Category: Working with ‘Agile’

I find I admire those artists who immerse themselves in some key concepts of their craft, learn the history, and then greet life as it is in the moment with eyes wide open. Think of Samin Nosrat traveling the world through the lens of Salt Fat Acid Heat chemistry to create nuanced variety and tastes from each culture as she goes.

I just watched a film about Piet Oudolf, a Landscape Architect I have admired. Seeing his process, you realize that his simple color-coded marks on paper are an expedient notation to trigger all he has internalized about the “character” of plants as “actors” to place on his stage.

We used to say in my father’s design firm “make the grid to break the grid!”. Structure and improvisational play are the keys to the flow that occurs within the artist and sympathetically resonates in each of us as we join the dance.

I’m a lifelong hack on the saxophone. Yet, even in my amateurish ways, this perennial balancing act is what I’m striving for both consciously and innately in my playing. A very compassionate sax teacher of mine (You need to be saintly patient to be a music teacher!) once tenderly implored me to “please Henry, learn your scales, then forget them!”.

So, it’s no surprise these kinds of dynamic tensions have embedded themselves in my practice of Project Management. Like a good martial artist, we need to know when to be “tight” and when to be “loose”.

In my projects, to strike a balance between polarities, I have selectively taken elements from many frameworks and methodologies over the years. A bulleted list looks like this:

• “Lean” for efficiency and making work visible
• “Agile” for velocity and allowing teams to self-organize
• “Jobs To Be Done” framework for outcome-driven innovation and prioritization
• “Design Thinking” for enabling the business to drive technology at the nexus of “desirability, viability, and feasibility
• “Critical Chain Project Management” for optimizing resources
• “Earned Value Management” for consistent, objective reporting
• “Organizational Change Management for the adoption and sustainability of project outcomes
• And all of the PMBOK, BABOK, and DMBOK guidelines…

I have taken my path through these ideas driven by the ad hoc experiential needs of my work.  That’s why I was very excited to see the next evolutionary step coming from the Project Management Institute (PMI) with their introduction of Disciplined Agile training and certifications. The idea is simple. One size does not fit all. Good execution of that simple idea takes lots of practice and staying open to a continuous journey.

I am adding some discipline to my experience and embarking on formal training and certification in Disciplined Agile. I’m looking forward to putting more tools in my kit and learning how to use the right tool for each job.

As Miles Davis said, “Man, you got to get hot if you want to blow cool!”.

It’s the promise of spring in Vermont. Sun today and tomorrow, then rain followed by snow, then rain. So, as the sun was promising a two-day run, I decided to abandon my office plans and stain our deck.

As I was scraping, sanding and vacuuming I was reminded of an old timer admonishing me as a young man on a construction job. “Henry”, he said, “Ya know what the three keys to a great paint job are dontcha?” Being aimable and gullible, I bit. “Nope” I said. “Preparation, Preparation, Preparation!” he chortled throwing a glance at the other crew members. That summer I got all the worse painting jobs. It was a real pain in the rear, and, unfortunately, I received the unsavory moniker “Preparation H”.

As it would happen, as this long-forgotten memory popped into mind, I was also considering writing some observations regarding meetings.

I once complained to a fellow PM, “God, I hate meetings!”. He replied, wisely, “Of course, Henry, but that’s the work.”.  Well we get our ‘lessons learned’ from the most unexpected quarters. For some reason his words resonated with me and that set me on a course of very intentional understanding of meetings and how to make them fun, productive and good work. A great meeting is hard to hate.

The key I have found is Preparation, Preparation, Preparation!

While each of the following topics warrant their own blog post, I wanted to outline some ideas and perhaps elaborate in detail in the future.

Planning

• What is the goal of the meeting? What is the expected outcome? Knowing your objective is as important as the time and date. State these explicitly in your invitation.
• What kind of meeting is it? Working, updating, presenting? Each type will need an agenda adjusted to suit. One size does not fit all.
• Who should attend? If it is a working meeting no more than 7-9 people should be included. Use optional attendance liberally, to inform stakeholders, but not require them for the goal at hand. Less is more. If it is a presentation, will it include virtual attendees? Have you tested all presentation tools beforehand? A status meeting benefits from a repeatable template reporting period to reporting period.
• Agendas need to include:
  • Time, date, location, and virtual meeting hyperlinks
  • Attendees, and a way to mark attendance
  • Subjects, discussion leads and times allotted
  • Reference documents (hyperlinks and attachments)
  • Notes Section
  • Action Items Section
  • Decisions Section
  • Risks and Issues (Optional)

Protocols

• Publish your agenda 24 hours in advance and include any previously recorded Action Items, Risks and Issues
• Hard copies of your Agenda and Reference Materials
• Start and end the meeting on time. If the culture of your organization is to have back to back meetings schedule to start 5 minutes after the hour or half hour. If you consistently do not accommodate stragglers and don’t re-cap for latecomers, folks will pretty soon sub-consciously adjust to be there on time ready to focus.
• Understand “learning styles” and have multiple approaches for communicating accordingly.
  • Visual—Use graphics, pictures, color and graphic design. Use these tools to summarize and provide details later if needed.
  • Reading—Be sure to have written details and back up materials available. Leverage email when following up.
  • Auditory—Read key agenda items. Speak conversationally to bullet points. Repeat questions from others, particularly if in virtual conferencing.
  • Tactile—Provide hard copies of materials. Have writing pads, sticky notes and pens available.
  • Kinetic—Similar to Tactile, however distinguished by the need to move their bodies. Have them help set up a room. Whiteboards are essential. No, the guy bouncing the table with his knee is not trying to give you hives. He’s just a kinetic learner. Understanding it makes it less disruptive.
• Publish your notes, action items and decisions within 24 hours.
  • Attach as a document but include in the body of the email (At a minimum the Action Items and Decisions)! Most folks will be too pressed to open attachments. Put the Action Items at the top of the email. 

Persistence

• Have fun and be flexible but do that in the substance of your agenda. Be sure the fundamental brackets outlined above are always applied.
• Lead by example and the culture will come along. As a rule, in the friendliest way possible, I decline meeting invites that don’t have a goal, objective, agenda or expected outcome. Pretty soon, it becomes the general expectation.
• Always take notes. Assign a notetaker if that is your preference. For recurring meetings, I prefer to take my own notes so that I can control the editorial thrust and have at the ready my prompts for follow up.
• Always identify Action Items and Decisions with owners and dates. If there are none, consider how to fine-tune your planning.
• If Risks or Issues are identified mark your notes as such to become ready input for your risk ledger and mitigation planning.
• Plan your calendar to allow for the required work before and after meetings. An hour of a good meeting equals two hours of a PM’s commitment.
• Be hard on the process, not on the people. There are as many ways of doing things as there are people. Neuroscience is showing that it takes hundreds of repetitions to acquire new skill or knowledge. Maybe there’s a fourth “P”—Patience!

These bullets may just be stating the obvious for many of you. The take-away for me has been that by settling on a few key structural items allows me to be much more present and engaged during the meeting. This in turn leads to spontaneity, creativity and good times. In other words, Progress!

Let me know if you have any sure-fire tricks and tips in the comment section below. 

If there was any doubt, we certainly are instructed in these days that we are in fact one world. The importance of our inter-connectedness is a lesson for human systems as small as individuals and runs through the gamut of families, teams, companies, cities, countries and the planet. 

Will we rise to the challenge of seeing others’ well-being as our own? 

I am heartened by the humane virtues that bubble up from the cauldron of crisises. 

One such outpouring is a small group of folks, project managers that is, who have organized an adaptation for the need of the times. The organization is called COVID-19 PM Response. The purpose is to provide pro bono project management expertise and services to organizations working to match the curve of the pandemic with egoless cooperation and the most important math I know: 

1 + 1 = 3

It’s a great bunch of folks with wide-ranging experience. I’m happy to have a small part. Come check us out at: pmresponse.com

Stay safe and keep healthy!

Is it Still ‘Agile’?

I was recently leading a vendor’s engagement where the client’s executive expectations were left unchallenged and process debate trumped progressive achievements. The goals were lofty, important and of a sizable magnitude for a project team comprised of both customer and multiple vendor members with widely variable experience.

Trust and patience had worn thin. The political goals were too costly to adjust. Our project was in crisis.

The mandated methodology was a traditional waterfall approach. The belief was that the statement of work predicted outcomes and we would perform to create those per a master schedule spanning multiple years. In fact, the “What” of our scope was highly generalized and the “How” was left to be proposed and approved. The “When” was ironclad.

There’s nothing new to this scenario. One common driver is the belief that capturing a fixed relationship between scope, schedule and cost will minimize risk. As we have seen in practice, and as the research has shown repeatedly, it does not. https://learn.g2.com/project-management-statistics

Let’s go “Agile” was a rallying cry as a panacea to our circumstances. So, the discussions ensued, and it was agreed, in spirit, that we could do “timeboxed iterations”.

Timeboxing is the process of fixing the iteration date and adjusting the scope and resources to deliver the chosen tasks and demonstrate their value.

In Scrum methods the timebox is a repeated unit of time, say a month, so that what is measured is “velocity” or how successful is the team at delivering value (scope x quality/effort).

In contrast, iterative and incremental development has timeboxes of varying length to match the goal for each cycle.

In either case, these processes assume the evolution of the scope, schedule, and cost based upon adaptive inputs from a product owner or other governing bodies.

As we assembled the documentation of our new process, we quickly realized that without the cultural support or the shared vocabulary for an agile practice— ‘timeboxed iteration’ really was going to mean the continuation of a waterfall SDLC. That SDLC could be completed within a timebox or not. Regardless the sponsors needed to measure our ability to predict and perform against the fixed-priced contract.

This led to a strange yet somewhat effective hybrid approach.

Our end to end waterfall plan was decomposed into a scope that was timeboxed for inspection every month and every quarter. The monthly timeboxes could have scope move in and out of them determined by the teams doing the work. These ‘sprints’ were governed like a Kanban with sprint planning, daily stand-up, and retrospective meetings. The quarterly timeboxes were fixed demarcations of scope against contractual obligations.

Development cycles would be deployed to environments that could be inspected for completeness, but not through the entire SDLC that results in User Acceptance Testing and promotion to a production environment. That would eventually be achieved over a two-year period of quarterly timeboxes. Any adaptation would be addressed through contract amendments based upon quarterly discovery and review of timeboxed achievements.  

The goal was to fit inside mandated contract governance, allow for executive review and validation while enabling the working teams to self-manage. The Work Breakdown Structure was transposed from the end to end waterfall plan to the sprint backlog.

To date, this has begun to rebuild trust. I like to think this is from the power of the “Lean” principle of “making work visible”.

This was a bootstrapped project salvation. It remains largely waterfall in principle and governance. However, by burnishing the process with some of the lean and agile concepts does this hybrid method belong somewhere on the continuum of agile methodologies?

Often we need to pick and choose from all the tools available to tinker and jury-rig continuous improvement from wherever we may find ourselves.

What do you think? If ‘waterfall’ is timeboxed has it become slightly ‘agile’?

I’ll be watching and learning as things unfold.