Tag Archives: Agile Management

Managing self-organizing teams in an Agile Software Development practice is about encouraging and allowing developers to embody values of collaboration, creativity, quality, integrity, and individual initiative in an environment that provides sustainable pace and opportunities for personal development.

Team

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At Oxygen, we have a team. Knot

Building this team has been the collaborative work of years.

Our CTO, Steve, made IT a strategic asset and championed a seat at the table for software development. I introduced agile principles, carved out space for agile development practices and built a product team.

Our dev director, Luke, and coach, Kris, built a disciplined XP practice. Our product team, Ilio and Suzann, and our Scrum master, Salim, built our Scrum practice.

With Luke’s lead, the team built itself by adding exceptional talents and engaging human beings. Wendy, Oksana, Lee, Robert, Daniel and our first UX Designer, Bob. Each brings experiences, specialties, passions and humor that spurs creativity in our products and simplicity, quality, and expressiveness in their underlying implementation.

For the last year, our team has included our CEO, Gerry, an inspiring and audacious product owner.

Over almost eight years together, the core of us struggled through bad practices and mediocre projects. We taught ourselves better methods and brought in great talent providing the best fit. We grew, we availed ourselves of experienced coaches, we matured, we hit our stride. Now we contribute to our field through open code, writing, presentations and mentoring.

This team is a competitive advantage. We share values, practices, and history. We have complimentary strengths, camaraderie and spirit. We are inventive, versatile and fast on our feet. Our dedication to each other is our strongest retention and recruiting tool.

I care for these individuals and I love the team we’ve created.

The Oxygen Team

The Day Oxygen Became Extreme

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Extreme What? by Justin DonnellyAt the precipice of change, we are getting sentimental here at the Oh! Network.

As a developer joining Oxygen NY in 2001, I entered a code and fix culture under a facade of waterfall planning. I fought arbitrary dates, bloated specifications, and reality-challenged reporting. I acquired a survivalist’s skill for landing valuable projects and picking co-workers who helped carry them to completion.

As team lead, I made myself project manager. I used a risk-managed, iterative approach based on Steven McConnell’s Software Project Survival Guide and Earned Value Planning. We provided transparency, met dates and exceeding expectations.

Still, I had the awful, lonely feeling it was unsustainable. A tiny team, we were isolated from each other. We needed a collaborative practice. We needed to share knowledge, commit to a common way of working, and lift each other past our individual limitations.

I found the following e-mail thread capturing the moment we adopted Extreme Programming (XP). A bit of everyman’s history with a very small ‘h’…

From: Ken Judy
Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2004 2:40 PM
To: Luke Melia; Kristofor Selden
Cc: Steve Morgan
Subject: Agile Methodologies

Here are sites for different agile methodologies. Of the five of them, XP is the most exacting. The others are generally light frameworks for ways of developing or managing projects that support the agile manifesto http://agilemanifesto.org/.

XP: http://www.extremeprogramming.org/
Scrum: http://www.controlchaos.com/
Crystal: http://alistair.cockburn.us/crystal/crystal.html
Adaptive Software Development: http://www.jimhighsmith.com/
Feature Driven Dev: http://www.featuredrivendevelopment.com/

— Ken

From: Luke Melia
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 5:09 PM
To: Ken Judy; Kristofor Selden
Cc: Keith Frank
Subject: RE: teamwork

Hi Ken,

Kris and I spent some time today reviewing the agile process frameworks you sent around and met this afternoon to discuss our planning. We’re going to follow the XP rules and practices for the most part.

http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules.html

We will likely invest somewhat more effort in up-front detailed requirements in order to support your work-package tracking efforts. In addition, some practices are irrelevant for a team consisting of a single pair of developers. We’ll ignore those and pay close attention to the practice “Fix XP when it breaks” in order to arrive at a set of practices that is effective for us. I’ve read the criticisms of XP that argue it is “all or nothing” but I feel that this approach will work for us.

We’re going to be pair programming and plan to work together 11am – 1pm and 2:30 – 5pm. This will allow us time at the beginning, middle & end of the day to respond to email, etc.

This is all going to start this Friday. On Friday, we’ll do a code review, go over the task breakdown for the SES project and plan for our first milestone, as you suggested. I’m also going to rearrange my desk to make it work better for two people to sit at.

Luke

From: Ken Judy
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 5:31 PM
To: Luke Melia; Kristofor Selden
Cc: Steve Morgan
Subject: RE: teamwork

Sounds good. Our team is so small that a strong agile approach should work well as long as we manage risks. I’ll look into the “Tracker” role in the XP model to see how to adjust my tools to your approach.

— Ken

From: Ken Judy
Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2004 10:33 AM
To: Luke Melia; Kristofor Selden
Subject: RE: teamwork

Hi,

Please go ahead and block out 11:00am-1pm and 2:30-5pm in your calendars as “busy”. I’ll send out an e-mail to IS all so they know what’s up. Feel free to decline any meeting requests at your discretion and let me know of anything in your calendars you need me to cover for you on.

We will need to start the morning “standup” meetings so that we keep focus on the project and one of the things we’ll need to address is how to best use Michele as owner.

— Ken

To Mine Own Self

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My company begins planning its integration into a new parent organization.

As a participant in that process I have to obey:

  1. Laws and policies.
  2. My duty as an executive to create strategic value.
  3. My duty as a manager to treat my team humanely and fairly.

I feel other ties:

  1. Guiding my actions according to ethical values and agile principles.
  2. Loyalty to my boss — he’s created opportunities for me. I owe him.
  3. Loyalty to my departing CEO — she is a visionary and a mentor. I can’t wait to see what she does next.

Brooklyn Street SignsThese obligations may contend but should not fundamentally conflict as long as the integration plan we develop clearly communicates an achievable, rational outcome.

“Above all, to thine own self be true.” — Hamlet, I, iii

Inspiring and daunting advice but not to be taken at face value. For the character who delivers it has too high a regard for his own ingenuity, places himself at the center of events and meets a bad end. A creation as complex as life.

I will try to heed a fool’s words without becoming a fool. To be true to mine own self in this circumstance is not to delude myself that this situation is in any significant way about me. Options that don’t make business sense will not serve the long-term interest of anyone involved. My obligation is to work towards the best outcome for all parties given that reality.

Managing and Leading

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John Maeda on leading and managing and the need to do both.

The manager sets up the win with perfection for her team; the leader executes the win with passion.

The word “perfection” conveys discipline but the agile practitioner in me bridles at it. As John Maeda says, “a manager never manages alone.” Community defies perfection.

I do resolve to do better. Do by committing myself to action employing the most appropriate knowledge and tools at hand. Better by using the hard lessons of success and failure to make my actions more effective the next time.

Worship the Plan: Part 2

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This is what unrealistic planning does to execution.

Worship the Plan

Here’s the scenario:

Management adopts a project plan with unachievable goals given the time, features and resources.

The team begins in ignorance of “the plan”. Initial progress represents a sustainable pace.

Visible progress doesn’t match “the plan”. Management pressures the team. Short term, the red line gets steeper.

At this point, management revises the plan adjusting the start but retaining aggressive assumptions. “Now we know what we’re doing!”

Problem is, the productivity gain is not sustainable. The team is working extra hours and skipping necessary work to declare things done.

Problem is, the productivity gain is not real. Under stress the team works to increase the measure of value instead of value itself.

So productivity stalls. The team catches up on sleep, settles into the slog, and confronts thorny problems created by messy, incomplete and untested code.

Ultimately, the team produces less than had it maintained a sustainable pace.

Assuming the people and codebase aren’t hopeless, I added a period before the end where the team returns to sustainable pace. These are the tragic days when management gives up and before they cancel.

Another scenario – similar chart:

Management adopts a business plan with unachievable goals.

The product owner becomes risk averse or fool hearty, ignoring real opportunities that won’t hit impossible numbers.

The product drifts or lurches in bizarre directions and declines.