Two Teams Go Lean: An Audience-wide Retrospective

On April 9, 2013, Terrence McGovern and Lori Masuda facilitated a live retrospective of two business functional teams that piloted lean practices at the Agile / Lean Practitioners Meetup.

See The slides:

Agile / Lean Practitioners Meetup: Two Biz Funk Teams Go Lean: An Audience-Wide Retrospective from drgravitee

Watch the Recording:

***Interested in learning more? Join our group***

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Event Description:

We will be presenting on how an Editorial and Marketing Team used Agile / Lean practices to execute their projects and work. This presentation will be followed by a panel discussion where team members and stakeholders talk about what 
prompted them to try it and how it worked for the execution teams, while sharing the good, the bad, and the future. This event is co-sponsored with PMI NYC.

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Update on event format:

In order to keep the event concise and offer the opportunity for audience participation we will be conducting a live, public retrospective where our Editorial and Marketing Teams will write down what worked well in their Agile adoption and what didn't work.

Ever heard of a Retrospective?

According to Dictionary.com, in the real world:

ret·ro·spec·tive

[re-truh-spek-tiv]

adjective

1. directed to the past; contemplative of past situations,events,etc.

2. looking or directed backward.

In Scrum:

ret·ro·spec·tive

[re-truh-spek-tiv]

ceremony

1. time-boxed meeting

2. a Scrum Ceremony where the team reflects on what worked well and what can be improved.

3. offers encouragement for teams to continue to improve

Starting an 'Agile / Lean Practitioners' Meet Up in NYC

In April 2013, Mariya Breyter, Terrence McGovern, Lori Masuda, and I decided to start group called Agile / Lean Practitioners in NYC. We wanted to create something that would give back to the Agile / Lean community, because we each have learned from other practitioners. Our objective is to create a forum for practitioners to meet and share their experiences. We plan to meet monthly on topics that are relevant to you.

Based on the early success of our first two meetings, we've been able to land some great speakers / companies for our upcoming events:

• 6/11/13 - Tech Practices @ Amplify
• 7/16/13 - Developer Testing Methods @ Google 
• 8/13/13 - Leadership-Level Teamwork @ Spotify 
• 9/10/13 - Going from Idea to Prototype 

We hope that we'll see you at one of these upcoming events. Please join our meet up, tell others about it, and use #ALPNYC when tweeting about it.

Want to Suggest or Lead a Future Topic 
Reach out to one of the organizers or Submit your Topic.

Can I attend these events if I am new to Agile / Lean? 
We welcome those who are not currently practicing agile or lean practices and want to learn more, but our goal each meeting is to dive into issues that practitioners deal with, rather than provide an introduction to what agile is. If you're new to agile / lean practices, please feel free to see me or the other co-organizers after the event and we'd be happy to talk with in detail about what agile / lean are and share great introductory materials on these topics.

Very Proud of Our Internal Hackathon

Last August, my colleague Don Gregori and I facilitated a division wide hackathon at the company we work for.   I've blogged about this experience elsewhere and the following video was put together:


Jenny Liang of IntraprenuerLabs wrote a flattering case-study called Sparking a Culture of Innovation within the Enterprise.

For me, helping coordinate such an event was one of my proudest professional moments, not just because innovative product ideas were generated, but 18 teams of people were truly proud of the prototypes they presented and built over an 48 hour period.  Really looking forward to the next hackathon that we're doing this year.

Facilitating Retrospectives with Remote Attendees using Google Drawing in 5 Easy Steps

When you talk about retrospectives, most people probably imagine a group of people in a room together using stickies to identify what is "working well" and "opportunities to improve."  If you have participated in a retrospective when everyone else is co-located, you may have found that experience sub-optimal.  Consider the alternative of running a retro with no one co-located, where all members participate remotely.

The following are 5 easy steps to facilitate a retrospective using a 4 square format with Google Drawing.  The example I draw from was run with fourteen remote participants--most of whom never used Google Drawing and some who never had been to a retrospective.   In general, I am tool agnostic, but I have found that Google Drawing is intuitive, provides some of the "tactical-like" feel that you get with using stickies, and it is not difficult to set up. 

Step 1: Set Up - Est. 10 Min

Create virtual retro board and pre-create blank stickies and voting chips for each participant in advance of meeting.  Alternatively, you can open the Remote Retrospective Template* in Google (you'll need to 'Make a Copy' to be able to edit it).  Note: Please abide by the Creative Commons license referenced at end of this post.

I suggest grouping of "stickies" and "voting chips" to a named individual so there is no confusion on where people should start.  

You'll need to give participants edit rights to the document.   

First time doing this I add people in advance of meeting without email notification.  This enables me to explain how to use the board to everyone at once.    Everyone can benefit from questions raised.

Step 2: Explain How to Use The Board - Est. 5 Min

If this is the first time your participants are using Google Drawing, take a few minutes to show them the basics.  Although the tool is very intuitive, you will lower anxiety by showing how easy it is to: drag a shape >  double-click to edit > enter text.  I also showed various ways to create additional stickies. 

In my example, many participants were not familiar with retrospectives, so I explained the values behind why we do retrospectives and the guidelines I wanted people to follow prior to showing how to use the Google Drawing..  

Step 3: Create and Add Stickies - Est. 10 Min

I time-box this part of the retrospective to 10 minutes.  Each person adds their thoughts (1 per stickie) to the corresponding quadrant: (Working Well, Opportunity to Improve, Questions, Suggestions)

Here's a 10 second time elapsed view of 14 people simultaneously adding items over the time box.

Step 4: Group like items and use voting chips to prioritize items for discussion - Est. 10 Min

Once everyone has independently added their items to the 4 different areas, group similar stickies together.  I like to employ silent grouping to items.  I have found this minimizes the amount of time spent discussing what the team agrees to. 

Ask for volunteers to read the groupings.  Anyone participating can ask for clarification to what is meant by a stickie, but no one should make challenge or comment on the validity of what someone else shared at this point of the meeting.

After all items have been read, each person can assign 3 "voting chips" to the groupings that they think are more important.  A person can choose to allocate their chips to separate items or put more then one on a specific item.  Voting chips can be applied to a grouping in any of the 4 quadrants.  This voting can be done silently and independently.  In a matter of minutes, you will have identified themes and prioritized them as a group.

Step 5: Identify Action Items - Est. 10 Min - 30 Min

As a group, discuss the groupings of items starting with the items that received the most votes. Suggest which activities the team wants to continue and what the team wants to do differently.  Identify a few action items that the team can commit to in the upcoming iteration. 

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Additional Tips and Tricks

• Suggest participants use Chrome when opening your Google Drawing virtual board
• The first time you try this you might miss the ability to read visual queues from other people participating in the retro.  Encourage folks to speak up about how their feeling.  
• Enable video when discussing the items as a group.  Google Hangout is great, but there are a bunch of other tools that work well too.
•  I like to differentiate the color of the action items that the team comes up with collectively, from the items that are suggested independently.
• There are many excellent ways to facilitate a retrospective, depending on maturity, team dynamics, organizational context and a set of other factors, so I encourage you to experiment with that will work best with your team(s).

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* Note: Use of Remote Retrospective template is under:

Remote Retrospective Board by Ilio Krumins-Beens & Terrence McGovern is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/17cyx7QZJLpMIoVHsdlAldXfgU-cPdIg9v_XlVhhtkZU/edit?usp=sharing.

Techniques for Getting Aligned with Stakeholders

From my experience, a key challenges is in getting everyone on the same page about how to approach the problem or opportunity you are trying to address. If you are not aligned on the vision, it is nearly impossible to gather requirements from multiple stakeholders when each person brings a different perspective based on their own experiences and context with in which they work. 

Many agile teams employ techniques to help alignment with stakeholders. These techniques are lightweight, but require key stakeholders to be involved in the envisioning exercise. Techniques that I've enjoyed include:

• Creating a Vision Board or Product Canvas. For more on this, you can see read some other posts about why product visioning is important: 
• http://agile.conscires.com/2012/06/28/why-is-product-visioning-important/
• http://mhjongerius.tumblr.com/post/9539129138/using-the-product-vision-board

• Use "Provisional" / "Assumptive" Personas to create shared understanding about who your target customers are 
• http://www.agile-ux.com/tag/personas/
• http://www.romanpichler.com/blog/agile-product-innovation/persona-template-for-agile-product-management/
• Ideate with Stakeholders using Design Studio Technique 
• Story Mapping to visualize the user flow and prioritize the work 
• Use games to partner with your stakeholders and become aligned 

Stakeholders have differing levels of interest in your project, but if they aren't accountable to the outcome they may not share the same sense of urgency that you do.  Those with "skin in the game"  should have decision making authority. This is illustrated through the Classic Story of the Pig and Chicken illustrated by Michael Vizdos / Tony Clark.  Although, Scrum has moved away from using classic story, I believe it helps to illustrate that those who are committed and accountable (pigs) should be separated from those only involved (chickens), and only those committed and accountable should get decision making authority.  NOTE: In high-trust environments all stakeholders are committed and accountable.  

Product Ownership is Challenging and Rewarding

The Product Owner role is essential but can be extremely challenging to fill.   Most organizations struggle to find someone with the right blend of skill and experience to fulfill this role perfectly.  Before we explore why that is, let us define what the role entails.  


Roman Pinchler, author of Agile Product Management with Scrum, describes the role as "the individual who champions the product, who facilitates the product decisions, and who has the final say about the product."1   The ideal product owner has to have:

• Vision for the product(s) they own
• Strong understanding of their customer(s)
• Deep domain expertise
• Ability to collaborate with multiple stakeholders
• Authority and respect throughout the organization
• Time and willingness to work with team to describe his / her vision 
• Leadership style to motivate others to see that vision and work with the team to achieve it 

Having been a product owner for several years, I know the pitfall and rewards of this role.  In his article, The Product Owner and the Product-Shaped Hole, Jeff Patton jokingly suggests product owners should wear "spandex and a cape” given the super-hero-like demands placed on them.4  

Organizational context and product maturity greatly influence the expectations on a product owner.  For example, if you’re responsible for delivering a new product that will change how we sell products to our customers that is a very different challenge than inheriting an internal business system that has been in production for 10+ years.  If you are responsible for delivering a new product, you are likely to be judged as an "entrepreneur" or “intrapreneurs,” while an owner of a mature product might be judged on how well they maximize the return on investment on a series of enhancements.1 This is does NOT imply that product owners of mature products are less inventive than those building new products, or that one is easier or more valuable than the other.  Understanding how your product fits into the larger ecosystem of the organization you are working in is critical to the choices you make as a product owner.  

Most agile literature on product ownership takes it as a given constraint that there is ONE product owner per product.  This is certainly a best practice, but in many resource-constrained organizations that I’ve worked, teams often support more than one product, and sometimes product owners support more than one team.  If you find yourself supporting multiple products or multiple teams, do the best you can to protect the team from context switching and churn by helping to focus the team’s effort and coming to planning sessions fully prepared.  Furthermore, leverage the talent on your team to see how you can involve them more and take some of the load off your shoulders.   

Here are some suggestions that I offer to product owners, regardless of the organizational context, product maturity, or number of products you support:

• Focus on outcome, not output  – Outcome is what we expect to happen after the software ships. We can only improve if we assess whether what we deliver is meeting its intended purpose. Furthermore, teams are motivated by knowing that what they build is expected to move the needle. 
• Involve the Team - Resist the feeling that you need to figure it out on your own. Present the team with the opportunity or problem you’re looking address, and they’ll find a solution that works and likely be more engaged as part of being involved in product envisioning. 
• Talk and test with actual customers – Why not learn from the people you are looking to serve. Validating your assumptions or being able to course correct will greatly improve your product offering.
• Communicate with Your Stakeholders – As a product owner, it’s your responsibility to make sure that you’re effectively prioritizing and sharing feedback from stakeholders and representing your team well back out to stakeholders.

While challenging at times, I have found product ownership to be one of the most rewarding jobs because you have an opportunity to work with motivated team members and deliver true value to an organization.  


Sources:

1. The Product Owner on One Page by Roman Pichler
2. Top 10 Product Owner Qualities and Characteristics by Peter Saddington
3. The Product Owner Role: A Stakeholder Proxy for Agile Teams by Scott Ambler
4. The product owner and the product-shaped hole by Jeff Patton

Product Owners can Prioritize their Stakeholders

The product owner role is a critical to the success of an agile team.  Scott Ambler describes the product owner role as a Stakeholder Proxy for Agile Teams. "The primary goal of a product owner is to represent the needs and desires of the stakeholder community to an agile delivery team, being the first source of information about the problem domain for the team." Scott Ambler further illustrates this with the following image:

Scott Ambler's Role of Product Owner

If you are a Product Owner and you struggle to partner effectively with the various stakeholders in your company or organization, rest assured that you are NOT alone. Depending on the product you responsible for and size of your organization you may have numerous stakeholders and need to develop ways to coordinate among so many people. We all have limited time, so we need to determine how to invest your it most effectively to deliver value. In traditional project management, a suggested technique is to prioritize stakeholders based on their influence and interest so you can identify who you want to manage closely, keep satisfied, keep informed, and monitor with minimum effort.

The problem with this approach is that it is a power grid and emphasizes a stakeholder's influence, instead of knowledge or value, that a stakeholder can provide to a product owner and agile team.   It positions the stakeholder as a power broker that the team serves, rather than a partner who works with it the team.  


I like the concept of a simple matrix for prioritizing stakeholders, however, I choose not to use the power or influence of the stakeholder as an axis.  Instead, I modify the grid to focus on the value the stakeholders can provide the team.  I define value as knowledge that can take many forms.  It could be domain expertise, understanding of customer needs, business acumen, technical know-how, and the list goes on.   
  
My form of the stakeholder prioritization matrix looks like this:

• High Knowledge / High Interest = Stakeholders that you partner closely with
  These are the stakeholders require little effort to involve and willingly work with the team.  As a product owner, I identify touch points (development / updates to product roadmap, prior / following release planning, during backlog grooming sessions) to keep these stakeholders in the loop and often seek their counsel.  
• High Knowledge / Low Interest =  Stakeholders that you consult with (and try to move to high interest category)
  These are stakeholders that you want to involve but they are either too busy, or may not (yet) see the value to them helping the team.  I seek to convert these stakeholders to willing partners (i.e., high interest) by .   I seek  
• Low Knowledge / High Interest = Stakeholders who you keep informed
  Agile teams believe in transparency.  I believe demos should and any communication of team progress should be made available to anyone who is interested.  You may discover that one of these stakeholders deep knowledge in an area that you were unaware of.
• Low Knowledge / Low Interest = Stakeholders who have an open door in get more involvedThese stakeholders are welcome to attend demos or express interest in becoming more informed, but I don't go out of my way to involve them.

If you have a number of stakeholders and find it difficult to keep up, this technique might help you prioritize your efforts accordingly.  While this post is geard at Agile product Owners, it is useful to others who work with Stakeholders on a diaily basis.