Got Pull?

Brain Hours – What’s Your Capacity?

How many hours a day can you run? Stand on one leg? Think creatively?

We have no problem imagining limits for physical activity but when it comes to knowledge work most organizations seem to imagine there is an infinite pool to pull from and if they only push harder then they’ll get more work.

But we humans are creatures of limits. Studies have repeatedly shown that the part of our brain that governs logic (and will power) tires quickly and must be refreshed if it is to work well. This explains why, as I walk through the halls of corporate America, I sometimes feel I’m in an episode of The Walking Dead – everyone seems to be a combination of exhausted and manic.

Is this really necessary?

In my experience the answer is a resounding “NO” but like most things worth doing, helping people create sustainable lives AND create massive amounts of value for customers takes vision and, of course, discipline.

Netflix is a company that gets it. They have no vacation policy. Let me repeat that. They. Have. No. Vacation. Policy. They hire good people and judge them based on what they contribute not how many hours they sit in a chair. And their managers are expected to set an example by taking long vacations and returning to work refreshed and ready to create.

Corporate America is missing out. If you’re self employed you are most likely missing out too – even if someone else isn’t we all tend to push ourselves too far and too fast, then beat ourselves up for not getting more done. This is waste pure and simple.

Lean means using less to do more and when it comes to your time, it starts with getting real about what you’ve got. My informal survey (with a fairly large sample size) indicates that the average person has about 6 “brain hours” each day. Meaning they have 6 hours to spend in productive, creative effort. Beyond that returns on effort start to diminish.

This means that any more time spent focusing on the complex creative work most knowledge workers are expected to perform is waste. The company (the customer, the project) would be better off if the person went to the beach, or played with their kids than spent another minute in their chair.

As a manager one of the highest leverage things you can do is get real about your team’s capacity and don’t let them commit one minute over it (in fact they should ideally commit to no more than 80% – try running your computer at 100% capacity if you want a test of how this works).

And you – stop wasting time and go have some fun.

Why Self-Organize?

Self-organizing teams are the key to unlocking creativity and improving quality and motivation.

Time is Money, Time is Life

Focus. It’s the core of productivity and effectiveness. It’s the reason I meditate every morning and it’s the reason “good” meetings are supposed to have a stated purpose and defined agenda. But you can have these and lose focus – and you can focus without them.

Last week I taught a simple technique to maintain focus in meetings to a management team in Hartford CT (can you guess the industry?). Five minutes of work on my part after which one of the participants said “Wow, that would save us thousands of dollars.”

I thought “no way!” until I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation and determined that a meeting of 8-10 moderately well paid people could easily cost $500-$800 per hour. Not to mention the opportunity cost. What else could those people be doing that would actually add to the bottom line (and their own morale) rather than detracting from it?

Are you ready for the tip? It’s truly revolutionary. Add this to your meetings and I promise you more focus, more fun and more productivity – instantly.

Step One: Talk to the team about focus and why focus is important and ask for their help in maintaining it. Be humble, give them respect and most importantly give them power. This is never a difficult sales job.

Step Two: Mention that the two most common ways to lose focus is either to talk about something that is irrelevant to the purpose of the current meeting (a Tangent) or to continue talking after agreement has been reached.

Step Three: Hand out post-its or 3×5 cards and sharpies and ask each person to make small flag (I think I should make an iPhone app). On one side they write Tangent and the other side they write Sold. Ask them to hold up the flag whenever they think it appropriate.

Step Four: Continue the meeting and watch as the participants (hopefully) get drunk on new power.

This will save money for sure but more importantly it can save life. Our time is our life. And work is where we spend the bulk of it. If we make our meetings more productive (and fun) we lessen frustration, build positive culture and show that we respect our people.

And people are what your company is made of.

Let’s Talk

Charlie Gilkey recently asked me for a guest post on the importance of conversation in my work for his excellent blog Productive Flourishing. It was quite an honor as I was joining the ranks of Seth Godin and Pamela Slim – ah the sweet smell of reflected glory.

In the post I noted that good conversation makes good software and that my job as an Agile Coach is essentially to improve the quality and frequency of conversation on software teams.

As much as I love my iPhone, iChat, Facebook and Email I’m continually amazed how often we look for some kind of tool to make communication easier. But, as Rich Sheridan (the inspirational CEO of Menlo Innovations) says “we prefer to use high speed, wireless voice communication” (I hope I got that quote right Rich).

The simplest highest bandwidth form of communication I know of is direct face-to-face verbal communication. It saves time and energy and potentially avoids costly miscommunication.

But why do we avoid it? Why do we seem to reflexively prefer technical solutions to a direct human one? I’ve often caught myself writing an email when phone call or face-to-face conversation would be more effective. And I know that on more than one occasion this has cost me. I’ve lost contracts because it’s easier to say “no” and more difficult to hear my concern and care for you over email. I suspect I’ve lost friends or important social connections for the same reason.

There’s a reason that courage is a core value of XP. It takes courage to make something of quality. And Courage means being willing to have difficult conversations. Whether it’s a coworker who doesn’t bathe often enough (this is something I’ve heard more than once privately from people who work in close quarters) or an unclear spec for a feature, being able to call out and have a difficult conversation face-to-face is an important skill for anyone who wants to advance his or her career.

As leaders in our organizations (and remember you can lead from any position) it is important for us to model the art of the constructive difficult conversation. Openness of communication isn’t always easy but it’s crucial if we are to work together and create great products.

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photo by: nyoin

The Two-Pizza Rule

In my last post I (re)articulated what I believe to be the fundamental rules of the Agile Org Chart. But I left out something important.

Yes “resources” are people and yes, people work best with other people in stable teams. But this means nothing if the teams are too big.

It’s simple math really. A group of 2 people has 1 line of communication – very easy to manage. 3 people have 3 lines and again this is simple. 7 people have 21 lines of communication and the addition of just 3 more people more than doubles the lines to 46. You can see how things can get complicated and while complex is good, complicated means trouble (as with wine and women).

If we want people to work well together we need to keep team size and communication lines within human limits. The rule of thumb is that teams should have 7 members plus or minus 2. This keeps open lines somewhere between 10 (for a 5-person team) and 36 (for a 9 person team).

The trick is to have teams big enough that they benefit from diversity (e.g. complexity) and small enough that they don’t overwhelm the computing capacity of the individuals.

We call this the Two-Pizza Rule. If you have to buy more than two large pizzas to feed your team lunch the team is either too large … or the team members are.

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Photo By: Subtle Panda

The “Resource” Myth

The reason money is so popular is that it’s a fungible unit of energy. I earn a dollar at work and spend it at a restaurant without any loss in value a long the way. Thus eliminating my need to only patronize restaurants where I can barter Agile coaching for dinner. It’s a good system.

But problems arise when business treat employees the way consumers treat dollars. Does this sound familiar? A manager with the spreadsheet looks at available resources then allocates that resource to projects that needs that resource’s skills. And this is usually done partially across several projects; 50% here 25% there and 15% waaaaaaay over there.

Need to move faster? No worries we’ll just allocate you a few more partial resources and your project will speed up for sure.

This would be great except individuals are not fungible. Not even close.

There is a cost to switching context as each person needs to be brought up to speed and increased numbers require increased overhead coordinating those numbers. And when’s the last time a project manager asked for 50% of your time when that’s what was allocated. Inevitably these lucky resources get asked to do more than they are able in each project and are quickly overwhelmed.

The solution lies in changing how we think about the way people work and adopting a new mindset – a mindset at the core of Agile organizations.

1) Resources are people.
Get used to this. People need to be treated as humans. While I have a kind of moral aversion to using the word “resources” to refer to individuals that’s not the main problem. The problem is that by not acknowledging up front that we are dealing with messy, difficult-to-define people we create a dangerous illusion of control where actually we have none.

2) People work best with other people.
A brief examination of social science, management theory, psychology and even neurobiology will quickly reveal that humans are here to interact with other humans. As a species homo sapiens are hyper social meaning that we function best in groups. Nowhere is this more (and ironically less) true than in the modern corporation.

3) Teams work best when stable.
Changing membership on teams breaks continuity, creates churn and generally disrupts patterns. While pattern disruption can be good for innovation it’s terrible for productivity and morale.

So is it possible to have a fungible unit of production? Actually it is. But we need to change our thinking and the way our organization is structured.

Rather than moving people to projects we need to organize into stable teams and move work to the team NOT the resource to the project.

This requires vision, leadership and discipline. It’s not easy but the payoff is worth it.

How is your business doing?

Bob’s Top Agile Reads

“There’s this amazing book by ______ Have you read it? No? OK, I’ll send you a link after class” I repeat this so often in trainings that I sometimes feel like a broken record.

I’m a bit of a bookish nerd and I usually get very excited about whatever I’m reading at the moment (right now that’s Sex at Dawn – which, oddly, has quite a bit to say about Agile, more on that after I finish the book). In this post I want to share with you the resources I find foundational to any Agile transition.

If you are well into a transition or just taking some halting first steps (like reading a blog on the topic) these are essential resources. They are especially well suited to managers and executives and those of you on the product side of the house, though IT and delivery team members will also find them incredibly useful. Let me know what you think!

THE LINKS:

Dan Pink wrote an excellent book on motivation and management called Drive. There’s a 10 minute video that captures the main points on RSAnimate. The book is excellent, however you can get plenty of useful ideas and inspiration from his talks I recommend you start there and then get the book if you want more.

One of my favorite books on Agile and Management is Management 3.0 by Jurgen Appelo. I also highly recommend his blog. Jurgen is thorough and concise – two virtues that seldom cohabitate. He presents a foundation for action that is academic and pragmatic. If you have to start somewhere, start here.

Chad Holdorf the Scaled Agile Coach at John Deere has done some great work on team organization at the enterprise level.

Dean Leffingwell is the author of 4 books on software requirements and Agile at scale (he also worked with Chad at John Deere). He has an excellent (if a tad busy) model for a Scaled Agile Framework – it’s an excellent vision of what’s possible. Read his blog, buy his books (and read them too).

Story Mapping – a methodology developed by Jeff Patton – is an excellent way to visually represent an entire product. It helps avoid some of the pitfalls of a flat backlog and envision clearly what a Minimum Viable Product might be. A PDF of his original 2005 article on the topic is here. And there has been much written on the topic since, Google will show you the way.

Eric Ries has done some excellent work combining Steven Blank‘s work on Customer Development with Agile. He is working to put scientific rigor behind the process of achieving Product-Market Fit. This is crucial to startups of course, but this kind of entrepreneurial thinking is also important in larger organizations and will only get more so in coming years. Start with their respective blogs (linked above), Steve’s foundational book Four Steps to the Epiphany or Eric’s new book The Lean Startup.

And finally one resource I find essential is the book Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. We Agilists are in the business of Transformation and this means we need to have a clear understanding of how change actually occurs in complex human systems. The Heath brothers have broken a very complex set of social science and brain research into a set of simple, usable steps. Their work is especially aplicable if you feel you want to increase your influence but have limited authority. They also do a series of excellent podcasts and pdfs which are free to those who register on their site (also free).

What are your go-to books, blogs and videos for inspiration and information?

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Photo by: accent on eclectic

Extinction and Success

“I think it apt to say that every species is a success until it fails and goes extinct.” Jurgen Appelo in Management 3.0

What does it mean for a software product to be successful?

We of course want our products to be popular and allow us to, in the mantra of the Valley, “retire early and retire often.” But what of products that aren’t? Do we count time spent on them a total loss?

My friend Bryan Franklin says that the goal of a marketer is to find the tracks the freight train of the market is running on, then create a product that gets hit by the train. A colorful way of saying that markets are discovered not created.

But how do we find those tracks? The same way any species finds its niche – iteratively and incrementally. Product market fit – the goal of any product team – is almost always achieved with a combination of trial and error fueled by sudden bursts of brilliance.

Great products therefore are built upon the bones of ancestors. They stand on the shoulders of previous versions and previous products – some of which made little money.

In the same piece Appelo points out that dinosaurs ruled the planet for 160 million years while modern homo sapiens have been around less than 200,000 years. Which species is more successful?

Even products that don’t lead directly to other products can be useful because they lead us to new ideas, new capabilities even new desires.

Today I want you to take a broad view of your product and even business category. Get a sense of the evolutionary story you are a part of. What can your future product learn your current product? What can your future self learn from your current self? And, most importantly, what are you grateful for?

Agile Perfect & The Adjacent Possible

This week I went to Connecticut to deliver an Agile Intro to the IT management team at a new client. During the prep call I asked, as usual, what their desired outcomes for the day are, and was told, “we want a clear picture of Agile Perfect”.

This is a lovely goal on the surface, but contains assumptions that may not be so useful. Let me explain.

Agile is iterative – not only for software releases but also in terms of process and organizational capability. When we transition an existing businesses from waterfall or chaos to a disciplined Agile system we work evolutionarily not with big bang changes. At least not at first.

That is we start with where they are now and look for the highest value next steps – what design thinking and evolutionary biology call the Adjacent Possible. The goal is to create a learning organization that continuously improves not a perfect static system.

Think of the deep past of this planet when single celled organisms were the most complex forms of life. At this time there was potential for all we have now – sunflowers, cats, honey badgers and humans – but they were not yet possible. Biology had to take it’s time and iterate towards increasing complexity until the sunflower was the next potential item on the evolutionary backlog.

And so it is with organizations. Sustainable change happens iteratively and incrementally. While it’s important to have a strong view and discipline around what it means to be Agile it’s not useful in the beginning to spend too much time envisioning an ideal system (though models like Dean Leffingwell’s Scaled Agile Delivery Model are inspiring and challenging to review). It’s far more useful to focus on the next step that is possible for the organization as it is.

The client in Connecticut for instance realized after our session that their next most important step was getting buy-in on Agile principles from the business side. IT is already on board but without support from the product people the transition will likely falter and fail.

While a vision of an Agile Perfect world is desirable there is far more value in focusing energy on the Adjacent Possible. And once achieved, the next horizon of possibility will come into view.

What’s the next step your organization can take? What’s the adjacent possible? What feels out of reach?

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Photo by: Kyle Rush