The Downfall of Agile Hitler (Funny stuff)

The downfall of Agile Hitler video

Enjoy :-)

Cutter Consortium 2010 predictions

The Cutter Consortium just published its 2010 predictions.
http://www.cutter.com/predictions.html
Three of them are related to Agile.

APLN chapters in Latinamerica

Back last June I came up with the idea of staring an APLN chapter in Mexico. After talkng about it with several people in both the USA--at the BayAPLN mainly David Chilcott and Cesar Idrovo--and Mexico (polling people to see how much enthusiasm there is about it) I decided to go for it. Coincidentally an agilist from Costa Rica, David Alfaro, contacted BayAPLN in October and so we held a teleconference USA-Mex-CR (since I was in Mexico on business those days) to brainstorm how to get those chapters started. I suggested David A and I to keep in close contact to share experiences and help each other out in addition to getting coaching from David C and Cesar.

Then in November I had the opportunity to meet a group of Brazilians let by Guilherme Chapiewski, who were in San Francisco for the QCon conference, and invited them to the BayAPLN meeting to be held the following day (talk about good timing). They all attended and loved it. Guilherme told me he would like to get a chapter started in Brazil.

Long story short, David A has been actively increasing awareness on agile in Costa Rica and is working towards getting the first meeting. We learned that a chapter in Brazil was started a while back but didn't succeed and current efforts are towards re-starting it. From my side the first MexAPLN (unofficial for now) took place on Dec 8th in Mexico City and was a great start, with 8 executives from diverse enterprises attending.

Several ideas I have in mind are:

• Leveraging the fact that we have close relationship with BayAPLN (with me now being part of the Coordinating Committee) to figure out ways to help those chapters get up and running.
• Growing the MexAPLN to become the prime chapter in Latinamerica
• Create a latinamerican APLN metachapter to have higher impact in that geographical area and organize world-class events.

Last BayAPLN meeting of 2009

The last BayAPLN meeting, held a the Tacit Knowledge offices, was a retrospective of the year. There were 24 people at the meeting, which is low for BayAPLN meeting standards but understandable given that lots of people are either out of town, shopping, or wrapping things up at work to finish the year in balance.

What was done and accomplished throughout the year was quite impressive, for example:

• 329 registrations at the yahoo group
• 394 registrations at the linkedIn group
• Average attendance per meeting was 44, and topped around 70.
• We had a pretty good number of Agile-Lean celebrities giving presentations at meetings on topics related to agile and: current economy, adoption patterns, group coherence, learning games, agile transition styles, scaling scrum, Personas and story maps.
• Co-sponsored the Agile Open California 2009 open space.

We also noted areas of improvement and action items for next year, such as:

• Better task distribution
• Make presentations more easily available on our website
• Increase knowledge, e.g., adding terms on Wikipedia
• Give support to new APLN chapters such as those in Mexico, Costa Rica, and Brazil
• etc

We all look forward to an even better 2010. First meeting is Jan 19 and the activity is Chartering.

Journey to the Centre of the Ministry of the Economy in Mexico: part I

I started traveling to Mexico on business last January with the objective of injecting Agile and Lean practices into Mexican businesses. By the end of my first 12-day trip there I came to the conlusion that way too little was known about these and so instead of focusing on getting some contracts it was necessary to first evangelize about them, thus I decided to change strategies. As result, between January and April I gave 17 presentations on agile-lean at technical and leadership interest groups, associations, academia, and companies. The presentations were received with great enthusiasm and business-level meetings came out from some of them.

I was glad with the outcomes until another reality hit. Numerous Mexican businesses in the high tech, financial, and other white-collar sectors have to face a situation I expected to see on blue-collar sectors only, namely that of government mandated corporate governance such as ISO, CMMI, et-cetera. There is even a recent new regulation under the name of MoProSoft, a mexican model to regulate software development maturity that the Mexican Government approved as a norm for software development. Furthermore, it is undergoing evaluation by ISO to be accepted as a new standard. By now you might be wondering, is MoProSoft a model or a standard? Well, I wonder that myself and haven't got an answer for that yet. What I can indicate is that MoProSoft is, in good measure, a 1:1 mapping between some aspects of ISO and CMMI, plus the addition of a set of templates that need to be followed to fulfill its compliance requirements. Sounds heavy? It is! All those initiatives have been backed up by the Ministry of the Economy in Mexico.

I came to the obvious conclusion that if Agile-Lean are a great alternative to the aforementioned approaches to software development, and if corporate culture in Mexico is still heavily guided by government regulations then the obvious move to be effective was to reach that same government organization to get it to back up agile-lean. So, I took upon myself the quest for it. In March of this year I started talking to people in industry, academia, friends of friends, and so on trailblazing through professional networks, and going through numerous frustrations until by the end of November I got the luck to meet a person who connected me with a congressman directly who is directly connected with the Ministry of the Economy (this part is a great anecdote but I'll hold on to it for an article I'm writing). I met with the congressman, who liked what I have to offer so he asked me to give a presentation to other folks at the Congress building before bringing this to the attention of the Ministry of the Economy; and so I did. As result, those who attended gave to my proposal a thumbs-up and they agree this should be escalated to the Ministry. The congressman asked me to give another presentation, this time to a larger audience to then bring it to the Ministry of the Economy next month.

It's been an arduous journey but I am glad that I finally got to get some progress done before the end of the year. Hope things will move faster next year and that my objective of getting agile-lean be backed up by the Ministry of the Economy so that we can penetrate market more effectively.

I'll make a part-II posting when the time for it comes.

Editor's pick at Cutter Consortium

I wrote a short article for the Cutter Consortium, based on a previous blog, which ended up being the Editor's pick for this month. www.cutter.com

First MexAPLN meeting

The first MexAPLN meeting took place today at 7:45 PM at the Marie Callender's restaurant in Mexico City located on Insurgentes Avenue. Attendees were executives from diverse entities: Sergio Eduardo Duran Rubio (Accival), Martin Villalba Paredes (FIDEM), Alejandro Escamilla (Software Guru magazine), Armando Peralta and Ivan Carlos Rivera (Infotec), Jesus Flores, Jennifer Vazquez and René Molina (Bytline), and myself.

After introductions I talked briefly about how agile got started under a bottom-up approach and how as time has passed by, the practices matured, and the chasm has been crossed, executives are taking a more important and proactive role towards adoption thus the increase of top-down adoption. I then talked about what APLN is and, as a case, how BayAPLN operates. Next explained the benefits that MexAPLN can provide to industry and to us as professionals by bringing awareness on agile-lean.

Last we talked about the success factors and did some action planning for the next meeting, that time to be held at a company instead of at a restaurant.

To finish we did an intro planning pocker exercise for those new to it.

Photos I took today on my way between meetings in Mexico City

Lean-Agile could've saved this company

Air-Go was a software services company that went belly up. It's former CEO reported 10 reasons it failed. When I read about it I couldn't stop wondering where that company would be nowadays had it been an lean-agile company. I identified 8 of the reasons could've been fixed doing lean-gile
1. Poor people interaction. There was too much focus on personal benefit instead of team and business benefit. Also, interaction with customer was low.
2. Lack of vision. Chartering was never done and the company had no direction.
3. Different values. Individuals and teams were not on the same page with respect to what value should be added and how to add it.
4. Lack of focus. Teams handling too many projects at the same time instead of one at a time.
5. Overestimating. No knowledge of their teams' velocities.
6. Failed often but late. Most of their projects failed and failed too late.
7. Too much planing and very little execution. BDUF!
8. Overconfidence and designing for best-case scenario. Lack of planning and incremental/iterative development.

A recipe to improve enterprise success-fail project rate

Larry Gelwix has been the head coach of the Highland HS Rugby team in Salt Lake City for 36 years. Along that time he has accumulated a 413-9 win-loss record; the most impressive any sports coach—professional or amateur—has achieved ever. Wouldn't it be fantastic if our projects had a similar success-fail rate? Some aspects of his coaching style are well in tune with some agile-lean values and principles:

• High degree of teamwork: doing collaborative work with all stakeholders within and beyond the project boundaries makes much more likely to achieve team coherence.
• Horizontal leadership: to give room for self-organization, delegation, empowerment of the team to make better decisions, and boost skill improvement amongst team members. This fades away micromanagement and a command-and-control culture.
• Setting goals: short, achievable milestones which are goals on their own right. An incremental-iterative approach to create products foments discipline, increase quality, and motivate customers to provide feedback throughout the creation of the product they want.
• Realizing potential: by trusting and empowering the team we form motivated individuals. And a motivated person is usually more productive and less prone to make mistakes.

This recipe doesn’t ensure project success, but it can help your enterprise become hyperproductive and, as a consequence, successful. As Larry said: “good decisions don’t make life easy, but they do make it easier.”

Agile seminar in Palo Alto: Coaching coaching coaching

Last Thursday, Nov 12, (yes, yes, I know, I know... last Thursday was ages ago but I'm still posting this) Serena sponsored an agile panel at the California Café in Palo Alto, within the Stanford Campus, which they called Agile Pigs and Chickens BBQ Silicon Valley. It was a nice event at a good venue and around 50 people attended . Panelists were Roger Brown, Jeff McKenna, Jorge Rodriguez, and John Scumniotales.

The panel had a Q&A format and que questions were case-based mostly. Some of the topics were:

• Dealing with legacy: yes it is possible to start adopting agile while dealing with legacy (most projects do) and a recommendable approach is to start new things agile and to transition legacy as it is revisited.
• Getting started with agile. Recommendation is to start small and grow layers gradually.
• Scalability. Advice was keep it as small and simple as possible and avoid outsourcing, otherwise the task becomes quite challenging
• Web 2.0 and agile. There's a misperception that agile doesn't require discipline and documentation when in fact it requires stakeholders to be continuously on top of their game--without overdoing things--and documentation as well as planning are necessary in agile. It is done differently and more effectively.
• Next challenges: Focus on design, value, outer layers of the organizational onion, creation of companies 100% agile.

One other point that is quite crucial is that agile adoption can be much better if companies have an agile expert coaching then for as long as necessary. This is way too often neglected, with companies assuming that training is sufficient only to go belly up at implementation time. See for example my recent posting on a scrum project gone bad.

What happened to self-organization and collaboration?

While at yesterday's Agile Journal seminar in Santa Clara CA it called my attention that all presenters who talked about how they do scrum (oh, yes, other practices were mentioned but not talked about) said something that made me question how much self-organization they allow their teams to have. One aspect is that of story assignment. A self organizing team is one that allows its members to self-assign the stories to be implemented during each sprint, considering of course priorities and upon agreement with PO and SM. The teams mentioned at the seminar were given the tasks to implement by the SM.

Since the seminar was primarily to promote software tools the presenters talked about how much the tools have benefited their projects and how great it is for stakeholders to have a tool to go to for, say, write a story to then be assigned. Nobody talked about the importance to maintain face-to-face collaboration. Based on their description it seems the tool ends up being at the center of activities instead of being a means to capture and track the activities to facilitate documentation and reporting. People must continue having close communication and collaboration. A story should be discussed, estimated, and assigned properly.

A failed scrum project in pictures...

What could happen when a company doesn't take agile coaching..
(question is will they take coaching and the necessary training or abandon agile???)

Cutter Consortium Summit Latinamerica '09

The Cutter Consortium Latinamerica Summit took place Oct 28~30. The first two days were for sessions and discussions panels, and the last day for workshops.

Tom DeMarco gave a great presentation on Collaboration during which he said that key aspects to build systems are: small pieces and collaboration, where trust is the bandwidth of collaboration.

There was then a session and discussion panel on Operational Excellence during which it was discussed what factors affect operational excellence in organizations. Some of the aspects brought to the table were better change management and fast delivery, better governance, do what is good enough vs. perfect, build on trust. I added to it the importance to pay much more attention to human interaction. An important metric is how much of the budget is used to support the front office vs. the back office. Trends that help are moving the architecture towards the business process, business process improvement, governance focused on end to end coverage, stress the idea of SLAs to reach company and customer. My personal preference is towards paying attention to these aspects in a light way. That is, yes, do them but don't make them big, heavy, and friction-adding (keep it within the Agile boundaries). An attendee mentioned that in Mexico the areas of innovation and process will be dismantled to then become part of IT.

Next was a session and a panel on SOA. Mike Rosen gave a great presentation in which he presented 4 case studies, one of them being a failed project. SOA is expensive and complex. Its architecture has to be oriented towards the business and not IT, and should be, arguably, centralized (and there were opinions towards the opposite). SOA doesn't only bring IT process improvement but long-terms ROI. E.g. Wells Fargo had $300MM waste in architecture until they got it right with SOA and the expense on it paid by itself. Wells Fargo can fully absorb a new bank in 6 weeks.

The first session of the second day was my own. I talked about competitive advantages of adopting agile-lean, even more so in times of crisis. I'll be posting the ppt on my website shortly.

Rogelio Oliva took then the audience through a wonderful exercise on how manage your boss in a crisis. A recommended book that was used for this exercise is Adventures of an IT Leader.

Michael Mah showed measurements that show the impact (not pretty) about outsourcing and the benefits of using agile practices. It was followed by a discussion panel on the same subject, where it was mentioned that even though nearsourcing makes the time zone differences be less significant there are still cultural and communication problems that need to be solved. We have to also take advantage of the fact that the world is better interconnected than ever before to find alternatives to improve the the way we communicate while at the same time improving the current state of the planet (ecological crisis).

The third day was for workshops. I attended Bob Benson's on Filling the Governance Gap. It was fun half-day with discussions and guidance. The three keywords are:

• trust
• relationship
• process

For more highlights on what went on, in the words of presenters check my tweets @masakmaeda.

Ultrasist

Just out of a meeting with Ultrasist, the first Mexican company to achieve CMMI Level 5. They are actually a very progressive company definitely ahead of the average Mexican software dev company. What was actually cool is that the innovative mechanism they utilized to achieve level 5 was apply the principles of XP at design level (pair design). They didn't go about doing pair programming though or any other agile practice. However it may not take long before they start doing some adoption.