Trombones and Agile. Wait… What?

So, this might be less about the trombone. It could be about any musical instrument. But, in my case, it happens to be a trombone. Actually, for many years, it was a bass trombone.

The funny thing about the trombone is that in an orchestra, concert band, or military band, the bass trombone very rarely caries the melody. It very rarely caries the counter melody. There are pieces where the trombone is featured, but really, not most of the pieces in these settings.

If you look at who gets the recognition and rewards, it’s the soloist. It’s not the bass trombone player. Believe me. But, being the bass trombone player, playing the music in front of me, I get a huge amount of personal satisfaction. You see, I know that for that soloist, for that melody, for that thing you reward: I’m the one who made it sound great. Yep. It’s true. The melody of pretty much every piece of music is hollow without the counter melody, the accompaniment, the supporting foundation that allows the melody to sound amazing. And I get to be the one to provide that.

It took me a long time in my career to realize that the role I play with my team is the same. I don’t want to be in the spotlight. Not that I’m not great at what I do – or at least think I am. I am pretty darn good at what I do. But what makes me great as the Scrum Master or Agile Coach is that it’s not about me, and I don’t want to be the focus of anything. I’m just the guy who helps the team be amazing. I’m the guy helping the team remove anything and everything that’s preventing them from delivering great quality code and delivering iterative and incremental business value every single sprint. I’m the guy helping everyone involved with the project work together.

If the team I’m on, the team I’m working with, succeeds, then I’ve succeeded too. It’s not about me. But it’s sure great to see the team succeed, and knowing that I played my part in helping them shine.

A Recent Experiment on Reporting

I’ve been working with one client, well, not just one, but this post is about one. I helped them out a year or so ago launch a new website, although it was the entire team, and I was just a very small part of it. But, for the purpose of this post, I’m going to take full credit for everything.

It went pretty well. We delivered what they were asking for, but it took a lot longer than we expected it to. There was overtime. There were additional sprints. There were sections we threw out and then rebuilt because we didn’t like them as we learnt more. But in spite all of this, it really did go okay. The client was mostly happy, and the end product was far better than had been originally envisioned (and wireframed by a design agency).

In spite of the road bumps along the way, the client came back and asked us to do another site for them. So, step one was to look at the wireframes they’d spent about six months creating and getting sign-off on. No problem… We’d built a site for this client less than a year ago, had familiarity with their domain, and building it with the same technologies. So, we estimated the time it would take us to build what had been designed. We came up with a number, and took that to the client.

I was lucky. I wasn’t in the room when that number was presented. I was told it wasn’t a fun conversation to be a part of.

Basically, the number we’d come up with wasn’t in what they thought it would cost, or how long it would take. But we knew, because of our experience on the first project, that we were in about the right range, for what they were asking.

Round two: We had a look at their scope and tried to figure where we could reduce some of the scope or complexity. We found a few places, and reduced the length and cost of the project by about 20%. Maybe 30%. Still, we’d be delivering a pretty functional site, with pretty much everything asked for, but just streamlining some of the designs and workflows.

This time, I was asked to come along and present this to the client, so I could help them understand the amount of work required. The meeting went a lot like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg – especially the part when they point out they’re only asking for seven red lines, it’s not like they’re asking for 20 red lines… Sigh. Our estimate was still over double what the client was expecting.

I asked for the client’s budget and timeline. Why keep guessing, if they’ll just tell me. And they did. So, off I went, not really sure if I’d be invited back. Ever.

But I was invited back. And this time, I was prepared. I’d taken their budget, and we’d figured out what we could do for that amount of money and time. We’d figured out a way, at least our best guess, to deliver a fully functional site for the amount of money they had. And we closed the sale.

You might be thinking that’s the end of this story. And you’d almost be right. Except that now that we’d sold the project, we had to deliver it. And I was under a huge amount of pressure to be able to show if the project was on track or not. After all, we’d shortened the delivery time by more than half from our original guess.

The problem with this is that we didn’t have a fully created backlog, no way of really knowing the total scope. In order to sell the project, we’d eliminated any up front work, opting to just start development. What a novel idea…! And, about three days into this project, the client came to me and told me that there’s a new section they’d like to include. A very complex section. Never scoped before, never discussed before. But this was absolutely needed, no matter what, for the site to launch. My response? Of course we can do it; other features might need to be deferred to a second phase, but of course we could do it. One other thing I did – I asked if we could restructure three of the six sections we’ve already got in scope, streamlining them to not only deliver a better user experience, but also afford us more time to work on this new, must-have, feature. There was agreement on this, and off we went.

I spent the first sprint trying to get a handle on all of this, and at the end, reported it “red”. After all, I had no way of proving one way or the other if we’d get everything done. And as our first sprint, we didn’t get nearly as much done as we would have hoped.

By the end of the second sprint, I was still reporting this project in red. I still couldn’t prove, with hard data, if we were on track or not. But if anyone had a conversation with me, or asked what was going on, I would have told them that we’d already figured out two of the most complex parts of what we needed to do. We had a backlog now that would take us to the end of the fourth sprint.

During the third sprint, the backlog that we’d been working on changed again. Yes, we’d learnt some stuff along the way that would impact future work, and would impact what we could deliver. In a good way. We figured out how to deliver a couple of things slightly differently that would reduce the development effort. And, new features were identified.

For the fourth, and fifth sprints, I was still reporting the project in “red”. I was being berated for my inability to move this project out of red, and not know what the future would hold. My customer, by the way, wasn’t ever fazed by this – they took in stride. They knew what work was being done. They could see huge velocity improvements, and could see that their site was coming together. They were creating and publishing content along the way, and providing feedback on a weekly – often a daily – basis. They were totally engaged with the development team and were all working towards the same goal with a shared vision. This entire time, I was told on a regular basis that I’m wasn’t meeting expectations.

By the time we arrived at the end of sprint six, through lots and lots of conversations, and an amazing dev team who had been improving every single sprint, and identifying new ways to deliver better code even faster, the client was thrilled with the progress and at a point they were able to think about actually going live and replacing their current site. I started reporting the project health as “green”.

We completed the work in eight sprints. The decision to go live was now totally within the control of the business team, when they determined the timing would be right for them. This was faster than our final guess – we’d actually sold a fixed price project with nine sprints. But, we completed the work in eight. In fact, we completed way more work than had been originally scoped for those nine sprints.

Some might think I got lucky. Perhaps. But I know how much work I did managing expectations, saying no without actually saying no, refocusing asks on ways we could deliver something that would solve their problem… And, making sure that the team felt safe to identify things that were getting in their way, and helping to get those things out of their way… And creating a safe environment for the team to try things that they thought might help them go faster, without worrying about someone speaking to them about doing something, or implementing a tool, or writing a script, that wasn’t part of any story, but just something that would allow them to deliver better quality code, faster.

Yeah, it was an interesting experience and experiment for me. I’m pretty proud of the team I got to work with; pretty proud of the product; pretty proud all round.

Home Renovation & Agile Software Development

First of all, let me say that I’ve had it up to here with comparisons between building great software and building a house, or any physical building. They’re different industries, and building something a house is not the same as building custom software. Without dwelling (unintended pun) on this, it’s not the point of this post. Maybe I’ll write that post some time. But for now, let’s move on. There is an element where there is indeed a parallel. It’s not found in just custom software and construction, but in any venture where there’s a desire to build or create something new. It’s found in marketing, in advertising, in sales, in finance. And that’s that they all required interpersonal skills, communication, and coordination. But it’s more than just active listening, and this is what caught my interest and inspired this bit of writing.

About a year and a half ago, I started interviewing General Contractors to complete a renovation of my unfinished basement. My wife & I decided there would be a lot of benefits in having my mother-in-law come live with us; benefits for her, as well as for us.

I don’t know a heck of a lot about construction or renovations, but as a true generalist, I know a bit about everything. Including construction. And, I like to learn and know what’s going on. But I also have a full time job working at a job I quite enjoy. And while I like what I do, I tend to work a lot of hours – nothing excessive, but I do like to get into whatever project it is that I happen to be working on. So, I wanted to find a General Contract who would manage the entire basement renovation for me. Call me up when they had a question, talk to me about my needs & requirements, and come to me with creative options and ideas for decisions on what the end product will look like.

I contacted and interviewed nine potential general contractors. After narrowing my choices down, and having some fun with a weighted factor scoring model, narrowed it down to two, and from there, with some additional conversations and reference checking, selected one.

Quality was my one non-negotiable. Cost was on the table, as was the schedule. But I wanted to do this once, and do it right. My contractor started off really well, with getting things done, and getting them done right. As you can imagine, somewhere along the way, things started to not go so well. The schedule really started to slip, but I’d accounted for that. But it began to slip even more, and more… Eventually, he stopped working on my job all together and I was forced to terminate him, with the job far from complete.

I was in quite a bind.  We’re at the point now where my mother-in-law’s house had sold, we had a fixed closing date where she was moving in, ready or not.

Here I was, in the exact situation I was trying to avoid – managing the project and coordinating things myself.

But this isn’t about my woes. Or at least it wasn’t meant to be. If you’ve made it this far, I’m hoping you’ll keep reading, as so far all I’ve done is set the stage for what happened next. As you can likely guess, I ended up managing this project, getting involved in all of the daily details, coordinating various trades (well, first finding the trades, and then coordinating them), and even making trips to my local home improvement stores to buy things that my original General Contractor was to supply. Things like a toilet, shower door, bathroom floor tiles, doors, and kitchen cabinets.

I turned my kitchen wall into a Kanban board with two colours of post-it notes (one for things I needed to do: find a plumber; and one for things someone else needed to do: install the toilet). I prioritized the tasks so that those items that needed to get done in order to allow my mother-in-law to move in would be done (finishing the flooring in her bedroom is a higher priority than installing the phone line). With limited time to get her moved in, things needed to be prioritized though – there was no way everything was going to get done in the time before her house closing.

Now I did a pretty good job, if I do say so myself, in finding the people I needed to move this job forward. I found a new General Contractor, but limited his scope of work to drywall, doors, trim, and painting. I found a plumber, and limited his scope of work to the bathroom and laundry room. I managed to keep my original electrician. I found a flooring company to finish the stairs. And, without any real knowledge of how to renovate anything, I managed to coordinate all of these different people. I didn’t do anything special, I just communicated. And communicated. And communicated. And when one trade would ask a question, I would connect people, bringing them together to solve the problems themselves.

My plumber asked when he could have power for his reciprocating saw to cut a drain pipe that was too long. I had no idea – I knew my electrician was going to be done in four days from now, but I had no idea when he was going to do the bathroom. I brought them together, and something interesting happened… My electrician explained that he’d be getting to the bathroom at the end – not so good for my plumber – but once the electrician realized someone else needed power in that room, he change his plan, and the bathroom had power the next day. It actually required extra work – the bathroom power was being fed from a line that – you know, never mind the details of where the power was coming from: it’s not important.

The point is that the interaction and communication of others working on the same project helped things get done faster, and in an organic way. Sure, I was filling the role of Project Manager, but there was no management, just coordination, and communication. It’s interesting to reflect on what I did to make everything happen, and I’m pretty pleased and proud of the final result. This is what I do at work on a daily basis. And I like to think I’m pretty good at my job. I bring people together, facilitate conversations and understanding, and allow the experts to work together. They know their crafts far better than I could ever hope to. All I can do is enable and empower them to do their best, and then help move things out of their way that are preventing them doing what they do. There are many times when I look at the work that’s going on, and wish I could contribute directly. But then I reflect on my ability to set the stage for the experts, and enable them to flourish. That’s a pretty good job.