- Management is primarily about people and their relationships, not about departments and their profits
- management 3.0 = complexity
- need to replace hierarchies with networks
- agile software development is the best way to develop software
- old style management is the biggest obstacle
- managers must learn how social systems work
complexity is one of the most important concepts in the 21th century
- those who know all about one level of a hierarchical system may be unqualified to deal with higher or lower levels because those other levels require different knowledge
- applying linear thinking to complex system can create big mistakes
Innovation
- innovation is key to survive for many organisations - crucial elements for innovation are
- knowledge - to be productive
- creativity - to produce original and useful results
- motivation - to do something worth doing it
- diversity - adds robustness and flexibility to an organisation
- personality - result of people embracing a number of basic virtues
- the orga must focus on actionable items out of ideas to really get innovation implemented
- a team consumes information and produces innovation (means - it also need the information)
agile fundaments
- people
- are unique individuals
- required to self organize
- are trusted
- functionality
- direct customer involvement
- simplicity as key for the design of each feature
- quality
- focus on it is crucial
- technological excellence is needed
- tdd, code reviews, definition of done, iterative development, refactoring, emergent design (do it when needed)
- tools
- for daily builds, ci, automated testing
- to avoid boring tasks and concentrate on innovative tasks
- time
- sprints - to produce valuable results in a short time frame
- value
- fast respond to change (through fast feedback cycles)
- detect the need in moment
- process
- daily face to face communication
- continuous improvement
- conflict
- conflicts as natural aspect of complex systems
- force improvement
complexity
- difference between complexity and complication
- e.g. a clock is complicated but not hard to to understand
- a group of 3 people is not complicated but complex in it’s behaviour
body of knowledge of systems
- system theory
- a team can construct itself, can define its identity, needs to interact with its environment and importance of interaction between team members
- most phenomena can be viewed as webs of relationships among elements
- cybernetics
- study of systems that have goal and interact with their environment through feedback mechanisms
- understand the process in regulatory systems - that include iterations of acting (with effect on the environment), sensing (check response of environment), evaluating (compare current state with the goal)
- a team is a goal oriented system that regulated itself using various feedback cycles
- dynamical system theory
- systems have states - some are stable others not
- not longer changing states or states where systems tends too are attractors
- helps to explain why some projects are stable and why sometimes an organization reverts back to its original behaviour
- game theory
- multiple systems compete for the same resources and systems may develop competing strategies
- helps to explain the bevaviour of people in teams and of teams in organizations
- evolutionary theory
- teams, product and projects evolve while adapting to their changing environment
- helps to understand growth, survival and adoptions of systems over time
- chaos theory
- even smallest changes can have tremendous consequences at a later time
- behaviour of complex systems is often unpredictable
- consequences for estimation, planning and control
- dimension of a complex system
- simple or complicated
- ordered, complex, chaotic
energize people
- creative phase
- preconventional creativity
- children <7 years
- creative without knowing constraints
- conventional creativity
- children <11 years
- creative with knowing constraints and domination of constraints
-
postconventional creativity
-
11 years
- knowing constraints but produce new things that use the constrains
-
- preconventional creativity
- problem with knowledge - it constrains peoples few of the world
- you need to push people to the postconvetional creativity (orga often stuck in conventional creativity)
- give challenges - e.g expose them to environments that stimulate reflection and inspiration
- environment should be creative too - its the managers task to do this
- safety
- freedom to take risks and ask questions
- acknowledgment that failures are OK
- with safety you’re more inclined to express ideas
- play
- play games (turn activities into little games, play games during lunch break)
- variation
- routine work kill creativity
- make sure there is always sufficient variation
- visibility
- show creativity results
- edge
- try to get edge experiences (bungee jumping,…)
- make real challenges a little scary
- safety
- creativity is based on intrinsic motivation
- care about orga survival
- care about innovation
- care about creativity
- care about intrinsic motivation
- motivators
- challenging work
- achievement
- personal growth
- recognition
- responsibilities,…
- hygiene factors (if not present they cause damage)
- job security
- salary
- status
- working conditions
- policies
- fringe benefits,…
- intrinsic needs
- competence - the person must be capable in coping with the environment
- autonomy - autonomous choice of action
- relatedness - care for and be related to others, be involved in social world
10 desires of team members {#10-desires-of-team-members}
- make people feel competent - challenging but within their grasp
- feel accepted - make compliments on achievements
- curiosity (Neugier) must be addressed
- satisfying their honor
- idealism - contribution to make the world a better place
- independence - different from other people with own tasks and responsibilities
- order - some company rules and policies
- power - listen to what they have to say and arrange possibilities to do so
- social contacts - create environment to emerge ~
- status - let them see their status in the organization
ASK what can I do to help you do your best work?
- acknowledges that person is capable of doing her best
- person evaluates her own performance
- initiates discussion about further improvements
Create motivational balance sheets
- list points that could influence motivation and say if it motivates or demotivated - make the final balance of all points
creative techniques
- processes
- creative problem solving, productive thinking model, synetics
- problem definition
- who, why, what, where, when, how
- divide into chunks
- idea generation
- brainstorming, talking pictures
- idea selection
- anonymous voting, consensus mapping, sticking dots
incentives
- the pushing of individuals in a complex system leads to side effects that cannot be forseen
diversity
- watch for every team member what connections it creates in the organizations network - to extends the common network
- search for new people that extends or strengthen that network
- use it in the recruiting talks - scan for behaviour to build networks
personality
- do personal assessments for each team member ask, present your own results and let them share if they want
- test - Big five factors of personality or sixteen personality factor questionnaire
- do it yourself team values kit - to create own set of team values s.92
- define also your personal values - and use not a different value set to your team (except you have all the team values already)
- remove open door policy (implies, that there are bigger differences) - better have a no door policy
self organization
- self organization is the default (in nature)
- makes no distinction between good or bad – command and control pattern was invented
- emergence - a property in a system that cannot be traced back to its individual parts is an emergent property
- supervenience - property does not longer exist, if you remove the individual parts
- not an aggregate - e.g. fluidity of water is not only through the addition of water molecules
- downward causality - influences the individual parts - e.g. culture influences its group members
- physics - chemistry - biology - psychology - economics
- each level has emergent properties
- you can’t explain problems by only picking one part of a system
- collective decision making without central planning
- system (team) can be more than the sum of its parts
- emergent behaviour of a team cannot be predicted when you put a team together
- self selection - team that selects it’s own team members - its an emerging team (no manager was not defined by the manager)
- self direction - no management from outside is directing (some friends playing football)
- darkness principle - each team member has only an incomplete mental model of the whole projects
- thats why you need to plan and decide together
- self organized teams increase control (because the darkness principle is also applied to managers)
- software development = micromanagement by the team
- delegation of control is the best way to keep projects manageable - Conant-Ashby Theorem - Every good regulator of a system must have a model of that system
- you push decisions and responsibilities down to a level where someone has information that is smaller in size and more accurate
- most of the decisions should be made in the subsystems
- distributed control is better (nature did it - brain, digestive nerv system, immune system)
- a single controlling authority makes a system neither robust nor resilient
- empowerment
- core responsibility of a manager
- reason - improve manageability and also motivation
- people must be empowered to make their own decisions based on their (better) information - whether they like it or not
- don’t create motivational dept
- don’t be bossy - people don’t want to be told what to do - they want to be asked
- wear a wizard’s hat
- the wise wizards never do the real work - they help the heros to succeed
- is more than just delegation
- includes support of risk taking, personal growth and cultural change
- also acknowledges how powerful people already are
- improves worker satisfaction and quality of life
- improves productivity and quality of service
- does not diminish your own status - it’s more likely to increase it
- you make your team (and therewith yourself) better if you empower it
- investment (takes a while to pay the interest rate) in social capital
- choose the right maturity level - low, moderate, high
- pick right authority level - Tell, Sell, Consult, Agree, Advise, Inquire, Delegate
- tell - make decision and announce it
- sell - make decision and attempt to gain commitment
- consult - invite and weight input before making a decision
- agree - invite workers and join a discussion to reach consensus in a group - your voice is equal to others
- advise - attempt to influence workers by telling them our opinion - they decide
- inquire - let them decide first - ask them to convince you afterwards
- delegate - leave decision entirely up to the team
- gradually build up empowerment - by giving more and more challenging tasks
- number of persons to involve for each task?
- depends on risk - a group can reduce the risk
- options (depends on the situation):
- one specific person with another (higher) level
- express the requirement that must agree
- allow people on the same level to act on their own
- team needs to assign someone to do something
- use delegation checklist (page 132) - all questions should be answered with yes - if not - make the team aware of it
- is the risk factor of delegating this work adequately addressed
- do the people have the right empowerment skills and discipline
- have you considered and selected the right level of authority
- have you considered the question of delegating to individuals or to teams
- is what you’re delegating a discrete chunk of work
- do the people have the skills to do this particular kind of work
- do the people have the right format for the work products to use
- do the people have the tools necessary to be useful
- do the people know what the results should look like
- did you set the boundary conditions for the work (e.g. budget, time, resources)
- do the people know when the work is due
- do the people know what progress looks like
- do the people know how often to report to you on progress
- is someone available to coach or mentor the people in case they need help
- if you want something done - practice your patience (never do it yourself)
- what did I do wrong - use the checklist to analyze this too
- address the intrinsic desires
- make sure that the environment is supportive (and work on it if its not the case)
- trust
- trust your team
- let them solve problems in the team
- make it clear who is responsible
- earn trust from people
- do what you say, do what you’re committed to
- behaviour must be predictably pleasant
- help people trust each other
- communication and commitment
- respect them - give them the environment to try - others built also trust on their skills
- trust yourself
- you can only trust others if you trust yourself
- respect
- know what people think about you - ask for feedback
- what is it that I should stop doing
- what is it that I should start doing
- what is it that I should continue doing
- and give feedback
- be somehow in the topic (at least at an high level)
- trust your team
- organization structure
- ordered
- no creativity and innovation
- no empowerment
- bureaucracy - behaviour is regular and predictable
- complex
- employees often don’t empower themselves - they are empowered by managers
- chaos
- self empowerment - not structured and predictable
- ordered
who or what is tuning the rules in an organization
- misconception is that managers do it
- managers are not responsible for self orga
- its the managers job to make sure that the people can create their own rules together
- one responsibility is the development of a self organizing system
- alignment of constraints - and protection of the system
- protect people and shared resources - make sure they’re treated fairly
- self- orga needs a boundary around it
- make sure that what emerges has value to you and the environment
- you don’t manage the people - you manage the system
- define the direction of the self-organizing system
- short - tasks
- develop the system, protect the system, direct the system
leader
- a complex system does not need a single leader - needs more leaders by topic
- a cross-functional team functions better when it has multiple leaders - each with own area(s) of interest
- rulers - law making. enforcement and sanctioning
- football - leaders are the teams best players - rulers are the referees
- managers are leaders and rulers
- do also governance(administrative leadership) - like hire/fire
- what projects to work on, how much they are going to earn, what clothes to wear
- leader - agree, advise, inquire
- ruler - tell, sell, consult
purpose and goals
- every living system has an intrinsic purpose (comes naturally to a system)
- every living system can have an extrinsic purpose - assigned to it by an owner
- every living system can have an autonomous purpose - assumed by itself
- the goal of the team is not a result of the goals of its team members but of the interaction between the team members
- shareholder value is NOT the goal of an organization (its the goal of the shareholder)
- an organization has many stakeholders - each with their own goals
- friedman - was not aware of the complex system - when he said shareholder value is the only goal of an organization
- shareholder value is an outcome - not a strategy
- what’s the purpose of a software team?
- intrinsic - product software
- extrinsic - (defined to have the boundary and allow self orga to take place in the right direction) - needs to be defined by the manager
how to align constraints
- goal - only an extrinsic or autonomous purpose; if intrinsic use better - meaning
- the team should have/get a shared goal - examples:
- next year we’re going to win the Best Product award for our industry
- checklist for agile goals - pick some of them that you find important to the current situation:
- specific and understandable that people know what it means
- simple and concise that it fits on a small sticky note
- manageable and measurable that success can be determined
- memorable and reproducible that it can be communicated to others easily
- attainable and realistic to have a chance to achieve it
- ambitious and stimulating so that it isn’t too easy to achiv
- actionable and assignable to turn it into specific actions
- agreed upon and committable that people feel responsible for it
- relevant and useful that people care about it
- time-bound and time-specific that people know when to do it
- tangible and real to see the effects of achieving it
- excitable and igniting that people are motivated to do their best
- inspiring and visionary to see the bigger picture
- value-based and fundamental that it builds on company values, team values or personal values
- revisitable and assessable to reassess its applicability later
Goals
goal don’ts {#goal-don’ts}
- not created to intimidate people and threaten them (with loss of their jobs)
- not defined merely to impress shareholders or people watching the orga from the sideline
- should not favour short term wins over long term losses
- should not distract people from a desired outcome by focusing only on the action plan
- not too many goals
agile goals (in difference to old goals)
- higher purpose - transcends goals of all individuals (not only CEO or shareholders)
- goal depends on its context
- should not be connected to rewards or incentives - should address intrinsic desires (as learned from Drive - extrinsic motivation often destroy creativity)
- should give employees a sense of direction
communicate your goal
- you raise the pressure and make it transparent
ASK - Do you still know what your goal is? How is this action going to help us in achieving our goal?
vision statement
- created for business, projects and products
- outward facing
- deals with place the system has in the world and the change it will bring to its environment
- is about the desired end state
- paint picture about delighted users, market domination, world peace
mission statement
- used for groups and teams
- inward facing
- steering the internal dynamics of a system
- is about the way to get to an end state
- talk about technical excellence, innovative achievements, defeating the competition
allow team to have an autonomous goal
- you need to map other goals with it
- other goals should not overrule the team autonomous goal
- team must find it on their own - never tell them to create their own goal
use boundary list of authority
- table with key decision area, how (authority level- see above), whe (team/individual)
- avoids that people run into hidden electrical fences - helps to keep them motivated and productive
- set authority level to lowest possible level
protect people
- self organizing system must not be fair (see kids group)
- manager promotes self organization but also needs to protect people
- ask - Who are your friends there to get a feeling if the member is integrated
manage shared resources
- otherwise it leads to the tragedy of the commons - work the four ingredients:
- institutions
- work on building trusting relationships between competing systems - to increase acceptance of common rules
- information
- that increases the understanding of the physical and social environment - reduce uncertainty
- identity
- increase one’s sense of community and reduce competition
- incentives
- reward responsible use, punish overuse
- institutions
quality
- you need to put the right and clear constraints in place to enforce quality
social contract for orga
- freedom to voice your opinion
- professional development
- nondiscrimination
- help
team - rules
- agree on the team’s direction; don’t go at it yourself (alignment)
- don’t collide with team members and prevent problems (separation)
- work together with the team; don’t single yourself out (cohesion)
some agile manager principles
- culture - no matter what other methods you apply to achieve competence in a social system - in the end it all depends on whether people actually care
- instructors - teach people how to do their jobs properly - again, and again and again
- drivers license - require that people are properly tested before allowing them to participate in (challenging) projects
- traffic signs - decrease the chance of problems in your teams by using smart and proactive tools, checklists, alerts, notifications
- traffic police - have a process manager walking around whose job it is to make samples of the results in your projects and check whether the quality output is produced
- car horn - make sure your team members have guts to tell each other how to improve their daily work
- government - management will need to clean up the mess
feedback loops
- positive feedback loops - effect increases itself
- you need to recognize feedback loops - enables to understand why an orga can get stuck in a certain kind of behaviour
- negative feedback loops - system counteracts by slowing down the change
- when an organization grows, the amount of overhead increases with the square of its size, whereas the horsepower of the orga grows only linearly
- can bring stability to a system
- intentional feedback loops in a short cycle are often better than in long cycles
Competence - discipline * skill {#competence-discipline-*-skill}
- discipline
- importance of discipline is evident
- skipping discipline makes you go slower (you produce technical dept)
- maturity levels
- oblivious (vergesslich) - we even don’t know that we perform a process
- variable - we do whatever we feel
- routine - follow our routines (except when panic)
- steering - choose among routines
- anticipating - establish routines based on past experience
- congruent - everyone is involved in improving everything all the time
- skill
- novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, expert
- skill differs from discipline and must be developed separately
- create a skill - discipline matrix
- maturity can be measured with those two dimensions
- managers must take care of both dimensions
- rules
- behaviour of a team is guided by rules
- each team member maintains his own set of rules
- avoid senseless synch of rules - give them freedom - it motivates
- competing rules in a team can strengthen the whole
- good rules are adopted by all team members
- subsidiarity - organizing principle that things should be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority
- responsibility of individual worker unless he cannot perform its tasks effectively - then establish the rule on the next higher level
- e.g. follow your own rules of writing unit tests unless the team can prove that its more effective to establish centralized rules
- people can make rules on their own - they don’t need managers for that
- please explain me why your higher level rules are more effective than my individual rules
- responsibility of individual worker unless he cannot perform its tasks effectively - then establish the rule on the next higher level
- avoid precautionary principle - when something might go wrong make a new law to prevent it from happening
- you achieve the best results if your create your own rules on the spot - approriate for the situation of the day
- the best way to implement agile processes is to do it your own way (wailgum 2007??)
- memeplex - collection of interdependent memes (pair programming, refactoring, iterative development)
- e.g. Christman, Scrum, agile software development
- practices in a memeplex tend to reinforce each other (positive and negative feedback loops!)
- is much stronger than the individual memes
- help to copy it as a bundle between peoples minds
- it can be easier to get people adopt multiple ideas, concepts and practices simultaneously
- not all ideas, concepts and practices need to be beneficial - the bad ideas still could help to copy the good ideas
- the removal of individual memes may weaken or destroy the strength of the memeplex
- multiple competing memeplexes may reinforce each other (e.g. XP, Scrum, Kanban - draw intention the agile brands in general)
- memes can appear in different memeplexes
- broken window theory (signs of disordery and petty behavior trigger more disorderly and criminal behaviour - causing the behavior to spread)
- behaviour = function of person and his environment – people tend to adapt their behaviour to the environment they live in
- bad behavior is likely to lead to more bad behaviour
- big problems often start small
- if a problem is too big to handle - target another related but smaller problem
How to develop competence?
- maturity models are too narrowly focused on processes
- an orgas capability of learning and processes is measured but not the capability of being innovative and adaptive in a complex environment
- applying one rank to an entire orga is useless - there are many different topics to consider in complex systems - and every part needs a ranking
- instead classify specific activities performed by specific people
approaches to competence development (should begin with the first approach - and the followers are fallbacks) - competency stack:
- self
- self discipline and self development - refer to one’s own initiative
- its part of the behaviour I have adopted myself and that I intend to stick to
- coach
- training a person to develop specific skills and behaviours
- tests
- some authority verified that a person has the necessary skills and behaviour
- tools
- signs and signals to steer people’s behaviour
- peers
- influence by a group to encourage a person to change her behaviour
- supervisors
- making sure - on behalf of an orgas managment that people are doing their jobs
- manager
- its about setting good examples and about ruling and judging in some cases
sub-optimization principle
- if each subsystem, regarded separately, is made to operate with maximum efficiency, the system as a whole will not operate with utmost efficiency
- conclusion: always optimize the whole
- what you measure and constrain has to cover everything
- global metrics over local metrics
- metric of individual performance should be combined with metrics on team leam level should be combined with metrics on business unit …
7 measurable dimensions of software development {#7-measurable-dimensions-of-software-development}
- functionality (story points completed)
- quality (problems reported)
- tools (costs per month)
- people (impediments reported by team members)
- time (days remaining until live release)
- process (checklists completed)
- value (increase in users per minute)
performance metrics
- distinguish skill from discipline
- helps skilled people to think about discipline and vice versa
- discipline: task-board is up to date skill: few bugs reported, no build failures, customer demos always accepted
Books
- peopleware
- first break all the rules
- the 21 irrefutable laws of leadership
Notes mentioning this note
Agile 2 and leadership
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Agile 2 and Leadership