Traffic Jams “The role of an Agile Coach”

May 26, 2016

AbstractWe understand how traffic jams impact our day to day life ranging from frustration, waste of time/resources, to not being able to reach our destination for critical work, to catastrophic impact of losing someone's life on Road. Similarly how bottlenecks/jams in Agile software development/Organization impacts the throughput of teams, to impacting the product/project development lifecycle/timelines/resources, to catastrophic impact hindering organization transformation/growth/sustainability.

Assessing, analyzing and identifying the root cause/impact of the bottlenecks, System thinking enables the Agile coach to look/approach problems differently and provide suggestions, guidance, optimal solutions and create learning environment enabling individuals and organizations to evolve from the bottlenecks and helping in growth and transformation.

In this presentation, Sumeet would like to highlight the key root causes of the traffic jams/bottlenecks and role of an Agile Coach applying agile-lean mindset/principles/techniques to evolve solutions, optimizing the whole.

The causes of Traffic Jams

Bottleneck

Culture, habits and practices

Education system

and awareness

Managing the flow

Visualization and

information radiators

Obstacles and

Impediments

Discuss agile network, public 2016

Culture, habits and practices

September 26, 2016

Traffic Jams:

• Aggressive driving habits/behavior : Improper or erratic lane changing, Illegal driving on road shoulder, in ditches, or on sidewalks or medians, Operating the vehicle in an erratic, reckless, careless, or negligent manner or suddenly changing speeds, Failure to yield right of way, Failure to observe warnings or instructions on vehicle displaying them, Failure to signal, Driving too fast for conditions or in excess of posted speed limit, Racing, Making an improper turn, ME First, Observers than Helpers etc.

• Many of traffic mathematical theories fail at the driver's behavior/habits, which vary from culture to culture.

Impact:

• Leading to Road Rages causing fatal accidents that result in injuries and even deaths.

Agile bottlenecks:

• Not aligning to Agile values and principles which are the building blocks of Agile culture: Unhealthy competition out showing each other, Ignoring Quality(hiding defects, ignoring warnings ..), taking short-cuts to DONE, Failure to take constant customer feedback, Failure to flag or raise impediments, Individual goals focused vs Team goals focused(Not collaborating),  not offering help/service to others etc.       

• Many Agile frameworks/practices fail at cultural transformation.

Impact:

• Leading to Product/Project failures, Organizational transformation/growth and sustainability.

"It wasn't me, it was the other

guy!"

Driving is a semi-conscious activity since much of it depends on automatized habits acquired through culture and experience over several years - By John Peter Rothe

Culture are the actions taken by the organization when no one is looking

Obstacles and impediments Traffic Jams:

• Men at Work

• Diversions

• Pit holes

• Poor infrastructure

Impacts:

• Slows the traffic, having cascading effect leading to traffic jams

Agile bottlenecks:

• Blockers

• Dependencies

• Technical Debt

• Imediments

Impact:

• Slows the team down having cascading effect of unsustainable/undeliverable product

Education system and awareness Traffic Jams:

• Poor driving learning schools or teaching mechanism.

• Various ways/workarounds of getting driving license(bribing, just paying fees without test etc.)

• Not much awareness of driving/traffic rules.

• Poor way of penalizing/realization on breaking rules (Monetary fines or bribes) with not much scope to learn from mistakes.

Impact:

• Leading to more and more poor drivers on the road with valid licenses, less awareness of traffic/driving rules without learning much from their mistakes aggravating to the traffic jams

Agile bottlenecks:

• Poor Agile training institutes and courses

• Various ways/workaround of getting Agile certifications

• No much awareness of core Agile values and principles

• Penalizing for trying out things/experimenting(push for achieving more and more velocity or timelines). Failures highlighted more than retrospecting and acknowledging/understanding the learnings

Impact:

• Leading to more and more agile certified professionals without much awareness of Agile core values/principles practicing Agile without experimenting, retrospecting(inspecting and adapting) from failures, scared to be Agile and learn from failures and creating more and more bottlenecks

Visualizations and information radiators

September 26, 2016

Traffic Jams:

• No visual sign boards

• No/un-operational Variable message sign(VMS)

Impacts:

• No direction to the drivers/road users or indications of traffic congestions, accidents, incidents, roadwork zones, or speed limits leading further traffic congestion and accidents

Agile bottlenecks:

• No Visual Scrum/physical boards

• No/un-updated Impediments board or live Gecko boards/dashboards

Impact:

• No visibility to the team, management and customers on the progress, where we stand, where we need to focus/collaborate, where are the impediments/bottlenecks and misalignment to the common goals

Managing the flow Agile bottlenecks:

• No workflow/columns, swim lanes and WIP defined

• No/ill-defined backlog items for the team before Sprint

• Not- DONE items within sprint

• Insufficient Infrastructure - Lack of staging environments, insufficient QA infrastructure and/or production ready environments 

Impact:

• Not able to deliver sprint commitments, causing spillovers, leads to further bottlenecks, increased cycle time and lead time to deliver.

Traffic Jams:

• No Variable message signs or mechanism to identify, monitor and alert the break/change in flow/traffic stream

• Insufficient infrastructure – Lack of roundabouts, traffic lights and Smart Traffic management systems

Impacts:

• Leads to slower speeds, longer trip times, and increased vehicular queueing leading to traffic congestion

The role of an Agile Coach

gile-Lean Practitioner ervant Leaderystem Thinkervolvingtrategizerituational Leader

ASSESS

Shaping the Flow –using Kanban system and Lean Metrics

Kanban “visual signals” A picture is worth a thousand words for scientific reasons: The brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text. Forty percent of all nerve fibers connected to the brain are linked to the retina. Visual information comprises 90 percent of the data that comes to our brain, suggesting that our neurological pathways might even prefer pictorial displays over text.

• Work in Process or Work in Progress (WIP) - Start tracking your current work in process by recording it on a weekly basis to analyze trends in the amount of work you have in process at any one time. Using little’s Law you can calculate the WIP limit in Kanban System if end time of the project is certain and if you know the average time you finished a job. Septembe

r 26, 2016Multitasking kills efficiency

A consistent flow of work is essential for faster and more reliable delivery, bringing greater value to your customers, team, and organization.

Shaping the Flow –using Kanban system and Lean Metrics• Queues - Identify the queues in your workflow so you can see where work could

get stuck in your process. Track the amount of work you have in queues and try to minimize it, relative to the total WIP in the system. Shorter queues lead to shorter wait times and lower overall cycle time.

• Blockers - blocked work items are easy to track and can provide opportunities for quick improvements in flow. Track both the number of work items blocked at a given time and how long they stay blocked. Mark/Highlight Blockers !!

• Lead Time and Cycle Time - Select your metrics based on how your team creates value (e.g., time to market, higher quality, etc.) and the economic system in which you operate. A marketing team might want to analyze their cycle time on creating sales collateral so they can deliver value more quickly, a product development team might want to improve their quality to prevent rework, and an operations team might want to track lead time so they can resolve issues more quickly.

Shaping the Flow –using Kanban system and Lean Metrics• Throughput and Little’s Law in Practice- Throughput is the average number of

units processed per time unit like “stories per day,” “stories per week,” or “story points per iteration.” . Consider the effect of outliers in your measurement, as one significant event can drastically change the entire average. Little’s Law allows you to roughly predict the effect of allowing or reducing additional WIP into the system. It is important to pair this ability with an understanding of how changes in WIP and cycle time will impact the economics of the system when making key business decisions. Also, you can use this for weekly velocity analysis

• Cumulative Flow Diagrams- A CFD provides quick, visual insight into the overall WIP in a system and how that WIP is flowing through the system. It can be used to calculate burn-up trajectories for work, as well as to provide a quick visual identification of where process bottlenecks may be forming.

Discuss agile network, public 2016

Expedite laneIn a Kanban system we will sometimes have an Expedite lane. No-one can use use it unless they meet some pre defined conditions and rules

We don’t keep 1/4 of our team members sitting idle in case something expedite class comes in, they all work on standard work items until they are needed to work on expedite. The cost is then only bourn when an exceptional event happens and the traffic is moved out of that lane to make an on demand emergency capability.

In real life one way to do this is to have a rule where some of (usually your best) people cannot ever pick up a work item of their own, but can pair or swarm on a work item someone else ‘owns’. That way if expedite work comes in, you can move your best people onto that without having to block some other work up, unless they need help of course. It also means that your best people are working with and helping your other people more often, which is a motivator for both sides as one gets to show mastery, and the other gets to increase their mastery

Reducing batch size• Reducing batch size- the size of the units of work, leads to

a reduction in Cycle Time. A motorway full of motorcycles is less likely to be congested than a motorway full of huge trucks as motorcycles are more maneuverable. As the movements of trucks are controlled during the days hours on the highways. Investing on Infrastructure and automation including DevOps automation, CI helps in reducing the transition cost and improve economics of handling of smaller batches

Accelerate feedback• Accelerate feedback to ensure teams build the right thing by

learning from customers and responding fast to market conditions. Shorter feedback loops mean we build more of the right thing and less overall. This is like giving drivers navigation systems that tell them where the problems are so they can be avoided.

Training and mentoring

• A Trainer, explaining/training on the basics of the various frameworks/methods, be there Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, Extreme Programming techniques or Lean principles. Helps in how to become more Agile, how to address your constraints, and emphasizes on core Agile values and principles enabling for the success/transformation.

• A Mentor, providing a one-to-one support to the Client/team-members/Leadership members in mentoring them and help in implementing the techniques/best practices. Through his real life experience he enable to bridge the theory and practices. Creating a learning environment of allowing teams to fail (fail fast) and learn from their experiences.

Defining values The Foundational Bricks of our Culture

Results

Actions(Drive the Culture)

Principles (Make Value Real)

Values (The Possible)

Beliefs (Models are Sets of Beliefs: Predictions)

Experiences (Perceptions Becomes Reality)

Results become new experiences andenables new learning

Each layer informs the next, up the stack

Thank you

Sumeet Gupta Agile

Coach

@sumeetgupta1982

sumgupta