This week it is time for Chapter 5 of Great Big Agile, An OS for Agile Leaders by Jeff Dalton. This week we visit the Performance Circle, Crafting. I often state, somewhat tongue and cheek, that this part of agile is where all the stuff that’s required to actually create and deliver quality products and services occurs. If I wanted to be even blunter, I might state that this is where the magic happens – where words become something tangible. This circle includes three holons:
- Planning
- Solving
- Delivery
Taking a software-centric perspective, these three holons describe the technical practices required to plan how to solve the business and technical problem, write, test, and implement the code. Examples of techniques supporting these areas include managing technical debt, test-first development (TDD, BDD, and ATTD), and pair programming.
There are several ideas that jumped out at me when re-reading this chapter. One of them is in the performance level outcomes for planning (for those of you jumping in this week, each holon has a set of performance level outcomes) demonstrate agile values during planning. This is a fairly basic requirement for even doing agile, however, in many organizations, it’s still a problem. Planning is often not a team level event. The work you get to do and how you get to do it is inflicted on individuals. This is a chronic issue. When challenged I am told; it is easier to just tell them, they are too junior to know how to do the work, or they will have too many questions if I don’t tell them explicitly how to solve a problem. I hear these rationalizations in the same organizations that proudly state they only hire the best and brightest. Actually using agile’s fast feedback loops and microplanning events (daily Scrums, huddles, and stand-ups) to support team members set aside the need for these rationalizations. Jeff’s insistence on exhibiting agile values in planning ought to be tattooed on every leader’s body in a prominent place as a reminder (just a bit of hyperbole). Agile is premised on having the correct mindset in order to maximize value. The mindset that sees the need for directly involving the people doing the work in planning and estimating has existed and rationalized away, at least as far back as the original CMM (the precursor to the Capability Maturity Model Integrated – CMMI). Good work gets done, but as measurement gurus such as Capers Jones and others have argued that far less good stuff gets done when barriers are generated.
A second critical idea in this Performance CIrcle is the idea of self-subscription. This is where teams and team members take or pull the work they are going to do from the backlog. This is the exact opposite of the “I will tell you what to do” model. Self-subscription empowers both teams and individuals. It does, however, require that the team be allowed to have some level of self-management so that there are no free riders and so people on the team are empowered to help each other improve. Taking a piece of work establishes ownership in a way that can’t happen any other way. Delivering on the work that you pull generates an incredible level of pride and motivation. Over my career, it’s been interesting to see the impact of different management styles on long-term performance. Styles that assume people are interested in striving and working forward always allow individuals to pull work (sometimes with guardrails) while low trust management styles use push techniques. The former approaches work for agile and the latter does not.
This Performance Circle begins at planning and ends at delivery. Although the sheer number of holons and pages in this chapter are fairly small, I suggest that it is half of any agile transformation. Unfortunately, it is the half that often gets ignored or is assumed. Agile without crafting is sort of like the sound of one hand clapping – very muted.
Remember, buy a copy and read along.
This week’s installment can be found at http://www.tomcagley.com/blog
Previous installments:
Week 1: Re-read Logistics and Front Matters – https://bit.ly/3mgz9P6
Week 2: The API Is Broken – https://bit.ly/2JGpe7l
Week 3: Performance Circle: Leading – https://bit.ly/2K3poWy
Week 4: Performance Circle: Providing – http://bit.ly/3mNJJN7
Week 5: Performance Circle: Envisioning – https://bit.ly/2JEVXdt
