estimates
  • Explore the assumptions used when not using estimates
  • Explore what each side could learn from the other
  • Posted and voted on what could possibly be the next thorny topic we tackle
  • and retrospect on how the Agile Dialogs unconference could be better

Here’s a few teasers of some of the discoveries… I’ll go more in depth on what was discussed in future posts as well as post some proceedings on the Agile Dialogs site.

  • When management or customers are asking for estimates, it is more important to understand their need for it; then more valuable alternatives to fulfill that need may be explored. Estimates may prove best for fulfilling that need though, so don’t force fit an alternative technique.
  • Estimation has become a scapegoat for other dysfunctions within the works system. Removing estimation won’t fix these dysfunctions, but it may help uncover them.  Whether at the end of the day, you remain with or without estimation, if these more fundamental dysfunctions can be fixed, then the work climate will improve.
  • Estimation always exists, but when pursuing a noestimates approach, the nature of the estimation actually changes from cost, time, and/or complexity to value (which is not based on those in most environments).
  • Focusing on understanding time and money estimates tends to introduce longer feedback loops for actual learning. If it is possible (and that is an IF), then removing them can eliminate waste in the work system to that learning.
  • Measurement is important in both approaches; when doing estimates we sometimes get lulled into a false sense of security that good measurement exists, when often it doesn’t.
  • Humans suck at estimation except on conceptually obvious items (obvious equating to the obvious domain in the Cynefin framework); mathematical models (particularly when the underlying assumptions on those models are validated by the team doing the work) can really help produce accurate results in the complicated domain.  The complex domain can be assisted greatly by these mathematical models, but the loop through is validating a hypothesis.
  • Another way to test a hypothesis is to set time or cost box and see if the solution at the end of the box is on track decide whether to spend more, accept as-is, or abandon; think Lean Start-up approach.

I have set-up The #AgileDialogs Daily that curates information from both sides of this thorny topic; other thorny topics will get added as a discussion on them emerges.

Locking Cadences to Optimize the Whole Scaled System – Not Really…

I had a reminder through some recent comments that people view locking cadences in step as a means for optimizing the whole of the system and not for individual teams (by allowing them to choose the cadences at which they wish to deliver).  this is used to justified in the case of when you have a need for a program.  I think this is missing the point, so I am going to go through some explanations.  I really like how Jurgen Appelo has applied David Snowden’s Cynefin framework to work systems so I am going to illustrate my rationale using some of his work.

So let us start with a team:

Programs_Explained_in_Mgmt3.0_speak-1Teams are simple to understand, predominantly because of their simple structure with few people; however they are  complex in nature because we are dealing with humans.  Sometimes we can’t even predict our own behavior, much less a whole team’s.  Next, let’s think of where most policies and processes wind up…Programs_Explained_in_Mgmt3.0_speak-2Good processes (and their accompanying policies), try to add order into systems; this is particularly true of many of the scaling systems out there (SAFe, DAD, to some degree LeSS) where structure and process is imposed on the ‘program’ system in order to achieve more predictability.  Unfortunately most of these are quite complicated in nature; some have helped by providing well diagrammed (some even animated) pictures, but there is still no denying the complicated nature of their arrangements to attempt to get predictability.

This is very well intentioned, yet what happens in reality is the following:

Programs_Explained_in_Mgmt3.0_speak-3The complicated-ordered process thrown on a simple-complex team yields a complicated-complex result.  This isn’t achieving what we wanted… and we’re just talking about a single team! And if we expand this to many teams such as we would have in a program, this is the best case we can hope to achieve.  It may become complicated and chaotic as the additive results yield less predictable results. Programs_Explained_in_Mgmt3.0_speak-4So why is this happening?

It’s because we humans create complex social systems.  There’s a reason why we value individuals and interactions over processes and tools; the latter can be complicated in nature perhaps and yet they are ordered in nature, while people systems can be either simple or complicated, yet are always at best complex.  People aren’t robots, so our behavior is never entirely predictable.

And yet… we try and put systems in place that have unintended consequences, such as imposing cadences on teams to get more order (predictability) out of them.  Think about the last time you had something forced on you that you disdained; it probably had you at best working at less than motivated – it sucked the motivation out of you, so you didn’t perform as predictably as desired. And at worst case, you went and found a new job and now the team was thrown into reforming and restorming to get back to renorming and performing.

Each team and its individuals will be different, perhaps some won’t care that much about the ‘normalization’ of cadence.  But some will have deep negative impacts that will occur.

So I ask you what ‘system’ are we trying to optimize? The process or the people?  Imposing a process to de-optimize how humans perform seems to me have many potential negative longterm effects; besides losing good people or demotivating people, even if this happens to only one team out of ten, it sends a signal that people don’t control their work system at all, that any element can be changed on a whim. Basically apply the pants principle and let teams adopt as simple a process as possible, including the orchestration.  As Saint-Exupery said, simplicity is not achieved by deciding on not when there is more to add, but deciding on when there is not more to take away.

Programs_Explained_in_Mgmt3.0_speak-6 Does this mean that locking cadences can’t ever be adopted? Not at all… Facilitate teams to select a good cadence within themselves firstand then collaborate with other teams to find how to best orchestrate delivery.  This may result in lockstep cadences or perhaps a creative branching and merging strategy. This could be done during team chartering by holding a futurespective. Regular intra-team retrospectives could help teams identify when changes need to occur. Simply installing a locked cadence at the beginning may result in a sub-optimal approach as it overlooks the people part of the equation.