San Francisco has just required that most business offer paid sick leave. According to Benefitnews.com 43% of all American workers have no paid sick leave benefit.

Our development team spends most of it’s time in a group room around pairing stations.

Per Alistair Cockburn, commons allow for highly efficient warm modes of communication. Unfortunately, commons spread disease like a daycare center. One cold can easily work through three or four team members. Plentiful supplies of tissue, wipes and hand sanitizer are standard operating procedure.

As is strong encouragement that sick team members stay home. Ironically enough, with a performing agile team this is a hard message to communicate because they simply don’t want to let their team down.

Modern technology to the rescue! Our office is in Manhattan and we have workers who live in New Jersey and Long Island. In a city that manages to be shut down at least once a year for tragic or trivial reasons, we are setup to telecommute. We equip our team with laptops, headsets, a secure tunnel, skype and vnc. We’ve found that the developers work so closely and interchangeably together when in the office, they know each other well enough to overcome many of the disadvantages of short-term separation and cold modes of communication.

It’s typical to have a team member e-mail “I’m not feeling well but I’ll sleep through the morning and try to pair up in the afternoon.”

How closely we work together facilitates the ease with which we can remote. This mitigates how easily colds spread because we work so closely together. A beautiful symmetry in offsetting, unintended consequences.

Posted: March 1st, 2007 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1

I started talking about the manager’s role in scrum as facilitating a series of conversations between the team and the larger company.

The first of these is the product owner and the team.

As a manager, I have to constantly remind myself I’m a chicken, not a pig. My main responsibility is to deal with issues escalated to me by my scrum master. I also coach around practices. This is often about challenging team members to find their way towards our expressed values and principles.

On occasion, I do intervene in the dev room. This is dangerous ground. Innovation springs from the ability of an organization to surprise itself. Such creativity finds its source in autonomy, accountability and necessity.

Software development doesn’t proceed down straightforward path. For each unexpected problem there is a wealth of possible solutions. Ingenuity can add wasteful complexity or differentiate and define a product. You want a team to keep momentum but you want them to think deeply.

I need my team to be open to the problems before them, purposeful and playful in devising solutions but determined to release. This takes more than good work for good wages and it’s profoundly more than good leadership from managers. Project success has to be the individual team member’s success. Tomorrow’s intellectual property is not code yet to be written, it’s the inventive potential of the coders.

If I step in therefore it should be to maintain personal investment and esprit de corps rather than to reverse any individual decision. I have a scrum master and I rely on him to maintain morale and productivity in sprint reviews and planning. Still, with my experience as a developer and unique observer role, I’ll intervene in conversations between the product owner and the team to:

• dispel misinformation
• surface contradictions
• flag intractable disagreements

Misinformation is toxic to the product and individual accountability. A misinformed team builds the wrong product. A pattern of misinformation leads a team to lose trust. They will focus on not failing in their narrow scope of execution rather than a successful business outcome. Playing safe eliminates surprise and invention and ultimately leads to failure.

Contradictions create opportunity. A solution that addresses both a value and its antithesis such as high quality and low cost can differentiate a product.

Some disagreements cannot be solved by conversation. Time and more information may resolve the conflict. Sometimes disagreements simply need to be acknowledged. In the spirit of “any decision is better than no decision”, the product owner or scrum master needs to be encouraged to move in one or other direction despite dissensus in the team.

All of this assumes the project in question is healthy. Intervention into a troubled project is a different animal [see my earlier post on stopping the line].

Posted: February 24th, 2007 under scrum.
Comments: none

Jeff Sutherland posted notes from an open space hosted by Jens Ostergaard on Nov 2006. The subject was the role of manager in a Scrum.

1. provide strategic vision, business strategy, and resources,
2. remove impediments surfaced by Scrum teams that the teams cannot remove themselves,
3. ensure growth and career path of employees, and
4. challenge teams to move beyond mediocrity

For me, introducing agile practices has been evolutionary not revolutionary – five years work, three title changes and counting. My role is to make sure the team’s accomplishments build towards something progressively more and more valuable for the company and the individual team members.

In my experience, this involves facilitating a conversation between the business and the team on at least three levels:

• Product owner and product team,
• Organization and employees, and
• Leadership’s grand vision and the team’s accomplishments.

[the oxygen team and management]

I’ll go into this in more detail in later posts.

Posted: February 23rd, 2007 under scrum.
Comments: 1