Author: Dan Greening

Dan Greening is a serial entrepreneur working on his fourth startup, where he leads implementation of two agile practices, Lean Startup and Scrum. Between the third and fourth startup, he was the lead agile coach for Citrix Online, Skype, Overstock, and other companies. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA. He is a Certified Enterprise Coach with the Scrum Alliance, and a Scrum@Scale Trainer. He has published innovative work on agile management, parallel processing, and chaotic systems.

Categories
Enterprise

Smart and Lazy: Our best generals!

400px-Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord

 

“I divide my officers into four groups: smart, diligent, stupid, and lazy. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are smart and diligent—their place is the General Staff. Some are stupid and lazy—they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Some are both smart and lazy; they are qualified for the highest leadership duties, because they possess the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. Beware of those who are stupid and diligent—they must not be entrusted with any responsibility because they always cause mischief.”
—Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord (1933)

Born September 26, 1878, Kurt Gebhard Adolf Philipp Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord was a German general who served for a period as Commander-in-Chief of the Reichswehr. He is famous for being an ardent opponent of Hitler and the Nazi regime. He died on April 25, 1943 [Wikipedia]
Categories
Enterprise Metrics

Metrics, Trust and Communication

Good managers try to measure important aspects of their business with leading metrics (aka “key performance indicators”) that precede desired outcomes. Managers seeking agility often try to measure behavioral compliance to agile practices, but can inadvertently create a lying culture. When  people don’t understand the metrics or can’t provide feedback, they perceive metrics as bureaucratic nonsense that gets in the way of “real work”. Trust-building lies at the heart of good metrics programs, particularly those that involve self-reporting. Managers can promote honesty by revealing their own personal motivators (their “internal metrics”), by researching others’ personal motivators, and by working to align business goals with all those motivators. Managers build understanding by collaboratively developing and retrospecting on measurement efforts. This honesty and understanding improves the accuracy and utility of the metrics.

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Enterprise Personal

Why succeed?

“It’s not about money. It’s about the willingness to outwork and outlearn everyone.”
—Mark Cuban

Categories
Enterprise Metrics Product Management Quality Scrum

The Goal Revisited

The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt is a business novel that recounts how a factory manager shakes off complacency and isolation to save his factory and its employees. Many MBAs, system scientists and agilists have read it.

I read The Goal 7 years ago. I was so excited I sent our CEO an email. “Have you read it? It has so many messages for us!” I said, breathlessly. “Yep. I’ve read it. Great book,” he said.

 

My coach friends and I have lately been trying to inspire executives and managers to sustain agile practices, to become competent agile coaches themselves. To help managers understand organizational agility, we have distributed copies of The Goal, foisting it on managers and begging them to read it. I felt I had to refresh my memory of it. On this, my second reading, I am inspired again, but for different reasons.

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Categories
Metrics Scrum

Forecast Horizon: Does Your Team Communicate?

Good communication between product manager and team, between value appraisal and product development, leads to success. It helps you build the right thing at the right time. When the Product Owner and Development Team communicate well, the Product Owner can forecast feature delivery dates with a statistical likelihood. It promotes great architectures. The Development Team can build, but not over-build, a resilient architecture suitable for likely future needs.

I developed the Forecast Horizon metric to measure team communication. Forecast Horizon is the sum of work estimates from the top of the backlog through the first unestimated Product Backlog Item. Since many Product Owner put unestimated Backlog Items at the top of a Backlog, you may choose to skip unestimated backlog items that have been modified since the last Sprint Planning or Grooming meeting. Forecast Horizon can be expressed in team-time, by dividing by a recent average velocity and multiplying by sprint duration. In my work, I usually talk about Forecast Horizon in weeks.

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Categories
Scrum

Four-part User Stories: Functionality that Matters

Four-part user stories improve communication between Product Owner and Development Team. They include context about the user and the sponsor of the work, which inspires creativity and better architectures from the team. They also make Grooming and Sprint Planning meetings faster, they yield more successful outcomes, and they facilitate Product Owners making better trade-offs. Are they better than sliced bread? I’ll let you decide.

Story Template

User stories are a short, structured format for Product Backlog Items in Scrum; descriptions of the functionality a Product Owner wants implemented. Explicitly naming the user and the value the user obtains forces Product Owners to consider users and helps developers rapidly understand what needs to be built. Historically, user stories have had three-parts: a stakeholder, a description of the functionality and a description of why the user wants it. I’ve found that adding a fourth part greatly improves ordering in the Product Backlog.

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Categories
Personal Improvement Scrum

Daily Mantra: Contribute 10× the Value You Capture

I have a little mantra I say to myself whenever I walk in the door of an employer.

“How will I save or gain at least 10 times my daily salary for my organization today?”

This question challenges us, especially if we are buried in the beast of a large organization. We might not even know how we add value. But the confusion just points out that we have a responsibility to figure it out.

Once you figure out how you contribute, you should say to yourself, “Well how do I measure that?”

Once you measure yourself, you might wonder how you can do better. You start experimenting with what you are doing, and measuring outcomes.

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Categories
Enterprise Metrics Personal

Failure Rates

Thomas_J_Watson_Sr“If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”
—Thomas J. Watson, IBM

Categories
Scrum

Pair-Author Backlog Items for Faster, Better Results

Product Backlog Item (PBI) writing in Scrum is best done by pairing a Product Owner with an architect or team member. The Product Owner brings a stakeholder perspective to the table, and PBIs should include that “value perspective” in every case. When the PO is not “primary”, you get PBIs that have no demonstrable stakeholder or business value.

However, some POs think they are the only people who can initially author PBIs. They think they must wait to talk to the whole team to get them into better shape. As a result, the whole team must edit confusing PBIs tied to an uncertain architecture.

When the Product Owner waits for the whole team to meet to incorporate developer insight, Product Planning slows, at very high cost to the organization.

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Categories
Marketing

How We Charge Our Clients

Senex Rex charges by the day, not the hour. This allows us to focus, to think, to innovate. Tracking time obsessively, as many lawyers and consultants do, turns them into automatons who can follow the rules, color inside the lines, who might take a dysfunctional situation and make it average.

We’re reasonable, of course. If we just do a one-hour call, we don’t charge. Doing the best for our customers sometimes means we work a 14 hour day, and we charge just a day for that.

When we take a client, we seek to make them world class. We address tough problems like agile sustainability. We seek to build our skills into the DNA of our clients, so they don’t need us anymore. And our clients praise us for that.

See James Surowiecki, “The Cult of Overwork,” The New Yorker, January 27, 2014.