Karl Scotland – Using Agile to Deliver Value
Archive for October, 2009
New and (Hopefully) Improved AvailAgility
Oct 28th
After over a year of blogging, I finally decided that it was time to move off wordpress.com and invest in an independently hosted version that gave me some more flexibility. So today I bit the bullet and grabbed availagility.co.uk (availagility.wordpress.com is being redirected, so all the old links should work). If you see anything which looks odd, or find any links which don’t work, please let me know.
I should also give credit to Just Host, who provided a seamless process for setting everything up, including a very quick and helpful response to a support request when figuring out how to get the redirects working.
Update: One of the downsides to moving the blog that I lost all of the article ratings. Feel free to go through and re-rate any entries you feel deserve it!
A New Lean And Agile Picture
Oct 21st
David Harvey posted a brilliant piece on his blog entitled “The Scrum Picture is Wrong”. I highly recommend reading it. His ideas and suggestions for an alternative Scrum picture got me thinking about how to visualise Lean and Agile software development in a process or label agnostic way. David’s picture looked like a figure of eight, and there seemed to be 2 inputs (a vision and reality), and 2 outputs (the product and the team). A quick google found me what I was looking for here – a figure of eight with a bar across the top and bottom. “A time sign that according to Diderot’s Encyclopedia meant hour for the chemists in eighteenth century France”. That seems quite appropriate. An hour would be quite a good interval for a feedback loop 
This is what I came up with. A vision and reality come together to produce a product and a team through process and improvement (and process improvement)
Now I just need to find a good label to stick on it…
Is Kanban A Relabeling of Scrum?
Oct 20th
Firstly, this post is not an attempt to be divisive or competitive. Instead it is meant to be exploratory. What would it mean for the statement in the title to be true? Actually, the full statement was “People have so misunderstood Scrum, that they’ve reinvented it and called it Kanban”. It was made by Jim Coplien at Scan-Agile, after (but not necessarily the result of) a conversation over dinner where myself and a few others were describing how we used Kanban. Each time we described different aspects of our processes, Jim would say something along the lines of “but I do that with Scrum”.
So what would it mean for people to have so misunderstood Scrum that they have reinvented it and called it Kanban?
- It might mean that at their heart, Scrum and Kanban have the same intent. That both are really focussed on helping teams think about their processes in order to help them succeed.
- It might mean that the way that Scrum was originally articulated (and is still articulated according to the latest Scrum Guide) was not as clear as it could have been. That teams might misconstrue the focus on roles, meetings, artefacts and rules.
- It might mean that there are alternative ways of articulating the same intent. That teams might find alternative articulations valuable.
- It might mean that Kanban can be equally misunderstood. That teams might be bewildered by a less prescriptive approach.
- It might mean that we should spend more time on understanding how to help teams solve their problems and less time arguing and fighting over preferred solutions.
These are just some of my thoughts. They do not mean that I think Scrum is bad – just not perfect. They do not mean that I think Kanban is perfect – although it’s currently my first language. The topic drew a good crowd at the Scan-Agile Open Space and we had a good discussion. What else might it mean?
5 Steps to Kanban in Cambridge
Oct 12th
I’ll be talking about 5 Steps to Kanban at Software East on November 19th. From the website:
This event will take place at Red Gate Software, Newnham House, Cambridge Business Park. See the location map for Red Gate Software.
BOOK NOW for this event. Tickets (including light buffet) £15 if booked on or before 16th November, £25 thereafter. Places strictly limited.
Evolving a Workflow
Oct 9th
Mary Poppendieck gave a talk on Workflow is Orthogonal to Schedule at Agile2009, during which she very neatly transitioned a schedule-focused view of work, into a flow-focussed view. At least I thought it was neat, so I’m going to try and reproduce the basic elements here, using my favourite agile workflow.
4 Week Time-box Schedule
Here we have a schedule showing an average of 4 features being delivered every 4 week time-box. Each time-box is preceded by 2 weeks understanding the next features, and a release is made every 8 weeks. Its not a bad schedule. There’s a regular release every two months which is better than a lot of projects, but it could be better.
2 Week Time-box Schedule
Now we reduced the time-box to 2 weeks, meaning that we do an average of 2 features in each time-box. This means that the preparation now takes only 1 week. Additionally, we are now releasing at the end of every time-box, which is also reduced to 1 week. Much better.
One Piece Flow
If we continue the evolution we end up working on a single feature at a time and releasing it immediately. Each feature only takes a week to build, and preparation and release times are now down to 1/2 a week. At this point, we don’t really have a schedule anymore, but a natural workflow.
Cumulative Flow Diagrams
One of the things that strikes me about the diagrams above, is that each step in the evolution transforms them more into a smooth Cumulative Flow Diagram. In fact, in the same presentation, Mary showed the following picture taken from Building the Empire State. This is the building schedule from from around 1930, and itself looks remarkably like a CFD. Another example of how we are not inventing anything new, but can learn from other industries and successes.
#lkuk09 – A Tweetrospective
Oct 6th
I ended up making notes at the Lean & Kanban UK Conference with good old fashioned pen an paper. Rather than try and write up those notes into something coherent and meaningful, I have decided to write them up in the style of a twitter stream. These are the things I would have tweeted if I’d been on my laptop. The quantity of “tweets” in no way represents the quality of the presentations. I also make no promises that all of the following “tweets” are actually <= 140 chars!
Monday
Mary Poppendieck – The The Tyranny of the Plan
- Plans – what did construction do before computers?
- Eliminate design loops by consulting experts early
- Design for decoupling workflow
- Cash Flow Thinking – Cost of Delay
- Design based on constraints of situation
- Establish a reliable workflow 1st
- Schedule is orthogonal to workflow
- Build schedules based on experience, not wishful thinking
- Variance from plan is a learning opportunity, not a performance failure
- Reliable workflow – output, pathway, connection, method, improvement – Steven Spears, Chasing the Rabbit
- Polaris Success – Quality of Leadership, Focus on deployment, Decentralised Competitive Org, Emphasis on Reliability, Esprit de Corps
Alan Shalloway – Creating a Model to Understand Product (and Software) Development
- 3 types of value: Discover what a customer needs, Discover how to build it, Build it
Jeff Patton – Lean Product Discovery
- There is a difference between Delivery & Discovery
- Undelivered software is a solution hypothesis (usually incorrect)
- Include discovery in the VSM
- Market demand = pull (but is post delivery)
- “Lets go to marble”
- Discovery Kanban + Delivery Kanban
- Visualisation creates collaboration
- Storyotype 1: Bare Necessity – minimally demo-able
- Storyotype 2: Capability + Flexibility – options-
- Storyotype 3: Safety – invisible
- Storyotype 4: Usability, Appeal, Performance – differentiating
- Chess analogy – Opening Game, Mid Game, End Game
- Use options when cost of iteration and failure is high
John Seddon – Re-thinking Lean Service
- If you manage costs, costs go up
- Failure demand is a signal
- Incentivising workers get less work done
- Predictable failure demand is preventable
- Lean is getting a bad brand
- The only plan is to get knowledge
- Improve flow – walk the flow
- Pull the help, keep the work
- Do “productivity” tools improve productivity?
- Make them curious
Tuesday
Don Reinertsen – Second Generation Lean Product Development: From Cargo Cult to Science
- Understand causal relationships and salient phenomena
- Scientific v Faith (Science Free) based approaches
- Faith based = Cargo Cult
- Every system has Push / Pull interfaces
- No bad tools, only wrong times to use them
- In Product Development, Requirements are a degree of freedom
- Inventory is information and invisible (physically and financially)
- Agile practitioners are going a better job at LPD than LM practitioners
- In engineering we are making economical (Profit + Loss) decisions and we have no clue what we are doing
- Quality = Process x People – If either drops to 0, the quality of the result will drop to 0
- Don’t tolerate initiative – demand it
- Chief Engineer doesn’t know better than the customer
Kenji Hiranabe – Learning Kaizen from Toyota
- Balance process control and process improvement
- Management fosters human potential
- Go to the gemba != PowerPoint
- To know and to understand are different
- Think within your constraint
Hal Macomber – Lessons from Target Value Design
- Meld planning with execution + control
- What signals do we pay attention to?
- Articulate + activate the network of commitment
- Only start work when it is in the condition to be finished.
- Embrace the contradictions of Lean
- Focus on tool users, not the tools
- PDSA – Study, don’t Check
- Creating constraints creates innovations
- Create constraints so that we can do our work
- Don’t open the trenches until you know you can fill them
Marc Baker – Lean Thinking: what is distinctive about it and where it is going?
- Pull means take the payment first
- Visual controls mean that nothing is hidden
- Standardised tasks are the foundation of employee autonomy
- Go see, ask why, show respect
