“If you’re not embarrassed by the product when you launch, you’ve launched too late.” Reid Hoffman, founder LinkedIn

Years ago I worked for a software company supplying Vodafone, Verizon, Nokia, etc. The last thing those companies wanted was to update the software on their engineers PC every months, let alone every week!

I was remembering this episode when I was drafting what will be my next post (“But our users don’t want to change”) and thought it was worth saying something about how regular releases change the risk-reward equation.

When you only release occasionally there is a big incentive to “get it right” – to do everything that might be needed and to remove every defect whether you think those changes are needed or not. When you release occasionally second chances don’t happen for weeks or months. So you err on the side of caution and that caution costs.

Regularly releases changes that equation. Now second chances come around often, additions and fixes are easy. Now you can err on the side of less and that allows you to save time and money.

The ability to deliver regularly – every two weeks as a baseline, every day for high performing teams – is more important than the actual deliveries. Releasable is more important than released. The actual question of whether to release or not is ultimately a question for business representatives to decide.

But, being releasable on a very regular basis is an indicator of the teams technical ability and the innate quality of the thing being built. Teams which are always asking for “more time” may well have a low quality product (lots of bugs to fix) or have something to hide.

The fact that a team can, and hopefully do, release (to live) massively reduces the risk involved. When software is only released at the end – and usually only tested before that end – then risk is tail loaded. Having releasable – and especially released – software reduces risk. The risk is spread across the work.

Actually releasing early further reduces risk because every step in the process is exercised. There are no hidden deployment problems.

That offsets sunk-cost and combats commitment escalation. Because at any time the business stakeholders can say “game over” and walk away with a working product means that they are no longer held captive by the fear of sunk-costs, suppliers and career threatening failures.

It is also a nice side effect that releasing new functionality early – or just fixing bugs – increases the return on investment because benefits are delivered earlier and therefore start earning a return sooner.

Just because new functionality is completed and even released early does not mean users need to see it. Feature-toggles allows feature and changes to be hidden from users – or only enabled for specified users. Releasing changed software with no apparent change may look pointless but it actually reduces risk because the changes are out there.

That also means testing is simplified. Rather than running tests against software with many changes tests are run against software with few changes which makes changes more efficient even if the users don’t see it. And it removes the “we can’t roll back one fix” problem when one of 10 changes don’t pass.

Back with Vodafone engineers who don’t want their laptops updated: that was then, that was the days of CD installs. Today the cloud changes that, there is only one install to do, it isn’t such an inconvenience. So they could have the updates but with disruptive changes hidden. At the same time they could have non-disruptive changes, e.g. bug fixes.

In a few cases regular deliveries may not be the right answer. The key thing though is to change the default answer from “we only deliver occasionally (or at the end)” to “we deliver regularly (unless otherwise requested).”

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The end is insight for my new book “Little Book of Agile and OKRs”. There are only a few more (short) chapters I want to write and I have put the wheels in motion to get a professional cover.

After that there is a lot of editing – including a professional copy edit – and perhaps a change of title, plus an audio version.

Anyone buying “Little Book of Agile and OKRs” will receive updates for free as they are published on LeanPub.

And if you are prepared to trade a little of your time I’m give you Little Book of Agile & OKRs for free. I’m looking for reviewers, right now I’d like feedback on my content, in a few months I’ll be looking for reviews on Amazon.

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Last year I had a surprise: the company I was working with introduced OKRs – Objectives and Key Results. I started off very cynical about how effective these were likely to be but …

Not only did I come to like OKRs and the OKR setting process I came to see how they plugged a gap in agile and how they can be powerful for agile teams.

So a few months ago I started writing a book: A little book about Agile with OKRs.

I stalled for a few weeks but I’m working on it again so expect more updates in the coming weeks. Please let me know what you think of the book, and if you are using OKRs I would especially appreciate your thoughts and stories – I might even include them!

(Yes the name is deliberately chosen to build on the success of my “Little Book about Requirements and User Stories”.)

The lockdown hasn’t effected my work environment that much. This is a picture of my home office, my garden office, my “man cave.” I am very lucky. When I’m not on site with clients I spend most of my time working here. Still, I miss visiting clients and conferences – although I did squeeze in Agile on the Beach New Zealand in the closing days of the old world.

A friend of mine works for Canonical – the Ubuntu Linux people. The vast majority of the people at Ubuntu work remotely. So while my friend lives in New Zealand he works with a team spread out across the world.

Once or twice a year, his whole team co-locates. They all fly together and work together for a couple of weeks, a sprint. Then they return home and work remotely with each other for another six months, then repeat. Once or twice I’ve seen Tim as he works in, or passes through, London. But as luck would have it the week I was in New Zealand he was on his travels.

In all this talk of how wonderful working-from home can be I don’t think there has been enough discussion about what makes a good experience and what makes it bad. The Ubuntu story highlights a couple of points which I think are missing from much of the current discussion over remote/home working.

Firstly the team are equal: they are all remote.

Over the years I have observed big differences in the way teams which are all distributed operate and the way teams with only one or two members operate. When the bulk of a team are co-located and only one or two are remote there is an unequal relationship. My intuition says teams are better off when they are either all remote or all co-located. When five of the team are co-located and a sixth member is remote then things are more difficult.

The way lockdown came about this year teams went from one to the other overnight, literally. Which also means it was very egalitarian. Everyone was in the same position. That can only be a good thing.

The second thing I take from Ubuntu is that face-to-face time is still valued. In fact, as we unlock I expect home working will be more common, more remote tools will be used but we will value co-locating and face-to-face contact all the more.

Where companies keep people remote I expect we will see the emergence of deliberate co-location. This might be a two week block like my friend or it might be a few hours or a whole day. I can easily imagine benefit from an agile team coming together for one day a fortnight to close out a sprint, run a retrospective and then plan the next sprint. (That will have a knock on effect in the office market as companies stop renting offices for years and rent meeting rooms by the day.)

In fact this will be essential. It is easier to build social capital – trust, comradeship – when you are face-to-face. For the last three months we have been running on the social capital and experience teams built up over years working together. The social capital account now needs toping up.

Existing teams, existing social capital and egalitarian distribution helped people work during the lockdowns. As we slowly move back to our offices that is going to change and we will need to make deliberate efforts to replenish social capital, keep people equal and build new teams.

New teams will benefit from working together face-to-face to get to know one another. Build some social capital and norms.

New employees in particular will need time together. Especially those, like fresh graduates, who are new to work altogether. Such people need to learn how to work. Doing that in a distributed environment is a challenge.

Those new to the workforce face an additional challenge: space.

Home working is OK for me, I have a garden big enough for an office (and I had the money to buy one.) How many people have been working of their kitchen table? or bedroom? Mixing your sleeping space with your work space can damage sleep patterns and add to stress.

How many new workers have that space?

I remember when I was a fresh graduate finding my way in the world I lived in house shares. I had a room in a shared house with similar people. Some of them I counted as friends but not all of them. Some of them had bad habits. Going to an office for work was important, staying in the house – especially when they were all staying in! – would have been too much.

Then there is the question of broadband: I have 200Mb fibre to the door but many people make do with a lot less and that can be variable. Not that 200Mb comes cheap…

If a company expect someone to work from home then I think they should pay for good broadband internet. They should also provide the equipment – I have heard of only a few employers who have given staff money to buy equipment for home.

In February and March many people all over the world found themselves having to work from home. Its been a better experience than many expected but I know people are flagging, I know people keen to get back to the office. In future I expect we’ll value face-to-face contact even as many people stay at home.

In the coming months people aren’t just going to walk back to the office and pick up where they left off. Work will be more varied. But now the initial pleasure and surprise of working for home is over we need to have a conversation about what companies need to do to support working from home in future and how it can be made sustainable.

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