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Herding pigs managing self-organizing teams
- 3. Herding Pigs – Managing Self Organizing Teams
- 4. U Used with permission, Michael Vizdos, www.ImplementingScrum.com
- 5. So, What’s the point? Tactics for managing self organizing teams Key principles for managing people to maximize productivity Leverage the best engineering practices and tools for both team and management effectiveness
- 6. Teams of Motivated People that get the job done
- 10. How Do You Manage a Self-Organizing Team?
- 12. The Role of Managing Self Organizing Teams
- 14. Make the context of self-organization well known
- 15. Subtle control and influence
- 23. KITA - Management by Motivation or Management by Movement?
- 25. How’s the work context?
- 34. So, are our self-organizing teams getting the job done?
- 37. Code Reviews Unit Testing Code Coverage Test Driven Development Code Analysis Code Metrics Application Profiling
- 41. Inattention to Results Avoidance of Accountability Lack of Commitment Fear of Conflict Absence of Trust
- 43. Leverage the best engineering practices and tools for both team and management effectiveness
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon, hope you have been enjoying DevConnections. I’ve got a session for you with some great information you can put to work on Monday morning.This session is about management; management of self-organizing teams. So what’s this thing about “Herding Pigs?”With Scrum the teams of developers that actually produce working software are called pigs – here’s the rest of the story…
- Developers are committed, the others including the product owner, stake holders, etc. are only involved; the chickens.(Used with permission, includes post event distribution.)
- Refine the objectivesSelf-organizing teams need some leadership to stay focused on the proper objectivesMotivation comes from the work itself and can be continually re-energizing. That’s what self-organizing teams are all about.A productive, healthy work context is essential to keeping your teams working at full potential.Leverage the tools
- Stonehenge is a prehistoricmonument located in the English county of Wiltshire, about 3.2 kilometres (2.0 mi) west of Amesbury and 13 kilometres (8.1 mi) north of Salisbury. One of the most famous sites in the world, Stonehenge is composed of earthworks surrounding a circular setting of large standing stones. It is at the centre of the most dense complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in England, including several hundred burial mounds.[1]Archaeologists had believed that the iconic stone monument was erected around 2500 BC, as described in the chronology below. One recent theory, however, has suggested that the first stones were not erected until 2400-2200 BC,[2] whilst another suggests that bluestones may have been erected at the site as early as 3000 BC (see phase 1 below). The surrounding circular earth bank and ditch, which constitute the earliest phase of the monument, have been dated to about 3100 BC. The site and its surroundings were added to the UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites in 1986 in a co-listing with AveburyHenge monument. It is a national legally protected Scheduled Ancient Monument. Stonehenge is owned by the Crown and managed by English Heritage, while the surrounding land is owned by the National Trust
- The don’t harness people’s full capabilities.More focus on sameness than leveraging specializationCommand and control management
- The Agile Manifesto established a common set of overarching values and principles for all of the individual agile methodologies at the time. It details four core values for enabling high-performing teams.Delivering working softwareResponding to changeCustomer collaborationIndividuals and their interactionsThese core values are supported by 12 principles, which you can find at the following Web site: Manifesto for Agile Software Development.
- Talk Scrum focus and benefitsTeams self-organizing, cross functionalHarness knowledge, creativity of the whole teamUse their intellectual capacityGive the team the space it needs to function effectivelyThen talk management of people Provide the opportunity to use knowledge, creativity, experienceProvide resources and environment to get the job doneMutual understanding of expectationsWe may be on to something that works here
- So an Agile Self-Organizing Team is:Autonomous: There is no single central decision-making authority. Control is distributed collectively to the team.Adaptive: The team dynamically adjusts as needed across roles, functional specialties, and other boundaries, in order to solve their own problems and improve their own performance.Accountable: The team collectively shares responsibility for results, and members hold each other accountable for outcomes.So, what am I now supposed to do?DirectorManagerSupervisorLeadBy themselves, self-organizing teams are neither "good" nor "bad." They simply "are." They require a supporting management environment (the "fitness landscape") and organizational culture that establishes, communicates, rewards and reinforces the "right" set of values and principles. Without supportive management and the proper leadership culture, there is a very high likelihood that a self-organizing team may be unable to create good results or effective processes (or both). In fact, it's not uncommon for a newly formed & "empowered" self-organizing team to fall into many of the same dysfunctional patterns of behavior that it was most trying to escape from within the "management" that only recently "empowered" the team.Agile ALM implies some important rethinking of how we use and treat people.Lead, follow or get out of the way!
- Leadership – it’s not the same as management, but related … and necessary!Provide a vision of where the ship is headed and make sure everyone understands it.Microsoft – Bill Gates – Course setting memos.The Internet Tidal WaveMay 1995:"In this memo I want to make clear that our focus on the Internet is critical to every part of our business."Get your people motivatedKeep the job context healthyWe’re going to first talk about the team, then people managementHe wrote a series of course-setting memos to lead the company in these new directions — a new computer interface, the Internet, computer security. They stand as signposts at several key junctures in Microsoft's history.The 1995 Internet memo in particularmarked an important turning point, when Microsoft's huge software success confronted an uncertain future online.In many cases, these prescient missives launched the company toward ever-greater heights. But even Gates couldn't see everything coming. And he knew it.The confident competitor was also constantly paranoid that an unknown would seize the next big trend in technology and ride it past Microsoft. It drove him to be vigilant and abhor complacency, an important imprint Gates leaves on Microsoft."We never come into work and say, 'Hey, we're golden. You know, hey, let's just lie around today,' " Gates said in an interview with The Seattle Times last week. "That's not our culture. And so it's a hungry company, and it's always thinking. ... "
- Winning coaches like John Wooden built on team work and fundamentals.OK, you have a collection of individual potential superstars. But that isn’t team!Self-organization rarely happens on its own. Self-organization requires a common goal, boundaries and knowledge of some simple rules. Learning the self-organized team behaviors takes time and determination. The whole team has to walk a path from rookie to an expert and needs different styles of support from directing to delegating. A good Scrum Master or decent Agile coach rarely if ever tells the team to do whatever they want from the day one of the Agile adoption. Learning the new way of working takes time and in the very beginning the amount of guidance might be even bigger, than in the world of “command andcontrol”. Coach just has to be clear that it is temporary and is needed only because the team is new to the process.
- tuckman forming storming norming performing modelThis was before the agile concept of self organizing teams but we can learn from the model.Bruce Tuckman's 1965 Forming Storming Norming Performing team-development modelDr Bruce Tuckman published his Forming Storming Norming Performing model in 1965. He added a fifth stage, Adjourning, in the 1970s. The Forming Storming Norming Performing theory is an elegant and helpful explanation of team development and behaviour. Similarities can be seen with other models, such as Tannenbaum and Schmidt Continuum and especially with Hersey and Blanchard's Situational Leadership® model, developed about the same time.Tuckman's model explains that as the team develops maturity and ability, relationships establish, and the leader changes leadership style. Beginning with a directing style, moving through coaching, then participating, finishing delegating and almost detached. At this point the team may produce a successor leader and the previous leader can move on to develop a new team. This progression of team behaviour and leadership style can be seen clearly in the Tannenbaum and Schmidt Continuum - the authority and freedom extended by the leader to the team increases while the control of the leader reduces. In Tuckman's Forming Storming Norming Performing model, Hersey's and Blanchard's Situational Leadership® model and in Tannenbaum and Schmidt's Continuum, we see the same effect, represented in three ways.tuckman's forming storming norming performing four-stage modelThe progression is:formingstormingnormingperformingHere are the features of each phase: forming - stage 1High dependence on leader for guidance and direction. Little agreement on team aims other than received from leader. Individual roles and responsibilities are unclear. Leader must be prepared to answer lots of questions about the team's purpose, objectives and external relationships. Processes are often ignored. Members test tolerance of system and leader. Leader directs (similar to Situational Leadership® 'Telling' mode).storming - stage 2Decisions don't come easily within group. Team members vie for position as they attempt to establish themselves in relation to other team members and the leader, who might receive challenges from team members. Clarity of purpose increases but plenty of uncertainties persist. Cliques and factions form and there may be power struggles. The team needs to be focused on its goals to avoid becoming distracted by relationships and emotional issues. Compromises may be required to enable progress. Leader coaches (similar to Situational Leadership® 'Selling' mode).norming - stage 3Agreement and consensus is largely forms among team, who respond well to facilitation by leader. Roles and responsibilities are clear and accepted. Big decisions are made by group agreement. Smaller decisions may be delegated to individuals or small teams within group. Commitment and unity is strong. The team may engage in fun and social activities. The team discusses and develops its processes and working style. There is general respect for the leader and some of leadership is more shared by the team. Leader facilitates and enables (similar to the Situational Leadership® 'Participating' mode).performing - stage 4The team is more strategically aware; the team knows clearly why it is doing what it is doing. The team has a shared vision and is able to stand on its own feet with no interference or participation from the leader. There is a focus on over-achieving goals, and the team makes most of the decisions against criteria agreed with the leader. The team has a high degree of autonomy. Disagreements occur but now they are resolved within the team positively and necessary changes to processes and structure are made by the team. The team is able to work towards achieving the goal, and also to attend to relationship, style and process issues along the way. team members look after each other. The team requires delegated tasks and projects from the leader. The team does not need to be instructed or assisted. Team members might ask for assistance from the leader with personal and interpersonal development. Leader delegates and oversees (similar to the Situational Leadership® 'Delegating' mode).
- Boundaries!Driving the autobahn requires respect for boundariesDriving in the proper lane, only pass on the left, Define limits where necessary for your teams, focus on what needs to be done and turn them looseSelf-organization does not mean that workers instead of managers engineer an organization design. It does not mean letting people do whatever they want to do. It means that management commits to guiding the evolution of behaviors that emerge from the interaction of independent agents instead of specifying in advance what effective behavior is. Teams self-organize around the achievement of a goal.Self-organizing teams are not free from management control. Management chooses for them what product to build or often chooses who will work on their project, but they are nonetheless self-organizing. Neither are they free from influence.A Scrum team’s job is to self-organize around the challenges, and within the boundaries and constraints, put in place by management. Management’s job is to come up with appropriate challenges and remove impediments to self-organization. That being said, the fewer constraints or controls put on a team, the better. If leaders overly constrain how a team solves the challenge given to it, self-organization will not occur. The team will shut down; because it has already been told so much about the challenge and how to solve it, it will wait to hear the rest. So how does an agile leader achieve the subtle balance between command and influence?
- A self-organizing team is a team that is led and organized by it's members, to attain goals and objectives specified by management within the constraints of its environment:Management can shape and "nudge" the team and its members, but management doesn't try to dictate the details of "what" the solution is nor the process of how to create it. The team is responsible for not only leading and organizing itself to achieve its goals, but also to monitor and adapt its behavior to correct/improve its own performance. This means the team can change how it leads and organizes itself in order to respond to feedback and constraints from its environment, which also implies that ...There is no single central "leader" for the team over the lifetime of the team/project - the "leader" is not a static assignment, but rather a dynamic role So the person(s) leading any given moment may change, depending on the particular decision, activity, or problem being addressed in any particular context/situation.No matter the specific problem, if you see that the team has self-organized in a way that impedes it, it is your responsibility to find a way to agitate, stir up, or otherwise disturb the status quo, so that the team adjusts, hopefully reorganizing in a more productive way.There is more to leading a self-organizing team than buying pizza and getting out of the way. Leaders influence teams in subtle and indirect ways. It is impossible for a leader to accurately predict how a team will respond to a change, whether that change is a different team composition, new standards of performance, a vicarious selection system, or so on. Leaders do not have all the answers. What they do have is the ability to agitate teams (and the organization itself) toward becoming more agile. Coach to disturb the status quo when necessary“Subtle control is also consistent with the self-organizing character of project teams.”
- The BP TransOceanDeepwater Horizon blowout in the gulf – if you watched the 60-Minutes report, read the recent AP articles, or National Geographic special on this there were a series of decisions and actions where the team didn’t push back but may have avoided the disaster. Make sure the team is empowered to act toward achievement of objectives, make tough decisions when necessary.
- Individuals and interactions are essential to high-performing teams. Studies of “communication saturation” during one project showed that, when no communication problems exist, teams can perform 50 times better than the industry average. To facilitate communication, agile methods rely on frequent inspect-and-adapt cycles. These cycles can range from every few minutes with pair programming, to every few hours with continuous integration, to every day with a daily standup meeting, to every iteration with a review and retrospective. Just increasing the frequency of feedback and communication, however, is not enough to eliminate communication problems. These inspect-and-adapt cycles work well only when team members exhibit several key behaviors:respect for the worth of every persontruth in every communicationtransparency of all data, actions, and decisionstrust that each person will support the teamcommitment to the team and to the team’s goalsTo foster these types of behavior, agile management must provide a supportive environment, team coaches must facilitate their inclusion, and team members must exhibit them. Only then can teams achieve their full potential. Moving toward these types of behavior is more difficult than it might appear. Most teams avoid truth, transparency, and trust because of cultural norms or past negative experiences from conflict that was generated by honest communications. To combat these tendencies, leadership and team members must facilitate positive conflict. Doing so not only helps create productive behavior but also has several other benefits: Process improvement depends on the team to generate a list of impediments or problems in the organization, to face them squarely, and then to systematically eliminate them in priority order.Innovation occurs only with the free interchange of conflicting ideas, a phenomenon that was studied and documented by Takeuchi and Nonaka, the godfathers of Scrum.Aligning the team toward a common goal requires the team to surface and resolve conflicting agendas.Commitment to work together happens only when people agree on common goals and then struggle to improve both personally and as a team.To create high-performing teams, agile methodologies value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Practically speaking, all of the agile methodologies seek to increase communication and collaboration through frequent inspect-and-adapt cycles. However, these cycles work only when agile leaders encourage the positive conflict that is needed to build a solid foundation of truth, transparency, trust, respect, and commitment on their agile teams. From Jeff Sutherland, MSF Agile 5.0
- "Responsibility-Based Planning and Control: Respecting people means that teams are given general plans and reasonable goals and are trusted to self-organize to meet the goals. Respect means that instead of telling people what to do and how to do it, you develop a reflexive organization where people use their heads and figure this out for themselves."—Mary Poppendieck, Implementing Lean Software DevelopmentBeing good citizensEnterprise standards and guidelinesCommon respect for othersWhile it is OK to think outside the box, don’t break the teamTreat people well, give them the freedom to take action toward objectives.
- In his 2001 paper Agile Processes and Self-Organization Ken Schwaber wrote:"Agile processes employ self-organizing teams to handle the complexity inherent in systems development projects. A team of individuals is formed. They organize themselves into a team in response to the pressure of a deadline, reminding me of the saying, "Nothing focuses the mind like a noose!" The pressure cooker of the deadline produces cooperation and creativity that otherwise is rare. This may seem inhumane, but compared with non-agile practices for dealing with complexity, self-organization is a breath of fresh air."
- Commitment, is especially important. It is only when individuals and teams are committed that they feel accountable for delivering high value, which is the bottom line for software development teams. Agile methodologies facilitate commitment by encouraging teams to pull from a prioritized work list, manage their own work, and focus on improving their work practices. This practice is the basis of self-organization, which is the driving force for achieving results in an agile team.
- Summarize on why teams, importance of self-organization, etc., then on to managing peopleA self-organizing team is a team that is led and organized by it's members, to attain goals and objectives specified by management within the constraints of its environment:Management can shape and "nudge" the team and its members, but management doesn't try to dictate the details of "what" the solution is nor the process of how to create it. The team is responsible for not only leading and organizing itself to achieve its goals, but also to monitor and adapt its behavior to correct/improve its own performance. This means the team can change how it leads and organizes itself in order to respond to feedback and constraints from its environment, which also implies that ...There is no single central "leader" for the team over the lifetime of the team/project - the "leader" is not a static assignment, but rather a dynamic role So the person(s) leading any given moment may change, depending on the particular decision, activity, or problem being addressed in any particular context/situation.
- Continuing on leadershipFacilitate professional and personal growth
- Parallel discussion to HBR articleMotivating with KITANegative Physical KITANegative Psychological KITAPositive KITAKITA is not MotivationHerzberg’s research found that the factors involved in producing job satisfaction (and motivation) are separate and distinct from the factors that lead to job dissatisfaction.
- Since separate factors need to be considered, it follows that these two feelings are not opposites of each other.The dual nature of humansAvoidance of painSeeking psychological growth
- So how’s the work context?Has the heat been turned up to get the job done? High pressure deadlines? Working weekends with some “old iron?”Maybe a pointy-haired boss trying to micro-manage, team members struggling to work together.Lousy pay, hours long, benefits bad, will we have jobs next week?These are all job context issues. When not managed well, they detract from work getting done. People experience dissatisfaction.
- Improper AdministrationKITACompensatory hygieneSubstitution hygieneProtestant ethic hygieneIdeological hygieneBe decent, don’t use as a KITAAddress the problem, don’t substitute as will just create a new source of dissatisfactionAgain, keep it simple to minimize more sources of dissatisfactionDon’t outdo yourself about how decent you are. It can easily backfire.Hygiene (work context) management is preventative management.
- Fear and Reward – At times they can have great amplitude but they are short duration. Even when added their summation only produces a short-term effect – movement.
- Psychological growthKnowing moreRelationships in knowledgeCreativityEffectiveness in ambiguityIndividuationReal growthDynamics of Motivators – Job ContentRelated to approach behaviorsDeal with job contentFinite sources from which to obtain motivator satisfactionMotivators produce “more than” feelingsMotivator effects are long-termThey are additiveMotivators have a non-escalating zero pointThere are answers to motivator needs
- Short discussion of each in motivator context
- Managing the MotivatorsIs hygiene getting in the way?Technical competence OK?Are we using people’s capabilities?All attitudes are proper attitudesWhich behavior is being reinforced and how?Dynamics of Motivators – Job ContentRelated to approach behaviorsDeal with job contentFinite sources from which to obtain motivator satisfactionMotivators produce “more than” feelingsMotivator effects are long-termThey are additiveMotivators have a non-escalating zero pointThere are answers to motivator needs
- The first ratio determines what a person is capable of doing. The more a person is capable of the more you can motivate him to do. This is getting the right person into the right job where his/her abilities can be manifested.The second ratio determines how much of a person’s talent or capability can come forth on the job. You can’t motivate anyone to do a good job unless he/she has a good job to do.The last variable is the nature of the feedback or reinforcement that is given for performance. It is what the person actually accomplished.
- So, we have our teams together and working, we’re providing good leadership, keeping the work context healthy, and facilitating self-energized motivation. Are our self-organizing teams getting the job done?
- We have discussed motivation and getting the team working together. The third component is leveraging technology.
- During walk through of tools to track progress, emphasize their proper use Keep team self-organizingKeep hygiene maintainedBuild motivation from work itselfPotentially shippable working software is the measurement standardVisual Studio 2010 ALM makes it easy to probe process details – positive facilitating hygieneWork items track all the way through ALMCode reviewsManaging quality – working software, continued process improvement, deal with smellsReportingIdentifying trends for managing – facilitating, removing impediments, opportunities for growth/motivationWe'll show some healthy and otherwise Scrum based project results reporting form TFS
- The team should use best engineering practices and tools to measure and improve
- Self-organizing team managementLeadershipEffective coaching facilitates the team coming together with self-organizationBoundaries focus the context of self-organizationUse subtle control and influenceEmpower the teamValue individuals and interactionsRespect peopleTeam focus on deadlines
- Review the TakeawaysSo, now you have some new material to sharpen your pig herding skills. And, yes, you can apply to chickens, even cats as well.