Possible Coaching Gig

[Eric Anderson]

Hello all. I spoke today with someone looking for help and I wanted to get some opinions. Also, this could turn into a couple of days of consultation for some teams in Spain.

This is for a group of approximately 25 people including managers, engineers, and technical project management. They are happy with their ability to prioritize delivery goals on an annual basis. They are also happy with their day-to-day Kanban practices and managing flow for daily work. They're having trouble bridging the gap between the two. They don't currently have a single prioritized backlog for work. Rather, the TPM's want to push for bigger chunks of work all at once which leads to competition for development resources.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? How have you successfully coached teams through such a situation?

This popped on my radar as someone looking for an outside resource to come in and speak to senior managers and directors about what "true Agile" is. After some discussion, it really sounds like a problem of dealing with multiple project owners competing for a constrained resource. 

Eric

[mheusser]

This sounds to me like a 'lead a horse to water but can't make him drink' situation. 

It's going to be tough to change behavior. Even if you explain it conceptually, the change management piece will be hard. If it were me, I'd do a six boxes model (google it) analysis and try to understand what is missing from a change. Then I would ask myself what people stand to lose from the change, what they stand to gain, how you can convince them the former doesn't matter and the latter is, like, a real thing.

Last time I was in spain spanish was the dominant language, even for technical folks - that was in Madrid. Has that changed? Is this an english speaking company?

Count me in for free advice, and interested in travel if you can't find someone local. (Markus Gaertner, over in Germany, is good and /more/ local. I'm not sure if Carlos Ble is interested, but he is in the canary islands and fluent in spanish)

Depending on your definition of 'success', I have worked with teams to break up this pattern, but it was in an IT shop environment where we simply started to align technical team by customer, eg this is the finance team, this is the marketing team, this is the claims team, etc, OKAY director of claims, go build your own backlog for your dedicated claims team to pull from ...

best,

--heusser

[Eric Anderson]

Thanks for the input, Matt.

This is definitely an English speaking company. Part of the issue is that the development teams are entirely in Madrid and the project managers are all on the US West Coast. The entire team is to be gathered in the same office in Madrid in November, and they are considering how to invest one or two days to invest in kicking off improvements to the situation.  Here is the explanation of the situation in a manager's own words:

My team wants to get better at Kanban. We have a board, we have WIP (but not reliably respected), and we have somewhat of a backlog. Stakeholders do a good job of planning for the next 4 quarters, but not a story-level breakdown of the epics.

I’m looking for a trainer to give a presentation to the whole team to emphasize how Agile improves the entire process but when it is used all the way. I want to explore what we can change to have a more optimal pull system in our Kanban, from the yearly roadmap to the prioritized backlog feeding the team.

Part of our challenges is that we are over multiple time zone with the stakeholders in one area and the developers in another (but all devs together!).

I have encouraged this manager to consider what real pain points he is trying to solve and how to quantify them so that he can then start conducting rigorous experiments.

Eric

--

---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lonely Coaches Sodality" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lonely-coaches-so...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Jon Kern]

Wow. That is not going to happen in a couple of days of coaching/presentation.

Send them to Agile Greece next week to see me (Thursday & Friday). In a couple of hours I can help give them some ideas of what I would do to help — but I am not sure I can back out of my current gig in November... ;-)

There’s so much to unpack even in those couple of sentences. Even the gap in time zones is huge. I did East Coast (Philadelphia and Raleigh) to St. Petersburg Russia… 3pm Russia was 7am at home. It takes a lot of little things done right to make this sort of thing work.

What business/problem domain? 

Jon Kern

blog: http://technicaldebt.com

twitter: http://twitter.com/JonKernPA

github: https://github.com/JonKernPA

[Charlie Poole]

This sounds like a basically unworkable situation: all decision makers are elsewhere and the team (at least as it sounds) not able to make their own decisions. It's the kind of situation that leads me to suspect there may be no desire to change, although it's possible that they simply don't know any other way to do things.

If the decision-makers are open to tough talk that tells them to stop doing a lot of things they are doing, then there is hope. I've done this kind of thing before and found it only works in selected cases. IOW, if the OP wants changes that the decision-makers don't want, then neither I nor any other agile coach is going to convince them differently. If they suspect they may have gotten the wrong end of the stick, then there's hope.

I'll be living in Italy in November (also December and January) and could probably schedule something but I'm not up for any long-term commitment to working for anyone at this point in my life. That could either be a disadvantage or an advantage, depending. Timing would have to be arranged if anyone is interested.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lonely-coaches-sodality+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--

---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lonely Coaches Sodality" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lonely-coaches-sodality+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--

---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lonely Coaches Sodality" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lonely-coaches-sodality+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

[Eric Anderson]

Yep. I believe your assessment for scope is spot on. I didn’t want to muddy the discussions with my own opinions up front. 

I believe the root for this is the desire to appeal to an external authority. I think the manager likely has some good instincts to begin with. 

The business domain is basically customized e-commerce. 

Sent with fat fingers and an autocorrect with a mind of its own.

[Allen Holub]

Eric, As Charlie and others have pointed out, there are lots of red flags. If they want someone to come in for a reality check that will be (mostly, I expect) bad news, I could do that. I could also do a class, but again, I’d be worried that the reaction would be “we can’t possibly do _that_.” I’m also dubious about doing a class without any real assessment up front, and any sort of real assessment will take more than a couple days. My main reservation is that they’d be wasting their money. I’d assess, and if I came up with something they didn’t want to hear, the whole thing would have been a wasted effort. Actually guiding the change is obviously much longer term, and given the distance (I’m based in California), would involve a lot of remote, which may or may not be effective. Are they just after some silver bullet, or are they serious about changing?  I’ll be in the UK in November and getting over to Spain is a nonissue.

-Allen
___________________________________
Allen Holub
al...@holub.com
@allenholub
+1 (510) 859-3620 (skype ID: allenholub)

linkedin: http://linkedin.com/in/allenholub

--

[Chris Pitts]

Hi Eric

I have been following this thread with some interest since I am striking distance away in the UK. However, I have to agree with others’ assessments - it sounds like they are not ready to change yet. The pain hasn’t reached a level where they have to do something IMO.

I’d be happy to talk to them/engage, but it would be at a pretty eye-watering initial day rate (but not as bad as flying someone from the States), on the principle that I’d need to charge high enough for them to take notice. I doubt they’d be interested, but drop me a line privately - a pattern I’ve identified is that sometimes an organisation is so far gone it needs a sacrificial coach taking point, laying some groundwork, and brief the next wave. (I have the T-shirt...don’t ask)

Chris
--
Chris Pitts
Thirsty Bear Software
www.thirstybear.co.uk

[J. B. Rainsberger]

Hi, Eric. I haven't read the rest of this thread, so I apologize if I'm going over well-trod ground.

Does the group of 25 people need a single prioritized backlog for work, or would it suffice to take another portfolio management approach? For example, if they have 4 streams of work, then dedicate 1 day to each stream, and in weeks with a 5th day, save that for slack. Or, for another example, if they have 2 steady streams of work, then alternate streams week by week, but add a slack week every 6 weeks to catch up on "other stuff". (Maybe that "other stuff" is really a third stream.)

If the TPMs want bigger chunks of work, but the "doers" want smaller chunks of work, then I might get them in a room and ask what they like about their respective preferences, then look for common ground. That might help them have a more-open conversation about the differences in their preferences.

Ugh. "True Agile". Please let's not. "If you had 'true Agile', what would you do with it?"

Good luck.

--

---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lonely Coaches Sodality" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lonely-coaches-so...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--

J. B. (Joe) Rainsberger :: tdd.training :: jbrains.ca ::
blog.thecodewhisperer.com

[Ron Jeffries]

I am becoming fond of "Faux Agile", however :)

On Sep 16, 2018, at 11:52 AM, J. B. Rainsberger <m...@jbrains.ca> wrote:

Ugh. "True Agile". Please let's not. "If you had 'true Agile', what would you do with it?"

Ron Jeffries

ronjeffries.com
Master your instrument, master the music, then forget all that shit and just play. -- Charlie Parker

[Eric Anderson]

This has been an interesting thread. I highly appreciate everyone’s feedback. I also agree with the collective assessment that (1) they are looking for a silver bullet which does not exist; (2) the people whose change could be the most impactful don’t currently have a stimulus for change; (3) the physically detached product owner is difficult in the healthiest of situations; (4) probably some other pearl of wisdom that has been offered which I cannot remember on a Sunday evening.

When this popped up on my radar it raised flags to begin with. You all have done an excellent job of bringing clarity to the misgivings I had as well as pointing out other problems I had not considered. Thank you very much for the support. “In the multitude of counselors there is safety.”

At this point, I do not believe this is setup for a healthy engagement. It’s funny how almost all of these consulting blue birds turn out that way. Unrealistic expectations.

Sent with fat fingers and an autocorrect with a mind of its own.

[Eric Anderson]

Your response re: true Agile made me laugh. When I hear that phrase from someone, I have to focus really hard to keep a reasonable poker face. Most times, I fail — generally with a rolling of the eyes. 

Sent with fat fingers and an autocorrect with a mind of its own.