Let MoSCoW help you with facilitation and workshop design ;-)

Interactivity vs. Schedule

When designing a workshop –or any session– you facilitate one crucial aspect is timing. But timing gets complicated when you have lots of interactive parts in the session in question. And we know from research about training and oftentimes also from personal experience, that interactive elements are essential to successful sessions, so there is a serious incentive to include interactive stuff. The same holds true for other kinds of meetings as well – from design sessions to board meetings.

Balancing being on time an interactivity with MoSCoW

There is an old idea, made popular in the early days of agile by its extensive use in DSDM called MoSCoW. The capital letters in MoSCoW stand for Must Should Could Won’t and the «o»s are just there to make it sound nice. Without looking into the original priotization method too deeply, thinking about the design of a session in therm of MoSCoW categories helps a lot in balancing timeliness and interactivity. Especially if you combine the MoSCoW thinking with the concept of Heijunka or work (load) leveling.

Designing the session

In most sessions, especially in teaching, it is not a good idea to have all the musts at the beginning – because of the way people learn a schedule should not be a backlog where you put all the important stuff up front and the rest at the end anyway. The approach that I have seen to be usefull to a lot of facilitators, is to make shure that your schedule consists of a well balanced mix of must, should and could elements. What ‘well balanced’ means depends on the circumstances of course. Assuming we’re in a training situation and we know only very little about your audience, we might want to include more ‘could’ elements than we do when we’re working in a well known setting. This is the Heijunka part – heijunka literally means ‘leveling’, but in the context of lean the meaning is extended to something like ‘smart leveling.’

BTW: In meetings that need to have decisions at the end, one of the must items –come to decisions– needs to be at the end. So it’s a very good idea to have discardable parts in the schedule even if the sessions you’re facilitating is not a training.

Applying triage as you go

Now while we run the session we don‘t want to constantly check the clock to see if we’re either too fast or too slow. Quite to the contrary. We do look at the time often, but we use our projected agenda (including the MoSCoW classifications) to adjust as we go. When we’re ahead of the time (e.g. because the audience is faster than expeted) we can transport a bit more information and include the could element that we put in our internal agenda. Should we be slower than planned we cut one of the should elements. By using this approach it is way easier to keep the value for the participants high for the whole session. (As opposed to lumping all the unimportant stuff at the end, so that we also could skip it – as we would do it in a prioritized backlog apporach.]

Just give it a try...

till next time
  Michael Mahlberg

Meeting hacks: playing the right cards

Some meeting run very smoothly. Others don't.
For today let's look at one special kind of meeting - requirements preparation (refinement meetings –to use scrum-inspired lingo– are one instance of this meeting type, but there are many others that fall into the same category). Those meetings share some common attributes:

• Usually they are time-boxed
• The intention is to talk about numerous topics of a similar nature
• All of the discussed items should be elevated in quality, depth or detail to reach some –more or less well defined– threshold
• [optional, but very common] Often those meeting tend to overrun and annoy a lot of the participants

How to make it better

With experienced participants or an experienced facilitator, these meetings tend to run much better - neither breaking the time box nor annoying the participants. What can we do to make this kind of meeting work better for teams without a facilitator, or those just starting of with the practice? Over the years I have seen two behaviors that seem to drive up both the annoyance-level and the time required for the meeting more than most others.

Too much detail

The first behavior we tend to fall into, is to discuss an item in way more detail than is required for the current level of decision making. A special case of this is bike shedding where almost everyone is discussing details of an irrelevant topic because that happens to be the easiest way to contribute. But even without this phenomenon, it happens all the time and with the best of intentions.

Off-topic discussions

Another driver for the discussion going ‘off the rails’ is exactly that: getting off-topic. Often by deepening the discussion on topics triggered by talking about the original item, but actually straying away from the context of the item under discussion. Even worse, many of these spontaneous discussions completely disregard the purpose of the meeting and morph into heated arguments about unrelated issues.

Cards on the table

Oftentimes, some of the people in the room may notice these effects, but due to a number of phycological barriers, it can be hard for them to voice their concern. Reasons not to speak up might be the impression that they are the only ones with that concern, past experience that trying to stop an argument only extends it, a difference in rank and many others.
Using playing cards (or planning poker cards) as a means to assist in the management of the two behaviors mentioned above, has proven to be an effective self-facilitation tool. I typically use the Aces and the Jokers from a traditional card deck or the question mark and the coffee cup from a planning poker deck.

• Ace indicates that the discussion is lost in detail
• Joker is used to denote the fact that the discussion has run off-topic.

When using planning poker cards I tend to use the question mark as a symbol for too much detail and the coffee cup to indicate getting off-topic.
In any case it is a good idea to post the rules visibly so that the group doesn't have to remember –or even discuss– the meaning of the cards.

Rules of engagement

Just discussing the meaning of the cards and being physically in possession of them already raises everyone’s awareness of (at least) these two ways to derail even well-structured elaborations, but some additional rules on how to use the cards make this technique even more valuable.

I suggest these three rules:

1. If one person holds up an, card nothing happens. The discussion may continue. (This allows for a simple verification of the personal impression without interrupting the potentially important discussion and simultaneously gives permission for other people to ‘voice’ their opinion.)

2. If a second person holds up a card of the same type the discussion is tabled for the moment, and a reminder to pick it up again is posted on a jointly visible spot. (I also reduce the time of the main discussion by a minute or so –depending on the group– for each Ace.)

   Furthermore, I tent to use two different spots for the different types of cards, because those different concerns need to be addressed differently. In most cases I find it important to make sure that the Aces (too much detail) get picked up before the meeting is closed.

   It is up to the participants whether they want to do anything about the Jokers after the meeting, but for the Aces the next (third) rule seems to be an extremely valuable practice:

3. Take time at the end of the meeting to agree on a further course of action for each of the topics posted under «too much detail». For those items the ‘course of action’ tends to be an agreement on «who is going to clarify the details with whom until when?» (Pro tip: Don't elaborate on the details in this meeting, just schedule a follow up meeting and agree to convene again to share the results of that meeting.)

Since I started using this approach, I've seen a steep improvement in the way people conduct refinement meetings, Sprint-Plannings and other “lets discuss this number of similar topics in a fixed time” meetings.

Maybe this approach also works for you?

till next time
  Michael Mahlberg

The round table - or how to make remote meetings (more) fair

Don’t single people out

In my opinion the worst way to have a remote meeting (aka conference call) is to have a bunch of people sitting around a phone while one person is sitting somewhere else alone in front of the phone. Even though the “80% of communication is non-verbal” theory from 1972 is mostly misinterpreted, a large amount of communication is not in the words alone. So this dysfunctional teleconference scenario deprives the single person of all the nodding, pointing, smiling, looking at the mobile, doodling on a notepad etc. of the communication.

Even a singe camera on the side of the many and a display on the side of the one person makes it way more balanced.

Two way video isn’t a bad idea either.

Don’t use huge video conferencing rooms

In theory, it is a nice idea to have two rooms equipped with high quality video gear and really large screens, so that it almost seems as if people sit in only one room.
In the real world this doesn’t work most of the time. Foremost because the two video conferencing rooms very often are reduced to two laptops at the ends of two conference tables.

Level the playing field

Yes, we all know that in person meetings are better than remote meetings, but if we have to do them, why not ornanize them in a truly balanced manner with equal rights to all attendees?

We live in a time where bandwidth doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore in most areas. The average TV nowadays sports a resolution of 4K. Even most office displays are capable of HD or better. So why don’t we go the easy way and instead of congregating in locations where we skew the communication channels, just use state of the art video conferencing software that allows for a gallery view of a dozen or so participants from our workstations so that all the participants have the same environmental conditions?

But I don’t like to be on video

Why not?
What is really worse when you’re on video compared to a real live meeting?
Of course you can’t (or shouldn’t) be in front of the camera in pyjamas and you probably can’t play World of Warcraft while on the call, but then again: would you do that in a live meeting? And if the virtual meeting is not that important, then it’s probably a good idea to say so and find better ways to make use of the time for all parties concerned.

But our company policy doesn’t allow for it

Bummer.
But hey, the upside is that you just identified a really huge cultural problem, that you and your colleagues can work on.

till next time

  Michael Mahlberg

The Spice Girls on requirements engineering and root cause analysis

Just the other week I came across an interesting thread on the "kanbandev" mailing-list. It was all about "have you asked the Spice Girls question?" which seems somewhat odd, if you consider that this mailing-list is about managing Software development projects...
turns out it is only about the second verse of "wannabe" : "So, tell me what you want, what you really, really want" [you can (and should) ignore the rest of the song for the purpose of this post].
That one sentence actually captures remarkably well what differentiates a shallow requirements or root cause analysis from a thorough one: Asking beyond the obvious to find out the need that fuels the obvious.
according to Jabe Bloom Steven Bungay formulated the question a bit more formally:

[...] This should be encapsulated succinctly in the form... We should do What in order that Why.
For example... We should implement Continuous Delivery in order to minimize Lead time.

But "Tell me [...] what you really, really want" seems to stick a lot better than just "why".
So thanks, Jabe Bloom, for raining this!

Post-mortems are for dead projects - what to do with the living?

"He's dead, Jim" – the famous quote from "Bones" McCoy in the original Star Trek may be one of the shortest post-mortems one can think of, but it's not necessarily what you want in an Agile retrospective. What you might want instead is the attitude of Star Trek: the Next Generation's captain Picard - "Make it so".

From post-mortem to retrospective

But then again: the history of retrospectives is a history of misunderstandings...
One – plausible – version I have heard goes like this:
When the idea of project retrospectives came up in the context of early space missions, the idea was in fact to learn for the next iteration. But "the next iteration" would have been the next iteration of a rocket design, and the previous iteration would now have been reduced to a lump of metal shreds after it's successful test flight. Under these conditions it must have seemed quite fitting to borrow the term post-mortem – after all there wasn't much left moving at the "landing site". Developing safe ways of landing was not quite as high on the list of priorities as getting off the ground in the first place.
Gradually the scope of post-mortems expanded and soon the term was used to describe the process for all kinds of projects and was even adopted as a general term in commercial software development.
In 2001 Norman L. Kerth wrote a book titled Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews in which he made a strong case against the use of the, then accepted, term post-mortem. Before Esther Derby Diana Larsen's Book Agile Retrospectives came out, this was the definitive guide on retrospectives for me (now both books share that place) and I always tried to follow his emphasis of the fact that we don't do retrospectives for the past but for the future.

So let's use the term "Retrospective"?

At least there is a somewhat common understanding of the term.
When Tom and I laid out the structure for the Hands-on lean and Agile practices course we decided to go with the term "retrospective" – partially because that term is more widely recognized and people would have a clearer picture of what we talk about in that part, and partially because "retrospective" is the term commonly used in descriptions of the mechanics of such a review which makes it a good search candidate when looking for additional information.

How about "operations reviews"?

Nowadays I'm contemplating to suggest naming this section of the course "operations review" – a term used in the lean and Kanban literature. Although there are many very tight definitions of that term pointing out that an operations review is not at all comparable to a retrospective, these "clear" definitions are contradictory and some (a lot) actually suggest a certain similarity between operations review and (healthy) retrospectives.

Now what's it with this nitpicking with words?

Is it really important how we call this activity in our daily work? If we start with the intention in mind – looking forward, wanting to influence the future – won't the rest follow?
Well, modern brain science has it's own take on this.
As humans, our expectations and actions are influenced by the language used. In one very well known experiment people where told that they where tested on word-understanding while in reality their physical behavior was the subject of the experiment. One group had to work through a series of words with connotation of old age while the other group worked with words implying agility and youth. Sure enough the "old word" group was measurably slower on their way out from the testing facility. Even though this specific experiment on `priming´ has been disputed lately, the effects of priming also are one of the things the whole advertisement industry thrives upon. One last argument I would like to quote for this influence of words are the Implicit Association Tests from the harvard university. In these tests unconscious beliefs can be discovered by measuring the time it takes to identified words after the brain has been 'primed' with simple but powerful concepts like 'good' and 'bad'.
I don't know about you, but if I have the chance to 'prime' the whole team conducting the activity, I would rather like prime them with a concept that directs our attention to the future than setting them up for looking at a project that's still running with the mindset of a retro-spective, "looking back from a distance". Although much closer to "being in the present" than the mindset of a post-mortem, it still sets us apart from the things we want to influence. For my ears an "operations review" sounds much more like a thing I would undertake to influence what I'm doing right now.
I'm open for suggestions, but whenever possible I propose that we use words like "operations review" instead of "retrospective" or "post mortem" – at least until we find an even better way to put it.

The term conflict is vastly misunderstood

"We never have any conflict in our team"!

For me that is a really, really sad sentence. I really love to work with teams without quarreling and bickering – but I very much hope that there is conflict.

The meaning of conflict

What is `conflict´ after all? According to the english Wiktionary conflict is:

Noun conflict (plural conflicts)

1. A clash or disagreement, often violent, between two opposing groups or individuals.
   [...]
2. An incompatibility, as of two things that cannot be simultaneously fulfilled.
   [...]

And while almost everybody thinks about the first interpretation, the second one is equally valid and extremely valuable to recognize.

It's all about managing conflict - and that's a good thing

This is yet another thing that popped up when Tom and I prepared our hand on Agile and lean practices course - a lot of the techniques in lean and Agile are there just to handle conflicts in a reasonably civilized way:

• We prioritize work-items because they are competing for development time - there is a conflict for the time
• We queue deployments - there is a conflict for the deployment machine
• We use A3 reporting to point out conflicting interests.
• etc.

Recognizing conflict is an enabler

Without recognizing conflicting interests as such there is no way to resolve the conflict - take the original idea behind (non-automated) continuous integration: Software developers in the nineteen-nineties realized that they ended up with incongruent systems, when they all just committed their work to a central repository whenever they had a working result.
Apart from testing mechanisms and some other technical details, there was also a hidden conflict - the conflict for exclusive access to the system for modification. Recognizing this conflict enables people to find solutions. In the original example from Kent Beck, integration happened only on one machine, thus mediating the conflicting request for access to the system by queueing them. Denying this conflict on the other hand prevents solutions.
(Or this denial leads into misguided attempts on Jidoka like continuous integration servers which should really be called build servers and more often then not are just used as a fig-leave ... but that is another story – which will be up here shortly).

Conflict, there's just no way around it…

…but there are many ways to handle it wisely - by applying tools and techniques to resolve or manage it. As with change in the subtitle of the first eXtreme Programming (XP) book, fighting it only makes it worse. In XP they say "embrace change" - the same is true for conflict if handled responsibly "embrace conflict".

Notes to self - 002, Keep Records! Measurement & Calculation beats guesswork

=====8<---------- Start of note-to-self 002, Keep Records! Measurement & calculation beats guesswork ----
Sometimes I have to reminded myself to "eat my own dogfood" (or "take my own prescriptions")

Why should I not apply the same principles to facilitation that I recommend for software development?
Yesterday's Weather is perfectly applicable to meeting facilitation - if you know your tasks.
It's rather a high probability that the same task with the same amount of people in a retrospective (e.g. gathering data via a FrIm Chart) will take more or less the same amount of time.
So - to develop a plausible agenda - it's helpful to record the time each task took and the relevant circumstances (Time of day, number of participants etc.)
Therefore: Keep Records!
In the case of retrospectives you get a very sound foundation base your planning on data instead of guesswork very quickly. I'd say 3 Iterations should gauge your instruments [for that team] pretty precisely.

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