Story Points versus Hours

Well well well… this is probably the hottest issue to any agile implementation… most certainly the issue causing the most debate, emotions and pure frustration to any agile team!

Can one convince a team or individual to adopt points over hours, or hours over points?

Well, as an Agile coach I made the massive mistake of thinking that one could!

A few years on, I can now say, one can’t, there will always be a counter-argument to any argument you make… teams and individuals have been conditioned throughout the years NOT to think relative, but in hours… that is just the nature of the beast…

I found the best way to deal with this, in training and in coaching, is to divide the teams into two camps, points and hours, give them reading materials and articles, and let them present the case for either story points or hours… they will debate this one for hours, but its worth the time spent!

However, make sure they at least try relative estimation with Story Points, or let at least ONE team do that… once teams grasp the concept of relative estimation over ‘accurate’ hours, then the benefits will show and most teams will make the mindset change, not to say that one don’t get high-performing agile teams using hours… it’s a preference!

This works really well, and it stays true to what an Agile coach is supposed to do… present the issue, ask some provoking questions and provide the environment for the teams to actively and effectively communicate…

All this said, here is a fantastic article covering both Story points and Hours… http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/09/story-points-versus-hours

Note that we will be covering this subject in detail and in a fun way in our course, Agile Bootcamp planned for 7-8 October 2009! For more information, visit http://www.kaizania.co.za/agile/agile_bootcamp_registration.php

Agile Bootcamp public training completed!

Another 2-day course completed by Kaizania, Agile Bootcamp, last week in Centurion…

This was again a fantastic group of people, seems like the people who attend Agile training are always open-minded, eager to learn and active particants!

The companies represented, NuPay – JunkMail – Telamenta – Investec, made for good variety in opinions, experiences and organisational size and complexity!

We deviated a little bit from our previous course outline which was focused around Scrum, to a course outline focusing on laying the foundation of Agile first – Flexible Production Era (download the whitepaper here).

Then we covered Scrum, history and principles of Scrum, Scrum framework and all the roles, ceremonies and artefacts in detail.

Different to our previous courses, we introduced Kanban to the delegates as an Agile solution to service support development organisations and teams. We did this by playing a great game to illustrate Kanban and the financial effect thereof… What was nice to see was the teams actually embracing the concepts and principles discussed earlier from Lean, especially avoidance of waste!

Overall, a great success and a fantastic opportunity to spend time with eager Agilists!

Kaizania likes to think that we not only train and coach folks on our training courses, but that we also treat them a little bit… and we can truly say we did, what a fantastic venue for training at KleinKaap, and the food was fantastic!

A venue with style, warm and friendly service and absolutely great food! Well done all at KleinKaap!

Here is some feedback from JunkMail who were on the course:

“I found the course to be highly informative and enlightening with regards to a better PM approach, handling the demands of modern online business development. The course was very well presented and kept the flow going strong, making for a mentally sparking and invigorating experience.

I am confident that this will assist us significantly in our development team to minimise development time and maximise accountability among developers for their various tasks. The reduction in project specifications time is also a huge bonus to us.

Well done guys! I would recommend Kaizania training in a heartbeat.”

- Douglas Bailey, Internal Development Manager, JunkMail Publishing Group

Next course is planned, not yet confirmed, for mid-September… may you be interested, please send a mail to agile@kaizania.co.za or phone Arrie on 083 700 2181 and we can place your name and preferred dates on a list, which will help Kaizania to try and accommodate all as best as we possibly could!

Watch this space – Kaizania White Papers on the way

In helping organizations take full benefit of Flexible Production Era work practices, Kaizania is continually seeing how much organizations need to change in order to achieve the full benefit. Every now and then we summarize our learnings in a white paper.

It is that time again and here is an overview of white papers we are currently producing. We will post them soon as we are done, so watch this space!

Service Support and Kanban

IT departments everywhere are under continuing pressure to deliver excellent customer service to their customers – whether these be internal and/or external customers. The cornerstone of most organization’s approach to deliver has thus far been the combination of ITIL and a Help Desk system. The following are still significant problem areas not well covered by ITIL and a Help Desk system, which are very well addressed by introducing Kanban:

• Task visibility
  What is in progress? Information is available on Help Desk systems but there is no one single, public, visually rich view of what the work and service status is at any one time.

• Knowledge transfer
  Reducing knowledge “single points of failure” is a challenge – how to go about it? ITIL does not provide any real guidelines in terms of work practices to promote knowledge transfer

• Self organization and tasks
  How are tasks assigned to teams and individuals? Is there significant management overhead? How can a work environment be created where support teams have clear goals and self-organize to reach these goals?

• Continuous improvement
  How is a continuous improvement culture introduced, nurtured and soon turned into an ingrained habit for service teams?

• Process bottlenecks
  What is impacting a service team’s ability to reduce cycle time i.e. resolve service calls better and faster? Kanban makes it very clear and visible where process bottlenecks are occurring, and makes it very clear when and how service teams must act in order to resolve and permanently remove these bottlenecks.

We will introduce an integrated ITIL, Help Desk application and Kanban approach to delivering excellent customer service in one of our next White Papers.

Project and Portfolio Management in Service Organizations

The way in which IT projects and project portfolios are managed in service companies needs to change so much it is daunting.  The key problems with how service organizations currently work are:

1. Apparent control of risk and soundness of the project business case through significant upfront requirements gathering, detail task breakdowns and time and cost estimations – just a pity these detail plans are at best 50% correct – so much waste to maintain the comforting illusion of a perfect plan.
2. Inability to get a pilot off the ground – with so much upfront effort it is terribly difficult to be quick and exploit opportunities – innovators feel like they are working in mud….
3. Ensuring the “perfect plan” succeeds actually creates huge obstacles to learning and improving what is delivered – think change control board…. – must we really make it sooo difficult to ensure the best possible product or system is built in the shortest possible time, adapting as we learn more on exactly what we want and exactly how we build it?
4. “Efficient” resource allocation as project “teams” are continually broken up and formed – just a pity that writing software is akin to a team writing an epic poem under direction of the customer, requiring intimate knowledge of the subject matter, the capability of each team member, commitment and passion. It is very, very tough to do this with a new team every few months, or even every 2^nd day. Why not let the same team write more than one epic poem together? Surely they improve their creative ability over time….

We will summarize our views of the road ahead in one of our next white papers.

Kaizania – changing the way we manage projects, portfolios and creative people; bit by bit, day by day

Kaizania Scrum|interact training – 29 & 30 July 2009! – Limited seats available

Sweeping changes have been occurring in the software development world.

‘AGILE and Scrum’ has moved from obscurity to the leading framework for software development and is the most sought after process in the market.

The Kaizania SCRUM|interact course is geared to enable teams and organizations to adopt Agile and implement Scrum.

Software developers, Testers and QA, Analysts, Product managers, Program managers and Project managers – this is a training course that one and all will find immensely valuable.

Join us for two fun filled days of learning and self exploration!

Take up this offer and register for this course, limited seats available For more information  on the course as well as the course outline, please download the SCRUM|interact brochure here…

Venue: KleinKaap ( Centurion ) – KleinKaap Map
Date: 29 and 30 July 2009
Time: Arrival 08:00, Course to start at 08:30, the day will end after 5pm, dependant on Q&A
Included: Refreshments, lunch and all training materials
Bookings: Arrie van der Dussen – scrum@kaizania.co.za / 083 700 2181
Registration: To register, please go to http://www.kaizania.co.za/agile/interact_registration.php

Kind regards
Kaizania -  Agile

+27 12 991 0269 | agile@kaizania.co.za

Good Product Owners are too rare

The past few years while using Scrum and helping organisations adopt Agile and Implement Scrum the case for Good Product Owners became clear…

Let’s be honest, it’s not that difficult to implement Scrum within any organisation at all, it’s difficult to bring all that’s needed together for any Scrum implementation to show the expected success organisations so badly wants to see.

One of the key roles to any Agile adoption and Scrum implementation must be a good Product Owner, yet this is where things usually struggle to get forward momentum or sometimes the lack of a good Product Owner make the whole implementation fail. Who’s blamed then, well, most of the time, Scrum!

Why blame Scrum? Scrum is just a process, a framework and a very lightweight framework. That said, the reason, and the only reason why that organisation knew that they were failing was most probably because Scrum showed them that they are running the risk of failing. The only thing that organisation managed to overlooked was what Scrum was trying desperately to tell them, that their role of Product Owner was failing! If only we listen when Scrum speaks to us! Yet, the era of the blame game is not over yet, we have some way to go, we are still searching to feel comfortable and protected by placing blame on process, frameworks etc, instead of having the courage to face up to what is standing in our way of moving forward…

So, that out of the way, let’s look at the role of Product Owner then…

A good Agile Product Owner

·         must be responsible for the success of the project the team delivers.

·         has to make business decisions, about what is important to him and how much it is important in comparison to other requirements he may have.

·         must provides the vision about the product for the team.

·         provides the team with user stories and needs deep domain knowledge to do that.

·         has prime responsibility to validate the deliverables the team produces. Do they meet his quality requirements? Are all conditions of satisfaction met?

·         has to provide timely feedback to the development team, when questions arise.

·         has to be able to make decisions on the spot, to resolve questions on how to proceed.

·         needs to be in constant communication with the team and other stakeholder or project sponsors

·         has to keep the financial situation of the project under close scrutiny

Author: Jiri Lundak

Being able to do all the above, a good Agile Product Owner must surely have the following skills and attributes then…

·         the ability to communicate effectively on all levels

·         good business sense

·         technical foundation and

·         trust

Given this, does your Product Owner fulfil these criteria or is it that organisations don’t have the courage to get the right person to fulfil this role, do they just take traditional roles to fulfil this crucial role without realising the consequence?

Agile adoption and specifically Scrum implementations lack the forward momentum expected or fail most of the time because of the lack of a Good Agile Product Owner, not because Agile or Scrum or Lean or XP. Those are just processes and frameworks, it’s still the quality of person and teams making the world go round!

Work hard at your Product Owner role and your road to Agile success will be much easier! Your Product Owner must be by far the most important person for any Agile team!

For Agile Product Owner training, please visit the Kaizania Agile Training section…

Arrie van der Dussen

Agile Business Manager

Kaizania