A simple formula for becoming Lean, Agile and unlocking high performance teams - 2018 redux

© 2013-18 Scrum WithStyle scrumwithstyle.comPlease do not redistribute without the author’s permission.
A simple formula
for becoming Lean, Agile and unlocking high
performance teams
Rowan Bunning, CST
scrumwithstyle.com
@rowanb

Rowan Bunning
• Background in object oriented & web dev. with
vendors, start-ups & consultancies
• Introduced to Agile practices over 10 years
ago as: “the way good Smalltalkers develop software”
• Pioneer of Scrum in Australia
• Worked as an Agile Coach / ScrumMaster
at a leading Agile consultancy in the U.K.
• Agile Coach in Australia
• I also help with training including...
• Certified ScrumMaster
• Advanced Certified ScrumMaster
• Certified Scrum Product Owner
• Effective User Stories
• Agile Estimating and Planning
• Agile for Teams

Session Outline
1. Lean knobs (how you can implement Lean using Scrum)
2. The taste of ‘half-baked’ Agile (…and what you can do about it)
3. Ingredients in the formula (particularly interesting to the academically inclined)

Please do not redistribute without the author’s permission. © 2013-18 Scrum WithStyle scrumwithstyle.com
Results as per July 4, 2018 session

Lean Knobs
Being Lean by turning the knobs in Scrum
0 11

eXtreme Programming was about
turning it up to 10
When I first articulated XP, I had the mental
image of knobs on a control board. Each
knob was a practice that from experience I
knew worked well. I would turn all the knobs
up to 10 and see what happened. I was a
little surprised to find that the whole
package of practices was stable,
predictable, and flexible.
- Kent Beck

Can we take it to 11?
See Spinal Tap video at:
youtube.com/watch?v=EbVKWCpNFhY

Lean Software Development
thought leaders on Scrum
“Scrum is a ﬁne example of a Lean environment. Scrum is a
set of practices; this is how you do things. Lean would be
the principles behind those practices. Lean is the general
principles that encourage you to use something like Scrum.”
- Interview with Mary and Tom Poppendieck on using Lean for Competitive
Advantage, InfoQ, 2007: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/poppendieck-lean-2007

Lean Thinking House for Development
Wastes:
• Non Value Adding
Variability
• Overburden
• Handoff
• WIP
• Information scatter
• Delay
• Multi-tasking
• Defects
• Wishful thinking

Lean Knobs we’ll look at
• Plan Do Check Act - The PDCA cycle
• Batch Size (multiple levels)
• Limit WIP (multiple levels)
• Managing Queues
• Pull (multiple levels)
• Seeing Waste
• Eliminating Waste
• Amplifying Learning

Potentially Releasable
Product Increment
The PDCA Cycle in Scrum
Sprint
Product Backlog Sprint
Planning
1
Sprint
Review
3
Sprint
Retrospective
4
Sprint Planning
- Plan the new cycle
Day
Daily Scrum
2
Daily Work
- Execute.... learning by
Do-ing!
Sprint Retrospective
- Act on what was learned to
improve future cycles
Sprint Review
- Check Product Increment against
latest understanding of the customer
need and product design

Batch size at release level
Sprint 1 Sprint 4
Go Live #1
Go/No Go?Go/No Go?Go/No Go?
Cycle time of Requirement
to releasable software
Go Live #2
Sprint 2 Sprint 3 Sprint 5 Sprint 6
Go/No Go?
Envisioning +
Release Planning
Release Size
0 11

Batch Sizing knob for
Interaction & Adaptation
Sprint N
Sprint work
Sprint N+1
How long to create a Product
Increment of suﬃcient value
for meaningful feedback from
stakeholders?
Sprint Length
0 11

Limit WIP
“Do your job. Focus all of your eﬀorts and skills
on doing the work that you’ve committed to
doing. Don’t worry about anything else.”
0 11
Focus
Stop starting,
start finishing!

Limit WIP within Sprints by
‘Swarming’
PBI 1
PBI 2
PBI 3
PBI 4
PBI 5
PBI 6
Sprint
0 11
WIP
Degree of Swarming
Not Started WIP Completed

© 2013 Scrum WithStyle scrumwithstyle.com
The ‘Waterline’
Pull Items into Sprints
The current Release
Manage Queue Size by only
disaggregating the tip of the iceberg
Ready items

Push
Pull Backlog into stable Teams
Project ‘Resources’
Portfolio Team
Rather than seeking ‘resources’ to ﬁt the work
...construct pipelines of value to be pulled into stable teams based
on current capacity
Source: Serge Beaumont, Practical tools for the Product Owner: Focus, Value, Flow, Munich Scrum Gathering October 2009.
Product Backlog
Pull
0 11
Degree to which
Portfolio Management
uses Pull scheduling

Task I
8h
Task K
4h
Task L
4h
Pulling from the Sprint Backlog
Task C
0h
Product
Backlog Item
Not Started WIP Completed
As a user, I...
As a user, I...
Migrate...
Task E
4h
Task B
0h
Task A
0h
Task D
4h
3
8
5
Task H
6h
Task L
4h
Task G
4h
Task F
6h
Now that
I have capacity, what’s the
next most urgent task that I
can PULL across?
0 11
Inclination of team
members to Pull tasks
and use all of their skills
to level work to capacity

Seldom or
never used 64%
Always or often
used 20%
Always
Often
Sometimes
Seldom
Never
Reference: CHAOS Report, Standish Group.
Features in software systems
Seeing the Biggest Waste in
Software
0 11
Degree to which Sprint
Reviews are used
effectively with the
right people giving the
right feedback and the
Product Owner taking
the right Backlog
adjustment action

Eliminate waste
“Drop it”
“Do it sooner”
Sprint
Release Burndown
“Do it later”
0 11
Focus on Backlog
ordering byValueBacklog Ordering
Feedback
Urgency: What is the Cost of Delay?
Importance: What is the beneﬁt?

Exchanging items to increase value
Time
To add a new item...
...drop an item of equal or
greater effort.Value
Source: Serge Beaumont, Practical tools for the Product Owner: Focus, Value, Flow, Munich Scrum Gathering October 2009.

Amplify Learning
0 11
Pairing and Sharing
Photo: Calqui

Complicated
Complex
Pattern-based leadership
Sense, analyse, respond
Create panels of experts
Listen to conﬂicting
advice
Fact-based management
Probe, sense, respond
Set boundaries
Create environments and
experiments that allow
patterns to emerge
Increase levels of interaction
and communication
Use methods that can help
generate ideas
Stimulate attractors
Monitor for emergence
Encourage dissent
Thanks to: Dave Snowden cognitive-edge.com
The applicability of a given
management approach is
bounded
Chaotic

Scrum knobs for complexity
Complexity approach Scrum Knobs
Managing starting conditions Vision,Agile team formation
Probe, sense, respond Apply, Inspect,Adapt*
Set containing boundaries Sprints, team, committed work...
Safe-fail environments Timeboxing and iteration...
Experiments, pattern emergence Self-organisation, retro. actions
Increase levels of interaction and
communication
Colocation, collaboration...
Generate ideas Ideation, collaborative design...
Open up discussions Well facilitated workshops...
Use distributed cognition Self-organisation
Stimulate attractors ScrumMaster interventions...
Encourage dissent and diversity Cross-functional teams...
Monitor for emergence ScrumMaster activity, retros...
Thanks to: Joseph Pelrine.

Take-away:
From a practitioner’s point of view...
Lean is a set of thinking tools to better
understand how to get the most out of
Agile application frameworks such as
Scrum.

A previous session... London, 2007

The taste of
half-baked Agile
Fragile
Scrummerfall
Scrumbut(t)Waterscrum
RUP-tured Scrum
Cargo cult Agile

Usage of Agile methods
81.5% Scrum
58.5% Iterative
44.4% Waterfall
37.1% Kanban
35.6% eXtreme Programming (XP)
32.7% Lean
“overall Agile adoption now approaches
45%, up from 39% in 2010”
References: Forrester Research, "Rightsource Your Agile-Lean Ecosystem" by Diego lo Giudice, September 4, 2012.
Forrester Research, "Survey Results: How Agile Is Your Organization?" by Diego lo Giudice, November 2011.
Non-Agile
Agile

“Agile”
is an umbrella term deﬁned by...
Values & Principles
“Agile” and Agile methods
Practices
Time-boxing
Reviews
Test Driven Development
Acceptance Test Driven
Development
Continuous
Integration
Daily Scrums
Scrum eXtreme Programming
Dynamic Systems
Development Method
Crystal
Feature Driven
Development
Agile methods*
...to be agile
etc...
Visual
Management
Do 1...n
Be...
Use n...N
User Stories
Adaptive Systems
Development
* the key ones represented at the
Agile Manifesto gathering in Feb 2001.

Agile is an Abstraction over more
concrete frameworks
What happens when you try to instantiate
an abstract class?

A few things to keep in mind...
• There is no such thing as “the Agile Methodology”...
which one?
• You cannot “do Agile”... see: tinyurl.com/nodoagile
(unless the term is being overloaded to mean someone’s
custom/proprietary method that is being called ‘Agile’).
• You can however, do an Agile method and Agile
practices as a means of living the Agile values,
following the principles and creating an Agile culture.

“No single practice works well by itself, each needs the other
practices to keep them in balance.”
“If you follow 80% of the process you get 20% of the beneﬁts.”
- Kent Beck
XP Practices are Interdependent
© 2013 Scrum WithStyle scrumwithstyle.com

Scrum is a mirror
Quoted from:Alistair Cockburn.

Scrum exposes issues to be fixed
“Scrum is a very simple framework within which the
‘game’ of complex product development is played.
Scrum exposes every inadequacy or dysfunction
within an organisation’s product and system
development practices. The intention of Scrum is to
make them transparent so the organisation can fix
them. Unfortunately, many organisations change
Scrum to accommodate the inadequacies or
dysfunctions instead of solving them.”
- Ken Schwaber
“The mistake we made was to change Scrum to fit our
current environment, rather than use Scrum to improve
our current environment.”
- a recent client

“Scrum is like chess. You either
play it as its rules state, or you
don’t. Scrum and chess do not
fail or succeed. They are either
played, or not.” - Ken Schwaber

Beware ‘cargo cult’ Agile
The term “cargo cult” is used as an English
language idiom for referring to any group of
people who imitate the superﬁcial exterior
of a process or system without having any
understanding of the underlying substance.
Reference: http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/cargo-cult-climate-science

It’s not just about going faster...
When the authors of the Agile Manifesto began
talking about what was important to each of us,
way back in 2001, we clearly agreed on two
broad goals:
• improving software development performance
(striving for software excellence) and
• creating exciting, collaborative, fun work
environments.
The latter - better working environments - was
just as important as the former, but in the
intervening years it often became sidetracked...
- Jim Highsmith in his forward to The Human Side of Agile by Gil Broza

Losing the definition of ‘Agile’
“Semantic diffusion occurs when you have a word that is coined a
person or group, often with a pretty good definition, but then gets
spread through the wider community in a way that weakens that
definition. This weakening risks losing the definition entirely - and
with it any usefulness to the term.
I see this semantic diffusion happening very publicly to two terms
at the moment: 'agile' and 'Web2.0'.
...both of these face a lot of corruption in the field. I've run into
people who think agile methods mean you shouldn't do any
planning ”
- Martin Fowler
Reference: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SemanticDiffusion.html

Beware the Pit!
The Pit of
Dysfunction
Worst of both worlds
No fully functional
system of Agile
management and
delivery has been
achieved
“Let’s get rid of our old
approach and just do the
bits of Agile that suit us!”
Traditional Predictive
Project Management
has been disbanded
“This isn’t really working so well...”
Neither robust
Nor resilient
Traditional Predictive
Waterfall Process
High Performance
Agile Teams and
Transformed
Organisation
High Capability
Low Capability

Things you can do about half-baked Agile...
1. Get someone in to talk to your leadership team
2. Become a change agent / ScrumMaster
Manns, M. L. and Rising, L. Fearless Change: Patterns for
Introducing New Ideas. Addison-Wesley, 2004.
Cohn, M. Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using
Scrum. Addison-Wesley Professional, 2009.
3. Do ScrumMaster or advanced Agile Leadership
training
4. Get an external Agile Coach in
5. Connect with people at other organisations who
have overcome similar issues... at Meetups...
perhaps at a conference...

Ingredients in the
formula

Knowledge creation

How Development is Diﬀerent
MANUFACTURING DEVELOPMENT
Tasks are... Repetitive Non-repetitive
Tasks are... Predictable Unpredictable
Requirements are... A Constraint A Degree of Freedom
Requirements are... Fixed Evolving
Work is... Bounded Unbounded
Cost of Delay is... Homogeneous Non-homogeneous
Task Durations are... Homogeneous Non-homogeneous
Variability is... Always harmful Sometime Required
Inventory is... Visible Invisible
Inventory is... Physical Objects Information
Reference: Donald G. Reinertsen,Workshop: The Science of Lean Product Development, 2012.
In Product Development,“you always have to change the recipe to add value.”

Efficiency vs Creativity
Reference: http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-06-10/at-3m-a-struggle-between-efficiency-and-creativity
Efficiency programs such as Six Sigma are designed
to identify problems in work processes—and then use
rigorous measurement to reduce variation and
eliminate defects. When these types of initiatives
become ingrained in a company's culture, as they did
at 3M, creativity can easily get squelched. After all, a
breakthrough innovation is something that challenges
existing procedures and norms. "Invention is by its
very nature a disorderly process," says current CEO
George Buckley, who has dialled back many of
McNerney's initiatives.

Product Development considered
more relevant than Manufacturing
Take-away:
Manufacturing and New Product
Development are very diﬀerent in nature.
They are best served by very diﬀerent
management approaches.
Be careful about copying too much from
Manufacturing. Try looking at how the most
innovative companies design new products.

Study how Lean companies invent
New Products
1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
A new
Product
Development
Paradigm
W. Edwards
Deming
Decades of ‘Lean’ Manufacturing and
Product Development in Japan
Describes Product
Development as a form
of Knowledge
Creation

Point 9 for Management from
Deming
“Break down barriers between
departments. People in research, design,
sales, and production must work as a
team, in order to foresee problems of
production and usage that may be
encountered with the product or service.”
- W. Edwards Deming
Reference: http://deming.org/index.cfm?content=66

The New Paradigm is All-at-once
1 2 3 4
Type A (e.g. at NASA)
Type B (e.g. at Fuji-Xerox)
1 2 3 4
Type C (e.g. at Honda, Canon)
1 2 3 4
Source: Hirotaka Takeuchi, Ikujiro Nonaka, The New New Product Development Game,
Harvard Business Review, January-February 1986.

Products developed using Type C
Scrum
Remember... this was
in the early 80’s!

A new management paradigm
“This new emphasis on speed and flexibility calls
for a different approach for managing new product
development.
The traditional sequential or “relay race” approach
to product development... may conflict with the
goals of maximum speed and flexibility.
Instead, a holistic or “______” approach – where
the team tries to go the distance as a unit, passing
the ball back and forth - may better serve today’s
competitive requirements.”
Source: Hirotaka Takeuchi, Ikujiro Nonaka, The New New Product Development Game,
Harvard Business Review, January-February 1986.
rugby

Although project teams are largely on their own,
they are not uncontrolled. Management establishes
enough checkpoints to prevent instability, ambiguity,
and tension from turning into chaos. At the same
time, management avoids the kind of rigid control
that impairs creativity and spontaneity.
- Takeuchi & Nonaka
Self-organising Teams are key

From: Kent Beck
To: Jeff Sutherland <jsutherland>
Reply: 70761.1216@compuserve.com
Date: Mon, 15 May 1995 18:01:15 -0400
(EDT)
Subj: HBR paper
_________________________
Is there a good place to get reprints of the
SCRUM paper from HBR? I've written
patterns for something very similar and I
want to make sure I steal as many ideas as
possible.
Kent
New, New Product Development
Game inﬂuenced XP as well
Thanks to: Joseph Pelrine.

Take-away:
Superior speed and ﬂexibility can be
achieved through disintermediation of silos
of specialists and using cross-functional
teams.

Iterate
• Means “re-do”
• A deliberate re-work strategy
• Used to reﬁne a feature or quality of the
product
• Develop a rough version, inspect it,
then improve it
• Allows evolution from vague idea to a
high quality realisation
1 2 3 4 5
Source: Jeff Patton. www.AgileProductDesign.com

Increment
• Means “add onto”
• A staging strategy through
“Product Increments”
• Contrasts with “big bang”
52 3
Source: Jeff Patton. www.AgileProductDesign.com
41

Scrum should be both Iterative and
Incremental
1 2 3 4 5 6
Combining iteration with incrementation provides:
• Meaningful visibility
• Strategy to manage uncertainty / risk
• Relatively low cost of change
• Options and ﬂexibility
• Many chances to leverage learning to optimise
product

The New, New Product
Development Game Time-boxes
Iterative, Incremental
Development
Smalltalk
Engineering Tools
Scrum
Source: Ken Schwaber.
Ingredients in the Formula
Lean

High Perf Software Dev research
- AT&T Bell Labs, Jim Coplien
Complexity and Management
- Prof. Ralph D. Stacey
Scrum
Additional Ingredients
Empirical Process Control theory
- Babatunde A. Ogunnaike
Team Leadership
- Prof. J. Richard Hackman (RIP)

Reference: Harrison, Neil B., and James O. Coplien. "Patterns of Productive Software Organizations." Bell Labs Technical
Journal 1.1 (1996): 138-45

Minimise roles for performance

Reference: Coplien, J., Borland Software Craftsmanship:A New Look at Process, Quality and Productivity, Proceedings of the 5th
Annual Borland International Conference, Orlando, FL., 1994.

Process control paradigm shift
The reaction upon Ken Schwaber showing widely
used software development methods to
Ogunnaike and other process control experts...
Reference: Ken Schwaber, Mike Beedle, Agile Software Development with Scrum, Prentice Hall, 2002.
“They inspected the systems development processes that
I brought them. I have rarely provided a group with so
much laughter. They were amazed and appalled that my
industry, systems development, was trying to do its work
using a completely inappropriate process control model.”

The emergence of a formula
1950 1960 1970 1980 1990
First book
describing
Scrum for
software
OOPSLA
paper on
Scrum
2000 2010
Agile Manifesto
The word
“Agile” is
coined as an
umbrella term
A new
Product
Development
Paradigm
W. Edwards
Deming
Describes Product
Development as a form
of Knowledge
Creation
Decades of ‘Lean’
Manufacturing and Product
Development in Japan

* The original metaphor of dwarfs on the shoulders of giants has been attributed to Bernard of Chartres in 1159.
*

Potentially Shippable
Product Increment
Simple Scrum Flow
Sprint
Product Backlog Sprint
Planning
1
Sprint
Review
3
Sprint
Retrospective
4
Day
Daily Scrum
2

Scrum: 3 Roles, 3 Artefacts, 5 Events
• Product Owner
• Team
• Scrum Master
Roles
• Product Backlog
• Sprint Backlog
• Increment
Artefacts
• Sprint
• Sprint Planning
• Daily Scrum
• Sprint Review
• Sprint Retrospective
Events
Values Openness Focus Commitment Respect Courage
Principles Empiricism Self-organisationIterative Incremental Time-boxing

Creating the Scrum formula
See Jeﬀ Sutherland explain the creation of Scrum at:
youtube.com/watch?v=O7cA1q0XwhE
If you missed this session/section, this is a good
summary of what was discussed in this section.

Take-away:
The Scrum formula incorporates patterns
from advanced product development and
high performance software development
so that you don’t have to re-invent it all to
get going. You do need Agile and Lean
principles to get the most out of it however.

We’re
rowan@scrumwithstyle.com
Twitter: @rowanb
au.linkedin.com/in/rowanbunning
Rowan Bunning
www.scrumwithstyle.com

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