XPDay 2007: Mr Agile Goes to Washington: The Impact of Politics on Agile Projects - Panel Discussion

Panel

Sallyann Freudenberg — internal agile coach (permanently employed)

• previously did PhD in collaborative software development
• approach: gently let things bubble up and then deal with them

James Davison — head of PM at Razorfish (previously at ThoughtWorks)

• has come across a lot of politics
• don’t think you can stay out of it — perception is very important
• try get everyone into the same space by socialising

Stuart Blair — investment bank

Mike Feathers — object mentor in US

• travelling coach

Rachel Davies — independent coach

• often working with several companies at one time
• facilitating retrospectives: ensure voices are heard in a neutral way before jumping to solutions

Discussion

The focus of the group seemed to be of within large corporations rather than smaller companies working with other companies.

Politics:

• covert action to get what you want from scarce resources
• decision making process not clear — individual roles not well defined

Good politics:

• Aligning projects with high-ups objectives
• Finding right person to present the case on your behalf
  • Externally, this would be called sales; but internally called politics…
• Try reframing their goals in a more positive way
  • At least lets you work with them
  • When you catch yourself saying bad things about another, it’s time to stop and step back
• Having a strong manager who can recognise political games and call people on it
• We often assume intentions
• Selling the success of the project within the organisation
  • We find it hard to celebrate success

Bringing politics into our practices:

• We don’t really have a lexicon for political behaviour…
  • Need a rudimentary politics for software developers
• Getting to Yes — by Roger Fisher (from Harvard Law School)
  • also others in series (Getting Past No, etc)
• Can we have a patterns book for politics…?
• De-politicising a situation:
  • Listening
  • System thinking — showing how things all fit together

In any group have a tension between wanting to belong to a group and wanting to be an individual

Dealing with customers who play games?

• Build a relationship with them
  • Delivering to 11 countries
  • Turned up in Austria — greeted on front door of building: you’re here to implement a system that means the office will be run from London; go away
  • Had to do a sales job; had to get sponsor on phone to convince him
• Very difficult to build a relationship with someone when hiding something
• Can bank integrity in relationship
• Ask questions of everybody in the company
  • Find different points of view
  • Understand perspective of lots of different people

How do we get recognition within hero-based culture?

• Always have to sell success (even if not being massively successful)
  • what we are delivering is useful, provides value, ready on time
• some clients have culture of celebration when a project is completed
• agile projects release often and regularly
  • need to celebrate that
  • tie in to business successes
• hold an end of year retrospective
  • show off all that has been achieved
  • lots of issues overcome, just not by panicking
• hero culture can cause problems — expose the problems and compare with smooth delivery
• make time to be seen to be doing a good job — and build that in to project planning
  • regular show and tell

What to do when gantt chart and burn down chart start to disagree?

• agile bubble in a non-agile company
• often pressure for report comes from middle management: just query with higher management
• use extra features and benefits of agile methods to sell
• if the agile project is the first to report that it’s running late…?
  • be honest — hard conversation early on (risk of getting fired)
  • speak their language (e.g. use gantt chart)
  • that’s the project manager’s job
  • it’s going to be late or you can have this instead
  • saying “no” in a way that can be accepted

XPDay 2007: Embrace Uncertainty - Jeff Patton

I came in 10 minutes late for this keynote. Train problems…

Results of stories don’t need to completely satisfy the customer — the aim is to get value and reduce risk. Iteration retrospectives should evaluate on these two goals:

• Did we get some value? Could we get more value? Biz should answer this.
• Did we reduce risk?

It’s ok to do the simplest possible thing that could possibly work, rather than the simplest thing that could be released.

Three different customer prioritising strategies:

1. Follow the money — go for a single business benefit at a time
   • cuts out whole swathes of stories and simplifies iterations
2. Don’t choose your solution too early — look at what the user wants to accomplish and defer choices as late as possible
3. Build up feature quality iteration by iteration — need everything but can build up quality and complexity
   • e.g. building a bus — can’t
   • e.g. leave out AJAXy stuff until later, improve performance gradually
   • if build to ideal quality in each iteration then may miss out vitally important function
   • customers say “great, it’s done, let’s move on”
     • so have a report card across the features: D to A
     • can say to customers, “you have your X but it’s D quality now. You’d really want better”

As soon as you start to be dogmatic about following the process, you’re dead!

Q&A

What’s your idea of the role of business analyst in agile?

• in commercial software company like Yahoo, there’s no such thing — instead they have designers
• would like to see BAs take more design responsibility for what they’re doing
• in enterprise software houses, have business people talking to BAs, talking to developers

How do you deal with multiple business voices?

• use user-centred design & scrum product owner
• product owner takes responsibility for direction of product
• understands the different factions and can answer to them why the development is going in that direction

In Yahoo, have designers but also product managers — how do they fit in and can we learn from them?

• they choose direction of business value from choices given by designers

If stay uncertain, how much is it going to cost?

• strategies outlined before came out of fixed price projects
• play space is users to support, kinds of things to do, quality of resulting product, etc

See Jeff Patton's blog version for more details