Thanks entirely to the generosity of Lisa Crispin and Angeline Tan I was able to attend the inaugural San Francisco Agile Conference. In fact Angeline upon hearing that Volunteermatch was working to transition from a hierarchical waterfall process to a more agile Scrum process generously offered tickets to our entire organization.
I had been excited to see Jurgen Appelo speak about Agile Management and was bummed when I read in his blog post that he would not be coming.
When I sat down at 9AM and Eric Ries
Usually I’d think that “Innovation Accounting” at 9AM would put a room full of people to sleep but we were riveted. The concept that we should stop wasting people’s time seemed like common sense. Eric talks about how much time we waste as an industry building products before we even know if there is a customer for them. The application of this methodology to existing orgs struck me. We have a user base, how do we know that we’re engaging them in our user research and identifying what matters to them. How do we know we’re innovating if we don’t show those customers disruptive designs rather than showing them small improvements to products to which they’re already accustomed? It took the rest of the conference for Eric’s keynote really sink in.
In fact it would not have been wrong to rename “SF Agile Con 2011″ “SF Leanstartup con 2011″ because so little of this conference was about Scrum or the practices of agile. Actually my outlook on Scrum changed dramatically due to this conference.
It was amazing to see people like Zach Larsen and Tim McCoy talk about Lean User Experience design, and shifting the product team’s focus off of deliverables and onto product stewardship.
Ted Young gave a revelatory talk about post-scrum agile practices. In Ted’s talk he explained how his team escaped Scrum’s rote processes in the interest of actually being agile rather than just doing agile. His team began to identify processes that were beginning to suck for them. In fact they coined a new term within their group. “Retrospectives were starting to feel ‘grindy’ and no longer felt productive or fun.”
This opened my mind in an unexpected way. How is practicing Scrum processes or blindly following Scrum tools agile? You’re doing things that are not adding value to your team because a specific and rather dogmatic school says you should do them. The Scrum Alliance dictates how you do your job rather than the context of your business. To me, that doesn’t seem agile, it seems rigid and guided. It seems like your scrum team is following a map.
So how does Ted’s team celebrate releases or discuss issues if they don’t have scheduled retrospectives? They visualize their retrospective need by having a wall dedicated to it. If somebody on the team feels like there is an issue they’d like to discuss in retrospective, that team member puts an index card or sticky note on the retro wall. Once they reach an agreed upon critical mass (I think he said it was 3 cards) on that wall, they have a retrospective to discuss those issues.
To the dogmatic “Certified Scrum Master” this may seem irresponsible, to me it seems brilliant. No more “rosy retrospectives” where everybody says things went great for fear of rocking the boat, no more retrospectives just for the sake of following a map. You could argue that Ted’s team was trumping Scrum process with lean principles. Of course to the uninitiated or somebody transitioning from waterfall to scrum, Ted’s methods may seem like an excellent excuse to abandon scrum altogether.
One risk of exposing teams that don’t adhere to agile/lean principles to Ted’s revelation is they might say “Since we have no safe environment in our retrospectives due to a blame-driven hierarchical command-and-control culture, why should we have retrospectives at all? What’t the point of daily stand-up for that matter? Why not stick to what has always worked for us?”
For teams that are succeeding with agile principles, but for whom the toolkit offered by Scrum becomes rote and meaningless, Ted’s team has derived a brilliantly context-driven solution.
Dave Sharrock gave an excellent talk about building agile teams. He shared with us The Ringelmann Effect supporting the theories behind keeping scrum teams small and self-organizing. He specifically presented the social loafing drawbacks of large teams. He also talked about how harmful traditional management can be to the creativity and success of agile teams. He reminded us all that self-organizing teams are not self-directed. We all need to be constrained to the goals of the business, but we need to be free to use our creativity to solve those challenges. When management doesn’t trust us as professionals to apply our expertise there is a visible impact on the quality of the output.
At the end of the conference Joshua Kerievsky from Industrial Logic gave an awesome closing keynote. He shared how sometimes necessity drove innovation at Industrial Logic. He shared accounts of how they used leanstartup and validated learning to grow their business. They used “feature fakes” to gauge customer interest in product changes. He closed the keynote by making a strong statement.
“A lot of us are riding the agile wave right now, but we should turn around and see the monster wave that is Leanstartup. It is a massive wave with the potential to dwarf the agile movement in the near future.” -Joshua Kerievsky
I started to feel like Scrum as a rote process is far less important than delighting our customers. In fact I believe one message I could summarize from Eric’s keynote it’s that if you’re not delighting your customer, it doesn’t matter how clean and disciplined your internal engineering processes are, because you’re on the decline.
There were literally scores of stories that caused what I’d call an “Ah ha!” moment for me. When I walked out of the room at the end of the conference I felt like I needed a couple days off to digest what I’d just learned. There was far more value in this conference than I could communicate in one blog post. In fact I anticipate blogging a lot more in the future about these subjects.
I got a TON of value from this conference. I made smart new friends like, Dave Sharrock, Dave Rooney, Ted Young and Josh Kerievsky.
As an amusing footnote to this conference, on the way out as we piled into the elevator the door-alarm went off and Josh Kerievsky had to pull his arm out of the elevator as the door was about to close on him. He just barely missed our elevator. When the door closed our elevator jarred 6 inches before coming to a complete stop. Lanette Creamer, Dave Rooney, Ted Young, two unsuspecting SFSU students and myself got to spend 90 minutes on that hot elevator. Maybe it was the conference buzz or the fun company but when we were rescued by the OTIS guy after 90 minutes the security guard (who had been listening to us on the intercom) said “They should study you guys, I’ve never heard people laugh while stuck on the elevator, and you guys laughed the whole time!”
When we arrived late to the networking event I informed Josh he just barely missed out on 90 minutes trapped on a hot elevator with us and he graciously bought us all a round. What a hilariously fun way to end a paradigm shifting conference.
Thanks so much to Agilemeister for having me there, and to the presenters and attendees for challenging my preconceptions and contributing to my personal and professional growth.
I can’t wait to see you all at San Francisco Agile Conference 2012! I just hope we can get tickets before they sell out.
(Note: I found a lot of info including some videos of similar talks shortly after attending, my next blog post will include links to them for further enjoyment)
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