David Alfaro: Scrum Costa Rica

Doing something because we really believe in doing it is the best moral code one can have, there’s nothing better than the celebration of reason and the standing of the “Why?”.

Doing something because I say so, because is mandatory make it sounds like “just because”. Even more, forgetting the “Please” particle ignores the existence of the order’s recipient, transforming him in a entity without volition.

Companies start loosing perspective when they start giving the message that in the company’s magnanimity, the employee has the job benefit of, well, having a job. That easily degenerate from leadership to direct management. Thinking that the employees don’t have any other job choices encourages patronizing. Ok, in the current economic turmoil, maybe job choices are really scarce. However, the huge challenges that such turmoil is creating requires a strong, adaptable and High-Performance company.

Surviving in the current market requires having a compelling performance purpose that exceeds sum of individuals goals. Requires joint work to integrate complementary skills. And guess what, just leadership can inspire a bunch of employees to do that.

There are several angles of good leader, however I want to focus in the foundation of leadership: Credibility.

James Kouzes and Barry Posner, authors of the best selling book “The Leadership Challenge”, lay out the common phrases many company employees have used to describe how they know credibility when they see it:

• Leaders practice what they preach.
• They walk the talk.
• Their actions are consistent with their words.
• They put their money where their mouth is.
• They follow through on their promises.
• They do what they say they will do.

People first listen to the words, then they watch the actions.[...] If people don’t see consistency, they conclude that the leader is, at best, not really serious, or at worst, an outright hypocrite.

Are you saying you are very innovative company but in reality you don’t have the money for a R&D Department or new Product/Services initiatives? Do you promise a extra benefit or promotion, but you are not sure you have the money to do it? Do you say you listen to your clients but your products and/or services hasn’t evolved  for a while and they won’t? Do you say you are building something but zero effort is on it? Are you serious at all with this credibility thing? Good employees are smart and wary, specially technical ones.

Don’t ask for a leap of faith if you haven’t proved how trustworthy your judgment is. Don’t encourage a company culture where there isn’t any. Don’t complaint about lack of communication when you have enforced silos.

Commitment and loyalty are patiently built on credibility. Once they are built, and with the right skills, your company will go beyond surviving.

Further reading

Leading Teams – First Comes Credibility
Wikipedia entry: Credibility

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A False dilemma “involves a situation in which only two alternatives are considered”, states the Wikipedia, “when in fact there are other options”. Do you remember “If you are not with us, you are against us.”? Well, that happens when you fall in fundamentalism.

Fundamentalist anti-agilists got deeply offended because they say agile doesn’t follow a scientific approach, that it is offensive not treating Project Management as a Computer Science, alas! Turing is wallowing in his tomb!

Fundamentalist anti-cascadists say that traditional software management techniques are obsolete, that it ignores the innate nature of uncertainty of every software project, the virtue of self-managed teams always outperforms past management practices.

Before continuing, let me state clearly that I am a truly believer of High Performance Teams (HPT). In the way of getting a HPT you will inevitably  ended up practicing the agile principles.

That said, HPT’s are not always needed. So practicing agile is not always needed. Although most of the software projects fall in the uncertainty levels suitable for Agile, there a bunch of cases when direct and cascade-like managing is the best fit, so a group, rather than a team is needed.

Take the case of some massive web agencies or software sweat shops (very common down here in Costa Rica), or a well established  and reliable software migration processes. They are a typical production line. They’ve got efficiency through specializing and strongly documenting every phase  of the project development (or better said: production  line). Of course, there are parts of those processes that can be significantly improved by implementing agile practices. Even more, those kind of companies would want to jump to the “Product Creation” wagon where Agile is the best.

Be wise and take time for analyzing the complexity of the problem/project about to start. To do that, make your homework and use the Ralph Stacey’s Agreement &  Certainty Matrix against the project:

Identifying management decisions on two dimensions: the degree of certainty and the level of agreement.

When issues are Close to Agreement and Close to Certainty, Stacey says:

Much of the management literature and theory addresses the region on the matrix which is close to certainty and close to agreement. In this region, we use techniques which gather data from the past and use that to predict the future. We plan specific paths of action to achieve outcomes and monitor the actual behavior by comparing it against these plans. This is sound management practice for issues and decisions that fall in this area. The goal is to repeat what works to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

That is: use Cascade.
When issues are in the edge of chaos (Complex gray area), Stacey says:

This is the zone of complexity where the traditional management approaches are not very effective but it is the zone of high creativity, innovation, and breaking with the past to create new modes of operating.

That is: use agile.

Further reading

There is also a outstanding article in the Harvard Business Review called “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making”. Really amazing article. Do read it! I’ve found a PDF version of it.

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Seth Godin has posted a wonderful checklist for solving the terrible problem of long unfruitful meetings. I have lost count of how many too long meetings have finished with the uncomfortable sense of being in the middle of nowhere.

Making an unshameful copy-paste act, the list goes like this:

1. Understand that all problems are not the same. So why are your meetings? Does every issue deserve an hour? Why is there a default length?
2. Schedule meetings in increments of five minutes. Require that the meeting organizer have a truly great reason to need more than four increments of realtime face time.
3. Require preparation. Give people things to read or do before the meeting, and if they don’t, kick them out.
4. Remove all the chairs from the conference room. I’m serious.
5. If someone is more than two minutes later than the last person to the meeting, they have to pay a fine of $10 to the coffee fund.
6. Bring an egg timer to the meeting. When it goes off, you’re done. Not your fault, it’s the timer’s.
7. The organizer of the meeting is required to send a short email summary, with action items, to every attendee within ten minutes of the end of the meeting.
8. Create a public space (either a big piece of poster board or a simple online page) that allows attendees to rate meetings and their organizers on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of usefulness. Just a simple box where everyone can write a number. Watch what happens.
9. If you’re not adding value to a meeting, leave. You can always read the summary later.

Seth Godin is a genius in the marketing arena and product development and you better subscribe to his blog to get digestible chunks of wisdom on a frequent basis.

To that list I want to add:

1. Make everybody clear how much money the meeting is costing. Sum all the fractions of involved people’s salaries invested in being gathered X amount of time.
2. Boldly leave the room once the egg timer rings or when your have detected that the meeting has been ineffective.
3. Don’t wait for your boss. If your boss is late and anyone else is on time, start the meeting. Be consistent with the policy. Make him pay the fine as anyone else.
4. Identify issues that can be effectively resolved in the meeting.
5. Define clear Action Items to deal with detected issues that need to be resolved out of the meeting.
   1. Set a person to take accountability on the resolution of the issue.
   2. Measure the issue and set the metrics to know if the issue was clarified or resolved.
6. At the end of the meeting, review all the agreements reached, action items and people responsible  for those action items.

Recommended reading

Running Effective Meetings

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I am really passionate when it comes to organizational culture, specially the attitudes and values it comprises. People who choose to be in a company for a while, coalesce around attitudes and values, that’s the lock-in factor.

How to take a sip of a company culture? Go to those corporate/company meetings when every is invited.

I willenumerate the common behaviors in a traditional company meeting, a company that thinks itself living in a Cold War world of secrecy and castes. Conversely, I’ll enumerate the common behaviors of a company meeting that promotes credibility and commitment. Effective leaders realize that Information Workers of today baulk more at any imposed directive. Information Workers grudgingly do something that they consider whimsical or not fully explained.

Old-Fashioned Corporate meetings

• Boring.
• Upper management is seen as Ivory Towers.
• Flaunting Managers.
• Patronizing, overemphasis on hierarchy.
• One way channel:  Management just want to talk, not conversation-friendly.
• TOO formal.
• Technology oriented rather than people oriented.
• Management is noncommittal when asked about goals committed in past meetings.

Engaging Corporate meetings

• Topics provoke interest.
• Upper Management is seen as connection hub for employees and customers, willing to hear.
• Presentations are succinct, result-oriented, but in a “telling story” fashion.
• Managers are humble: no problem in admitting mistakes.
• Informal enough: It’s not a bacchanalia, but is not a mass either. The environment tend to be conversational.
• People oriented (customer, employees) rather than Technology oriented. REMEMBER: Technology is a tool to satisfy PEOPLE. PEOPLE FIRST, then technology. When you think in that order of priorities, you end up with the most advanced technologies, or advanced enough at worst.
• Management commit to specific and reachable goals, and present results in following meetings.

The latter kind of company understands how important is getting people connected, how important is to listen and joining the conversation that employees are already happening in the hallways, and customers are already happening in the streets.

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     For traditional Human Resources department (well, the kind that maybe is still needed in textile manufacturer factories in the third world) the most outstanding sign of its success can be said in terms of: being kind, payroll done on time and deliver required Wage Statements with punctuality.

However, for a Technology Company, such achievements are not enough. How different is a Software company from a textile manufacturer factory?

1. Employees are Knowledge Workers:

a. Replacing a position is very difficult. It’s not just a prescriptive position; it’s also a lot of knowledge and expertise that is lost when someone leaves the company. So Talent Management (attraction and retention) becomes the number one concern for HR.

b. Psychology of Knowledge Workers is peculiar, complex. Programmers can be Systematic, Pragmatic and/or Opportunistic Programmers. We can be more demanding in the reason and effectiveness of managerial orders or “team building” requests: We can sense easily when HR is doing activities just for the sake of doing them, or just because HR wants to show off its power. HR needs to understand Geek culture.

c. Good Software Companies move at Internet Speed; the best move faster. That kind of movement requires embracing a lot of change and innovation. That means tolerance to continuous questioning of hierarchical structures and building self managed teams. Open discussion and constructive conflict, problem understanding and coaching. Exploring new ways of doing things and anticipating risks and opportunities on a daily basis. And very importantly, HR needs to understand and appreciate the needs and aspirations of sophisticated talent. The company is not supposed to dealing with a HR that has been left behind of technology and opportunities. HR is meant to be an adviser.

d. Employees are smarter. Like saying that my readers are smarter than me (why? Visit this wonderful article), HR must have healthy perspective of her ego and thrive for collaboration and dialogue.

2. Recruiting is a challenge: Any high performance company requires the right set of skills, among others things. Not only highly talented people but also highly agile people, able to work in an agile company, able to define and follow a reached approach and willing to inspect regularly such collaborative approach. In many cases a strict description of a job position is not useful, the kind of company I’m talking about have people able to contribute beyond the prescribed position. They are resilient. Where can HR find that kind of people? What would you do if you have a product and want to reach people that fit your persona description? GO WHERE THEY ARE! Where are the talented people? Where are people that keep up with technology? Web 2.0 is helping a lot. Don’t come whining saying you are not from the Technology world and those techie fads like blogging, LinkedIn and Facebook are unbeknownst to you. That’s the way talking today, whether you like it or not. Need to have any good idea of a candidate for a position? Take a look at her profile in LinkedIn, it is updated? Is she well recommended? Has a very remarkable blog? What can you see through all that? A LOT! Sure you have to do it wisely and good timed.

3. Information sharing is vital, of course, we deal with knowledge. HR needs to foster transparency of fluid communication between teams, between teams and managers/executive board. Sharing knowledge? Blogging has smooth conversations in many ways, especially inside the company. Where can you keep all you employees’ profiles updated? Again LinkedIn is by most the proven answer. More and more I hear about companies asking their employees to update their profile in Linkedin. Intranets must reflect such willing to communicate. Facebook can be an interesting idea, but whatever the choice is, invest to have a good intranet that ease the talking through the company.

4. Compensation packages must be based on performance, ROI, and must be transparent, understood by anyone. Remember, money is not the most important motivator. I highly recommend this article of Mary Poppendieck about it.

5. HR is strategic. HR is not just coordinating parties. HR is not meant to be in charge of merely operative aspects of managing people. It could be at the highest organizational level reporting to the CEO or even the Chairman. HR is an adviser. That means a complete awareness and constant contribution of company’s strategy. That means a complete understanding of technology market and company’s product portfolio and current strategic and future needs as the company evolves.

The speed of our technology world can be daunting; the HR Manager must help the company to embrace change, must help to be agile.

Recommended articles:

• Are You Ready for an Agile Future? by Susan M. Heathfield
• The New “DNA” of HR by John Sullivan

Do you know any HR Manager (who fits this description) willing to work in Costa Rica? Let me know.

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