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More notes on Agile on the Beach – this is going to go on all week, sorry but there is a lot to get on the record. Maybe only conference-geeks and those thinking of submitting to AOTB will find useful but I’d like to get it on the record and this is my blog 🙂

First off the Agile on the Beach is pretty much the same every year. Unfortunately it has grown over the years as we try and share more information with those submitting. I expect most conferences have the same problem.

Problem #1 the call for submissions is too big, problem #2 people don’t seem to read it. Actually, it is not just that people don’t read it but some people who submit don’t seem to know much about the conference.

The wrong track, Gromit

For example: lots of submissions are put against the wrong track. Many people seem to just submit to whatever track the system defaults to (and this year it looks like Agile Business was the default.)

While we can, and do, move sessions between tracks we don’t do this methodically. With nearly 300 submissions it would be too time consuming to review every session and decide which track it should be in.

Plus, some people deliberately want their submission in a particular track. Last year we had a talk on technical debt submitted to the business track. Before I moved it I happened to ask the submitter why he had gone there not software. His reply: “We deliberately did this because we want to raise the issue with managers.”

Some reviewers will mark sessions down because they are in the wrong track. That is a little unfair but understandable.

Where is Falmouth again?

One problem that seems to growing is people not knowing where the conference is. To be clear: Agile on the Beach is in Falmouth UK – lookup Falmouth on Google maps.

Falmouth is five hours by train from London. Seven hours from Manchester. Nine from Newcastle Upon Tyne.

You can fly into Newquay airport from several UK airports but you are still nearly an hour by taxi from Falmouth.

Both last year and this year we’ve accepted people who then, when they look at how long it takes to get to Falmouth pull out.

What is your conference about?

But that is not the worst.

Every year we get a few submissions, mostly from the USA , which are totally inappropriate, something like “Calisthenics for a younger look.” OK, I guess calisthenics helps make your body agile but did they stop reading at the conference name?

Mostly with some hint that the person who filled in the form is not the speaker. I suspect the semi-famous person has a PA who just submits to everything they can find.

We don’t pay

Similarly we get a clutch of submissions – again mostly from the USA – where in the synopsis the speaker say: “My feed is $1,500 plus travel expenses.”

AOTB only pays speakers a travel allowance, and we say that in the call for submissions.

OK, we do actually pay keynotes. But we choose the keynotes, usually in advance of the call for submissions. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

During the year we get a few people – again largely Americans – who e-mail us to say: “I can keynote you conference blah blah blah…. my fee is blah blah.”

I can’t blame them, they are only trying to make a living. One day someone who we find interesting might even contact us!

(Ummm… maybe I should do it myself rather than waiting to be asked to keynote…)

I am …

A new one this year: round 1 was blind, no bibliography details. The hope was this would help new speakers and increase our diversity.

Some speakers chose to self-identification: they gave their names in the synopsis “I this talk Adam Jones will be talking about…” or even a mini-bio in the synopsis: “Sally Smith will draw on her long experience working as Agile Coach with companies such as blah blah blah”

True we didn’t tell people not to do this. Blind reviewing was an experiment so we didn’t really have any rules. But, some reviewers took a dislike to this – I can see comments which say “Would vote higher but speaker gave their name”

Please please please answer me when I call

Finally, AOTB has a two stage acceptance process.

If you get accepted you get a mail from me saying:

“Congratulations… here is the boring admin details, now confirm you can speak by clicking on this link….”

We know that a) some people can’t get to Falmouth, b) schedule change between submitting in December and acceptance in February, c) people forget they submitted, d) something in the admin details isn’t to their liking, d) some other reason.

Result: some people who submit can’t make it. That is why we ask for confirmation.

If you are accepted I need your reply. And the quicker I get it the better.

If I don’t get a reply after a few days I chase: repeat e-mails, Twitter, LinkedIn, SMS and if I need to I will pick up the phone and call you.

This year one speaker was impossible to contact, no phone number, no Twitter, no LinkedIn. My e-mail may have been going to spam. With a heavy heart I switched them from accept to decline.

Apart from this taking up my time it also delays the work of the rest of the committee, the website, the publicity, ticket sales and everything else. Until we have the programme in place a lot is on hold.

Your submission is important to us, please hold

Plus, we don’t say: “Sorry, your submission was not accepted” until we have our programme in place. When we loose a speaker we make an immediate substitution. It doesn’t seem right to tell a lot of people (about 240) that they are not speaking at AOTB and then a few days later say to one or two “O sorry, can we have you after all?”

We only send the sorries once we have all our speakers confirmed. So, if someone doesn’t reply, and we can’t get hold of them, we have no choice but to wait and try again. Which means everyone else has to wait which is not fair either.

Overall our system works. It is not perfect but I don’t think any system is perfect.

“Dear Customer, the truth about IT projects” was originally published in The Agile Journal way back in 2012. Unfortunately the essay has stood the test of time and is still regularly re-discovered online.

A couple of weeks ago I recorded an audio version of Dear Customer which I have now posted online. You can find links to the original publication and of a PDF of the essay at the same site.

O, and the essay forms the prologue to my Xanpan book, but newsletter subscribers probably know that because they downloaded a free copy of Xanpan when they subscribed!

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My last post on hierarchy generated a fair bit of interest – both online and offline. Once it is pointed out people recognise there is a positive side to hierarchy, it is not so much “hierarchy bad, no hierarchy good” as it is “how much hierarchy?” and the culture around that hierarchy.

But there is something else I have to say, something that has been bugging me for years. Look at the picture above, it is a structure chart, this one from Wikipedia (public domain). I suspect few people below the age of 40 have seen one, this is the way I was taught to design software at University. A structure chart is like a flowchart but horizontal, not vertical.

Look familiar?

A structure chart looks a lot like a hierarchy chart. Compare the picture above with the (fantasy) organization chart on my previous post.

Structure charts are used when doing structured programming, a technique used in procedural programming. So Pascal, Modula-2, Algol, even C. In this world (experienced) programmers spend a lot of time thinking (and worrying) about layering. They aim for layered systems, these are drawn as dependency diagrams which – can you guess? – look a lot like hierarchies too.

While all of these techniques still have relevance, in our modern world things have changed. Primarily, procedural programming has given way to object-oriented programming. In OOP the object is the thing: the object is an idea, code and data reside in the object. We build our systems with self contained objects (well ideally).

Sound familiar?

I like to talk about Amoeba teams, similar ideas emerge under names such as Feature teams, or stand-alone, or even Spotify Squad. The repeated idea is that teams have a purpose and contain the people and skills they need to pursue that purpose.

In the 1970s and 80s we had procedural programming, structure charts and hierarchies. The organizational form of hierarchy matched our programming model. In the 1990s we switched to object-oriented programming and now our organizations are playing catch up in switching to “object oriented teams” (if I can coin a new expression, which naturally abbreviates to OOT).

Conway’s Law strikes again!

OOP changes how you design software, it also changes how organizations structure themselves. While OOP changes the way programmes are structured and reduces the way programs are layered (and dependencies managed) it doesn’t do away with a structure. There is still a framework in place. Similarly, OOTs don’t exist in isolation, they need to exist in a framework – a hierarchy of sorts.

(And of course modern UI models and micro-services means main() isn’t always the top of the program any more!)

Conway’s Law implies that a hierarchical organization will adopt procedural programming, which was true in the 60s and 70s. New companies, start-ups, born in the OOP age natural structure as OOTs. Existing companies first see tension because the two models rub against one another.

Then reverse Conway’s Law (Yawnoc as it is sometimes called) would suggest companies move towards OOT – which of course we see with all the big companies adopting “Spotify.”

Which raises the question:

If stand-alone/self-contained teams, and reduced hierarchy, are the organizational structure which parallels object-oriented design and programming… what is the organizational form that parallels functional programming? How do you structure your teams when you are working in Lisp, Haskell or F# ?

What about concurrent (parallel) languages like Occam?
What organizational structure parallels message passing systems?
Or Data flow architecture? And quantum computing?

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Hierarchy, it is one of those topics which provokes a reaction.

There are many in the agile community who believe hierarchy is a bad thing. Teams – and whole organizations are better off without hierarchy. It is simply(!) a case of finding better ways of organizing which don’t involve hierarchy.

Then there are those who acknowledge that hierarchy has been with us for millennia and find it hard to imagine how anyone could organise without it.

As a general rule the supporters of agile come down against hierarchy. I’ve been known to rail against hierarchy myself but at the same time I’ve long had my doubts that it is possible to remove hierarchy altogether. Rather I aim for less hierarchy and greater independence rather than the abolition of all hierarchy. I tend to keep this view to myself because a) it is subtle and b) I suspect I’ll loose a lot of agile street cred if people know.

So when I heard about a book called Hierarchy by John Child I immediately bought a copy. This is no easy read – Child is a Professor and so the style is academic rather than pop-psychology business blockbuster. So far I’m about half way through but the book raises many interested point that I’m still thinking through.

In particular Child highlights a number of benefits of hierarchy which deserve attention and I think are too often overlooked. Right now I want to capture my thoughts so far before I get into the arguments against hierarchy. So…

The benefits of hierarchy to an organization:

• Hierarchy has benefits were there is regulation
• Hierarchy helps large enterprises bring structure to their activities
• Hierarchy tend to develop in all societies whether they are intended or not, therefore imposing a hierarchy gives an organization a chance both to impose the order they want – and choose the leaders – and rather than accepting the hierarchy and leaders that emerge.
• Hierarchy allows for succession planning
• Reduce illegal behaviour: maybe not a big issue in your twenty-first century office but this can be an issue. It can also be a particular issue when people rise to the top of a hierarchy and find the organizational controls they had before are gone: they have nobody to report to. Could this explain some of the sexual and business mis-conduct that has been in the media in recent times?

Benefits to the individual:

• Hierarchy creates psychological safety, individuals know where they fit in and what is expected of them. They know who they need to pay attention to.
• Hierarchy reduces cognitive load and fear, in part because of the psychological safety it creates.
• Hierarchy provides a career model: people know what advancement in the organization looks like and those who want advancement can map out a course to achieve that.

Benefits to a team:

• Hierarchy creates clear areas of responsibility which enables team members and creates focus within the team.
• Hierarchy provides team members with a structures and helps them accept their position. On the whole people are accepting of hierarchy and accept the position. (Perhaps because they also know how they can advance their position.)
• Hierarchy allows a mix of strong and weak personalities to work together. While hierarchy can be used by powerful formal leads to suppress weaker staff hierarchy cuts both ways. Team decision making can be improved when hierarchy facilities equitable discussion between strong personalities.
• Formal hierarchy, with formal leaders, actually puts a responsibility on the leaders to ensure balance and allow weaker personalities to have their say. (While this can be abused when it is abused it should be clear to all concerned that the leader is not upholding their part of the bargain.)
• In a recognised hierarchy the senior people have a responsibility to moderate and listen to all. Where there is no hierarchy few may feel that responsibility and a single strong voice may dominate the weak.
• Where there is no hierarchy and multiple strong personalities the result can be conflict and disagreement. Without the hierarchy it can be hard to resolve such problems.
• Hierarchy provides for decision makers, perhaps one, perhaps more. Having recognised decision makers can make for rapid decisions: people know who to go to and that person knows they have responsibility. Conversely, where decisions are made by consensus decision making can be slow or absent entirely.

Recently I observed a team which made most decisions by consensus. But as one strong personality rarely agreed with the others any decision they didn’t agree with became a battle field. Most team members kept quiet and nothing changed. Sometimes another strong personality would try and force the decision through but this was usually unsuccessful. Only when several other team members were prepared to take sides. As a result consensus became a recipe for not changing.

Of these arguments the ones I find most interesting are those which concern the emergence of social hierarchy. I’ve certainly seen this – even in organizations with a formal hierarchy. Emergent leadership and hierarchy can be a good thing. They can also be a bad thing.

I can immediately think of several teams I’ve worked with were one of the developers – sometimes a relatively junior one at that – emerge as leaders and the team adopted a hierarchy oriented towards that leader. On one occasion that leader was me and I like to think I brought an order and structure which was beneficial. But I’ve seen other occasions were the leader who emerged was at odds with others in the organization with the result of tension.

I expect the idea of emergent hierarchy is immediately recognisable to those schooled in emergent design and behaviour. The question becomes: should organizations accept this? Or should they try to guide it?

In the extreme should an organization fight an emergent hierarchy which conflicts with the aims and goals of the organization? And is it worth the effort?

So far I have more questions than answers. I haven’t suddenly become an advocate for hierarchy but I now recognised this is not a one sided discussion. I plan to write another blog when I get to the end of the book and have had a chance to think through the for and against arguments.

In the meantime I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments, just add them below.

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“Planning has rapidly diminishing returns: plan less, do more, learn more, redesign governance to kill early and often.”

Happy new year! – There is always a special responsibility that comes with the first blog post of a new year. Fortunately Tom Cagley of SpamCast fame asked me a fantasy question:

If there is one piece of advice you would give to CxO executives what would it be?

There is plenty of advice I’d like to give them, but one piece of advice?

One piece of advice which is generic and cuts across industry upon industry. One piece of advice for all those companies I know nothing about.

Tough. When I eventually came up with my answer I knew I’d have to explain it.

I had to think long and hard. I knew immediately that it would be something on the continuous digital theme. (One piece of advice for budding authors: don’t write long books, I knew this already then I mistakenly wrote Continuous Digital, that should have been four books.)

Eventually I came up with this:

“Planning has rapidly diminishing returns: plan less, do more, learn more, redesign governance to kill early and often.”

I believe this is universally true. Plan anything for long enough and you will eventually plan your way out of doing anything. When I run my Extended XP Game I regularly see teams plan their way out of good approaches to work.

Some planning adds a lot of value. But the rate of learning slows and continues to slow. At some point you aren’t learning more at all, and sometime after that your learning is counter productive. As economists say: there are diminishing returns on the investment.

A little planning adds a lot of value. But each extra minute of planning adds less value than the previous minute. Plan a little, do a little.

In our modern technology driven world two factors make this especially true.

One: learning by doing is faster with modern technology

Technology has advanced: Moore’s Law means I have over 100 times as much power in my MacBook Air as I did in the 6502 BBC Micro I learned to program on in the 1980s. That in turn had more power than the IBM Mainframes of the late 1960s.

That means our tools are more powerful: the Python I programme in today isn’t the most powerful language but it is a damn site more powerful than 6502 assembler and BBC Basic. Add open source libraries and that Python is immensely more powerful than writing in 1960s COBOL.

As a result things that tool months or years to create take hours and days. A week of planning for a OS/360 COBOL program that will take 6 months to write makes sense. A week of planning for a Python program I’ll have running in the cloud by the end of next week doesn’t.

And when I say planning I mean all aspect of planning: research, requirements, schedules, architecture designs and the rest.

Sure a bit of planning makes complete sense. I would be stupid not to make a coffee and think about what I was about to do. But planning is all about learning, is about experiencing the future a little bit. The power of our tools today means that future is a lot closer, and the most rapid way to learn about it is to create it.

Once I reach that future it makes sense to stop, review and plan again. The quickest way to learn is to alternate thinking (that is “planning”) and action (learning by doing.) Do something, see what works, then take time to reflect and learn.

Doing is learning too. The question at any given point is: what is the fastest way to learn? In the beginning that is planning, very soon doing becomes faster.

Two: cost of delay changes everything

Once you appreciate cost of delay you see the world differently (If you don’t know cost of delay look at my Time-Value profiles (Look at my article in Agile Connection or read Don Reinertsen’s Principles of Product Development Flow.)

Now remember: planning time is time, planning delays launch. Keep planning, analysing, talking to potential customers, drawing imaginary project plans or perfecting your architecture (before you start building) all delays the time you will get a product into the market.

That delay is bad because it increases risk: until your product is in the market you are at risk of creating a product nobody wants, or at least nobody will pay for.

That delay means your product will earn less money – thats cost of delay. Potential customers may have found other solutions, competitors may have got there first, or technology advances may render your product obsolete.

Lets be straight: I’m not saying No Planning. A little planning can be really really useful and valuable. So please plan!

What I am saying is: plan a little, do a little. Repeat.

Then stop, reflect, evaluate, and plan a little more before you do a bit. Alternate planning and doing. I’m not original in saying that, the Shewhart cycle (i.e. the Deming cycle or PDCA), says the same and so do half a dozen other approaches.

The problem is: many executives have been taught to plan plan plan. Nobody ever gets in trouble for planning too much and most failures can be traced back to a failure to plan more if you try hard enough. Ultimately, if you plan enough you will never have any failures because you will never do anything.

Which brings me to the last part of that executive advice: “redesign governance to kill early and often.”

Organizational governance is overwhelmingly based on the assumption that we know what we are doing. Only things that are very well understood will be allowed to start. That incentivises people to plan plan plan. And when something does get started there is a bias against closing it down (inertia and commitment escalation).

That needs to change. Since we can’t know in advance we need to be able to react once work is in flight.

Organizations need to be prepared to start work where the outcome is vague. Governance then needs to kill initiatives which aren’t showing promise. Put it another way: the early stage gates need less rigorous and the later ones more rigourous. If governance isn’t killing initiatives often then either governance isn’t working or you aren’t taking enough risk.

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To coincide with my new book, The Art of Agile Product Ownership, I’ve written a post which appears on the publishers website: Four Things Every Product Owner Needs.