Welcome to newsletter 54
Past 3 newsletters:
Empirical Coach weekly newsletter #53: Five observations about architecture
Empirical Coach weekly newsletter #52: Changes to Scrum Guide coming
Empirical Coach weekly newsletter #51: User story is not a format
Interesting Quotes
Capitalization makes me leery. When six sigma become Six Sigma, when lean becomes Lean. When agile becomes Agile. And when they get their own trainers (Agile Trainer). They become de facto Religions (cap R).
- Tom Peters
A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”
― Albert Einstein
When people find that they are truly being treated as responsible and free individuals, they tend to live up to those expectations.
—Harrison Owen
Scrum Guide 2020 Changes
Large-Scale Scrum(LeSS)
There is an upcoming conference LeSSDays in Europe. It is an online conference, and I would be speaking at the conference.
You can join the conference here
Guide: Don’t “Manage Dependencies” but Minimize Constraints
Defining Products is a key theme in LeSS. LeSS goes a bit deeper about the topic of dependencies. Thought would call out key nuggets from LeSS books here.
In product development, we distinguish between internal dependencies and external dependencies. Internal dependencies are between the teams within a product group, whereas external dependencies are either outside the product group or to non-feature teams within the product group, such as in the undone department.
In LeSS, there is no need to manage internal dependencies.
Why? Any feature team can work across the code base for their items. And teams manage their coordination between themselves, applying ideas such as continuous integration, communities, multi-team workshops, and sharing and swapping work.
It’s not complicated, but it’s a huge mindset shift for a group that previously had component teams with private code, and traditional dependency management, such as via an integration team or big planning events.
Don’t manage external dependencies but minimize constraints
Suppose completing item-A is (apparently) dependent on a delivery external to the product group, typically for a data feed, service, interface change, hardware component, or library. That’s common in large-scale development. A traditional way that a Product Owner handles this:
1. adds an external dependency to item-A in the backlog,
2. predictively plans some Sprint in the future when item-A can be done, synchronized with the delivery of the external thing, and
3. adds the planned Sprint in the Product Backlog.
Now, in big products this won’t just apply to item-A, it’ll apply to many items. Then there’s predictive planning with synchronization points across a range of future Sprints. The planning is messy and time-consuming. Plus the predictions fail, so you’ll have wasted time planning and have to repeat, wasting even more time.
Don’t do that! Rather than seeing dependencies as immutable milestones you must plan around, re-frame them as constraints that can be broken.
Principles:
1. Don't let dependencies trick you into predictive planning. Don't try to “manage dependencies” with future synchronization points, which just leads to painful predictive planning.
2. View dependencies as constraints causing inflexibility and delay.
3. Challenge, minimize, and remove constraints, as much as possible.
Consider the word dependency: It suggests you are powerless as you depend on others. But “minimize or remove constraints,” says action, options, empowerment as the constraint is within your control. This affects the contents and priorities of the Product Backlog.
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Upcoming Events
Look forward to public courses in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and India in 2020. Possibly expanding to other countries.
I have conducted several online training for Certified LeSS Basics and Provisional Certified LeSS Practitioner till date. I recently completed a few and would be announcing a few more soon. Keep an eye on this newsletter.
Many might not know that I also offer Certified LeSS Executive training. This is specifically for senior leaders who might be interested in learning the intricacies of management and structure to influence the culture.
Please reach out: venky at agileworld.com.au for further details.
About Empirical Coach
If you are interested in Agile coaching, mentoring and training services, please reach out to me (venky@agileworld.com.au). We have a team of passionate coaches collaboratively working together and could help.
Our team has deep expertise in Agile, Lean, Systems Thinking and Complexity science. We look at challenges from different angles and apply tools from various schools of thoughts. This is different from the cookie-cutter approaches you see around. We are proud to be different.
I have been deeply involved in many of the initial experiments that lead to the birth of LeSS, one of the countable number of people globally.
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