Notes on Rachel Davies workshop "The Role of the Agile Coach"

Rachel Davies ran a very interesting workshop yesterday at MiniSPA2009 on "The Role of the Agile Coach."

I won't give away the details of her workshop, but suffice to say that it involved some people working on a task and other people taking management roles. It looks like a very simple activity, but to me it felt like a re-run of the Stanford Prison Experiment with non-toxic glue and feathers.

Some observations from the experience:

• Even though Rachel's an Agile coach and this workshop was supposed to be about Agile coaching, everybody, especially those in management roles seem to treat this as a waterfall project, even down to trying to treat the instructions that came with the activity packs as a fixed spec.
• I was a worker, and as a worker my main motivations were to bond with my other workers and to make myself useful. I didn't really take any notice of the coach who was there supposedly to ask questions.
• Comments from the two people who were asked to take on management roles were almost all critical. In a sense, this was an artefact of the task - what else did they have to do but point out what they thought was going wrong?
• The spec for the task was very loose, but that didn't stop some people who were in management roles adding in extra assumptions, assuming spec where there wasn't any. And assuming that part of the task was to hammer down the spec.
• I found myself saying "We thought we were being creative, but management just thought we had no idea what we were doing." Oh boy did this chime! To some degree with my experience at Xerox, but especially with my experience working in research at Universities.
• We got fascinated with the task and missed a (perceived to be) crucial aspect of the spec. In the end I fixed this as I walked up to submit our entry. "Management" on our team perceived this to be a grave failing, even though my last minute solution worked.
• As a team of workers, we instinctively seemed to understand that we had to feel each other out and understand what we capable of - I think this is what's called the "Forming and Storming" sections of team building. Management focussed instantly on the "Norming and Performing" and fretted and criticised as it watched our "Forming and Norming" activities.

For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)

Innovation and the Credit Crunch: tell me a new, new story

This post is a response to a call for writing for this discussion.

I recently read London Lore: The Legends and Traditions of the World's Most Vibrant City by Steve Roud. One thing I learned from this book is the power of certain types of story to dominate over troublesome facts and details. For example, any tract of land in London that appears disused was once a plague pit: "The plague pit idea, for example is particularly common among legend makers...for many years any unused piece of land seems to have attracted the story to explain its condition, and in the last fifteen years or so there has been a veritable explosion of these stories."

Several other stories also recur: that buildings are haunted, that ugly buildings were built incorrectly because the architect got the plans upside down or that buildings hide secret tunnels used by "monks, nuns, smugglers... assorted kings and queens with motives criminal, religious, amorous, or if possible, all three."

In form and in content, the stories that people tell very often have much more to do with stories that other people tell and the stories that people want to hear than they have with the actual facts. Even though the world is a very complicated place with new things happening all the time that we need new concepts to understand, there is a tendency to explain it to ourselves in terms of the same few old old stories.

This was never more clear than in the way that the credit crunch has been reported, even in the supposedly "serious press". Runs on banks, announcements of job losses, and scape-goating of "greedy" bankers and short-sellers: these few stories seemed to account for almost all stories about the credit crunch. There were far fewer stories about the precise nature of collateralized debt obligations and how similar financial derivatives might be regulated in the future.

I think the stories that we tell ourselves about innovation are a similarly impoverished set. Internet success stories are perpetrated by geek geniuses in their bedrooms. The story of Google is of two really, really clever guys, not the story of Stanford University's enlightened attitude to intellectual property. The story put out about Facebook is that it is another "bunch of college kids in a dorm" success story, not the story of part-ownership by a defence research company part-owned by the CIA. But this in itself shows how hard it is to avoid one old, old story, without slipping into another (in this case a conspiracy theory).

As with the credit crunch, there is a real danger that clinging to old old stories can prevent us from making any real sense of new data that we need new models and new stories to understand. There's no way of getting away from what Steve Roud in London Lore calls "The astonishing power of narrative in our everyday lives." But perhaps by collecting stories which don't fit comfortably inside the same three or four old old formats and paying less attention to those that do, we can get a better understanding of what's happening.

Here are few just for starters:

• Ebay was started by a French-Iranian geek in his bedroom but almost as soon as the company started to make money he hired serious business people with MBAs into all the company's senior positions.(see The Perfect Store: Inside Ebay by Adam Cohen)


• Adobe started off as a hardware company and went through 5 years and at least as many business models before it started to make any serious money. Postscript started off as a way of describing the movement of ships in New York harbour. (See Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition and Still Can't Get a Date by Robert X. Cringely)


• Edison may have had some inspiration, and perspiration but a some of his success was down to theft from inventors like Nikola Tesla. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla and The 48 Laws Of Power by Robert Greene)

For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604) or Matt@agilelab.co.uk (07713 634 830)

Change glorious change - why Agile is right for schools

A deputy head of a large rural primary school coming out of special measures recently described her working environment as one of continual crisis management. She talked about the way that they have to run the school pretty much on a week by week basis with continually changing priorities, an unstable staff base with a lot of absence and transience and with continual external interference.

A now ex-principle of a large academy school in London described the changing curriculum and increasing focus on creative, enterprise, innovative and project based learning as one in which teachers are now project managers as well as educators. He went on to describe the fact that projects have to cope effectively with continual flux in resources and with the time constraints of the timetable and therefore the notion that careful planning will somehow ensure success is a misnomer - it is the ability to deliver projects by coping effectively with continual change, reshaping and re-prioritising as you go that will ensure successful outcomes.

These two examples represent opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of school 'type' and current 'success status'. Yet despite this they both require internal process for leadership and management that can cope successfully with constant re-prioritisation, constant resource flux, limited time. They also need process that is light weight (teachers are time poor), easy to learn, flexible, works for external collaboration, is formalised enough that it can be reported upon and have success criteria built in, all of which is offered by Agile.

The following elements of Agile all map effectively onto the needs of schools:

1. Iterative working - by planning in terms of what can be achieved over a period of one month/half a semester/a term or whatever time segment works in terms of an individual school, Agile fits naturally with a school's 'heart beat'
   
2. Constant prioritisation - by recognising that demands on staff time and school priorities change on a term by term basis (or week by week in the case of a school on special measures), an approach that deals effectively with this is essential
3. Velocity - having a system built in that allows planning to respond effectively to constant change in time available to those delivering projects allows the project to fit the available time of those involved rather than the people having to fit the project and therefore massively reduces the risk of failure
4. Stories - the use of a narrative based needs and outcome communication approach allows Agile to work effectively as a planning and negotiation tool (particularly when used with inter-iteration re-prioritisation) with all stakeholders within a school community including governors, teachers, support staff, local authorities, partner schools and organisations, parents and pupils
5. Test-first - by determining how successful completion of tasks is to be recognised and negotiated before work begins, it becomes clear to understand what has been done and what hasn't and provide a clear progress reporting mechanism
   
6. Stand-up meetings - Agile works best with regular short meetings where people look at the stories they are working on, report on progress made and barriers encountered. These meetings can happen effectively in the coffee-length restrictions of break time, the 10 minutes available at lunch or before registration or before going home

This is just a sketch exploring how Agile would work in schools, but Agile grew out of the need for an approach that could deal effectively with constant change in needs and resource flux and does not allow these inevitable challenges to lead to failure. Therefore it would appear that Agile may well have a lot to offer school leadership and management.

What can Agile process provide to investors in innovation?

The idea of using an Agile approach to investing in innovation is nothing new. The BBC Innovation Labs have been doing this for many years through providing single iteration support to those with an interesting idea. The BBC invest in many companies producing a demonstrable first version of their idea before deciding to invest further. This approach massively reduces the BBC's risk as they are able to see both whether the idea has legs once it becomes demonstrable and if the development team are up to the job.

This use of single iteration development terms is used as a way of selling Agile development by providing massively reduced investment risk through only committing to a single iteration while delivering working code. This means that at the end of the iteration the buyer can take the code to another development team if they so wish. In the case of the Innovation Labs it is likely that the BBC would retain some degree of exploitation rights to the IP should they wish to take a good idea that was badly realised to another team.

The fact that Agile is so effective at marrying formalised project and product development management with creative and innovative process means that this is a no brainer for those that have worked in this way. Having talked to a number of investment organisations recently, it appears that Agile offers another potentially useful tool in addition to monitoring progress that can be tied to investment rounds as used by the BBC. This is effective communication.

The process of using stories and prioritisation enables the investor to see exactly what decisions are being made and to interrogate the rational behind prioritisation. If an investor takes part in the transition from iteration to iteration they have a clear picture of what is going on and are able to feel sure that their money is being spent realistically. The investor will also able to see the progress being made through the presentation of demonstrable tested development. This provides clear windows for investor communication while leaving the innovator free to get on with their work during actual iterations.

Therefore Agile's embracing and normalisation of constant change and risk (essential ingredients of innovation) combined with a process that effectively exposes this makes it a perfect process for allowing a better relationship between investors and innovators.