Agile: Prix fixe or a la carte?

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

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“They don’t do Scrum so much as ScrumBut”

“We don’t do Scrum by the book, we changed it”

“We follow SAFe, except we’ve tailored it”

“We do a mix of agile methods”

“They call it agile but it isn’t really”

You’ve heard all these comments right? But have you noticed the tone of voice? The context in which they are said?

In my experience people say these things in a guilty way, what they mean to say is:

“They don’t do Scrum so much as Scrum but we don’t do it the way we should”

“We don’t do Scrum by the book, we changed it, we dropped the Scrum Master, we flex our sprints, …”

“We follow SAFe, except we’ve tailored it by dropping the agile coaches, the technical aspects and …”

“We do a mix of agile methods, we don’t do anything properly and its half baked”

“They call it agile but I don’t think they really understand what agile is”

Practitioners aren’t helped by advisors – coaches, trainers, consultants, what-not – who go around criticising teams for not following “Brand X Method” properly. But forget about them.

I want to rid you of your guilt. Nobody should feel guilty for not doing Scrum by the book, or SAFe the right way, or perfect Kanban.

Nobody, absolutely no person or organization I have ever met or heard of, does any method by the book.

After all “agile is a journey” and you might just be at a different point on the journey right now. To me agile is learning and there is more learning to be done – should we criticise people because the haven’t learned something?

All these methods offer a price fix menu: you pay a fixed price and you get a set menu.

In reality all agile methods should be seen as an à la carte menu: pick what you like, mix and match.

In fact, don’t just pick from the Scrum menu or the SAFe menu, pick across the menus: Scrum, XP, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, DaD, whatever!

And do not feel guilty about it.

Do it.

My agile method, Xanpan explicitly says: mix and match. Xanpan lays out a model but it also says change things, find what works for you, steal from others.

The only thing you can get wrong in agile is doing things the same as you did 3 months ago. Keep experimenting, keep truing new ways, new ideas. If you improve then great, if not, roll-back and try something else.

In other words, keep learning.

Picture: Thanks to Andersen Jensen for the above photo on Unsplash.


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Testing Testing 1 2 – video blog

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

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Testing isn’t, or shouldn’t be, about finding bugs. Type-1 Testing is about ensuring you can go to Type-2 Testing and get some useful feedback. Customer feedback is the really valuable stuff: does your product address the need you saw? Is there more to do? More value to be got? – and does the value delivered justify the cost of doing it?

Testing-Testing 1 2 is a 13-minute video blog rerecording of a private presentation I did during lock-down, I hope you find it interesting.


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Is Agile is obvious?

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

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From time-to-time people say to me:

“Agile is obvious”

When I’m being honest it is kind of hard to argue with them, it is certainly “obvious” to me. But at the same time agile is not obvious, or rather, the opposite of agile is also obvious. For example,

Agile says: obviously, you don’t know the future so don’t plan and research too far into the future.
Non-agile thinking says: obviously, failure to plan is planning to fail, obviously you need a plan of action, you need to plan for the future.

Agile says: obviously, people work best when they are self-motivated and given a say in what they do.
Non-agile says: obviously, people are lazy and will do as little as possible, therefore someone needs to manage them.

Agile says: high quality makes it easier to change in the future, obviously.
Non-agile says: obviously, quality is an endless quest, there is no point in polishing something which isn’t important, 20% of the effort gives 80% of the reward so don’t do any more.

Agile emphasises the here and now, the soon, obviously requirements can be handled just-in-time, so live for today.
Non-agile says: if we don’t think about the future we will obviously duplicate work and incur additional costs.

And my own entry: obviously, software development as diseconomies of scale therefore optimise for lots of small. The opposite is equally obvious: economies of scale are what makes modern business – and the cloud – successful so exploit them

There are a number of obvious examples that go with that:

Agile says: obviously we should test every change and new feature by itself to avoid the complications of interacting changes.
Non-agile says: obviously full test runs are slow and expensive so bundle work together and test it on mass.

Both agile and not-agile are obvious. What you consider obvious depends on your starting point. Once you start thinking “agile” a lot of things become obvious. But if you are not thinking agile then, if you are thinking some other model, then the opposite is also obvious.

Some would term this “An Agile Mindset”. However I don’t want to do that, I find the idea of “an agile mindset” too nebulous. I also note that most of the people I hear talking about “an agile mindset” seem to clinging on to some piece of holy lore which I consider not very agile and they believe is totally agile (the project model and upfront requirements usually.)

Instead I find myself going back to Theory-X and Theory-Y. In general people fall into one camp or the other. If you, your philosophy on work and life, align with theory-Y then all the “agile is obvious” statements above are indeed obvious. Conversely, if you generally follow a theory-X philosophy then all the non-agile statements are obvious.

Perhaps surprisingly I find people can flip, and be flipped, from X to Y. What is more difficult is getting people to unlearn behaviours and actions which they acquired with a theory-X mindset. Even if some element of theory-Y (and agile) is now obvious people need help to learn the new way and let go of the old. Some people can do this by themselves, others need help – or at least help speeding up the change.

Yes, thats part of my job as an Agile Guide. Sometimes just talking (and reflecting on recent events) helps. Sometimes exercises (or process miniatures they are sometimes called) help. Sometimes it is by experiments, exposing people to others can help as well – so conferences, user groups.

Rarely do people change because they went on training and were lectured too, but good training incorporates talking, reflection, exercises, etc. Such training is less training and more about practicing the future.

Obviously, my training is like that: I aim to make my training courses a rehearsal for future actions. Actually, while I “sell” training I prefer to think of it as a rehearsal or kaikaku event – kaikaku events also call a “kaizen blitz”, they are big change events from the people who brought you kaizen, more on them another time.

So when someone I’ve worked with turns around and says “Agile is obvious” I take it as a sign of success. They no longer seem agile as something strange, it is normal, it is onbvious.


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September micro-workshops

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

I’m running all three of my half-day workshops again in September:

You can read reviews of these workshops on the Allan Kelly agile training pages where you will find more details too.
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Tickets are on-sale now with Tito – with a 20% early bird discount. (I’m using Tito this time because it promises to handle VAT better for those of you outside Europe.) If you have any problems with Tito or would prefer to receive an invoice contact me directly via e-mail, allan at allankelly dot net.

Blog readers can get another 15% off with the code “Blog15”.

Plus, if you book and pay for one workshop you will receive a code for 50% off the other workshops – buy one get two half price offer.

As before there are a few free tickets for the unemployed and furloughed. I might release more unemployed free tickets nearer the time so join the wait list if you are unemployed and miss out.

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Recent talks online

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

During the last few months I’ve done a lot of online talks and presentations. Most have been public but some have been private, some have been repeats (with updates) of past presentations while others are completely new.

As always a full list in the insights section of my website and on my YouTube channel. These include:

And “Everything think you ever wanted to know about the Product Owner but were afraid to ask”, a conversation with Adrian Reed.

Unlike conference recordings which show me dancing around a stage these were all delivered online so I expect you will find the recordings better quality. The slides are available as PDFs, again on my website.

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The Business Case for Agile in 2020 – video blog

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

A couple of weeks ago I gave a private presentation to an organization entitled: “The Business Case for Agile in 2020.” Actually, it surprised me a bit that in 2020 people still wondered what the business case for agile was but that probably says more about my arrogance and the agile bubble I live in.

I’ve re-recorded the presentation and it is now on-line: The Business Case for Agile in 2020 is on YouTube and embedded below.

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I’m an Agile Guide

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

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Anyone who keeps a keen eye on Linkedin might have noticed I recently changed my job description to Agile Guide. I feel “guide” more accurately reflects what I do: part coach, part advisor, part teacher.

I work as a consultant – a hired gun – but “consultant” is a very vague term and covers a lot of ground. Plus a lot of people in the technology industry have a very negative view of consultants. I’ve been known to share that view myself so while consultant might be an accurate description it was also vague and open to misinterpretation.

Many people consider me an Agile Coach, and I have worked as an agile coach. However – as I’ve written before – this too is a conflicted term. Most of us who go by the title “agile coach” like to talk about helping people help themselves, unlocking the individual, respecting the individual as the expert, and so on. I agree with a lot of that and I do it. Sometimes.

I also know what professional coaches do and I don’t feel I’m one of them. I have a lot of respect for real coaches. Such coaches put their own opinions second and I don’t. I am prepared to tell people the way I think it should be – they are free to ignore my advice but I’m prepared to say it.

Thats why I also regard myself as part teacher: not just direct training sessions (which I do) but also one-on-one and in small free format group sessions.

So what title should I use?

I’ve struggled with this for years. My epiphany came a few weeks ago: Agile guide. I help others to get more agile, coaching is one tool but so is direct advice and teaching.

Hadn’t others thought of “Agile Guide”. So I checked out LinkedIn myself. One person. Someone I respect, someone I call a friend: Woody Zuill.

I checked in with Woody and his thinking parallels mine.

So I’m an Agile Guide – I help individuals, teams and enterprises become more agile in a digital world.

Part coach, part advisor, part teacher, plus thinker and route finder. I use skills of coaching, teaching and consultancy.

Who knows, maybe, it will catch on. After all, as Woody pointed out, we have both changed the world already.


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Time value profiles

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

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The picture above is a time-value profile: it shows how value changes with time. It is a graphic illustration of cost of delay.

A fine wine might increase in value over time but most things – think product, project, feature or just story – decay with time. Having something today is worth more than having it next week.

I invented Time-Value profiles – although I’m happy to acknowledge Don Rienertsen’s influence. I’ve included time-value profiles in many presentations and courses (they are a key part of my value workshop) but oddly, while I’ve mentioned them in this blog before I’ve never described them. So here goes…

Imagine we want to build a feature for a product. Naturally we ask: “what is this worth?”

Money is the obvious way to measure value but strictly speaking money is not itself valuable – unless you happen to want small colourful pieces of paper or decorated lumps of metal. Money is a store of value. The value of money is not the money itself but what you can exchange the money for. And because money can be traded for a wide variety of things, which are themselves valuable, money is a useful medium for comparison and measurement.

So the question “what is this worth?” may be answered qualitatively (“a vaccine is valuable because it saves lives”) or quantitatively (“a vaccine is worth $10 trillion because it allows life to return to normal”). In order to compare competing opportunities and valuations, and in order to draw a graph, giving value a numerical quantity helps greatly.

A time-value profile shows quantitive value over time when value is measured numerically: maybe in hard money like dollars or yen, or an abstract measure like business points, wooden dollars or Atlantic shillings (I just invented that but it works).

The graph starts today: we say “If we had feature X today it would be worth 100,000 shillings”. Maybe it is worth 100,000 because that is what a customer would pay for it, or maybe because we could sell 100,000 units at 1 shilling each, or so on.

But we don’t have X today. “If we get feature X next month it will be worth 90,000 shillings.” One month delay, one month late to the customer, one month later on Amazon, costs 10,000 shillings.

“If feature X is 3 months away then it is worth less than 50,000 shillings.” And so on.

Now, the unit of value – dollars, francs, shillings, wood – is of little important. Sure $1,000,000 is very different to ₽1,000,000 (Russian roubles if you don’t know) but as long as you don’t mix currencies the actual currency is unimportant.

What is important is the shape of the curve and, especially, where abrupt changes happen. Look again at the graph above: between months two and three there is a sudden drop in value. That has scheduling implications.

Once you start to think about time-value profiles then it becomes obvious that value is a function of time and we need to understand what that function looks like for any given work – project, product, initiative, feature, story, just anything in fact.

It should also become clear that the question “how long will it take to build X” needs to be inverted: “how long have we got to build X?”, “how much of X could we build?” or “in the time we have what could create something to satisfy need X”

And then “how much of the available value can we capture?”. Having X might be worth 100,000 but having a half of X might still be worth 50,000 more than not having X.

As I’ve written before: to any given problem there are multiple solutions. Engineering is not about creating the best possible solution, it is about creating a solution within constraints – as my widgets exercise shows.

Add in capacity planning and a whole new paradigm of scheduling opens up.

Not that I wish to ignore costs – and effort estimates – but they are secondary, and the subject of another blog. I’ll write more about this, and perhaps put something into a workshop, in the meantime my value workshop is the best place to find out more.


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The problem with Product Owners

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

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Advertisement: at the time of writing there are still a few tickets available for my online User Stories Masterclass beginning this Wednesday, 90 minutes each week for 4 weeks.

After submitting his review of The Art of Agile Product Ownership one of the reviewers sent me a note about the review was and said:

“Gee, I really wish I could be that type of Product Owner.”

His comment made me smile. He nicely summarised much of the argument in Art of PO. The book makes a case for an expansive product owner – one with product management skills and business analysis skills; a product owner who looks to improve value over the short and long run, and for product owners with more customer empathy and marketing skills than code empathy and technical skills.

Many of the Product Owners I meet aren’t really owners of the product. Rather they are “Backlog Administrators” and as such the industry is creating another problem for itself.

Over the years the product owner role has been diluted, so many product owners are not really owners of their products. Instead their role is limited and constricted. They are judged on how many features they get the team deliver, whether those features are delivered by some date or whether they have met near term goals of doing the things customers – or internal users – are complaining about.

In other words the whole team is a feature factory: requests go in and success is measured by how many of those requests reach production.

Sure that is one way to run a team, and in some places that might be the “right” way to do it (a team dedicated to addressing production/customer issues perhaps.)

Unfortunately agile is prone to this failing because of the sprint-sprint-sprint nature of work. The things in front of you are obviously more valuable than the things that are not. The people shouting at you today obviously represent greater value than those who are sitting quietly asking nicely. And both groups can mask bigger insights and opportunities.

Hang on you say: Is this the same Allan who has argued against long term planning? And against analysis phases? The Allan who always argues for action this day?

Well, yes I am that Allan. And I agree that I regularly argue that teams should get started on coding and limit planning and analysis.

But that doesn’t mean I’m against these things, it only means I’m conscious of the diminishing returns of planning; and I know that what is technically possible frames not only the solution but the problem – because often we can’t conceive of the problem until we see how a solution might change things.

Teams need to watch out for the “bigger” questions. Teams need to take some time to thing long term. Time needs to be spent away from the hurly-burly of sprint-sprint-sprint to imagine a different world. Dis-economies of scale may rule but there still needs to be consideration of larger things, e.g. jobs to be done over user stories.

The responsibility rests with the Product Owner.

They own the product the way I own my house: I have to pay the mortgage and I have to change blow light bulbs but I also need to think: how long will the roof last? Will we build an extension? When will we rebuild the patio? And where am I going to put a car charging point when that day comes?

I don’t take those decisions in isolation, I don’t spend lots of time on them and I don’t let them get in the way of work today. But spending a little time thinking about them, and I may well leader on the discussion. Taking a little time to think through out how things might fit together (don’t do the roof until after the extension is built) has benefits.

And so many Product Owners aren’t doing that. Worse still their organizations don’t expect them to. Maybe they see an Architects doing that, or a Product Manager – or maybe nobody does.

The thing is: the Product Owner is the OWNER.

Managers and architects are hired and fired as needed. The buck stops with owners.

Many organizations have got this the wrong way round. The Product Owner role is diluted and individual Product Owners emasculated.

Advertisement: at the time of writing there are still a few tickets available for my online User Stories Masterclass beginning this Wednesday, 90 minutes each week for 4 weeks.

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User Stories: online workshops – booking now (free for furloughed)

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

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Last month I ran an experiment: I delivered my one day workshop on User Stories, Requirements and Backlogs as a series of four 90 minute workshops and offered them for free. I had a great response with over 20 people signing up immediately and during the last month we all learned something – I had great feedback.

I’m now reworking that workshop further into two series: User Stories Masterclass and Value Driven Planning. Both of these will run as four 90 minute workshops online over successive weeks.

Booking is are now open for User Stories Masterclass. This will start next week, Wednesday 13 May (3pm, London BST time.) There will be one class at the same time each week.

Places are limited so don’t hold off booking. (If you miss out let me know and I’ll try to schedule another soon.)

Workshops 1 and 2 will focus on User Story format and what makes a good story. Workshop 3 will consider some of the processes that fit around User Stories (definitions of done and ready, acceptance criteria, etc.) and, importantly non-functional requirements. The final workshop will look at splitting stories.

I’m making some tickets free for those who have been laid-off or furloughed because of you-know-what.

For everyone else there are two price points. “Self pay” for those of you who are paying out of your own pocket. And a more expensive “Company paying” ticket for those with a generous employer – who can reclaim or avoid UK VAT.

To sweeten the extra price I’m including a one-hour one-on-one consultation for those who pay the higher price.

More about the value workshop soon – and why the split? Well, a) it turns out I have more than enough material, and b) people had some great questions and I want to allow time for conversation.

More details on my website.


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