LeSS: Scaling Sweet Spot

By Venkatesh Krishnamurthy.

Read the first part of this series about Large Scale Scrum

There are several  frameworks, ideas and methods available for scaling Agile projects. Many are either too prescriptive detailing out practices making it too narrowly focused with no wiggle room.  The prescriptive, highly defined process destroys the principles of empirical process control. 

There are others which are purely principles based pushing the onus on users to worry about the practices.  

The secret lies in balancing the principles and the practices. This is where Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) captures the sweet spot. 

LeSS achieves the same balance as Scrum, for larger product groups. It adds a bit more concrete structure to Scrum, whose purpose is to maintain transparency and emphasize the inspect-adapt cycle so that groups can continuously improve their own ways of working. LeSS  consciously leaves the space for users to create context dependent practices. 

Find out more about LeSS training in Melbourne in February 2015. This is the first LeSS certification training in the ANZ region. 

What is LeSS (Large Scale Scrum) ?

By Venkatesh Krishnamurthy

In 2015, we are going to introduce Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) to an Australian audience. We think there are many who will be interested to hear about what LeSS is all about. How can it benefit large scale Agile projects?  What are the principles driving LeSS? How can I be LeSS certified?

My intention is to share knowledge about LeSS and at the same time, answer the above questions and beyond.  In this series of articles, you will be able to gain an understanding of LeSS and LeSS huge frameworks. 

Why LeSS?

Let me begin with "What is Large Scale Scrum (LeSS)? Essentially, LeSS is Scrum being applied to many teams working on a product development. 

As we know, Scrum is one of the most popular methods in the software development. Its popularity is due to its simplicity and powerful empirical process control. However, while multiple teams working on a product development apply Scrum, they need some additional guidance for improved collaboration and coordination. This is where Large Scale Scrum sits. 

Since LeSS is based on Scrum, the learning curve in adopting this framework is minimal. Personally, I have used LeSS on a large scale development with >100 people with no additional training on this framework.  

LeSS Principles and Themes

LeSS is fundamentally based on Scrum, and in addition, it has principles/ideas based on Queuing Theory, Systems Thinking, Lean Thinking, Empirical process control. 

 I will delve a bit deeper into the backlog grooming and other practices in the upcoming articles.

Read the Part 2 of this series "LeSS: Scaling Sweet Spot"
Find out about the upcoming LeSS course in Melbourne

Don't shoot the elephant...

By Venkatesh Krishnamurthy

Recently I came across this fascinating story by Orwell about shooting an elephant. 

Orwell, who was an English officer in Burma during 1920's,  was tasked to find the killer elephant. As he continues searching, finally finds the elephant in a field calmly eating it's food.  However, the crowd around Orwell starts jeering him to shoot the elephant and even more after seeing his gun. 

As Orwell describes in his story, 

Despite Orwell’s aversion to shooting the elephant, he becomes suddenly aware that he will lose face and be humiliated if he does not shoot it. He, therefore, shoots the elephant.  

You might be wondering, why I am sharing this story here... but wait I believe there is a huge meaning and a management lesson to be learnt from this story.  

In the above story, even though Orwell wasn't interested in shooting and killing an elephant, he was under social pressure. Orwell being in an authoritative position wanted to satisfy the crowd's hunger to look good and at the same time, he didn't want to look weak in front of them. Do you see what I see?

I see this behavioral pattern in everyday life at work and  in other social situation as well.

For example, consider the setting where one of your leaders is chairing a meeting with team members. One of the naughty team member asks a sensitive question about the unnecessary money being spent in furnishing the office when the company is struggling with cash flow. 

What happens now?  The room goes silent, and everyone would be looking at the leader to see the response. Now the ball is in leader's court, and obviously the leader has to defend. In the mean time, if the leader has a command/control leadership style, he/she cannot remain silent and show as weak. This leader now wants to demonstrate the strength in front of the team. That’s when all the insecure leaders shoot the elephant.

Many leaders shoot the elephant as a warning to others and sometimes just to satisfy their ego.

To conclude, I would say that we all come across social situations where we are expected to act in a certain way. The people around us whether our spouse and family, peers or team members wait to see our response. It is important to be mindful of the situation in a social setting without getting into social pressure.

In the Orwell's story, the "Mahoot" or the elephant trainer could have been called to take the elephant back to the forest rather than unnecessarily killing the elephant to satisfy crowd's expectation. 

Have you come across situations where your leaders have shot the elephant ?

What is common between Agile and FengShui ?

By Venkatesh Krishnamurthy

I know this is a tricky question if someone asks "What is common between Agile and Fengshui?" .  Not an easy answer ah?   

Let me give out the answer, both Agile and Fengshui has a lot of believers and followers. The followers have such a tremendous blind faith that they don't question and follow the rituals to the last letter. 

For example, I have seen Feng Shui followers setting up Aquariums, buying gold fishes, lighting scented candles to attract wealth/abundance. Whether it works, don't know.

I am seeing the same trend in Agile followers as well. If there are challenges in software delivery, stakeholders are asking the teams to just "practice" Agile and many a times some popular models like Spotify, SAFe or DAD.  

Many a times, just ignoring all the noise and just applying some common sense could solve many challenges.  

Are you a follower  surrounded with too much of noise?  Do you think ignoring this noise helps in your context?

Agile? Ask "why" first!

By Anton Rossouw.

I like the word “Agile”. It positively amplifies implied action, energy, and change. It also gets the change sceptics talking (we have always done it, it will not work, we have done it before, its not we us) !

I also believe Agile is a “strange attractor” ( Chaos Theory) that can be applied in social complex systems as a meme that attracts organisational behaviours towards the point in a basin where “newness” emerges. Emergent newness is uncertain and can be hugely disruptive or greatly beneficial. 

Dangerous roller coaster ride !

Caution is in order because Agile transformation can be a roller coaster ride where you must hang on for dear life!

Before getting on to the roller coaster ask “Why”. Don't get on until solid answers are articulated and a clear destination is envisaged.

Reasons why not to get on the roller coaster are:

1. It's a new and interesting fad not be missed.
2. Lots of cool people seem to be doing it and having fun.

One thing about Agile is that it will change your organisation, so we need to do it for the right reasons and for the better!

I found many of those right reasons in Stephen Wageners book Adventures in the Sea of Complexity. It explains in a humorous and engaging way what the new Agile world order looks like.

The story reminds me of one of my all time favourite poems - Lewis Carols The Hunting of the Snark.

Royal Family of the Kingdom of Mismanagement

In the book one meets the rulers and inhabitants of the Kingdom of Mismanagement, a sovereign island nation. They live in denial of the surrounding Sea of Complexity that rages to create chaos in the island. King Schedule and Queen Urgency govern with an iron fist.  Their son the fierce Dark Prince of Finance enforces control. A myriad of other characters prop up the Kingdom. You will meet the Crown Prince of Engineering, The Countess of Change, the band of Process Monkeys, Mr Continuous Degradation and the Grumpy Old Men of Influencers .

The story amplifies the undertones of modern corporate life on to Dave Snowdens Cynefin model, bringing it to life in a way that leads to unexpected emergent praxis. It also amplifies the important element of fun in the workplace as an alternative to simplistic debilitating seriousness.

You will also meet the elephant in the room. They are more common than one may realise!

Elephant in the room !

This book has offered me many poignant answers to “Why Agile?” as it illustrates what needs to change and how it needs to change.

Get a few copies for your company today and distribute it around. Prep the network for change.  Be brave enough for the roller coaster ride but make sure you Inform - Select - Confirm at first.

Embark on a fun journey for all ! 

Mediocre Managers Manifesto

By Anton Rossouw.

I have had the privilege over the past 30 years or so to work with many humane, inspiring and energising managers and leaders.

Since studying Industrial and Organisational Psychology and Computer Science in the early 80's back at university it has always been my hope that management science (with some technology) will foster the development of better managers. However of late I have not seen much evidence of that.

So in homage to the great leaders that inspired me I decided to create an “anti-” view that can be used to tacitly amplify what “good” leadership looks like as the mirror image i.e. “bad”. As a pattern I used the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (representing those on the good side).

Reflecting on my past career I must also confess that at times I caught (like a bad cold) some traits from the not-so-great managers I worked with because it seemed a good idea at the time and the accepted “way we do things here”. I now recognise that one should never take on bad behaviours but stand firm and be brave enough to change it, even though it means you may lose your job (yep its not as easy as that especially when its about money).

After all is said and done to get the “job done”, I always hope that I leave my workspace as happier places where I helped my teams in some way develop and grow to their potential.

Now for the Mediocre Managers Manifesto for creating Mayhem and leading the organisation up Schitt Creek without a paddle:

We are uncovering strident ways to work by doing it and forcing others to do it. Through these ways we have come to value:

Command-and-control over agility and self-organisation.

Passive aggressive conflict over collaboration.

Arguing the details over working the big picture.

Being promoted over delivering value.

Blunt answers over thinking what’s best.

Information secrecy over transparency.

Talking incessantly over listening intently.

That is, while there is most value in the items on the left, there is little value on the right but we will say we do it even though we don’t.

We follow these principles:

• Me, myself and I as the supreme manager always know best.
• Always blindly follow the bosses’ orders because they know best.
• People are annoying but considered as resources to be consumed and discarded.
• Get the job done at any cost but remain true to yourself by using manipulation, throwing tantrums, and whinging.
• Playing people off against each other is an important and fun game.
• Bantering in a critically logical way will be used to belittle, confuse and disorientate the team, and when that fails because they have better answers, then emotional blackmail must be applied.
• When I don't understand something then it is their fault.
• Vendors and suppliers are important because they are someone to blame when my team stuffs up and I don't want to lose many of my team members in one go.
• With power comes responsibility to weed out clever, considerate and open people. They have no place in this world and must be taught a lesson.
• Apathy must be applied to protect us from commitment.
• We believe in our own rhetoric as enforceable doctrine for everyone else to obey.
• Knowingly withholding acknowledgment and approval motivates people to try harder next time.
• Managers are not paid to foster happiness at work, rather spend their time growing empires and attacking others empires.
• My smartphone is at any one time more interesting than what anyone is trying to say in any meeting, except if it is a bosses meeting.
• In particular don't trust individual workers but specifically not teams because they may over time wield more influence than the manager. Facilitate infighting within teams to reduce their effectiveness.  

The Mediocre Managers Manifesto can be used as an assessment checklist tool for managers “where the shoe fits”. If only a couple items apply then there is hope and behaviours can easily be ameliorated, but if most items apply then major therapy and years of coaching would be required to become a “normal” manager again.

To further explore the "bad" side of management one of the best books about it is by Barbara Kellerman. Believe that good management is possible. Inside every bad manager maybe there is a great leader trying to get out!

Happy Remote Workers

By Anton Rossouw.

We are of the firm belief that the happiness quotient of remote workers can be improved dramatically. We know that the people in development centres and outsourced offices in places like Bangalore, Ho Chi Minh City and Manila will grasp at any opportunity to contribute more to projects and teams at "head-office" in Melbourne or Sydney.

A little help and support to engage them into the fold will go a long way. We think we have a good innovative part of the answer that can help overcome the tyranny of distance!

Our Double Robotics remote worker avatar has now been alive for three weeks. Her name is Melly, and her purpose is to help remote workers work in happier ways by being their representative and avatar where they are needed.

It was easy to bring her into life with the help of an iPad or two and a WiFi and 4G internet connection.

She is a delight! Very friendly and agile, always available when you need her in meetings or just for a quick chat. She gets around the office quite nimbly and can manoeuvre herself almost everywhere, but she is a bit wary of power cables and stairs.

She has really good hearing and a commanding voice that can effectively be used to make her presence known. Meet Melly in action.

She is a key ambassador of our Happy Melly Australasia remote worker happiness product, and we will be pleased to introduce her to your office and your remote workers, be it at a school, remote mine site, head-office or satellite office. Contact us today for a chat with Melly!

The Network is the System

By Anton Rossouw.

Our tribal business model is based on the anthropology and sociology of  tribes as networks.

Therefore we hold Network Theory as well as Complex Systems Theory dear to our hearts in our consulting practice, and often offer the combination as a great explanation of how leaders could understand  the true holistic nature of organisational structure, innovation incubation, opportunity discovery and directional flux influence for strategic direction setting. It also works well to model the complexity of business groups such as programs and projects. 

One of our most valuable primary paradigms towards understanding enterprise dynamics is to view organisations as a Complex Adaptive Systems that comprise a range of connected and linked nodes (agents) represented as a Network, as opposed to use the traditional simplistic hierarchical representation.

However, hierarchy remains a valid representation because the effect of hierarchy on our thinking can be used as a visualisation and sense-making cue to overlay on to the organisation as a network. When that is done, very different perspectives emerge from the visualisation particularly uncovering the nodes where true leadership and influence reside. This leadership and influence to best stimulate adaptation and innovation in organisations is most often not located in the traditional executive management structures as most people expect, but within the organisation in unexpected nodes.

Therefore an understanding of networks and how they operate in the real world is a very important contributor toward facilitating effective future strategies and innovative change. It is often better to harness the power of the network than to utilise the hierarchy.

A great way to start understanding the power of network visualisation, is to start with one’s own LinkedIn profile “network” which can be graphically visualised by a tool developed by the LinkedIn Labs. Our brains are great at pattern recognition and networks are great at offering patters for our brain to play with. As an example the clusters in my network are related to the various professions, technologies, industries and organisations that I have been involved in during my career, including a recently connected small network going back thirty years to the friends that I left school with and went to University with. I can with this visualisation explore complex connectivity that I was previously unaware of.

A great lecture on the importance of networks and what it can tell us (it explains the world!) can be found on the Santa Fe Institutes' (The best source for Complexity Science) YouTube channel - presented by Prof. Mark Newman - one of my favourites clips that I often re-visit. 

Scrum is Anti-Fragile

By Anton Rossouw.

Some months back I read Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s latest epic tome “Anti-Fragile - Things that gain from disorder” .

I bought the book because I loved his previous two books “Fooled By Randomness” and “The Black Swan”. And his mini poetic diversion “The Bed of Procrustes” is a great diversional romp into the philosophical space.

Image - Amazon

I have no doubt that he is a brilliant thinker and should be placed close to the top of the Pioneers list of the worlds most influential people (he is not listed yet).

The other person I see as a peer is Dave Snowden. I would love to see a serious philosophical debate between the two of them but suspect it will start in the sphere of  massive disagreement and end where they eventually agree on everything !

Diversions aside, I found the book and the concept of Anti-Fragile interesting but challenging.

Perhaps my brain is fragile when it comes to new hard-hitting conceptual arguments like this. I could at first not warm my mind to what Anti-Fragile could mean, and the closest I got was perhaps the words “toughness”, "agility", “resilience", “robustness”, "adaptation" and "evolution" which I was well acquainted with.

I discarded most of those words except Resilience because the other words did not carry enough multi layered meaning to approach Anti-Fragility with.

Resilience also made most sense because I read Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy's book "Resilience - Why Things Bounce Back" directly before I read Anti-Fragile.

Image - Amazon

I then toyed with trying to understand the antithesis of Anti-Fragile and came with “Anti-Agile” and also for some reason thought of the word “Government”.

As I plowed through the pages it became clear that there was no readily available synonym or close-fit word to describe what Anti-Fragile means. So here follows my summary in the terms of Complex Systems (the living type):

• It is a particular property of a Complex System as well as a transitionary condition of becoming.
• It is the ability of a Complex System to increase its fitness and become stronger the more it is challenged, exercised  and too some extent damaged.
• The Complex System can survive a lot of damage and abuse due to impacts from conflicts emerging from the environment it is in, from within, and encountered by other Complex Systems in the competive space.
• It is a learning COmplex System that is emotionally charged and energises, and best flourishes when pressure is applied to it.

Reflecting on our Agility, Innovation and Sustainability practice points of view I could not quite  understand how Anti-Fragile concepts can be integrated and what we could learn from it, and left it at that in a puzzled state.

Then one night when watching TV, some nature program documentary again, it struck me !

Waterfall projects are Fragile and Scrum projects are Anti-Fragile.

I think the seeds of the emergent thoughts were sown when I spoke to a colleague about Takeuchi and Nonakas' 1986 HBR paper "The New New Product Development Game" (worth a read for some deep insights into Agility) where they explained the difference between an Agile approach and Fragile approach (not their words) as the difference between a rugby team moving forward and gaining ground over a large field as a unit even while being attacked by the opposition, and a relay race where one runner at a time passes the baton on a set track to the next runner, and if one runner drops the baton or stumbles then the race is lost.

A relay team is thus a more fragile system than a scrum team.

So Scrum from an Agile sense as well a rugby team is Anti-Fragile because:

• Its a living system compring human agends who move as a team and not as any single individual.
• It is adaptive, self organising and self re-organising.
• It learns and reforms through iterative engagement.
• The more you exercise it the better its performance becomes.

This mindset could also be applied on our organisational systems I suspect. I will find out when I hopefully attend the Nassim Taleb and Yaneer Bar-Yam NECSI executive education session later this year.  

Braveheart

By Anton Rossouw.

I enjoyed the 1995’s semi historic and mostly fictional Epic movie Braveheart starring one of our favourite Autralian actors namely Mel Gibson originally from the Mad Max post apocalyptic smash hit.

Playing William Wallace he epitomises the inspirational, energetic, passionate and “brave-at-heart” leader who with passionate resolve and action starts a deep movement of change.

In William Wallace’s case he paves the way for the liberation of Scotland against the tyranny of King Edward “Longshanks” of England. At the end of the movie he is offered to submit to the English King but he remains stalwart with a last cry of “Freedom” that rallies emotions and energy that leads to liberation.

Movie poster : www.imdb.com

The movie also brought notions of what Agile leadership may look like  as a response to changing oppressive traditional culture, with focused alignment, surgical change, stealthy guerrilla thinking, quick delivery, rapid learning and finding new ways to attack the problems of the past. So I wondered if I can think of examples of corporate leaders that bravely face systemic and cultural challenges and remain focused to push through to enact an almost impossible transformation to an Agile culture.

I think one such leader is Partrick Eltridge, the Chief Information Officer of Telstra who embarked a couple of years ago to turn their ICT services towards Agility.

Telstra is Australia's largest telecommunications services provider as well as a huge consumer of ICT technology and labour. Many Agilists including myself have been watching Telstra's journey to Agility with frankly, a bit of skepticism.  After all, how do you get an elephant to pirhouette?

As CIO he took on the task to transform the IT services divisions to embrace an Agile mindset and practice it at the core of its culture. This was a big challenge because Telstra was commonly considered as a slow moving command-and-control driven dinosaurian like bureaucracy that told their customers what was good for them. The old IT adage ”Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” did not apply to the Telstra of yesteryear. How wrong I was!

Telstra has been on an Agile transformation journey initiated in 2010 by the then CIO John McInnerley (now at NBNCO) and implemented by his successor Patrick Eltridge, formerly the CIO of SEEK.

The change is stark because the Telstra of today is vastly different to the one of the past. It is now infused by Agility that puts customers first. However as with any enterprise change of this nature and complexity, it will take more time to perfect, but it is well on the way to achieving Agility.

How do I know this ? Because much of the intricacies and learning’s from this journey was presented at the last few Agile Australia conferences where Patrick featured as a prominent thought leader.

The 2013 Agile Australia conference offered us updates on the latest Telstra insights where Patrick contributed in an on stage interview. His leadership team (Lalitha Biddulph, Em Campbell-Pretty, and Jenny Wood) also presented inspirational stories about their journey and achievements at Telstra. 

During his interview he articulated his total focus on aligning the IT organisation with the business and their customers, changing to a culture where teams are less fearful of risk taking, and comfortably adapt to changing conditions, and feel empowered to develop their own skills and expertise. This changed the management culture to an  embracing style of leadership characterised by collaboration, openness, inclusion, and a diversity of thinking. Management is now less about control and more about leadership that foster collaboration, and trusts their teams to innovate and deliver. The approach is now all about being curious, receptive, a generalist, and ask first what the customer may want, then deliver it.

The IT press also offered articles on how focuseds Telstra approached the cultural transformation, particularly making way for a no-blame culture that encourages experimentation and learning. 

What I gained from following Patricks and Telstras journey is that if you are really passionate about Agile transformation because you know and trust deep down that it works best, and you are passionate and brave about it and put yourself forward as a leader, then you will change practices, minds and hearts at deep cultural levels which will delight your  stakeholders and customers.

And as a bonus you get the elephant to pirouette!