presentations « Thinking for a Change

Jan

Kaizen in Paris

$Dorothy et le Magicien d\'Oz$ A lean evening

Yesterday evening I was back in Paris to give a presentation about “Lean and the Toyota Way“. As I walked from the train station to the offices of Zenika, I came across a large billboard announcing “Dorothy et le magicien d’Oz”. It’s reassuring to see that the fairytales are alive and well.

My friends at Zenika had arranged a nice place and provided some fine drinks and snacks. More than 100 people showed up, among them many of the French Agilistas. I chatted for a while with them about agile, lean and the upcoming XP Days France.

And then it was time to start the presentation. The auditorium was almost completely full.

The Toyota Way

The presentation explained the 14 principles of The Toyota Way of Managing and the many parallels with Agile methods. As I go through the principles I illustrate them with stories from projects I’ve worked on. Each time I do this presentation it changes, as I learn more and discover more great ideas in Lean.

There were some great questions and discussions:

“What can I do to introduce more Lean and Agile in my organisation?” – Apply the principles and values, set an example. Support and collaborate with others who apply these values.
“Are there any incompatibilities between Lean and XP?” – None that I can see.
“For Agile and Lean transformations to succeed we need support from management and workers. Often, we only have support from one of them.”
“Lean coaches are very direct, not afraid of saying it as it is to management. Is that something they’re taught?” – It does seem so, judging from the documentary Kenji Hiranabe showed at Agile 2008, where a Lean coach almost made a factory manager cry by bluntly pointing out all the flaws in the production line.
“Does Lean make you lose weight?” – A Gemba Walk a day helps 🙂

Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for drinks afterwards because I had to rush to catch the last train back to Brussels. The next day I had another team to coach, another opportunity to “Develop exceptional people and teams”, the tenth principle of the Toyota Way.

I hope to see the participants again soon. See you at the XP Days France or a Zenika training session.

A bientôt!

What others say

Jean-Claude Grosjean summarizes the principles and contrasts them with the 7 principles of Lean Software Development and Agile.

Nicolas Martignole wrote a very extensive report on each of the principles and relates Lean, Scrum and XP.

Claude Aubry thinks “Obeya” is more beautiful than “War Room”. I fully agree. He currently tries to recreate the Obeya experience for an offshore team.

Thank you for the rapid and very detailed feedback!

Dec

A Toyota Way evening in Paris

Lean presentation in Paris

On the 21st of January 2009 I’ll be in Paris to present an evening seminar on how to apply the Toyota Way management principles to Agile software development. The seminar is organised by Carl Azoury and Olivier Huber of Zenika.

To me, Agile is the application of Lean principles to software development. So, the presentation contains a lot of parallels between the two. A lot will be very familiar if you already know and practice Agile.

So, what’s left to learn? Some of the Toyota Way management principles aren’t in Agile methods. These principles are useful when we go beyond software development. There comes a moment in any successful Agile enablement when the development team is no longer the bottleneck. Suddenly, we’re faced with a completely different set of issues. Now that Agile gains more and more acceptance, we need to be able to deal with these new challenges or accept that most Agile transformations will either die or bring limited extra business value.

The more I read and learn about Toyota, the more I realise how much I don’t know and how many preconceived ideas I have to abandon. I need to keep learning. The Toyota Product Development System, for example, contains many counter-intuitive ideas like set-based design. Real Options thinking can help us understand why some of these techniques work. We’ve only started to scratch the surface of Lean ideas.

Toyota losing money? Impossible!

In the news, even Toyota is affected by the economic climate. They might even have to post the first loss since the early years. Isn’t Toyota invincible and perfect? Of course not. It will be a real show of faith in the Toyota Way if Toyota continue to keep on their workers, keep training them and keep improving to be ready when sales take off again.

Secretly, top Toyota management must be happy that this crisis happens now. One of their main concerns is complacency. No one should ever think that the work is “done”, now that Toyota is the biggest manufacturer. Hansei and Kaizen should be applied relentlessly, it’s always possible to do better. Nothing better than tough economic times to bring back the sense of urgency.

See you in Paris

The seminar is free, but you must register here. Don’t wait too long because places are limited.

See you there!

Oct

Scandinavian Agile 2008

Good morning Helsinki

I flew into gray and rainy Helsinki yesterday and met up with Willem and Marc to go to Helsinki Marina, where the first Scandinavian Agile conference will be held. This is the first edition of the conference and they are already sold out with 250 participants. The night before the conference, organizers and speakers have discussions, dinner and drinks. Not too many drinks, because I have to “work” tomorrow: in the afternoon Markus, Marko and I will run a Business Value Game.

Morning sessions

The day kicks off with a keynote by Gabrielle Benefield about the introduction of Scrum in Yahoo. Many of the lessons learned sound very familiar:

Go deep Agile with a few of the most important teams, rather than spread Agile thinly over a lot of teams.
Technical excellence, attention to quality and good engineering practices are essential.
Grow slowly with teams that volunteer. Don’t overstretch your coach capacity.
Involve management. Inform, address fears and explain “what’s in it for them”.
There will always be people who don’t like or want Agile.
Don’t just change the process; change the structure of the company.
Bribe people with snacks.

Next up is Bjarte Bogsnes‘ session called “A journey beyond budgeting – because the future ain’t what it used to be”. The talk is about budgeting and management at Statoil Hydro and several other companies. The key principles of “Beyond Budgeting” are

Performance is about outperforming peers.
Do the right thing based on values, principles and sound business judgement.
Resources are allocated case-by case. No big-bang budget allocation process once a year.
Business follow up is forward looking and action-oriented.
Performance evaluation is a holistic assessment of delivery and behaviour. Did we get the right results in the right way?

Traditional budgeting ties three activities together: forecasting, setting targets and resource allocation. There will always be conflicts among these activities. Statoil separates the three. A forecast is not a target or commitment. A forecast is a call to action, it gets issues on the radar screen as soon as possible.

Designing KPIs that reward correct behaviour is hard. Statoil uses two principles: connect input with output (what’s the yield in new oild fields vs eploration cost?) and compare with others (where is Statoil in the “league table” of oil companies?). Individual goals and bonuses can skew behaviour, so use with caution.

The whole model is based on trust and regular follow up. It seems this provides a budgeting and management model that is compatible with Agile values and principles. Except for the individual goals and bonuses…

More info on the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable.

Next, Lasse Koskela and Jukka Lindström hold a mock-debate between Scrum Iterations and “iteration-less” Kanban.

Afternoon

The Business Value Game is up next. I’ve prepared 7 sets of game props. With 6-7 people per team, we should be able to accomodate up to 50 participants. More than 60 people turn up. I’ve never run the game with so many teams and so many people. Luckily Markus and Marko are ready to help after a crash course in Business Value Game coaching.

The first two rounds, where I explain how the game works and the teams learn to work together, are noisy and difficult to control with so many people. Gradually, people learn to work together and they work more and more effectively. After every two iterations we hold a short standup retrospective to share lessons learned between the teams. At the end of the game participants reflect on how their company prioritises (or fails to prioritise) projects. At the end there are lots of smiling faces and people ask for more information about this and other games. Have a look on my site for a partial list of games. There are more to come. All of those games are available with a Creative Commons license. Download them, customize them, play them and let us know what happened and how we can improve the games.

Evening

The day ends with a panel discussion about “Agile in Scandinavia”. Most of the questions and issues sound very familiar are are not specific to Scandinavia.

The conference ends with drinks, snacks and conversations.

The conference is a real success with so many people for a first organisation. Well done Agile Finland!

Oct

Agile Holland Conference 2008

Off to Amsterdam

Vera and I travelled to Amsterdam to play the Business Value Game at the first Agile Holland Conference in Amsterdam. The one day conference was set in the “Montessori College Oost“, a school with a very distinctive architecture.

In the train to Amsterdam we started the development of a new training workshop on discovering, hunting and fishing for User Stories. The Stories are out there, but they’re not easy to catch. Fortunately, there are some simple techniques we can use to get on the right track. Unfortunately, explaining simple ideas is very hard.

Money, money, money

When we arrived, Martien van Steenbergen was already explaining participants how to play the “Serious Crazy Money Game“. Players had to buy and sell products from each other during the day as way to get to meet new people and learn something about value, trust and cooperation. The XP Game and the Business Value Game were among the products. We had come to give away the Business Value Game.

Business Value Game

Three teams of 6-7 people competed to play the new Business Value Game v1.1. You can see from the pictures that they have this combination of total concentration and immersion with fun that characterizes learning moments.

Becoming a team

The first two rounds took a long time: we need to explain the rules and techniques and the group of strangers needs to become a team. After two iterations we held a standup retrospective to share what each team had learned, which strategies they were using and to resolve issues. After the retro, there was a coffee break.

Back from the coffee break, the teams started to work faster. Whereas the first two iterations and the retrospective take 45 minutes, the next two iterations have to be completed in 15 minutes total. Despite the time pressure and the will to win, the players stuck to the Agile values of Communication and Collaboration. Even when we tried to divise the team by giving chocolate bonuses to the “account managers” who managed to get “their customer’s” projects released, the players kept looking at the whole. They prioritised in the interests of the whole team. Some account managers even chose chocolate bonuses that they could share with the rest of the team.

Most of the teams didn’t notice the “small print”: some of the customer requests have extra conditions or information that have a large impact on the team’s decisions. We had to remind the players to look at customer’s request carefully and to ask us for more information.

Lessons learned

And what have we learned today? Amongst others:

Carefully read and ask what the customer really means and really wants. “Don’t guess! Ask.”
The economic benefit of releasing sooner.
Business Value is primarily useful on Epic level, less on User Story level. In some cases, looking at the business value of individual stories helps us to prioritize stories.
The difference between iterations and releases. The difference between iteration planning and release planning.
The difference between potential value, features developed but not released, and actual value, features released, deployed and paid for.

For me, the lesson of the Business Value Game can be summarized as follows:

Business Value is not a value.

Business Value is a function.

Business Value is a function of what you value.

Too often, prioritisation or selection of projects is done by “gut feeling”. When we introduce Business Value, we start a conversation about values. Which factors will we take into account when we prioritise?

How much money we can make in the short term?
How much money we expect to make in the long term?
How (un)happy a customer is?
How hard the customer shouts?
How much we like the customer?
How well the customer knows our CEO?
The size of the bonus for the salesperson who sold the project?
How late the project is?
Constraints?
Deadlines?
How (un)happy our team is?
The capacity of our team?
Strategic objectives?
….

That’s the conversation the teams have during the first iterations. Once they know the factors they value and the weight of the factors, they can prioritise effectively.

How do you prioritise your projects? What does that say about your values?

Do you want to learn about “Business Value”, prioritising your backlog, portfolio management and all the challenges that salespeople and account managers face daily? Do you want to experience the benefits of working with short iterations and releasing early? Do you want have fun while you learn? Download the Business Value Game, print the cards and organise your own game.

The Business Value Game by Vera Peeters and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Belgium License.

Or come and play the Business Value Game at:

The Scandinavian Agile Conference in Helsinki, Finland on October 29th, 2008
The XP Days Benelux in Eindhoven, The Netherlands on November 20-21, 2008

Oct

Business Value Game v1.1 on tour

Agile Holland Conference

The Agile Holland group organizes their first one day conference on October 24th in Amsterdam.

Vera and I will present the Business Value Game v1.1, which incorporates the feedback we got from participants at tryouts at Agile 2008, the XP user group meeting, Brain Train and Agile Business Conference.

Scandinavian Agile Conference

Agile Finland organizes the Scandinavian Agile Conference on October 29th in Helsinki.

I will present the Business Value Game with some Finnish coaches at the conference.

XP Days Benelux

The XP Days Benelux conference on November 20th and 21st in Eindhoven also features the Business Value Game, this time presented with Vera and Portia.

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