Scrum on One Page

This drawing is part of a Leanpub book: https://leanpub.com/agileplanet. If you like it, you might want to have a look at the book, too.

References:

• The official Scrum Guide
• "Agile Project Management with Scrum" - Ken Schwaber
• Agile Atlas on Scrum (Scrum Alliance)
• Jeff Sutherland's blog

Is This Company Agile?

Recently Boris Gloger tweeted the question:

Why do you work for a non-agile company? (1) › bor!sgloger - http://t.co/4L3LcTNOAa
— Boris Gloger (@borisgloger) October 3, 2013

This made me think: "If I would switch positions to another company - how could I find out, if it is really agile?".

My first approach to answering this question was to answer the following two questions:

• Which interfaces are there between me and this company?
• How can I see, if it is only the interface looking agile or the whole company beeing agile?

This resulted in the following list of companies interfaces:

• Web Page
• Building
• Job Interview
• Friends working there
• Social Media
• Classical Media (e.g. Newspaper)
• Rating Sites (e.g. WorldBlu, Kununu, glassdoor)
• E-Mail
• Phone call
• Job Advertisement
• Products
• Customers

I tried to figure out, how one could possibly learn about the agility of an organization by observing those interfaces. And failed. The only interfaces, that are likely to give some clue about agility are the two "organic" ones where you meet somebody working in this company:

Job Interview

In 2012 I participated in a Stoos Stampede session, where some guys collected a large set of really nice questions for a job interview. Some other guys even ordered them in a nice way. I think this is a good resource to look at before your next job interview.
Anyway - you should take a round trip through the company and have look in the faces of people. Observe their interactions and just listen to what happens, what does not happen and how people behave.

Friends working there

Probably the best source for information about any company is your network. Look out for friends and people you know, working for this company. You should ask them every question, that you are interested in and will very likely get an honest answer.
However: Even friends and relatives have different receptions of reality and different tastes!

What else?

After looking on the other interfaces for several days and trying to figure out, how agile companies differ from non-agile companies, I realized that this is probably a mission impossible: Being agile is a deeply cultural thing (as you can see e.g. here and here) and you will not be able to assess a companies culture by observing artifacts only.

So - what else?

I then remembered a really good book, I read some months ago: "The Corporate Culture Survival Guide" by Edgar H. Schein. Schein proposes a cultural model in this book, which consists of three levels:

• Artifacts: All the things you can see, hear, taste, ... All of the non-organic interfaces mentioned above are artifacts.
• Espoused Values: This are the values, the organization communicates actively. E.g. "customers first" or "employees first".
• Tacit Assumptions: This is the real hot stuff. Tacit assumptions are things everybody in the organization knows implicitly and which determine the factual behaviour of employees. This is the core of the companies culture.

(I already explained this and other culture models in a former blog post)

Schein additionally proposes a workshop format to assess a companies culture. This consists of seven steps where three steps are actually used to investigate the tacit assumptions, i.e. the real culture of a company:

1. Identify and list artifacts: Look at all artifacts, you can observe. To do this for a company, you are not part of, you can use the interface list above and observe, how the company behaves over this interfaces. Do they react fastly on customers questions? How does the building of the organization look like? What about the design and usability of the website?
2. Identify the organizations espoused values: Try to get all statements about companies values, you can get. A good way to do this is the web site, where you might find a blog or other content about companies values. Another way is to search the web for the companies vision and mission. Especially the latter one will probably contain some espoused values.
3. Compare values with artifacts: Write all identified artifacts on the left side of a whiteboard or sheet of paper and all espoused values on the right side. Look out for conflicts between espoused values on the right and artifacts on the left. If you find a conflict, you have likely found something that points to a deeper lying tacit assumption held within this company.

If you have this list of tacit assumptions, you will probably get a good feeling for the agility or non-agility of a company. If you take this list to your job interview at this company and discuss it with your counterpart, you are very likely to get a good sense for the agility of the company you are interested in.

Do you have any other ideas, how one might be able to find out how agile a company is before one joins the company? Please use the comments section and spread your ideas!

Update 1: Further Readings (Blog posts recommended to me after publishing this, etc.)

• "Perspectives on Rightshifting" - Bob Marshall

It's not the Culture, Stupid!

In many Agile transformations there seems to be an issue with corporate culture. People in the company often think and say, that the current culture is not compatible with Agile and the culture would have to change.

Values often mentioned in this context are the Scrum values:

• Commitment
• Openness
• Focus
• Respect
• Courage

I do only have one issue with this. Try the following: Take this values and present them to some randomly selected persons in your company. Ask everybody the following question: "How important are these values to you and are they part of your set of values?". I made the experience, that every single person will find these values to be important and most consider them part of their individual set of values. How then is it possible, that the corporate culture seems to be a problem?

To answer this question try another exercise: Again take the above mentioned values and show them to some persons and ask them the following question: "How much do you think do people in your close environment live these values?". You might be supprised, that the results will now be much worse than the results of the first question.

Find the explanation for the observed gap and you will probably be a huge step further in your Agile transformation. You can probably do this just by making the gap transparent and asking the people for an explanation. Eventually a retrospective may be a good place to do this.

The 10 Worst Management Practices, And How To Turn Them Around

Summary of a session by Laurens Bonnema at the Stoos Stampede 2012 (Mary posted about this session here)

At the Stoos Stampede 2012, Laurens Bonnema facilitated a session about bad management practices. Not only was the content of the session quite interesting. The way Laurens facilitated it was very informative, too. The first thing, he did was gathering bad management practices from real life from all participants. He used silent brainstorming for this which was extremely productive.

Result of silent brainstorming management worst practices

After the brainstorming results were clustered and ranked by participants. We tried to assign a reason and a possible cure for the negative behaviours.

Here we go. The ten worst management practices drawn from real life in descending order:

1. Failing to act on impediments

You will probably not have to dig very deep in your memory to find your personal example of some manager confronted with a serious problem, finding many reasons (often financial ones) to do nothing about it. Since - at least in my understanding - removing impediments and optimizing the working environment are core responsibilities for every manager, this is a sad situation.
What could you possibly do to work with such a problem? One suggested approach is to make the problem as visible and transparent as possible. The responsible person will then have much lower chances to succeed with hiding the problem.

2. Spreadsheet terrorism

Several participants reported the habit of some managers to cover their subordinates with reporting stuff. Someone called this "spreadsheet terrorism". The problem is, that all those numbers do not really help you to focus on your work and will probably even slow you down. In some cases the only reason for this kind of management is that the respective person has no clue, what to do in her job and cannot cope with people problems. Thus she tries to reduce those problems to numbers giving her the feeling of beeing able to control something. The most common reason for this behaviour is probably uncertainty and a mean understanding of people and their problems.
It looks like there is no simple hint, how to solve this problem. You could eventually try to sensibilize him for the problems of management by objectives (numbers) and suggest, to focus more on the customer and the employees than on costs and numbers. Try to talk openly to her and discuss how to improve her skills in realizing and working with people problems.

3. Saying != Doing

There is not much to say about this. Can you do anything worse than talking left and walking right? It will not a take long time and nobody will trust you anymore. And trust is the base, really good relationships are built upon. Even in business!
The most effective thing you can do about this problem is making the gap between talking and doing and the consequences as transparent as possible to her (and eventually everybody else) so that she will have the chance to realize it the reception of her doing by the rest of the world.

4. Management by fear

Have you ever been in the following situation? Your manager calls you into her office and has a short but firm conversation monologue with you about some recent or current problem and makes very clear that a repetition of this problem will have serious consequences.
It is almost tragic that strategies of punishment and fear are still widely used to manage and lead people. Especially since it is broadly accepted that the negative consequences of punishement and fear - even if this works in hindsight of changing unwanted behaviour - far outweigh the advantages of this fast way of learning (see e.g. the research of B.F. Skinner). If your manager uses this type of learning for her subordinates one reason might be, that she is overloaded with work and does not see alternative ways to enforce the desired behaviours fast enough (punishment is a very fast way of changing behaviour). In this case you should try to find ways how to reduce the workload of the respective manager.
Another reason might be, that the manager does not know any alternatives to punishment. In this case she is definitely in the wrong place and one should urgently consider to educate him with basic leadership skills or - if this is not possible - replace her.

5. Divide & Conquer

A manager has fear that a team has such a momentum that she will not be able to control its behaviour in the near future anymore. Her solution is to break up the team and accept the dropping performance only to be able to have full controll again.
If a manager indeed acts in such a way, I personally cannot see any way to turn this behaviour around. There must be a lot of things going completely wrong.

6. Failing to really listen

A manager talks to you, but she does not really hear what you say. There might be several reasons for this problem. Classical communication problems could be one of them. In this case it is probably a good idea to involve a third person as facilitator who is able to reflect your communication problems to both of you.
Another reason might be that the manager is just to busy and her head is filled up with stuff of all sort but not with your problems and thoughts. In this case you should on one hand tell him the problem you sense in your communication and talk openly and constructively to her about how to reduce her amount of work or creating room for focused communication in other ways.

7. Avoiding conflicts

This is not only a classical management problem. Be honest: Who of us is always jumping on conflicts as soon as she discovers them? Nevertheless, this is a problem. The solution might be simple. Directly address the conflict you see and make it visible. Do this steadily and insist on a resolution of the conflict using any opportunity.

8. Management by numbers

Very similar if not equal to "spreadsheet terrorism".

9. Featurism over Quality

Mostly a problem of project managers who promised a fixed set of functionality for a fixed price working against a not negotiable deadline. The only dimension where speedup is possible is in quality (since nobody spoke about this initially).

I think, Agile folks know the solution ;) In short: assume quality to be fixed and not negotiable and prioritize your requirements!

10. Blaming Culture over Finding Solutions

I have seen this to often: A problem is at hand and the first (and often last) reaction is "yep - we know - that's a cultural problem in this company". The process of discovering possible solutions is thereby terminated. Nobody wants to talk about your problem any longer.
You can try to work on this problem, by understanding the perspectives of the people giving you this answer (be on the same boat) and suggesting small steps to move to a better world. One participant of the session suggested to let those people read the book "My life is a failure" by Jim Johnson.

Conclusion

It is really depressing, how many awful management practices are in use out there. The huge pile of practices backed by some real world stories underline boldly the bottom line of Stoos: "There has to be a better way."

Value People over Techniques

Many people ask themselves: "What makes a successful organization?". And since there is so much question  and therefore much money to earn there are tons of consultancies and "simple technical" solutions to this question. So far, I did not see any of those solutions succeed. Even my personal favourite "Agile" is definitely not a solution in terms of "do it and you'll succeed". Why is that?
I think it's pretty easy: It's because the problems we have to cope with in todays environments are mostly "social" problems and only rarely technical problems. But people love to approach all kinds of problems with technical solutions, because it is the easiest and considered to be most "scientific and exact" way. It is for sure the most convenient way, since you must not bother with complex and not linearly answerable questiones.
This said, I personally believe that to align your environment to a more successful direction, you will have to focus on the more complex "social" questions first and at least become aware of these crucial factors and derive "technical" solutions later as one aspect of the way to go. Concretely this means, to focus on:

• Corporate culture before defining corporate strategies
• Values of your employees before implementing rules and guidlines
• Satisfying your customer before maximizing your profit
• Maintain the ability to change and adapt before maximizing the efficiency to produce.

Hereby I mean that everything mentioned above is absolutely important, but one should focus on the "social" items on the left first and derive adequate "technical" solutions on the right then.
Easy? Not at all. To me this evokes many serious and hard questions immediately:

• How do I know, what corporate culture I have? And how can I describe this appropriately? How can I measure this? How can I present advancements? (and many more...)
• How can I know what the values of my employees are? And how can I influence these? Is this possible at all?
• How do I meassure the satisfaction of my customer? It is sure not as simple as just implementing some simple tool (NPS, etc....).
• What is the right amount of ability to change? And what is the threshold where I must lay more value in efficiency?
• and tons of more questions ...

But after all: If you would agree, that in principle the four sentences stated above are right, the immediate consequence must be to focus on these questions first and think about the "technical" aspects later (which is, what for example the Stoos Network seems to do).