I am amazed at how many people claim to be better at software development than professional software project managers and engineers. Everyone knows the four dimensions of project management: schedule (time), features, resources and quality. The well understood notion is that one can fix any three dimensions while the fourth will vary. For example, management can fix the desired features, resource level and quality, however, the schedule will be whatever it will be.
For the software professionals, we would just love our world to be this simple. The reality is that there are not only four dimensions to consider, but as many as thirty two dimensions to consider. Let me outline those that we have to balance, manage, coerce, work around, plan for, and strategize around.
Just consider this partial list: new/emerging technologies, skill development, competitors, market evolution, technology partnership, development processes, design processes, architectures, complexity, testing/verification processes, build/code control, operational processes, collaboration, intellectual property, licensing, trouble shooting, incremental improvement, local/distributed development teaming, risk management, dependency management, economic decision making, documentation methods, customer support, requirements management, performance, scalability, reliability, talent acquisition, and customer support.
I consider each of these (and the others not listed) as fundamental aspects of software physics. A professional cannot avoid these in any project planning cycle. To avoid them, is like making a car or building that violates aspects or the laws of physics, or in other words, a disaster. I know of few professionals who willingly disregard these realities. But, why do many projects run into problems where they unintentionally violate one or more of these?
I would suggest two major reasons why software physics are ignored. The first is that executives and/or other departments believe that they know software development better than the software professions and direct them to ignore one or more aspects of software physics, maybe even unknowingly. The second is that software professionals are out of practice with mastering the management of software physics.
Let’s face it, we’re all under pressure to get more work done to ward off competitors or to increase revenues. I get why executives and other departments demand more results from software engineering. I once had a company CTO tell me that marketing would tell engineering the features, the quality level, the resource levels and schedule and that engineering’s job was to figure out how to make all of this happen. To demand than software engineering ignore one or more critical aspect of software physics means that the business is accepting one or more risks that won’t be managed, documented or visible. Wouldn’t it be better to keep the risks visible and put into place correct plans that either address or manage the risk?
While it would be nice to say that only other departments and executives force engineering to forgo acknowledging software physics, that would not be intellectually honest. I have found multiple engineering projects where aspects of software physics go unmanaged, unacknowledged and unchecked. Engineering departments are notorious for lack of transparency or, even worst, withholding reality from others.
What to do? Practice, inspect and adjust. These are fundamentals of agile development and, specifically, Scrum. Scrum’s backlog prioritization, focus on highest risk/value user-stories, and potentially shippable product completed for each sprint cycle are keys to understanding what aspects are important and those that may not apply. To master these Scrum practices means that the engineering team will also master the necessary aspects of software physics. For executives and other departments, the frequent sprint reviews provide inspection of the progress made and the opportunity to weigh in on future priorities. The frequent Scrum cycles (or sprints) means practice.
As we know, practice makes perfect.
Cloud Computing has ushered in new ways of developing and delivering products. The emergence of Agile Development Practices has sped Cloud Computing adoption. Interestingly, executives struggle with leading organizations that must master both. Here, I explore lessons learned from helping companies deal with these two dynamics.
Saturday, September 6, 2014
Smartphones, Tablets, Laptops and Incremental Improvements…
Tablets were hot items 4 years ago. They burst onto the market as iPads, then Androids and Windows 8s. They offered a compelling value proposition, lighter weight than a laptop and larger screens than a smartphone. Everyone had to have one. The market exploded. The pundits wondered if the eras of the smartphone and laptop might be eclipsed. Recent reports have shown that smart phone numbers are still growing. Laptop sales continue to be under pressure and look weak. The shocker is that tablet sales aren’t growing and they appear to be possibly shrinking.
Why? Could it simply be smudges, muscles and incremental improvements?
I went shopping for a new tablet to use during a trip to see my parents. I wanted to spend time writing my blog entries (like this one) while sitting on various airplanes and in various airports (like I am now). I have never owned a tablet and wanted to give a tablet a whirl.
I’ve owned various smartphones and know that I can send long text messages with iPhone or Android text input, autocorrect and autocomplete. Somehow, writing a blog post using a smartphone did not appeal to me. Even so, I’ve grown accustomed to a greasy smartphone screen from my ears, cheeks and fingers being pressed upon against the glass. Smudges were something that I have never been able to stand on my computer screen.
I’ve owned a laptop ever since those old clamshells computers that weighed 5 pounds back in the 1990s were in vogue. In those days, the airlines were still trying to figure out how to deal with those boxy electronic devices. Laptops have come a long way and made major improvements in keyboards, screens, storage, battery life, weight and wireless networking. I needed a break from my old friend, the laptop.
My calculus was that after four years, the tablets would be mature and ready for primetime. Their screens are sharp. They’d have greater storage capacity and longer battery life. Even the airlines allow tablets to be kept out and on during takeoffs and landings. Those poor laptops still have to be stowed away. I went to the universal, hands-on, low-priced electronics store of our age, Costco. I tried the iPads, the Androids and the Windows 8s.
I decided after trial and error, that grease and muscles are the unavoidable problems for tablets. I could not get past the constantly wiping of the screen to keep it clean. What is tolerable for the smartphone isn’t acceptable for the tablet. However the bigger issue was with my finger and wrist muscles. I am a poorly postured typist. I let my fingers rest ever so slightly on the keyboard. For computers or laptops, this slight sin of posture goes unnoticed. For cell phones, I only use one finger to type. With a tablet, my poor posture caused autocomplete and autocorrect to go crazy. I spent 80% of my time trying to figure out if autocomplete was smarter than I was. I finally accepted that I am incapable of typing on a tablet.
I ventured over to my trusted friends, the laptops. I cruised past the clamshells and went to the new Windows 8 Dell Inspiron 11 2-in-1. While the price was in the tablet pricing range, it had the keyboard, USB ports and reasonable battery life. I could flip it over like a tablet (and not stow it during take-off and landing) and then easily shift it into laptop mode. Another benefit was that the hinges allows various standalone modes for the display that lets my hands free from holding up the screen. Best of all, the smudges can be avoided and the muscles can rest in their poor posture when typing. I was sold.
The Dell Inspiron 11 is a nice blend of laptops and tablets. The incremental improvements of both has produced a product that can be use like a tablet and a laptop to get serious work done. The beauty of high-tech’s incremental improvements. Now, getting the smartphone integrated with a wireless Bluetooth headset might make for a nice 3-in-1 product. I can’t wait for the next round of incremental improvements.
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Innovations in Change Leadership
We enter into the high tech industry wanting to be that person with an idea that changes the industry. Few have had such ideas. The industry has been changed by such ideas. Somehow, even for those who have changed the industry, we create organizations, products, processes and roles that become resistant to change.
During my career, I've held various positions where I have been responsible for leading change. A few times, my team has been on the leading edge and we were operating in a future, potential state. Change was easy because we had no past. Getting others to see our potential was the difficult part. At other times, the business was forced to change. A near death experience is a good motivator. We reacted to correct for not changing sooner. Even then, change was difficult.
The drive for change was and is something that comes naturally to me. Early in my career, I felt that logical arguments wrapped with a little passion were sufficient to lead change. But, when asked how I led change, I could not describe it well. Unconscious-competent some would say. Reading studies on how leaders affect change, helped to explain methods and effects but they failed to create a workable model to shift an entire organization from one operating model to another. I read and practiced lean software and agile development methods. I read up on situational leadership by Hersey and Blanchard. I kept seeking better constructs to plan and affect change across a large engineering organization.
I came to a company to lead change. The executives wanted to pivot the organization from years of long-cycle development processes towards faster time-to-market processes for new enterprise products. This was important as we needed new, constantly improving products for emerging markets to return us to profitable growth. Previous product efforts missed their market windows. There were other issues facing engineering: focus on product features and not on customers, focus on waterfall checkpoints with lengthy periods for architecture and design, separated implementation from testing, multiple software control/build processes, and weak engineering skills in modern development, testing and tooling practices. The engineering organization was highly resistant to change after various predecessors and projects failed. Fortunately, a new management team was already in position was demanding change.
Building the case for change was easy as one of my product projects had already been established, the market conditions were right, and the company need was clear. The difficulty was, as a new leader, I had to use the people that I had while avoiding their passive-aggressive behavior. I needed to push change along multiple dimensions in parallel for a large, geographically dispersed organization. My dilemma was how to do this?
I was concerned with potential passive-aggressive behavior along two dimensions. The first being passive-aggressive behaviors vertically within the organization and, secondly, horizontally across multiple components of the product. I decided to orient the organization along four concepts: product, architecture, process and people. I would use Hersey-Blanchard situational leadership within of these areas to cultivate new leaders and methods. I selected Scrum for a development method due to my previous experience and readily available training. I made an appeal for change due to that fundamental reason why we joined high tech, to change the industry. I made the cause for change personal to each individual.
My innovation was to create three virtual organizations where the leader of each reported directly to me for product, architecture and process. A virtual organization leader had dotted line relationships to their organization but not direct management control. I created a fourth organization with people managers who had everyone else reporting to them. A leader was responsible for their area. This prevented any one of them overpowering another without me being notified. I selected a leader for each organization who had been open to change and had a strong understanding of their respective area. This organizational model gave me visibility into issues as those issues crossed between these virtual organizational boundaries. The issues escalated to me created teaching moments. This structure also mirrored Scrum roles.
The second step was to refactor the existing organization into the new structure while leaving the development process untouched. This allowed the organization to adjust while doing work as they had previously done it. Meanwhile, I started coaching of each leader on their roles and new expectations. I described to the engineers how the new organization would function in the future. Meanwhile, we kept current projects on track.
The third step was training. On product, training was focused at the use of customer stories with goals and definitions of done, as well as, release planning with shorter horizons and smaller increments. On architecture with the lead architect, we worked on a redesigned, flexible architecture. On process, I cultivated the notions of continuous integration, use of modern build and automated testing tools, test driven design, and early devops concepts. The goal was creation of a single repository, build, test and deployment model for the product. Lastly, I worked with the people managers on training (Scrum, virtualization, automation) and self-managing-team skill development.
The next step was practice. The product owners began to state requirements and SLAs as user-stories. The architects started to redesign the current architecture to allow refactoring and better incremental, independent changes. The process team began to pull together a single tool set using open source tools and modern methods. The next release that was heading into planning signed up for the first attempt at Scrum. The approach taken by the team was actually closer to spiral development while using Scrum terms. User-stories were closer to tasks than they were user-oriented. The back end was heavily focused on final integration and testing. Meanwhile, I continued to push product owners closer to user-stories, architects closer to enabling refactoring and independent development by component, and teams towards Scrum and self-management. The process team needed the least encouragement because they were building tools for future use and had already moved into the agile development mindset. Releases continued to flow out every 4 to 5 months.
I had the teams working on new releases incrementally move components on to the new tools and to automate aspects of builds and tests. This required shifting repositories and changing tools. It required finding ways to build things that were never automated. Meanwhile, we kept raising the quality of the definition of 'done' with each release.
The last step was to do a hard shift to only user-stories with a clear goal and definition of done, to being 'done within a sprint' and 'done-done' (or customer shippable quality). This created tremendous tension with the product owners and engineers as the whole organization had to shift from fast cycle, mini waterfall development to true Scrum development. The teams and product owners pushed back. They claimed it wasn't possible. I had the visibility to influence and coach the low-level product owners. I worked with the people managers and teams directly when needed. The architecture and the process were in place to enable this critical transition. The teams did make the switch. We moved into true agile development with user stories being started and done to customer shippable quality within a sprint. Releases continued to flow out under the new process
The quality of the product from our customers’ perspective improved with each release. The teams were able to deliver both incremental features and velocity improvements with each sprint. The product owners were able to remain focused on customers’ needs and stakeholder demands. Teams were able to show stakeholders feature demonstrations earlier. Sets of teams could work independently on different work streams than were integrated and released when done. Back-end testing moved from 3 sprints to 1 clean-up sprint with the number of serious bugs found during testing dramatically lowered. For a modest investment, the team created differentiated product features ahead of the industry leaders. From a change management perspective, the organization became fully bought into Scrum, its methods and its value. They pushed themselves to improve with each sprint cycle.
Looking back, there are things that I would change on my approach. For example, I should have been more demanding of the product owners to move to user-stories earlier. This would have provided a stronger motivation to break from the mini-waterfall development within a sprint to ‘potentially shippable’ user value being done for each story multiple times within a sprint.
During my career, I've held various positions where I have been responsible for leading change. A few times, my team has been on the leading edge and we were operating in a future, potential state. Change was easy because we had no past. Getting others to see our potential was the difficult part. At other times, the business was forced to change. A near death experience is a good motivator. We reacted to correct for not changing sooner. Even then, change was difficult.
The drive for change was and is something that comes naturally to me. Early in my career, I felt that logical arguments wrapped with a little passion were sufficient to lead change. But, when asked how I led change, I could not describe it well. Unconscious-competent some would say. Reading studies on how leaders affect change, helped to explain methods and effects but they failed to create a workable model to shift an entire organization from one operating model to another. I read and practiced lean software and agile development methods. I read up on situational leadership by Hersey and Blanchard. I kept seeking better constructs to plan and affect change across a large engineering organization.
I came to a company to lead change. The executives wanted to pivot the organization from years of long-cycle development processes towards faster time-to-market processes for new enterprise products. This was important as we needed new, constantly improving products for emerging markets to return us to profitable growth. Previous product efforts missed their market windows. There were other issues facing engineering: focus on product features and not on customers, focus on waterfall checkpoints with lengthy periods for architecture and design, separated implementation from testing, multiple software control/build processes, and weak engineering skills in modern development, testing and tooling practices. The engineering organization was highly resistant to change after various predecessors and projects failed. Fortunately, a new management team was already in position was demanding change.
Building the case for change was easy as one of my product projects had already been established, the market conditions were right, and the company need was clear. The difficulty was, as a new leader, I had to use the people that I had while avoiding their passive-aggressive behavior. I needed to push change along multiple dimensions in parallel for a large, geographically dispersed organization. My dilemma was how to do this?
I was concerned with potential passive-aggressive behavior along two dimensions. The first being passive-aggressive behaviors vertically within the organization and, secondly, horizontally across multiple components of the product. I decided to orient the organization along four concepts: product, architecture, process and people. I would use Hersey-Blanchard situational leadership within of these areas to cultivate new leaders and methods. I selected Scrum for a development method due to my previous experience and readily available training. I made an appeal for change due to that fundamental reason why we joined high tech, to change the industry. I made the cause for change personal to each individual.
My innovation was to create three virtual organizations where the leader of each reported directly to me for product, architecture and process. A virtual organization leader had dotted line relationships to their organization but not direct management control. I created a fourth organization with people managers who had everyone else reporting to them. A leader was responsible for their area. This prevented any one of them overpowering another without me being notified. I selected a leader for each organization who had been open to change and had a strong understanding of their respective area. This organizational model gave me visibility into issues as those issues crossed between these virtual organizational boundaries. The issues escalated to me created teaching moments. This structure also mirrored Scrum roles.
The second step was to refactor the existing organization into the new structure while leaving the development process untouched. This allowed the organization to adjust while doing work as they had previously done it. Meanwhile, I started coaching of each leader on their roles and new expectations. I described to the engineers how the new organization would function in the future. Meanwhile, we kept current projects on track.
The third step was training. On product, training was focused at the use of customer stories with goals and definitions of done, as well as, release planning with shorter horizons and smaller increments. On architecture with the lead architect, we worked on a redesigned, flexible architecture. On process, I cultivated the notions of continuous integration, use of modern build and automated testing tools, test driven design, and early devops concepts. The goal was creation of a single repository, build, test and deployment model for the product. Lastly, I worked with the people managers on training (Scrum, virtualization, automation) and self-managing-team skill development.
The next step was practice. The product owners began to state requirements and SLAs as user-stories. The architects started to redesign the current architecture to allow refactoring and better incremental, independent changes. The process team began to pull together a single tool set using open source tools and modern methods. The next release that was heading into planning signed up for the first attempt at Scrum. The approach taken by the team was actually closer to spiral development while using Scrum terms. User-stories were closer to tasks than they were user-oriented. The back end was heavily focused on final integration and testing. Meanwhile, I continued to push product owners closer to user-stories, architects closer to enabling refactoring and independent development by component, and teams towards Scrum and self-management. The process team needed the least encouragement because they were building tools for future use and had already moved into the agile development mindset. Releases continued to flow out every 4 to 5 months.
I had the teams working on new releases incrementally move components on to the new tools and to automate aspects of builds and tests. This required shifting repositories and changing tools. It required finding ways to build things that were never automated. Meanwhile, we kept raising the quality of the definition of 'done' with each release.
The last step was to do a hard shift to only user-stories with a clear goal and definition of done, to being 'done within a sprint' and 'done-done' (or customer shippable quality). This created tremendous tension with the product owners and engineers as the whole organization had to shift from fast cycle, mini waterfall development to true Scrum development. The teams and product owners pushed back. They claimed it wasn't possible. I had the visibility to influence and coach the low-level product owners. I worked with the people managers and teams directly when needed. The architecture and the process were in place to enable this critical transition. The teams did make the switch. We moved into true agile development with user stories being started and done to customer shippable quality within a sprint. Releases continued to flow out under the new process
The quality of the product from our customers’ perspective improved with each release. The teams were able to deliver both incremental features and velocity improvements with each sprint. The product owners were able to remain focused on customers’ needs and stakeholder demands. Teams were able to show stakeholders feature demonstrations earlier. Sets of teams could work independently on different work streams than were integrated and released when done. Back-end testing moved from 3 sprints to 1 clean-up sprint with the number of serious bugs found during testing dramatically lowered. For a modest investment, the team created differentiated product features ahead of the industry leaders. From a change management perspective, the organization became fully bought into Scrum, its methods and its value. They pushed themselves to improve with each sprint cycle.
Looking back, there are things that I would change on my approach. For example, I should have been more demanding of the product owners to move to user-stories earlier. This would have provided a stronger motivation to break from the mini-waterfall development within a sprint to ‘potentially shippable’ user value being done for each story multiple times within a sprint.
Running...
Lynn Cowan, an Unisys Scrum Master, wrote an IEEE paper and gave a presentation in 2011 about the work that we were doing together back at Unisys. I wanted to post it here for reference and as a framing paper of my various posts. Enjoy.
Returning to the fray....
I'm back in the consulting saddle again for a short two weeks before I start my next gig. I hope to post a few more blogs.
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