More of a write-up to come. For now, just wanted to make sure folks had the link to the slides I shared at AgileDC 2018. The playbook is at the top, followed by the slides from the full talk. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have questions!
Matthieu’s Playbook: Tried and True Patterns for Kickstarting Scrum Teams New and Old
You start your sprint thinking you can get the work done. But as soon as the sprint starts, new information comes your way: stories are harder than expected, someone is out sick, a blizzard knocks a day out of your team’s schedule, etc.
When do you deal with this new information? Daily standup.
Standup is of course a chance to commit to each other what you will accomplish during the day. But it is also a chance to replan the rest of your sprint as necessary. From the Scrum Guide:
Every day, the Development Team should understand how it intends to work together as a self-organizing team to accomplish the Sprint Goal and create the anticipated Increment by the end of the Sprint.
Part of that is answering: are we still on track? If not, what are we going to do about it? Unfortunately, I have found that teams don’t do this naturally. Here is the best trick I’ve found for building and maintaining this important habit:
In my experience, the hardest part about this is just asking the question. Teams naturally leap into action trying to help each other and problem solve; they just need the information brought to the surface. The voting takes virtually no time, and it forces the team members to look from the team/sprint perspective as opposed to the me/today perspective.
I now recommend this practice for every team, old and new. I hope it helps your team!
A few other things:
You may have heard the reminder that the daily stand-up meeting in Scrum is not a status meeting, it’s a commitment meeting. It’s a chance to pick a focus for the day, share it with your team, and push everything else to the side. I like to think of it as giving yourself the gift of focus.
A few years ago, I was reflecting on failures with my own personal daily commitments. Thought I wasn’t on a scrum team, I was setting out my tasks at the start of each day. Rather than saying them out loud to my team, I wrote them down. I found a few frequently recurring categories of problems. Later, doing retrospectives on OKRs, I was reminded of these categories. The timescale was different, but the problems were largely the same.
There are seven categories. The first six are typical problems that trip us all up, especially in the first two to three quarters of OKR adoption. Once we can routinely manage those six hurdles, we run into the seventh, which is a catch-all: execution. It’s a good thing when your main failures (if any) come from execution. It means you have made routine of evading those other pitfalls, and you can dive into fine-tuning your performance.
Sometimes you will fall short of a commitment for a combination of these reasons. The value of this framework is not in perfectly assessing which category was to blame; it’s in helping you pick apart what could otherwise be a confusing jumble of conflated problems. Do your best to pinpoint the biggest reason you failed to hit each Key Result, consider what you would have done differently if you could do it again, and keep this in mind as you head into your next set of OKRs
Underestimation
The work was bigger than you expected.
Overcommitment
The work was about what you expected, you simply took on more than you could possibly achieve. We all do this. Remember: there is no virtue in taking on more than you can possibly accomplish.
Blocks
You felt unable to proceed at some point.
Distractions
You focused on something other than the OKRs you set. Death from a thousand cuts of distraction is one of the most common problems, and one of the hardest to avoid.
Poorly Written OKRs
OKRs were too task-oriented or too vague about what done would look like.
Mid-Quarter OKR Change
If at all possible, you should avoid doing this. But sometimes you have no choice. Two examples:
If you must make such a change, clear it with all stakeholders first. Then, at the end of the quarter, make sure you look back to figure out what happened and how to avoid such changes in the future. If this happens to you more than once or twice a year, you definitely need to re-examine what’s going on.
Execution
If the problem is not in one of the six categories above, congratulations! You’ve avoided the common pitfalls. You are likely operating with a much higher degree of focus and alignment than you were before adopting OKRs. But the work continues: without the confusion of those common pitfalls, you can now start fine-tuning your approach to maximize achievement of your outcomes. Good luck!
“Inspect and adapt” is a key phrase in Scrum. Many parts of the framework ask you periodically to check in on something, see how its going, and modify your next steps as appropriate. One of the inspect-and-adapt meetings is Sprint Review, where you inspect the product increment (Scrum’s fancy way of saying “what you built in the last sprint”). There are a bunch of important things to check, but here I’d like to focus on this one:
During sprints, we are cruising along, focused on the details in front of us. It’s incredibly important to look up from what you are doing and make sure you are still headed where you meant to go.
Here is one particularly effective way I’ve found to connect this inspection question to adaptive actions. It assumes that you are using OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) set on quarters, but you can easily swap in whatever mechanism/time period you are using to set goals beyond those of the sprint.
A few common questions about this technique appear below.
If we’re behind, can we really afford the time to have a conversation about risk?
A frequent mistake is to stop after step 3 and say, “Oh, boy, we’re in trouble! We’d better get back to work!” It’s very tempting to do this! You just identified that you are behind, and it is counterintuitive to think that the right action is to not jump right back to work. Think of it this way instead: you have identified that you are on a course to failure; why rush getting back on that course? Instead, take a moment to look at the risk in more detail as noted in step 4.
Why write the answers about risk somewhere everyone can see?
As a general rule, it’s a great practice to record the conclusions of a conversation in a shared place. It greatly reduces the risk that participants come away with different memories of the conversation. In addition, you can refer back to it, and if you make it fully public it can help communicate status to people outside the team.
How detailed should my answers be?
Only as detailed as is useful for your team. For example, you might write something as simple as: “Concern over content being ready for us in time. Juniper escalating to Max.”
How do we rate a Key Result we haven’t started work on yet?
You should rate every Key Result in every iteration. Again, rate it based on confidence you’ll complete it by the end of the period. Just because you haven’t started something doesn’t mean it’s at risk. Let’s say you are renovating a bathroom. Painting the walls might be one of the very last tasks. Early on, you can still be confident that you’ll finish it on time even though you won’t start it until much later. On the other hand, if earlier work starts running behind, you might start to worry that you won’t get the painting finished. In fact, the piece that is running long (say, building the vanity) might be green, meaning you’ll finish it by the end of the period, but its overruns mean that later pieces (like painting) switch to red.
Why not replace the confidence ratings with our percent done?
You should certainly consider percent done so far, but the amount you have completed is not a great indication of whether you will get it all done on time. Being ahead early doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll finish on time, and being behind late doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll finish late. Since the point of this exercise is to inspect progress and adapt appropriately, we need a signal to tell us whether to adapt. Confidence that we will get it done by the end of the period is simply a better indication of whether or not we need to change our plans.
Me: I think the big bites can burn your mouth more than small bites, because there are more molecules–those little balls bouncing around–that can bump into your mouth and warm it up than there would be in a smaller bite. At least, that’s my guess.
My young daughter: That’s your hippopotamus?
Me: Yes. That’s my hippopotamus.
In my last post, I wrote that teams past the prototypical startup phase should still use the approach of validating hypotheses, highlighted in Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup. I left off with the question: where should teams find hypotheses to test? See the answer in my full post on the Amplify Engineering blog.
Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup holds a lot of great advice for prototypical startups, as well as for innovation efforts within more established companies. But some on more established teams might think this book has nothing for them. I suggest they think again! Although a couple of the lessons are a little less applicable later in the product lifecycle, much of the core thinking of Ries’ book is not only still usable, but crucial to understand.
I explain why in my full post on the Amplify Engineering blog.
In writing key results for OKRs (or generally trying to find measurable goals), I have noticed several patterns of measurement. I find this list useful when I am trying to brainstorm ways to measure a given initiative. I can ask myself, “Hmm, is there a Symptom measure I could use here?” Gives the imagination a little kick. This is especially useful when I am stuck with a bunch of output-based key results and I am trying to convert to something outcome-based. Will post more about that later; for now: it’s basically about trying to avoid the trap of measuring what’s easy to measure as opposed to what’s important to measure.
I just gave a talk at AgileDC 2016 about my experience over the last year implementing OKRs for a bunch of Agile teams. For now, this post is just a placeholder for the presentation. When I get around to it, I may fill out the posts with the relevant thinking.
Before I start, I have to give credit to Esther Derby for nearly 100% of the value of this post. She does a free (free!!) monthly Q& A conference call. During one such call a little over a year ago (“Reframing Resistance for Positive Outcomes”), she opened my eyes on a critical point. Here’s the very first sentence of Esther’s discussion that day (not verbatim, but close): What resistance really means, if you look beyond the frustration, is a person not going along with your suggestion as enthusiastically or quickly as you would like.
Just this sentence sparked a major perspective shift for me. The last four words put attention on the part the initiator of the change plays in the feeling of resistance. Think of it like Newton’s third law: if I punch someone in the face, their face pushes back on my hand. My hand might really hurt, but would it be fair of me to think ill of them for pushing back on my knuckles with their cheek? I’m obviously heightening my role as aggressor in this situation, but even in this extreme example, I might have good intentions (e.g., it looked to me like they were about to hurt my friend). Regardless: I took part in creating the pain I felt in my hand.
While this analogy is silly in some ways, I really like that it highlights something huge that I used to overlook when complaining about resistance: how does the other person feel about it? Just as focusing on the pain in my hand is unfairly ignoring the pain in the other person’s cheek, complaining of resistance is ignoring the position that I have put the other person in. They very likely don’t like pushing back, but I am forcing them to do so. (Of course, they have the option of just giving in, but neither of us does well in that outcome.)
Esther went on to cover some very useful techniques for working through how to approach perceived resistance. These techniques both involved shifting ones perspective: in one case re-framing the perceived resistance to find its potentially positive components, in the other case seeking an understanding of the other person’s perspective. Doing the exercises really drove home the truth of her opening statement. Every example of resistance I could think of fit that definition.
One might consider this massive self-deception: if I always slide around to the other person’s perspective, am I simply explaining away resistance that actually exists? Well, if my interest lies with progress that respects people for who they are, and if understanding their view helps me achieve progress, I don’t think I really care. Regardless, I truly have come to believe that–in all but very rare cases (e.g., deep personal animus)–resistance is just one’s own view of the feelings one creates by pushing on someone else too fast, too hard, or too insensitively.
The tools Esther shared that day are great, but the really cool thing she did was helping me see the futility in fussing over so-called resistance. Since then, I’ve stopped using the word in this context. That’s a pretty damned good result for a free Q&A call. Thank you, Esther!!
At the beginning of this year, I had a discussion with some folks at various companies about organizational issues at scale. At one point we touched on our individual experiences with high-level company re-organizations. As we went around the circle talking about frequency of change, we learned that the represented companies re-organized about once every 18 to 36 months. This struck me as interesting because the language typically used to communicate such changes not only fails to communicate predictable fluidity, but on the contrary implies permanence. I don’t recall explicit claims of permanence, but the old ways are usually cast as simply wrong, the new ways as the solution to a problem. Not one of the many re-orgs I’ve been through is billed as what it truly is: an approach aimed at solving current problems, which is therefore likely to cease being useful when the primary problems change.
In the call, I suggested the idea that the architects of such re-orgs might recognize this and take a different approach. I’ve thought about it a lot since then, in part sparking my thoughts on all management as a support function. If you accept that management serves a support function, it follows that management should constantly adjust to the needs of the org it supports. How would this in turn change the periodic re-org?
I imagine that announcements would make clear that re-orgs are explicitly temporary attempts to respond to the current set of support needs. To prepare for future re-orgs, management could establish an ongoing process to assess the fit of management structure to needs. I think of this as a sort of product in development. Just as the Product Owner attempts to fit a product to the needs of their customers, the Re-Org Owner would attempt to fit their product (management) to the needs of their customers (development teams). As with product release, you could then adjust the frequency and breadth of release to get the appropriate level of feedback on your changes. In any event, you would work to move away from the typical pattern: big announcement, months of figuring out what it means, months of learning to do it, months of learning the problems with it, months of attempting to fix those problems, and finally abandonment for the next approach. This would help de-emphasize any sense of permanence in the re-org. In turn, this would hopefully help defuse a typical response to many of these re-org announcements: “Humpph. More management bullshit.”
It’s possible that this thinking just flows from my bias towards typical Agile team structure. What I’ve observed, though, is that the structure of those teams rarely seems to change based on the high-level re-orgs. In short: the small team structure seems to work more or less indefinitely; you just need to modify the support structure around it to adjust to changes over time.
Regardless, there doesn’t seem to be much here that is too controversial: Why not just be honest that things are going to change again? Why not be thinking ahead about the next re-org to avoid waiting too long and starting too jarringly? Why not try out those changes in smaller measure to validate your decisions?
Thanks to Simon Marcus, Anders Ivarsson, Mac Fowler, and Erik Schon for the very interesting conversation that inspired this thinking!
