As a kid, I grew up in Cornwall, UK surfing the cold Atlantic coast beaches of Newquay and Porthtowan. Next week I am excited to be in Los Angeles presenting on waves of change and hybrid approaches.

This talk is particularly poignant since it will be 20 years since I gave my first PMI Global presentation on hybrid techniques, which was also in Los Angeles (Link). It’s like coming full circle from talking about something new to returning to see it mainstream.

Of course, it was not really new in 2004. People have been combining agile concepts with more plan-driven approaches for much longer. Tom Gilb was doing this in the 1980s. In 2000, I helped co-author what I think was the first hybrid white paper (Link) on using an agile approach (DSDM) with a structured project management approach (PRINCE2)—and this was a year before the Snowbird meeting and the creation of the Agile Manifesto.  

Combining agile techniques with more plan-driven approaches has always interested me. It helps us link valuable techniques to the real world, which has many non-agile aspects. The very best teams I have worked with (including a winner of a PMI Project of the Year award) used hybrid approaches, which I documented in my Beyond Agile book on situational agility.

When I made my original presentation, I knew I could either lay out my proposals for agile integration and hope people listened or be a part of the integration process.

Inspired by quotes like “For every thousand hacking at the leaves… there’s one striking at the root.” – Henry David Thoreau, and “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald I knew this meant working with PMI to add these concepts.

Another concept I like is Jim Collins’ “Genius of the AND versus the tyranny of the OR,” which suggests that there is often more power and utility in using elements from multiple approaches than choosing approach A or B.

We have seen lots of changes at PMI since that initial presentation, including:

• Agile courses in PMI Seminars World (now PMI Training)
• Forming the PMI Agile Community of Practice
• Having Agile mentioned in PMBOK 5th Edition
• Launch of the PMI-ACP Credential
• Creation of the Agile Practice Guide in partnership with the Agile Alliance
• The DA Acquisition
• Agile content being added to the PMP Exam and PMBOK 7^th Edition

Yet I am sure these changes will seem trivial compared to how project management will change in the next 5 years, let alone 20 years. My presentation is about more than just hybrid. It covers the convergence of three transformative waves.

1. Artificial Intelligence
2. Hybrid Approaches
3. Remote Teams

Like agile entering project management, these waves are impacting project management whether we like it or not. We can learn to surf or be left spluttering for relevance. After all, "In an environment where everyone else is moving forward, standing still has the same effect as moving backwards."

So, given that these changes are coming with or without us, we can engage and help shape them or be passive and let them shape us. My talk outlines practical steps to stay abreast of these changes, learn to utilize them and thrive on the rising tide of change.

If you attend the conference, it would be great to see you there, session 320.

Most of us will experience challenging and downright toxic people at some point in our careers. If you ever have, then you can probably see, in retrospect, how much those individuals differed from ordinary people. Yet, at the time, their impacts may have seemed so upsetting and jarring that it is quite common to question whether we had it wrong or contributed in some way toward the situation.

So, having some strategies for dealing with these people can save your sanity and provide pathways through the issues while also protecting others.

Fortunately, truly toxic people are few and far between. Most people we deal with are generally helpful or at least neutral. Occasionally, we encounter people with challenging personalities: people who unknowingly or deliberately bully, undermine, manipulate, or sabotage work, relationships, and people's self-esteem. Being unaware of these personality types can derail projects and cause high levels of personal distress to ourselves and other team members.

While terms like vindictive, argumentative, and manipulative might begin to describe these people, a more scientific understanding is helpful. The term Dark Triad is used in psychology to describe three negative and harmful personality traits. Some people have one or two of the traits, while others have all three.

Dark-Triad Traits

The dark-triad traits are Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy.

Narcissism

Narcissism is vanity, self-love, and having an overly inflated view of yourself. It is manifested through characteristics such as perceived superiority, entitlement, dominance, and self-admiration. Narcissists are egotistic, often lacking in empathy, overly sensitive to criticism, and have inflated views of themselves. Unfortunately, that self-love and inflated ego mean they generally dress well, interview well, and are happy to talk about their accomplishments, and so get hired into positions of power and influence.

Machiavellianism

Machiavellianism is manipulation to get what is wanted. It includes a disregard for morals and the ready use of deception. It is driven by self-interest and is marked by traits such as being self-serving, immoral, deceitful, and cunning. Machiavellian people are often emotionally detached, cynical, and lack principles. They can be domineering and, because they are so sneaky, often do well in office politics, rising to positions of power and influence.

Psychopathy

Psychopathy is having little or no empathy for others, combined with high levels of thrill-seeking, impulsive behavior. Psychopaths exhibit aggressive, antisocial behavior without guilt. They are remorseless but can appear extraverted and superficially charming. Unfortunately, this can lead to—you guessed it— promotions and positions of power and influence.

You probably recognize these personality traits in people you work with, even if you do not apply the same labels. Like all personality traits, they exist on a spectrum. In mild forms or infrequent bursts, they do much less harm than severe or prolonged exposure.

How to Handle These People?

Knowing about these traits is extremely important because it allows us to adjust the "volume control" in terms of how these people impact us. Without understanding these traits, it is easy to be swayed and confused, and even question our contributions toward the conflict and problems these people create. Once we know how to recognize these traits, we can adjust our behavior around and involvement with these people.

A safe default strategy is to disengage and avoid people with dark-triad traits. However, we sometimes manage people with these characteristics, work alongside them, or report to them. In these cases, avoiding them is impossible, so here are some strategies for minimizing their impact.

First, Check if You are the Problem

First, we need to make sure we are not the problem (i.e., that we do not have dark-triad personality traits ourselves). Dr. Peter Jonason and Gregory Webster developed the Dirty Dozen rating scale to roughly assess dark-triad traits. It asks people to rate themselves on a scale from disagreeing to agreeing with these statements:

1. I tend to manipulate others to get my way.
2. I have used deceit or lied to get my way.
3. I have used flattery to get my way.
4. I tend to exploit others toward my own end.
5. I tend to lack remorse.
6. I tend to not be too concerned with morality or the morality of my actions.
7. I tend to be callous or insensitive.
8. I tend to be cynical.
9. I tend to want others to admire me.
10. I tend to want others to pay attention to me.
11. I tend to seek prestige or status.
12. I tend to expect special favors from others.

The higher the score, the higher the concern and the greater the need for some empathy training. Most people continue developing their EI, including empathy, as they age.

I know early in my project-management career, I was liable to employ Machiavellian approaches to increase the success rate of my projects. I did not do anything too sinister, but I would book meeting rooms far in advance, in case we needed them, and claim favorable go-live dates when the best support staff were available. Now, I am much more willing to give up/trade rooms/dates for the organization's greater good or help people out when possible. It was not a monster-to-saint transformation but a more considerate mellowing with age. But let us talk about the real problem cases.

Dealing with Anger, Aggression, and Bullying

These are usually linked to psychopathic traits. If you see people frequently getting angry, shouting, or acting aggressively, or their anger spilling over into bullying, you must act quickly but carefully. Also, be aware that some people suppress their anger and instead brood, sulk, or ignore people. These are passive-aggressive behaviors that also need dealing with.

First, stay safe: do not put yourself in a situation with physical conflict. It is always better to walk away and engage HR. However, assuming the anger levels are lower, such issues must be dealt with. Resist the temptation to match the person's raised voice; instead, listen dispassionately and try to diagnose the cause of their issues. Techniques like questioning, active listening, and appreciative inquiry might help reveal why they behave as they are. If not, it may be time to recommend counseling, either directly to the person, if they acknowledge the issue, or to HR, if they will not.

When bullying is involved, be it verbal abuse, threatening behavior, or just unnecessary criticism, it is crucial to support the victim in addition to addressing the perpetrator. Leaders should listen for concerns both formally and informally. We are closer to team members than the senior level and can better spot shifts and pattern changes in behavior.

When someone does something you feel is disrespectful, have a conversation with them about it (if you feel it is safe to do so). We cannot assume that someone is a bully if we have not told them their behavior appeared disrespectful because we have not allowed them to understand our view and the opportunity to change.

We must also walk the talk, treating all stakeholders respectfully and encouraging respectful interactions through all communication channels. We often set the tone for workplace behavior, and people watch us for cues.

We should arrange, support, and attend training, then provide ongoing training on respectful workplace interactions. Having people acknowledge workplace policies during orientation is not enough. Everyone needs to know specific acceptable and unacceptable behaviors and be trained to handle aggression and bullying when it occurs.

Tackling Manipulation and Double-Dealing

These are Machiavellian traits. Manipulative people are skilled at hiding their behavior. They often present one face when it serves them well and then another, altogether different persona when that serves them better.

Look for people who will not take no for an answer, always have reasons and excuses for their hurtful behavior, or switch personas to suit their circumstances. Due to their chameleon-like nature, we need to be specific about pointing out what behaviors we have noticed and how they negatively impact the team.

Talk to them privately first. If you see manipulative behaviour in a meeting, hallway, or desk conversation, try calling out the manipulator in private first. It allows them to explain (but be prepared to see a different persona) and change their ways.

If that does not work, call out the behavior publicly to show that it will not be tolerated. This reduces the opportunity for the manipulator to lie or play dumb about the situation. It also shows everyone what is going on and builds allies for additional intervention and support. Follow up with them in private again, clearly explaining how their behavior must change, and consider implementing conduct agreements or performance agreements to hold them accountable.

Manipulators are often driven by insecurity. They are trying to build power through knowledge and connections. They often start out acting friendly with people to learn about them and gain personal information they can potentially use later for their own purposes.

An effective strategy for disarming them of power and influence is to form closer relationships with other people in their network. If the manipulator is a network architect, have lunch with some of the other network architects and the manipulator's boss. Once they see their source of power dwindling, they feel threatened and switch from manipulating others to defending their own career which they believe is linked to their connections and knowledge.

Ultimately, we want offenders to see the greater good of the team members and the organization they work in. Information does not become less valuable as it is shared. Helping others is a more powerful strategy for self-promotion than undermining them—it just takes longer to germinate.

Handling Entitlement and a "How Does That Help Me?" Mentality

These are signs of narcissism. There is less to worry about here. Excessive use of I and me language, as opposed to us and we language, is a telltale sign that we are dealing with a narcissist who can upset team harmony and performance.

With big egos often comes the denial of fault and an expectation of not being challenged, so it is essential to be direct and specific about how their actions impact team performance. Confront the perpetrators and explain the impact of their behavior. Come prepared with feedback and recent examples or evidence of their selfish actions. Suggest how to be more inclusive and supporting and better serve the team.

Follow up with team members to see if they are keeping these characteristics in check. They will unlikely transform into selfless servant leaders, so toning their behavior down to tolerable levels is often the best we can hope for.

Summary

Unfortunately, manipulative, nasty people are part of life. Being aware of the dark-triad traits can help us spot them a little earlier, somewhat negate their impacts, and provide us with some strategies for dealing with them.

The traits include the following:

• Narcissism is characterized by self-love, superiority, dominance, and an inflated view of oneself.
• Machiavellianism is characterized by a disregard for morals, the use of deception, and cynicism and cunning.
• Psychopathy is characterized by thrill-seeking, impulsive behavior, aggression, and a lack of empathy and remorse or guilt.

Review the Dirty Dozen categories to see if 'we are surrounded by gullible idiots' (i.e., you are the problem) and, assuming you are not the problem, ask yourself if you see those characteristics exhibited by others. Bullying needs to be dealt with, and HR should often get involved. Double-dealing often stems from insecurity, which can be used to rein people in and neutralize their impact.

To be forewarned is to be forearmed. In other words, knowing a little about toxic people can help us avoid them or reduce their impact.

[This post is an extract from my book Beyond Agile– a hybrid model for blending agile with additional emotional intelligence and leadership skills. You can read much more about the Power Skills to build and troubleshoot high-performing teams in the rest of the book ]

PMI had a reputation for being conservative and slow to adopt new ideas or technology (it was slow to embrace agility, for instance). So, I was pleased to see three progressive themes dominating the sessions at the recent PMI Global Summit in Atlanta, Georgia.

Theme 1: Putting Artificial Intelligence to Work
Going into the conference, I knew artificial intelligence would be a pervasive topic. There were great AI presentations and AI-powered tools being demoed in the exhibit area, and some impressive announcements from PMI:

• The "Generative AI Overview for Project Managers" course had more than 66,000 signups in the first few weeks of being offered—and saw an impressive 2,850 additional ones at the conference alone.
• PMI launched its own "Project Infinity" AI engine at the conference that returns trusted responses from PMI's extensive knowledge base of standards, guides, publications and articles. The come-try-it demo booth was popular at the event and answered over 1,000 queries.

The tools at the conference spanned a spectrum from basic AI assistants through project task augmentation, all the way through to task automation.

AI Assistants: Using AI to generate or summarize meeting minutes and create action items is an example of basic assistants. The same goes for drafting project documentation, creating lists of common estimation omissions for our industry, and brainstorming risks for our type of projects. These tools may be helpful, but are not new or particularly impressive. They are more the mash-up and evolution of speech-to-text, Grammarly and Google Search. Useful, but not exceptional.

AI Augmentation: Ricardo Vargas gave an entertaining demo of recent features from ChatGPT-4, showing how to attach project documents and spreadsheets to analyze. One example showed a 4,000+ task Microsoft Project plan, exported to Excel and then uploaded to query about utilization, constraints and recommendations for fast-tracking. Another included portfolio analysis of multiple project parameters to identify a candidate list of projects to undertake that should not exceed a specified budget.

Today's ChatGPT-4 can evaluate budgets, start and end dates, net present value (NPV) and risks. It can also provide a clear explanation of the justification for recommending the execution order and selection of candidate projects. This would already be helpful for some developing PMOs and portfolio managers.

AI Automation: I saw no useful examples of true management automation. However, given the current rate of tool progression and investment pouring into AI, I fully expect this to change by the next conference.

I went into Summit having only experimented with the free versions of ChatGPT, Bard and Jasper. Given all the press, they seemed to be at the peak of inflated expectations on the Gartner Hype Cycle, and I expected a year of decline through the “Trough of Disillusionment” before a smaller set of tools would emerge as “Productive” solutions.

I now think every PM should pilot the document analytic tools of ChatGPT-4 and other platforms, so you will be practiced as they become truly useful. As the old adage goes, "In an environment where everyone else is moving forward, standing still has the same effect as moving backwards."

Limitations and obstacles for corporate use are rapidly being removed. Models are now connected to the web to access current information. They can also encrypt training and query data to limit the exposure of sensitive data.

An AI-Hybrid Workforce: The newer adage, "Your job may not be replaced by AI, but it might be replaced by someone using AI more effectively than you are" ushers in a new class of team members. We will see teams staffed by people, people-augmented with AI tools, and fully AI-automated team roles.

Theme 2: Hybrid-Approaches Are Normalized
Very few organizations are purely predictive or all agile. I can not remember the last client I visited that used a totally traditional/waterfall approach. There is always work to provide early feedback, validate scope, and use proof of concepts to explore new technology or processes.

Likewise, outside of technology startups, most agile projects must deal with plan-driven external groups, annual budget cycles, and non-agile governance. I would wager that over 90% of organizations and projects use a hybrid approach. This might be largely predictive with some agile-aligned elements, or a predominantly agile approach wrapped in more traditional up-front approvals and backend handover.

It was great to see healthy discussions and several sessions on practical hybrid approaches at this year's conference. I presented on Implementing Agile in Non-Agile Organizations (effective hybrid patterns and tailoring tools.)

With agile groups and associations (understandably) promoting single, pure frameworks, PMI could really shine in helping people succeed with hybrid. It could provide more tools and guidance for the majority of organizations operating in the hybrid middle ground.

This is already happening in a fragmented way. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide)—Seventh Ediiton covers value delivery across the spectrum of life cycle approaches. Disciplined Agile features structured governance and optional phases. The Agile Practice Guide describes agile suitability filters, and my own Beyond Agile Model fuses traditional, lean / agile, with leadership / emotional intelligence (plus industry-specific knowledge and tools) in a dynamic recommendations engine for each project.

A portal, hub or roadmap to support project managers navigating the hybrid landscape would be a helpful next step.

Theme 3: Hybrid Work Locations
Post-pandemic, the work landscape is irrevocably changed. People who can work some time remotely want to retain some / all of this freedom. Organizations that mandate full-time onsite work risk losing their best talent, who are in high demand and the most mobile.

Talent is distributed, and organizations offering flexible work conditions have the advantage in the war for talent. Sedimentation—losing your best people while failing to attract top new talent because of poor work flexibility, while retaining your lower performing, less-mobile talent—leads to organizational decline and non-competitiveness.

I attended an insightful panel discussion by PMO of the Year winners Mazen Hassen Akhdar and Sarah Dhanorker. They described how their organizations balanced onsite requirements with work flexibility to attract and retain top talent.

It seems foolish now to think that the best people to form our project team will all be found in our hometown and just thrilled to come into the office every day to work together for eight hours. Remote-first organizations (like Automattic and GitLab) that were deliberately remote-only long before COVID still have much to teach us about overcoming onboarding challenges, gaining alignment and asynchronous communication.

Face-to-face (F2F) collaboration helps early on to form better connections and is also advantageous for many activities. However, these do not represent 100% of the work done on a project. The percentage varies by project, but the optimal F2F for some teams could be half a day a week (10%)—or far less.

Technology has made communicating easier, and digital-native Generation Z often prefers it to F2F. As we learn how to use this technology, organizations that can master the balance will have a significant hiring and retention advantage.

"The Future is Already Here; it's Just Not Evenly Distributed"
When I presented "Utilizing Agile Principles Alongside the PMBOK Guide" at the 2004 PMI Global Congress in Los Angeles, I did not know it was PMI's first global conference session on using agile approaches. I'd been involved in the creation of DSDM in 1994, and it seemed odd that—10 years later—project managers were not using agile approaches much (or even talking about them). I learned that ideas can take a while to go mainstream. (Also, to be fair, the Agile Manifesto that popularized agile approaches had only been out a couple of years by then.)

Now, 19 years later, agile and hybrid approaches are mainstream. The pandemic forced remote and now hybrid working locations to the mainstream in less than two years. I wonder how long the AI-hybrid workforce will take to arrive? Given the rate of recent development progress and investment levels, I think it will be under a year.

These work progressions form a cube illustrating the evolving project workspace if we present them together:

Organizations using purely traditional approaches—not leveraging AI and mandating full-time onsite teams—were once the classic project environment, but are now the exception in some industries.

The sessions I attended at the PMI Global Summit, and the people I spoke to, indicate that most organizations have transitioned in the last couple of years to a central hybrid³ position—meaning they use hybrid life cycles, some AI tools, and some remote work.

Industries will migrate at different speeds. Some project types—like road construction, mining, etc.—might seem location-dependent and people-focused, but construction robotics and remote telemining jobs already exist. These concepts may seem far-fetched now, but that's the nature of uneven distribution.

By the time the next PMI Global Summit takes place in Los Angeles again in 2024, there will be far more companies operating in the top center and right portion of this Project Cube:

These three themes are not acting in isolation—they are convergent accelerants. They act together as booster rockets for the transition to the upper right rear cube of Tomorrow’s Project Environment. AI-equipped tools can analyze distributed communications and boost tacit knowledge, enabling better remote work and agile development.

This migration will happen with or without us. Organizations looking for efficiencies and competitive advantage will drive the evolution. It is a great time to be a project manager as our profession undergoes a massive shift that we can be a part of and help shape the future—if we engage. I hope PMI continues to light the way and tap the collective wisdom of its great community of members.

I left the conference with many new ideas and a long list of new tools to try, books to read, and contacts to follow up with. It was a fun few days that provided great insights into an exciting future. If you did not get a chance to attend this year, consider attending in Los Angeles next year (or wherever your closest PMI Summit event will be held).

References

1. Generative AI Overview for Project Manager – Free overview course with 5 PDUs
2. PM Illustrated.com – Hybrid life cycle descriptions
3. Disciplined Agile - Choose Your Way of Working – Hybrid Implementation Patterns
4. Beyond Agile Model – A dynamic project approach recommendation engine
5. Agile Practice Guide – Explanations of hybrids and Agile Suitability Filter tools
6. PMBOK Guide 7^th Edition – Life cycle agnostic value delivery principles and performance domains

Handout - Download Three Trends Shaping the Future of Project Teams - Handout 

[Note: For more articles from Mike Griffiths, visit his blog at www.LeadingAnswers.com. Mike first wrote this article for ProjectManagement.com here.]

Inflection Point – a critical change in direction.

Yesterday, a couple of data points crossed my desk that got me wondering if the Agile movement has succeeded and will now be absorbed into the mainstream. First, Jurgen Appelo posted about how the Agile Movement is Shrinking, but the Agile Mindset is Growing. He explained that some Agile conference attendance numbers are shrinking while business change is accelerating, and the most sought-after skills are collaboration and agility.

An alternative explanation is that people do not go to in-person conferences as much anymore. COVID taught us that remote is possible. Anyone who tried to get Taylor Swift tickets knows in-person can be expensive, and maybe on video is the next best thing.

Then I learned the upcoming PMI Global Summit in Atlanta has already outsold all previous PMI conferences and will be the largest in-person event in PMI history with over 3,300 attendees and still rising. The program has many agile and business agility sessions, and I will be presenting on Introducing Agile to Non-Agile Organizations.

Confirmation bias – The tendency to favor information that confirms or strengthens our beliefs.

Also this week, Stefan Wolpers wrote a great article about Should We Change Scrum? He describes circumstances where interfaces or changes to Scrum could improve its adoption and increase business agility.

Hybrid-approaches and integrating agile techniques with more structured approaches are nothing new. In 2000 (before the Agile Manifesto was written), I co-authored the first white paper about using agile approaches with structured project management Using DSDM with PRINCE2.

If the agile movement is declining because it has succeeded in introducing agility, I guess that is good. Heck, I have dedicated a bunch of time towards spreading agility within PMI and know many others who have also.

Explaining agility will continue to be necessary, but maybe we are seeing an inflection point? Maybe these data points are just confirmation bias? I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts.

Suitability filters are models that offer simplified views of a decision-making process. They help people identify and discuss the variables at play and make a recommendation. The British statistician George Box said it best “All models are wrong, but some models are useful.”

A good model provides insights, usually a basic view of how something works or the interactions between variables. From this perspective, models are interesting and can speed up our comprehension of something. However, the greatest benefit of models is as a group alignment tool.

Visual Models Create Group Consensus

Much of today’s work is knowledge work. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) contribute their expertise and collaborate to solve problems or build new products and services. This work is largely invisible and intangible. There are few physical or visible increments in the process. So, when someone describes a requirement, decision, or problem, there is a high chance that other people interpret that description differently.

The Telephone Game and Tree Swing cartoon are classic examples of how even well-meaning interpretations can be distorted, leading to bad outcomes. Left unchecked, our mental models of a product, project or process can diverge from our teammates. This is where visual models offer significant benefits.

Models visualize the previously invisible and, if dynamic, allow us to manipulate the intangible. In doing so, they bring SMEs together by pointing at and discussing the same variables, goals, and interactions we see.

Since knowledge work is now pervasive, tools that can get people on the same page are incredibly useful. This is why I created PMillustrated.com to explain project management to visual learners, and I am a fan of the PMI product Wicked Problem Solving (WPS). They illuminate the invisible and allow us to manipulate the intangible nature of knowledge work. Models unite stakeholders and help avoid divergence.

Some Example Models

Project Plans, Release Roadmaps, and Kanban Boards are examples of familiar visual models designed to help get people on the same page about timelines, what will be released, and work in progress. They are all simplifications since listing every task or feature for non-trivial projects or products would not be practical – yet they are still valuable.

Project plans and release roadmaps are mainly static. While we can edit them to pull and push at the variables (scope, people, estimates), it is generally discouraged since we quickly lose the original view created by the project manager or product owner. Kanban boards are deliberately more interactive. Team members move their own tasks, select new items to work on, and we can see the impacts on queue length, WIP and maybe cycle time or throughput.

Models that invite more people to interact, capture more diverse insights, facilitate better conversations, and generate stronger consensus to the final configurations. So, ideally, good models are interactive, easy to reset and invite manipulation and conversation.

“Good models are interactive, easy to reset, and invite manipulation and conversation.”

Approach and Life Cycle Suitability Filters

I have long been a fan of approach suitability filters. Not because these are infallible or inherently superior to letting people discuss how to undertake something. Instead, because they make the invisible factors visible and get people talking about what common aspects are significant.

Without suitability filters, people can be stuck in old ways or recommend unsuitable approaches because “that’s just how we do things here”, “what our standards say”, “a cool new approach I just read about”, etc.

My first exposure to suitability filters was in 1994, working on the DSDM Project and Organizational Suitability Filters. I have written about the evolution of suitability filters several times on this blog. This comprehensive list post dates from 2007. More recently, I created the Agile Suitability Filter for the Agile Practice Guide by synthesizing elements from Boehm & Turner’s model, DSDM’s Organizational Suitability Filter and new elements.

The trouble with these models was that they were published as Standards, books, or static web pages. This meant people had to print and hand them out or implement them as spreadsheets to share for use and get feedback. These clunky implementations hampered the quick reset and shared manipulation we want from a good model. DA also has some good material around scaling factors, but they are currently static models with links to static pages of text. There is no interactivity or feedback gained from manipulating values.

Web-Based Interactive Tools

Web-based tools are less likely to get lost or need preparation before use. Anyone with a web browser can access them, so they promote use by many stakeholders. Plus dynamic web controls also allow users to interact and manipulate the model parameters and see, then discuss, how the model responds.

1) The Beyond Agile Model

<Link to Beyond Agile Model>

The Beyond Agile Model is a web-based tool initially sparsely populated with suggestions for approaches, training, webinars, etc. Dragging the Project Characteristics sliders expands or contracts the dotted-red line depicting the Recommends Lens. Choosing the “Simple”, “Medium”, or “Complex” options from the Choose Model drop-down adds more sliders.

My book “Beyond Agile: Achieving Success with Situational Knowledge and Skills” describes the model, which is fully reconfigurable based on a public Google Sheet spreadsheet as a starting point. You can copy the sheet, amend it to your organizational needs, save it privately, and point the tool to this new private version. Then continue adding or amending Recommendation Types (Approaches, Training, Artifacts, etc) Recommendations (Team Charter, Release Roadmaps, etc) and Project Characteristics you wish to model (such as Team Size, Criticality, etc.)

Organizations use it to describe their proprietary approaches or create hybridized implementations of DA and SAFe with other techniques. You can read more about the Beyond Agile Model here and here and here and here, or just get the book for all the info.

2) Agile Suitability Filter

<Link to Agile Suitability Filter>

This is a pilot implementation of the Agile Suitability Filter published in the Agile Practice Guide. Making the model available online makes it quicker to share, easier to reset and open for all to play with and discuss as a group.

3) Citizen Developer (CD) / Low-Code No-Code (LCNC) Suitability Filter

<Link to CD Suitability Filter>

This is a new pilot filter based on the existing Citizen Developer suitability assessment 2x2 matrix and personal experience. Are the assessment parameters complete?  - Probably not. Are they helpful in discussing with stakeholders about the risks and opportunities of using LCNC – Probably.

What factors do you assess when determining if a product or problem is a candidate for LCNC? I would love to hear from you and create alternative models for testing.

Likewise, what are your thoughts on dynamic models to help facilitate better conversations and decisions? What models do you use, and what would you like to see developed?

Communicating project issues is challenging. Exactly when should we escalate? Who to, and how much of a chance to correct things should be given first? This is why some projects create control limits around critical parameters and develop escalation plans to communicate exceptions and agree on the next steps.

However, on most small to medium size projects, these escalation plans are often missing or left to the project manager's discretion. This creates further problems if the response is too late, not far-reaching enough, or not aligned with sponsor expectations.

Also, what are the expectations for communicating delays, risks and issues at the team level? Do we want to hear when something takes a couple of hours longer than planned (probably not), a couple of days (probably, yes), or a couple of weeks (no, we should have been informed much earlier!)

A "Definition of Broken" (DoB) helps identify and trigger previously agreed exception plans. It is a list of events that allows us to flag and start addressing a problem without the emotions and delays of arguing if it is significant, warrants immediate action, whose responsibility it is, etc.

Just as you do not want to invent a fire evacuation plan during an actual fire, so should exception plans be created before problems arise.

Origins

Agile approaches often use a "Definition of Done" (DoD) to describe the attributes that constitute acceptable. For an increment of software, this may include items such as:

• Coded
• Tested
• Refactored
• Integrated
• Reviewed
• Accepted by customer
• …

Some teams also use a "Definition of Ready" DoR to describe the desired state of requirements. For example, this could be an appropriately sized user story that meets the INVEST mnemonic attributes. Similarly, “Goldratt’s Rules of Flow” describes creating a Full-kit that lists all the items required before starting work on something. Then a sprint or iteration transforms the selected items that meet the DoR into increments that satisfy the DoD.

A Definition of Broken (DoB) is a shorthand way of referring to tolerances and exception procedures. Creating a DoB allows us to objectively describe future issues and resolutions before the stress of a problem clouds people's judgment. I have used DoBs with teams for over ten years and found them valuable shorthand terms for significant impediments.

PRINCE2 popularized tolerances and exception plans procedures in the 1990s. While PMI literature does reference risk tolerances and escalations, the PRINCE2 coverage is much broader. Tolerances can be set up around spending trends, quality metrics, sponsor confidence, widget output, or any project parameter you like. The example below shows a tolerance range around projected spend at +10% and -20%.

So, tolerance is an agreed range of variation, like a control range. However, unlike control ranges, tolerances are paired with an exception procedure to be executed if the tolerance range is breached.

The Downsides of Tolerances and Exception Plans

While it would be helpful to create tolerances and exception plans for a wide variety of project variables, project managers typically do not have time to document them all and get approval from the necessary stakeholders.

As a result, the good practice of defining tolerances and exception plans is often omitted from projects that do not mandate them for safety, regulatory compliance, or quality reasons. Project managers are too busy to create them, and sponsors don't want to review a long list of "What if this happens…" procedures.

Definition of Broken (DoB) Can Help

This is where a Definition of Broken (DoB) comes in, as a lightweight pre-approved emergency response plan. Without all the documentation and signoffs, critical issues that would require sponsor or steering committee intervention can be agreed to in advance. Then, should any of these events occur, there is much less debate before action is taken. This pre-approved action plan speeds remediation and increases the likelihood of recovering from a significant issue.

A Couple of Examples

On a project to implement a 3^rd party membership management software package and write new custom code to link the membership system to various in-house developed systems, DoBs were created for likely but high-consequence scenarios. These DoB situations triggered an escalation report to the project steering committee and automatic inclusion as a discussion item at the weekly sponsor review meeting.

Example 1: Vendor Schedule Delay

The vendor's implementation plan showed the core member billing module configured, installed and tested by the end of May.

DoB Trigger: "Billing module not operational on June 30^th" 

(This was a month after the vendor planned to do it. So the vendor was happy to agree to the DoB trigger. Predictably, come June 30^th, the billing module was installed but still not operational. Having the DoB clause with an approved escalation plan meant no debate or weaseling opportunities for the vendor. The item was escalated, bringing in new vendor staff to expedite the issue resolution.

Example 2: Integration Team not Available

Since the micro-services group was a critical dependency, it seemed prudent to get pre-approval to resolve any delays.

DoB Trigger: "The project team waits more than two weeks for an integration or test- environment to be created."

(In this event, the issue will be raised with the Integration director and escalated to the steering committee. Due to many projects requiring work from the Micro-services team, this happened on three occasions. Fortunately, the team anticipated the delays, and the escalation resulted and quicker turnarounds than other projects experienced.

How is this Different from Basic Risk Management?

DoBs certainly overlap with risk management. The critical difference lies in the socialization and pre-approval of the escalation procedures to expedite action. Having a risk occur and turn into an issue then requires communication and issue escalation.

Using the risk response route is akin to sending a high-importance email to everyone at the affected location that there is a fire and they must evacuate. Then hope they read it, take it to heart, and act on it with the appropriate urgency. Having a DoB with a pre-approved escalation plan is more like sounding the fire alarm. It has been discussed and approved before; now we just need to do what was agreed. Since issues are like fish smells (they get worse the longer you leave them), things we can create upfront to speed resolution are often worthwhile. 

How to Implement DoBs

First of all, we need to be realistic about the effectiveness of DoBs. If we try to create too many, we will not gain the agreement or buy-in for the resolution we need to make them effective. I suggest no more than 5-10. Likewise, they need to be based on critical-consequence threats, not minor impact problems. If we cry-wolf too often, we will be correctly ignored. So, only use them for issues that would threaten the success of the project.

For serial, plan-driven projects, DoBs can be added to the project charter and updated at phase boundaries. Wording can be as simple as:

"The following Definition of Broken (DoB) items identify scenarios that would trigger immediate escalation to the sponsor and addition to the issues list reviewed at biweekly steering committee meeting:

• Building permits not obtained by June 15^th
• The pumping station is not operational at full capacity by year-end
• Telemetry software not completed and accepted by Feb. 28^th“

For hybrid and agile projects, DOBs can be drafted alongside the Definition of Done (DoD) and reviewed and updated at retrospectives as necessary. They can be recorded in the team charter you posted somewhere visible. "Our Definition of Broken (DoB) items that signifies immediate team resolution comprises:

• Customer satisfaction ratings less than 80%
• Servers not installed and acceptance tested by May 1^st
• Page load speeds over 3 seconds
• Critical bug cycle time > 2 days
• Team eNPS below 30”

Parting Thoughts

If the Definition of Done (DoD) is a broadly accepted and understood concept in your organization, consider discussing a DoB. Maybe it makes sense to try them? The criteria can be agreed upon with vendors and team members, product owners, business representatives and any group with a stake in the project.

The goal is not to set traps for future punishment but to promote constructive dialog and consensus about what constitutes a significant problem. Then collaboratively define the escalation procedure and gain agreement to expedite these issues, should they ever occur.

The process has a subtly different effect than documenting risks which is often not a collaborative process agreed to by both the triggering and impacted stakeholders. Creating a list of DoBs and making it visible can change behavior and impact outcomes.

Also, discussing issues and escalation plans with sponsors can uncover priorities not identified in the chartering process. The more we learn about what constitutes success, acceptable variation, or failure, the better we can navigate project decisions and direction to better outcomes. 

Note: I first wrote about the Definition of Broken (DoB) in my book Beyond Agile.

I'm excited to announce that the new PM Illustrated Audio/Video Book is now available! It's an excellent resource for visual learners studying for the PMP exam who would rather watch and listen to content rather than read it. It was a pleasure to partner with Barb Waters on this initiative. Her narration is excellent, and she brings the PM Illustrated book content to life.

If you are a visual learner preparing for your PMP exam or know someone who might benefit from this different learning mode, please head to PMillustrated.com to check it out. There is also a free sample with three videos and >30 minutes of content to get a feel for the format and content before buying.

Project management is a dynamic, vibrant career, so don't study for the PMP exam with dry, boring content. Our comprehension and recall are much stronger for fun and engaging topics. So, use PM Illustrated's visual learning tools as your Guide on the Side for deeper understanding.

See the video book and free samples.

On Friday, September 30, I will be presenting a session on Beyond Agile at the HTEC Project Management Virtual Conference. The session is free to attend and is part of a program that also features Scott Ambler, Sanjiv Augustine, Nader Rad, and Frank Turley. You can register here.

“Yes, And, And”

A colleague recently described Beyond Agile as a “Yes, And, And” toolkit, and I thought it was a great way to summarize the two elements of combining hybrid agile with the Theory of Constraints, and value stream view.

“Yes, And”

“Yes, And” is a term from improv comedy that refers to the idea of not undermining what has come before and adding valuable new elements. For example, we can say, “Yes, Scrum has been tremendously popular partly because of its initial simplicity, And when we add ideas from emotional intelligence, it can be even more effective.” We acknowledge the strengths of Scrum And add valuable extras.

The First “Yes, And” – Welcome Hybrid

Beyond Agile takes a “Yes, And” approach to hybrid agile. It acknowledges that agile approaches are a great place to start for knowledge work projects, And adds that sometimes, traditional approaches can bring useful elements for risk management, dependency analysis, etc.

Of course, Beyond Agile does not just add traditional approach elements to agile. It also adds ideas from leadership and emotional intelligence, along with recognizing the need for industry knowledge. These elements form the 4 overlapping circles of ideas in the Beyond Agile Model.

The Second “And”

The second And in “Yes, And, And” is the removal of insufficiently performing process. So, Yes, we use a hybrid of approaches And relentlessly remove processes that no longer justify their expenditure. This is the elastic property of the Beyond Agile Model Recommendations lens. It is always trying to contract and asking us to see what we can do without, so we focus more time and effort on value delivery.

The Beyond Agile Model defaults to a small set of recommended practices. We must manipulate the project characteristic sliders to open the recommendations lens to suggest more processes. Then we are always asking:

• What can we drop?
• What is no longer worth the effort?
• Can we try without X for a week and see what happens?

For most teams, this takes conscious effort. We get used to activities and events, so asking if we need them or if they are worth it seems unnatural. However, we carry the time and concentration burden of all processes, so asking if they deserve space in our ways-of-working backpack is valid.

Techniques such as visualizing our work time help us see the weight of our processes. It is an application of the Lean concept of removing waste. Any process that costs more than it delivers is wasteful, and the team should ask if they can get the same or similar benefits for less expenditure.

Ultimately we should expand our toolbox with as many valuable techniques as we can since knowledge is weightless. We can hone our skills through training and progressively larger-scale practice. Then become agnostic; it should not matter what camp the tools and techniques come from if they are valuable. Finally, we focus on value delivery, which means relentlessly removing excess process (agile or otherwise.)   

 “Yes And, And” captures the hybrid and value delivery focus nature of Beyond Agile. I look forward to explaining the concepts further on Friday and discussing case studies from teams that have used them. Please join us if you can, or sign up for the event so you can view the recording later.

This is part one in a series on leading agile teams from the Beyond Agile book. We will examine what leadership entails and how it applies to agile teams. Then discuss the transition from servant leadership to shared leadership.

EQ as a Foundation for Leadership

As we saw in the previous articles about Emotional Intelligence (EQ), leadership is built on top of EQ. We need good EQ to be able to recognize and manage our own emotions. This is a prerequisite for others to consider us credible and worth listening to. So, a firm grasp of EQ, either gained intuitively or improved through study/training, brings us to the starting line with engaged stakeholders. Then leadership involves bringing this collective willpower to bear on a vision or a journey to our project or product outcome.

We can create backlogs and release plans all we like, but until there is a motivated team with a shared vision of the end goal, it is like trying to push a rope—ineffective. Leadership is focused on creating the pull from the team and giving the team the goal and tools to overcome obstacles.

Leadership is a Huge Topic

Leadership has been around far longer than project management (which primarily grew from the Industrial Revolution.) Leadership goes back as far as people have lived together and worked together to achieve common goals, whether invading a neighboring tribe, traveling to new lands, or building a large structure.

There are over 70,000 published English-language books on leadership. If you read one daily, it would take you 191 years to finish them (by which time there would likely be 70,000 new ones to read). With such a deep history and broad scope, we need a focus to best direct our guidance toward knowledge-worker team execution.

So we will take a product-focused view toward leadership and concentrate on the leadership traits and steps necessary for building and leveraging high-performing teams in complex knowledge-work environments. Unlike many leadership books available, we will not cover leading companies or organizational change; instead, we will focus on leading projects and programs to deliver desired outcomes.

What Leadership Is Not

Unfortunately, there are many myths and misconceptions about what leadership means. So, before we get into how to become a better leader, we should dispel some of these myths that are common barriers to understanding.

The best metaphor I’ve heard for dispelling leadership myths is the “Cowboy leader” by Pinto et al.  When we think of a cowboy, we often picture the lone-wolf movie character who acts independently, often above the law, thinks on his feet, and saves the day. He cuts through bureaucratic red tape, circles the wagons, and rallies the people to overcome the bad guys. Then our hero rides off into the sunset with the pretty schoolteacher and onto his next adventure.

Yet this is just a movie-star definition of a cowboy, portrayed by the likes of John Wayne, Roy Rogers, and Clint Eastwood. Do you know what a real cowboy does? They lead cows. They use their dogged determination to turn and drive bovine herds toward the desired goal. I am not trying to be derogatory here, comparing your company’s staff to unintelligent cows; I am making the point that real cowboys do not typically do a lot of shooting of bad guys and rescuing damsels in distress.

Also, John Wayne, Roy Rogers, and Clint Eastwood are Hollywood actors, not cowboys. They live in big, fancy houses and do not spend much time around farm animals. Would you really trust them to look after cows? Your cows?

The term leadership is often loaded with this romantic notion of a swashbuckling go-getter with a larger-than-life rockstar personality. Yet, in reality, some of the best leaders are quiet, introverted people who care deeply for their teams and stakeholders and quietly grind away toward a common goal.

Real leadership is based on sound theory. It can be learned and exercised on a small scale before being brought to bear on larger groups. Authentic leadership is practiced on mundane things, yet when more significant events occur, the skills and trust of others can be used to overcome significant hurdles.

Additional leadership myths include the beliefs that leadership needs to reside in a single person and that all groups need leaders. Quite often, leadership roles are shared between team members. In fact, it is unlikely that any one person would be solely equipped to lead a team in all circumstances.

Establishing environments where people can step up to lead when the need arises creates resilience and competitive advantage. Likewise, some small teams without the need for high-consequence decision-making can operate just fine without a leader.

What Leadership Is

So, having established that leadership is not swashbuckling behavior or an innate quality of character, let us look at what it is. There are many different leadership models, but the same roles crop up repeatedly. Listing them is the easy part. We will then focus on the more difficult topic of how we achieve them, given all the challenges of project constraints, opposing demands, and people conflicts.

Leaders exhibit the following attributes:

1. Vision
2. Good communication skills
3. Ability to inspire trust
4. Ability to empower
5. Energy and action orientation
6. Emotional expressiveness and warmth
7. Willingness to take personal risks
8. Use of unconventional strategies

Let’s look at each of these characteristics in turn.

Vision - The ability to create and describe an exciting view of the future state. This includes what success looks like and the benefits it will bring to the sponsoring organization, the users of the end result, and the team members who created it. It provides a common goal to guide the team in times of questioning and decision-making. It is what we are aiming for.

Good communication skills - A vision, support, and guidance are useless unless we have a way to communicate them to people. Communication skills are required to inspire, inform, and advise stakeholders. They are also crucial for receiving information and quickly building rapport with a wide variety of groups and individuals.

Ability to inspire trust - Studies show that the greatest attribute people look for in leaders is honesty and trustworthiness. Working for someone we do not trust undermines our feelings of self-worth and respect in the long run. To be an effective leader, we must act honestly and with integrity—otherwise, people will not work with us.

Ability to empower - We should make use of people’s knowledge and skills by trusting them to do a good job. We must also be able to make the team feel capable and develop team members to their fullest potential.

Energy and action orientation - Effective leaders have elevated levels of energy and enthusiasm for work, which is contagious. We must understand that it is impossible to inspire others if we are apathetic or lukewarm in our reaction to the challenges.

Emotional expressiveness and warmth - Leaders must be able to express their feelings openly, but without venting or alarming people. They should not keep others guessing about their emotional state, but instead, be approachable and warm cheerleaders for the endeavor.

Willingness to take personal risks - It is desirable to have some skin in the game, to be personally invested beyond just a role, and to have some reputation or repercussion invested in the outcome. Like successful entrepreneurs, leaders are not risk-averse.

Use of unconventional strategies - Leaders must think creatively and not be constrained by conventional approaches. They are happy to model the desired behavior by trying new techniques and experiments.

These characteristics are the goal; things get more difficult when it comes to achieving them under challenging circumstances.

Shared Leadership: Primary Colors® Model

The Primary Colors Model of leadership was one of the first to recognize that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for any individual to possess all the attributes needed to be a complete leader. Instead, it recommends leaders build leadership teams that comprise all the necessary skills.

The Primary Colors Model offers ideas similar to those found in “In Praise of the Incomplete Leader,” a 2007 paper published in the Harvard Business Review. Its authors suggest that successful leadership comprises four capabilities:

1. Sensemaking: Understanding the context of the company and how people operate. Having a talent or knack for explaining these complexities to others.
2. Relating: Being able to build trusting relationships with others.
3. Visioning: Creating compelling images of the future by collaborating with others on what they want and then explaining it.
4. Inventing: Developing new ways to bring the vision to life.

The Primary Colors Model contains three intersecting domains of strategy, operations, and interpersonal skills. It also uses a human-anatomy metaphor to explain these functions and how they interact. The strategic domain is like the head, responsible for thinking; the operational domain is the hands and legs, responsible for getting things done and moving the organization or product forward; and the interpersonal domain is the heart and deals with forming relationships, motivation, and EI.

These domains and functions are shown in figure 11.2.

FIGURE 11.2 The Primary Colours Model of Leadership

In this human-anatomy analogy, the Primary Colors Model places leading at the center, like a central nervous system. It senses, balances, and coordinates all the other functions.

At the intersection of these overlapping functions are three key roles of a leader. Creating alignment is at the intersection of strategy (head) and interpersonal (heart) since it deals with creating a rational and emotional commitment. Team working, the skill of getting things done, is at the intersection of operational (arms and legs) and interpersonal (heart) since it deals with work and motivation. Finally, planning and organizing is at the intersection of strategic (head) and operational (arms and legs) since it deals with planning the work that needs to be done.

Now we know what functions need to happen and that it is unlikely that any single person has all the necessary skills. So, the next logical step is to assess our own skills, recognize our gaps, and go find people with the skills to fill those gaps. This is another instance where having diversity on the team is helpful. Diversity is Darwinian: The greater the diversity in the resource pool, the greater the range of external events that can be responded to successfully.

Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence, once joked, “If you find anyone in your organization who agrees with everything you say, fire them! Why pay twice for the same opinions?”

So, diversity is good, but how do we measure it? A simple approach is to assess people’s affinity for or attraction to different work types. Vocation-planning tools used in schools try to determine likely “fit” by assessing people on two ranges. The first range is things or people, and asks if individuals are happier working with things (be they animal, vegetable, mineral, or machine) or happier working with people. People who are interested in things enjoy collecting, constructing, and categorizing them, and analyzing them and their functions. People who prefer people enjoy emotions and idiosyncrasies; they are drawn to people for stimulation and support.

The second range is data or ideas, and asks if people prefer working with data and facts or with ideas and possibilities. People who prefer facts and data tend to be practical, data-analytics types. They are persuaded by logical, here-and-now facts and data. People who are drawn to ideas, possibilities, and theories enjoy what-if scenarios and are divergent thinkers. They may be thought of as creatives or dreamers.

Assessing people on these two ranges helps us determine where we fit and where others on our teams fit. The ranges and categories of preferences are shown in figure 11.3.

FIGURE 11.3 Two Dimensions of Vocational Preference

Here we see three roles and their positioning based on work preference. “Strategic” indicates someone who leans more toward the ideas end of the data-to-ideas spectrum and who is happy dealing with ambiguity. ‘Operational/Technical” shows someone who leans more toward the data end of the data-to-ideas spectrum and toward the things end of the things-to-people range. Finally, “Interpersonal/Supervisory” shows someone who is more comfortable with people than things and who prefers data over ideas.

Incidentally, full personality assessments such as Myers-Briggs, Belbin, or the Big Five typically take about an hour or so to administer. But having team members indicate where on this chart they rate themselves is quick and makes a great retrospective or team-building exercise to illustrate and respect diversity.

In figure 11.3, it is difficult for people to move between these roles as it requires major shifts in focus and interests. The nearer people are toward the center, the easier it will be for them to move into each of these roles.

Combining the Primary Colours Model of leadership with these personality traits reveals additional useful ways to categorize the functions and roles of leadership. Figure 11.4 shows the two models superimposed.

FIGURE 11.4 Primary Colours Model Combined with Personality Traits

Here we see the two job-preference dimensions of things/tasks to people on the x-axis and data/ present to ideas/future on the y-axis. Also shown are ovals representing the personality traits of the people who operate well in that domain and boxes representing the classical elements of air, fire, earth, and water.

Does your team have people that can assist in the roles of Influencer, Relationship Builder,  Implementor, or Strategist? Of course it does, so tap into those abilities. Lean thinking tells us that Non-utilized Talent is a form of waste, let’s not be wasteful and instead increase the team’s effectiveness and the likelihood of success.

The Primary Colors Model is powerful for several reasons. First, it legitimizes the idea of shared leadership and the need for collecting a set of competencies from the team and distributing power. Second, the human-anatomy metaphor creates an easily understood structure for uniting the skills and functions necessary for leadership, which are often described as discrete, unconnected, or vaguely connected elements in other models. Finally, it aligns well with vocational preference models and work types.

Key Takeaways

• Leadership can be shared.
• People have distinct preferences for dealing with things or people, hard facts or ideas.
• Holistic leadership needs to address all these dimensions.

<This is an excerpt from Beyond Agile. In future posts, we will explore additional shared leadership examples and introduce Host Leadership as a framework for implementing shared leadership in an agile team setting.>

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Agile approaches "Crossed the Chasm" a decade ago. The organizations we see adopting it today are in the "Late Majority" and "Laggard" categories of Geoffrey Moore's Technology Adoption Life Cycle.

As companies adopt agile because they have to / it's now expected / the industry norm / required to stay competitive / <insert your own reason>, we see more push-back and failures than ever.

Doing something because you have to, rather than because you want to, leads to shortcuts and the wrong mindset. The image below, from Ahmed Sidky, shows agile as a mindset.

In the image above, agile is a mindset described by four values, defined by twelve principles and manifested through an unlimited number of practices.

The correct way to learn agile is to start on the left of this image and learn about the four agile values in the mindset. Then learn about the twelve principles that define agile. Once you understand those, you will see all the agile practices are just implementing agile principles and values in various scenarios to solve different problems. This is the correct, Left-to-Right agile adoption.

Unfortunately, many organizations reluctantly adopting agile are impatient. Mindsets and values sound like unnecessary fluff. "We are serious engineers and don't have time for that kumbaya nonsense. Our people are smart, just show us the practices, and we will figure out the rest." So they start on the right-hand side, and adopt a set of agile practices, not appreciating the values and principles necessary for them to work.

Some practices work; others do not. They struggle to get whole-hearted buy-in and see only patchy pockets of success. Some teams continue trying agile; others revert back to how they were. They become an "Agile? Yeah, we tried that, but it did not work well here" shop. They experienced the right-to-left copying of practices without understanding the mindset, values or principles.

Incorrect Right-to-Left adoptions of agile (or anything) fail because they copy behavior without understanding the supporting structures. The practices we see agile teams undertake are just the visible components of a much larger ecosystem. This is known as the Agile Iceberg.

Supporting the visible practices above the water line is a larger, more significant commitment to the mindset, values and principles below the water line. Without investment in the below-the-waterline components, any attempts to copy and duplicate agile practices will sink and be dropped from practice.

Cargo Cults

Another analogy used to depict right-to-left attempts to cut and paste agile is the Cargo-cult. "Cargo cults" is the term used to explain the phenomenon of blindly replicating outward behavior, hoping that it will yield positive results. It originates from a few scattered instances of Pacific Island tribes recreating replicas of the wartime aircraft runways, control towers, and radios out of wood on remote islands, believing that they would bring back the cargo planes that brought Western goods during the war.

The islanders did not know how control towers or radios worked; they just copied what they had seen, hoping it would bring the benefits they had also seen. Implementing sprints, demos, and daily stand-up meetings without valuing individuals and interactions over processes and tools is just as ineffective as an all-wood radio. All it achieves is to frustrate people and give agile a bad name.

The Solution

Like anything worth achieving, the solution requires some thought and hard work. We need to work one-on-one with people and provide maps, not pamphlets, of how agile works so people can make their own informed decisions at the junctions on the pathway to value delivery.

This may sound like a lot of work, but it saves time and reduces workload in the long run.

Making Sense of Agile

There are thousands of agile practices documented in books, blogs and presented at agile conferences every year and likely many times more that never get reported. We do not need to learn them all; because once we understand a core set, we will see the themes, grasp the goals, and help teams create their own tailored ways of working that support the agile mindset.

Let's review some popular techniques often seen on Scrum teams.

Daily Stand-up meetings – These are the quick, inter-team coordination meets held daily where team members share with their colleagues:

• What they have been working on (or completed),
• What they plan to work on next,
• If any issues or blockers are hampering their progress.

Agile Concepts:

• The team owns the work – team members report to each other, not the Scrum Master or some project manager authority role
• Transparency – openly share information, good and bad, so people stay informed and can make better decisions

Sprint Demo – At the end of every sprint (usually one or two weeks long), the team demonstrates what has been built to the business and confirms what to work on next.

Agile Concepts:

• Frequent delivery – Deliver working software frequently. Working software is the primary indicator of progress.
• The team owns the work – It is the team that demos the work, not the Scrum Master or Product Owner. This demonstrates and builds ownership of the evolving solution.
• Focus on business value – Since the backlog is prioritized by business value, the team should be demonstrating the highest business value work items completed. Also, the discussions on what to work on next also focuses work by business value.
• Transparency – Openly share information, good and bad, so people stay informed and can make better decisions.

Product Backlog – The ordered list of work for the project/product. Prioritized by the Product Owner based on business value. Creates a single queue of work items to focus on.

Agile Concepts:

• Focus on business value – The product backlog is prioritized by the product owner, usually a business representative, not the Scrum Master or other team member, to ensure the project focuses on business value.
• Transparency – By putting all work items in a single, highly visible queue, everyone can see the full scope of work to be accomplished. This (hopefully) eliminates side-agreements or under-the-table agenda items being worked on. Also, since change requests are prioritized in the backlog, they bring visibility to these elements and likely completion dates.

Release Planning – The process of the product owner and development team collectively meeting to discuss, prioritize and estimate features for the next release. By engaging the do-ers of the work in the planning process, we simultaneously: 1) get better insights into technical work involved, 2) generate better buy-in for the estimates created and a stronger commitment to meet them.

Agile Concepts:

• Focus on business value – The business (through the product owner role) drives the planning process.
• Transparency – Features and stories from the product backlog are refined and estimated to create a release roadmap that illustrates target dates for key components of the product or service being developed.

Sprint Planning – This is the planning process one level below release planning. The product owner and development team collectively meet to discuss, prioritize, and estimate the next one or two weeks' worth of development.

Agile Concepts:

• Focus on business value – Work is prioritized by the product owner.
• Engage the team in decision making – The team makes local decisions about how best to undertake the work, how to self-organize, and in what order to undertake technical tasks.
• Transparency – All estimates and progress are discussed openly within the project team. Details about progress, issues, or setbacks are discussed daily at the daily stand-up meeting.

Retrospective – A workshop held at the end of each sprint/iteration to review progress, process and people aspects of the project. These regular inspect, review and adapt sessions typically result in suggestions of things to try differently in the next sprint/iteration. By conducting frequent, short-scale experiments, teams can inspect, adapt and improve rapidly throughout delivery.

Agile Concepts:

• Inspect and adapt – At regular intervals, the team reflects on becoming more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
• Engage the team in decision making - The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
• Transparency – Be open to talking about issues and ways to improve. Acknowledge there are constantly ways to get better. Recognize and thank teams for looking to improve their delivery capabilities.

Kanban/Task Boards – These are large publicly accessible displays of work done, in-process, and waiting to start. Kanban boards make the team's work visible.

Agile Concepts:

• Transparency – It shows what is being worked on, what has been completed and what is coming next. This information is not the domain of just the project manager, everyone benefits from knowing about it.
• Engage the team in decision making – By sharing the project plan visibly, team members can better alert us to potential problems and solutions.

Seeing the Agile Matrix

In the sci-fi movie "The Matrix", the hero, Neo, develops the ability to "see the code of the Matrix." This is the computer simulation he is living inside. Once he sees this, he understands how things work and can move faster and is more powerful than ever before. It is an "a-ha" moment; now things make sense, and he can see his world's structure and patterns and manipulate them.

It is the same with developing an agile mindset. Once you realize agile is based on a few core concepts, you see them repeated everywhere. These concepts include:

• Focus on delivering value
• Build incrementally
• Gather early feedback
• Inspect, adapt and learn as you go
• Let the team decide as much as possible
• Be transparent and show progress, good and bad

With these ideas in mind, practices such as estimating via planning poker make more sense. We are engaging the team in defining their estimates. We are using a visual, transparent process. It is iterative and incremental. There is inspection and the ability to adapt the estimates if outliers are found.

Everything agile teams do reflects these values. Information radiators are about being transparent and visual. Voting on decisions is about letting the team decide. We do not need to learn every agile practice because we will quickly be able to understand any of them once we recognize the agile mindset, values, and principles.

When making decisions, we can apply these agile concepts. Engage the team, be transparent, focus on value, get early feedback, etc. These are not complex concepts to grasp and are what many of us intuitively try to do anyway. That's why agile, for many people, feels like common sense.

However, it can be quite different from traditional project management's analytical world, which aims to specify everything up front before executing a detailed project plan. It is a mindset shift for some people, but one worth making if your work is complex, uncertain, and frequently changing. Here a Left to Right adoption of the agile mindset, values, and principles is the way to go.

<This article is an excerpt from PM Illustrated: A Visual Learners Guide to Project Management. If you are a visual learner who likes clear explanations, check out PM Illustrated here.>

Upcoming Presentation: “Hybrid Agile, Stepping Stone or Quicksand?”

How do you feel about hybrid agile – mixing agile approaches with non-agile approaches? Can it be useful sometimes, or is it the path to compromise and failure? (A great way to separate agile purists from pragmatists is to ask them what they think about hybrid agile.)

Please join me on April 26 to discuss hybrid agile with PMI San Diego Chapter. In this session, we will separate agile blends from non-agile hybrids. Then explore case studies of failures and success stories, examining patterns of problems and success factors. Topics include:

• Left-to-right agile adoption vs right-to-left implementation
• The Genius of the “And” vs. the Tyranny of the “Or”
• Hybrid models (switchover, sandwich, encapsulation)
• Case studies in success, failure and regression
• Red flags, anti-patterns, and warning signs to stop
• Further resources and case studies to learn from

To quote Ron Jefferies, “Agile isn’t any damn thing,” so come find out what breaks it and if we can preserve it with the combination of non-agile elements.

Registration Link

<This is post 3 in a multi-post series about EI and leadership taken from my book Beyond Agile. Check out Post 1 and Post 2 first if you have not seen them. In this article, we will dive into personal growth and the power of discovering the space between stimulus and response.>

EI’s origins - Mayer and Salovey Four-Branch Model

The precursor to Goleman’s EQ and Bar-On’s EQ-i models was created by John Mayer and Peter Salovey, who published their research in 1990. The Mayer and Salovey model extends the maturing idea we looked at in post #2 and adds layers of sophistication. It is called the Four-Branch model because it describes four branches of emotional skills, going down the table vertically in terms of sophistication and maturity, and moving from left to right horizontally as a timeline from childhood to adulthood.

This is post #2 in a multi-post series about EI and leadership taken from my book Beyond Agile. Check out Post #1 first, if you have not seen it already. In this article, we will explore what EI is and why it’s often such a tricky topic to define due to the proliferation of different models with similar-sounding components.

EI - Better Results by Becoming More Effective

Let us start the EI exploration journey with a process we are all familiar with, growing up and becoming independent adults. Stephen Covey talks about a progression of maturity and effectiveness that people go through as they get older.

We start as children, dependent on our parents for food, shelter, and support in life. How effective we are at accomplishing things grows, as we do, and eventually, we need less support. When we become teenagers and young adults, we become less dependent on adults and more independent. We eventually get jobs, move out of our parents’ homes (hopefully), and are more effective at accomplishing things in life than when we were children. Our level of effectiveness increases as we move from dependent to independent.

Covey says this is as far as many people progress. They learn how to be independent and contribute at an individual level. However, they are missing out on a further, more effective and productive stage called interdependent. This is what can be achieved when we partner and work with other people. When we learn how to collaborate and work with others, our personal limitations no longer hold us back. Other people can overcome our shortcomings.

So, if Mary is great at generating innovative ideas but lacks the patience or due diligence to see them through to fruition, she can partner with Dave, who thrives on detail and can transform ideas into completed products. When they can find ways to work together, they are both more effective than when working independently.

The bridge from the state of being dependent to being independent is called maturity. Parents, high schools, and the school of hard knocks move people from dependence to independence. Hopefully, there are several family members who can help with that transition.

The bridge from Independent to Interdependent is emotional intelligence. Learning how to interact, cooperate, and collaborate with others is not emphasized nearly enough. These practical life skills are hidden behind the unappealing label of emotional intelligence. There is much written about the process, but few people think to investigate further, at least at first. Often, family members possess it intuitively, but lack frameworks or words to effectively describe it.

I am long overdue for posting to LeadingAnswers.com. I have been busy finishing the content and games over at PMillustrated.com. While explaining project management through cartoon animals is fun, I wanted to post some meatier content here.

This is the first in a multi-post series about emotional intelligence (EI) as the foundation for team leadership. The material comes from my Beyond Agile book and explains why a firm basis of EI is critical to becoming an effective Scrum Master, team lead, or project manager. This first post introduces EI and explains its significance.

Leadership and EI work together to create cohesive, cooperative teams. The two approaches support each other and enable organizations and team leaders to build teams that overcome problems and achieve amazing results. However, to understand these topics properly, we need to decompose the system, see how the parts fit together, then tackle them in a logical sequence, which may, from the outset, seem counterintuitive.

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence (EI) involves learning how to understand ourselves, which in turn helps us work well with other people. It concerns how to communicate, support, empower, and motivate people. It’s important to understand self first, because we are not going to motivate or empower anyone by being a bully, a jerk, or getting flustered.

So, while our end goal is effective leadership, which is like an electric motor that drives high-performing teams, we first need to understand that it is powered by EI—the electricity that powers the motor. For this reason, we will start with EI (which starts with ourselves) and then work up to powering the leadership engine.

Why EI Is More Important than Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

To take advantage of our intelligence, our IQ, we first need good emotional intelligence EI. Regardless of how intelligent or gifted we are, if we turn others off with our offensive or abrasive behavior or cave in under minimal stress, no one will stick around long enough to notice our IQ.

A quick exercise to illustrate the importance of EI over IQ is to think of a mentor who has had a significant impact on your career. List five properties that made that person such a valuable influence for you. Now examine the list and categorize the properties as EQ or IQ related. Items such as caring about you, taking an interest in your development, and demonstrating integrity and honesty are all EQ factors. Items such as master strategist, guru-level coder/architect/statistician are more IQ based.

Chances are your most influential mentor used more EQ skills than IQ—they nearly always do. That is who we are trying to emulate. It will not happen overnight, but it is better to be on the right road, heading in the right direction, than totally unaware of the destination or direction to get there. In the June 21, 1999, issue of Fortune, cover story “Why CEOs Fail” reported that unsuccessful CEOs put strategy before people issues, while the most successful CEOs used integrity, people acumen, assertiveness, effective communication, and trust-building behavior. Projects are like mini organizations and the same skills apply.

Team leaders rarely struggle with core competencies in planning, change management, or reporting, yet they often struggle with communications, failing to see other people’s perspectives, and understanding the impacts of their actions.

Tackling the “Emotional” Elephant

The term emotional intelligence needs a makeover, a rebranding. The word emotion has too many negative connotations, unbefitting for the rocket fuel, the “secret sauce” that it really is. It should have a cool, powerful name like “results multiplier”, “smarts accelerator”, or “team unifier” because that is really what it does.

However, we have inherited the term emotional intelligence and it seems to be sticking around for now. That is a shame because too many people avoid it and instead stumble around researching motivation and conflict-resolution topics, hoping to get better at dealing with people, when everything they are looking for is laid out for them in the domain of EI.

So, get over any notions you may have about it being soft or too feminine to apply to your projects. If your project involves people in any way, understanding EI will improve your results. The good news is that unlike mathematical, logic, and language intelligence, which are measured in IQ tests and usually peak around age eighteen, EI develops more slowly and typically does not peak until our forties or fifties.

<To read more about EI and its relationship to effective leadership look out for the remaining posts in this series, or get the book Beyond Agile for the complete picture and supporting detail.>

The next 7-week PMI-ACP Supported Study Group with Mike Griffiths is starting soon. Register by January 15^th for Earlybird pricing of just $99 (regular $199).

This live 7-week online book-club / self-study program works as follows:

• Read one chapter of my PMI-ACP Exam Prep book each week
• Join me for a one-hour Zoom call to review topics and ask any questions you may have
• Get access to a private LinkedIn group where you can ask additional questions and discuss topics with peers
• Receive exclusive chapter summaries, mindmaps, additional sample exam questions, and extra resources
• A small group capped at 25 people.

At the end of the 7-week program, we will have covered all the material, and you should be ready to take the exam.

I wanted to offer a more affordable option than online training for a small group of people who are willing to self-study. This option allows people to clarify topics with me and interact with others who are also preparing for their PMI-ACP exam.

Frequently asked questions:

• Q: Does the course include a copy of my PMI-ACP Exam Prep book? A: No, you will need to have or buy your own copy of my book. We will use the latest version, the “PMI-ACP Exam Prep: Updated Second Edition.” This can be purchased, generally cheaper than Amazon, at the RMC website.
• Q: Is the book available electronically? A: Yes, you can choose the electronic format or paperback.
• Q: When will the weekly Zoom calls occur? The Zoom calls will be on Saturday mornings starting January 22^nd at 11:00 Eastern Standard Time. See WorldTimeBuddy to convert to your local time.
• Q: Will the Zoom calls be recorded? Can I watch one later if I miss a session?: A: Yes, the Zoom calls will be recorded and available for participants to view later.

Introductory price $99. This price includes the weekly Q&A Zoom calls, LinkedIn support group, and exclusive resources (summaries, mindmaps, extra sample exam questions, etc)

If you would like to participate or learn more, please send me an email: 

Mike <at> LeadingAnswers.com.

Stefan Wolpers recently reposted his survey “Would you recommend SAFe®?” on LinkedIn and it prompted some excellent discussion. One comment I liked by Maxwell Lamers summarized a common view of SAFe® succinctly as “The framework itself is built on solid ideas, and there is nothing inherently evil about the framework. The trouble comes in the implementation.” Maxwell described problems when SAFe® is not fully implemented, but I think taking on too much process and training is a problem in its own right.

Process Has Weight, but Knowledge Is Weightless

Ceremonies and processes have weight and take time to undertake. This is okay if the process adds sufficient value to warrant the expenditure. However, often they do not add enough value, or the processes continue to be used beyond the point where they are still valuable and become a net drain on a team’s efficiency.

Knowledge, on the other hand, is weightless. There is no penalty for collecting knowledge. Understanding a wide variety of topics and techniques allows us to use only the most efficient and appropriate for our current circumstances.

We can visualize process as the baggage and tools we carry on our project journey. Like going on a hike, some small undertakings may require no additional support. We can just turn up and do them. As projects get longer and more complicated, just like a longer hike, we might be glad of a raincoat and some food and water for the trip.

Complex and hazardous endeavors may require sophisticated tools (and knowing how to use them). The goal is to take just what we need, understanding that the more we elect to bring, the better prepared we are, but the slower we will go. The more energy you use carrying a heavy backpack of tools, the less energy you have available to move toward the project goals. So, we need to balance responsible process with goal focus and progress.

Problems with Agile Frameworks

The agile community is abuzz with discussions of and promotions for scaling frameworks that claim to help organizations apply agile approaches to large, complex scenarios. These frameworks include SAFe, LeSS, and Nexus and offer reasonable solutions for common scaling problems. They are generally well researched and supported by a wealth of training courses, credentials, and certified consultants. However, they come with some fundamental problems as well.

• Agile Myopia - Agile scaling frameworks suggest agile approaches as the only solution. When you have only a hammer in your toolbox, all problems look like nails. However, sometimes the best way to deal with that traditional stakeholder who wants a WBS is to give them a WBS. Likewise, maybe some aspect of your project is defined and repeatable, so why not use a traditional plan-driven approach for it? It is both arrogant and ignorant to believe agile is always the best solution.

• Software Focused – The agile approaches, scaling frameworks, and tool kits grew out of the software development space. Unfortunately, they have not shed their software-focused roots and still contain concepts based on software architecture. That might be okay for consultants who can filter out these elements and convert the ideas to other industries, but it is an impediment to sharing ideas and getting a broad spectrum of stakeholders on board.

• Buffet Syndrome - When faced with a buffet of tasty-looking food, there is a tendency to take more than we need. With so much information available in these tool kits, most organizations and teams try to adopt too much process leaving too little energy for the actual project goals. It is fine to understand the theory (knowledge is weightless), but when you start using these rich frameworks, the process weight overwhelms most organizations.

Often, speed of delivery and the ability to quickly react to changes (key agile benefits) are lost by organizations now using overly heavy frameworks. As focus shifts to training, learning new terminology, and roles like Release Train Engineer, less effort is directed to project goals, with predictable results.

Agile approaches are not always the best tools for the job. Like any good tool, agile tools are great for their intended purpose but are no panacea or silver bullet. Also, the size and depth of scaling frameworks create distractions of focus and dilute team effort from project goals. So, avoid framework consultants, training, and certification programs; we cannot afford distractions from the fundamental goal of completing a project.

Beyond Agile Avoids Agile Myopia and Buffet Syndrome

Unlike the large scaling frameworks, such as SAFe®, Beyond Agile avoids Agile Myopia and Buffet Syndrome by being simultaneously broader and more selective in its recommendations.

Beyond Agile recognizes that processes carry implementation weight, yet knowledge is weightless. So, it recommends learning much and implementing little—just the most relevant to retain maximum team effort toward the project goal.

The dynamic model changes based on project and organizational characteristics, recommending the highest-value-added approaches for the situation at hand. Some key concepts:

• There is no single, simple model for complex projects.
• Process carries weight, but knowledge is weightless.
• Guidance needs to be dynamic based on project and organizational characteristics.

Chasing “Done” Drift

For most modern projects, the destination is a moving target, and it is usually moving away from us. The longer we take to deliver a project, the more likely the endpoint will move further away to keep up with new competitor products, industry expectations, sponsor requests, etc. I call this phenomenon “Done” Drift because what constitutes “Done” will likely evolve during a project or product life cycle. So, we want to get to the destination as fast as possible without diverting energy on nonessential work.

We need to analyze all activities and processes that do not contribute directly toward the project goal. In the figure below, 100 squares represent 100 percent of the team’s effort toward the team goal. If 5 percent of their time and energy is spent on non-value-adding process, such as excessive agile ceremony focus, they can only direct 95 percent net toward the project goal.

The more process we add, whether it is necessary corporate process or cool new team activities, the more delivery capacity we remove from the net vector of progress toward the end goal (that is always moving away from us). The final image above shows an additional 10 percent of corporate process, and the net vector of progress is reduced further.

These images illustrate the double whammy dilemma. First, the end goal is always moving away from us—the longer we take to get there, the more we will have to do to declare success. Second, every call on the team’s time takes away from their ability to make progress toward the goal.

The numbers in these examples are conservative. Think about how long you spend on your projects in value-adding activities versus non-value-adding company process, meetings, or producing three sets of time reporting, etc. All the time and focus not directed toward the end goal are distractions. Plus, when you give people enough distractions, they lose energy and start making mistakes because of the interruptions of constantly switching tasks.

Laser Focus

A 40-watt light bulb will barely light a room, while a 40-watt laser can cut through aluminum, leather, and wood. It is the same light energy, just focused instead of diffused.

So, while it is great to be aware of many different approaches, we must always be alert to the costs. Every interruption and call on your team’s time that is not directed at the project’s end goal is reducing their capacity.

While it is extremely valuable to look beyond agile for guidance, we need to maintain a strict filter on what and how much we use from any approach. So, expand your toolbox, hone your skills, become domain and tool agnostic, and then direct maximum effort toward the project goal.

This expands the familiar DevOps model:

With a further dimension or loop as shown below:

The challenge (and skill of being a good leader) comes in using the minimum amount of the most appropriate approach for the situation to get the job done.

The Stage and the Spotlight

So far, we have explored two core ideas of the Beyond Agile Model (BAM). The first is that the project characteristics define the size and scope of the recommended approaches, training, and artifacts to consider for that project type. This is akin to setting or defining the stage we are working on.

The second idea is to be careful and deliberate about what to focus our attention and our team’s attention on since we can easily lose focus on the project end goals. To extend our stage metaphor, this is the spotlight that suggests what we should focus on.

These two ideas are used together in the model to define the recommendations scope—the dotted red line representing the stage encompassing everything in scope for us to call upon. Then the goal focus would be a spotlight shining on that stage, illuminating what we are to focus on.

The aperture of the Beyond Agile recommended-approaches scope is elastic: it is always trying to shrink, returning to a state where less is included. Project and organizational factors stretch it larger but also create tension. As soon as the approaches no longer justify their expenditure, they should be eliminated or pared back.

The spotlight is controlled by our economic view of decision-making. This means we ask, “Where is the next best dollar spent for the project?” Should we be building features, responding to issues, or answering a stakeholder request?

As project lead, we continually evaluate priorities and readjust the focus to optimize value delivery and stakeholder satisfaction. It is no use ignoring stakeholders to focus on building features or diverting the whole team to explore every new question or request. Instead, we dynamically readjust the team focus of effort to bring the most valuable outcomes.

Expansive scaling frameworks may look appealing since they appear to hold all the guidance we need. Yet this masks two silent killers of performance Agile Myopia (the tool you might best benefit from using next lies outside of the agile toolkit) and Buffet Syndrome (trying to use so much stuff and train so many people in it all will kill off any ability to deliver meaningful value.)

The solution is simple to describe but requires discipline to implement.

• Start with agile but also look beyond it for your tools.
• Ruthlessly refactor and keep removing process to focus team effort on the goal

Essentialism

It’s the same core idea as described in the book Essentialism, just applied to teams and value delivery. The book summary site Reading Graphics has an excellent visual summary.

(Image Credit: Reading Graphics)

The Beyond Agile Model recognizes Agile Myopia and Buffet-Syndrome as real threats to performance and provides an alternative.

It is not a one size fits all solution. It cannot be boiled down and printed on a pamphlet for memorization or easy access. Instead, it is more like a map you consult on your team journey multiple times to make local decisions towards your goal.

See more in the Beyond Agile book.

Now that my Beyond Agile book has been published, I would like to thank people who helped shape its content and ideas. David Anderson has done much to popularize and explain lean and the Theory of Constraints thinking.

The Kanban Method can teach agile practitioners many useful ideas about incremental improvement, successful organizational change, and improved team performance. So, rather than considering it an alternative to agile approaches, I like to think of it as a compliment, another source for ideas, tools, and solutions.

We have a tendency to get attached to our personal favorite agile approach, whether that is Scrum, XP, or something else, and regard alternative approaches as somehow inferior or derivative. However, the Kanban Method has some useful additions, so let us see what it has to offer.

First, many people are confused between kanban and the Kanban Method, so it is worth some clarification. The Japanese word kanban (usually with a lowercase k) means “signal,” “sign,” or “large visual board.” Agile teams often use kanban boards to visualize their work. These kanban boards typically show queues and work in progress (WIP). They may also show WIP limits for activities and expedite paths for urgent work.

The Kanban Method (usually capitalized) is a complete process for defining, managing, and improving the execution of knowledge work. David Anderson developed it in 2007 and, like agile, has its own set of values, principles, and practices. More than just using kanban boards to track and manage your work, it is a full lifecycle approach for running and improving knowledge-work projects.

David and I worked together in the early 2000s on the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN) board. He appreciated the concepts of agile and combined them with concepts from Theory of Constraints and lean design to develop a method focused on the flow of work that could be applied to any knowledge-work scenario. Unlike agile approaches that suggest a complete switch to agile work execution, Kanban starts with the process you have right now and provides tools to improve its service.

This makes the Kanban Method much easier to adopt, as no big upheaval, retooling or enterprise-wide training is required. Instead, the Kanban Method principles are applied to the way things are currently done.

Kanban Principles

• Change management
• Start with what you do now.
• Agree to pursue improvement through evolutionary change.
• Encourage acts of leadership at every level.
• Service delivery
• Understand and focus on your customers’ needs and expectations.
• Manage the work; let people self-organize around it.
• Evolve policies to improve customer and business outcomes.

Based on these principles, three parallel and ongoing agendas (themes of work) are employed:

Kanban Agenda

• Service orientation: Look outward and focus on performance and customer satisfaction. Ask How can we meet and exceed customer goals?
• Sustainability: Look inward to find a sustainable pace and improve focus. Make intangible work visible and then balance demand with capability.
• Survivability: Look forward to remain competitive and adaptive to more change. Scan for the emergence of disruptors and value diversity to better handle change.

Throughout all the approaches, a core set of values based on respect and collaboration is embraced. These are:

Kanban Values

• Transparency: Sharing information through straightforward terms improves the flow of work.
• Balance: The understanding that competing elements must be balanced for effectiveness.
• Collaboration: People must work together to be effective.
• Customer focus. We must know the goal for the system.
• Flow: The realization that work is a flow of value.
• Leadership: The ability to inspire others through example, description, and reflection.
• Understanding: Kanban is an improvement model that starts with self-knowledge.
• Agreement: The dynamic co-commitment to move together toward goals, respecting, and where possible, accommodating differences of opinion.
• Respect: Valuing, understanding, and showing consideration for people. A foundational value underpinning everything else.

We can use the Kanban Method to help introduce positive change into a team or organization. The “start with what you do now” and “agree to pursue improvement through evolutionary change” concepts are nonthreatening and difficult to argue against. So, if faced with an organization or department that is reluctant to change its ways, the Kanban Method is an excellent approach.

It also brings some great insights often missed in agile approaches. For example, since knowledge work is invisible, managers may not know how much work someone has on their plate. Encouraging people to make their work visible helps them show and explain their workloads to others. It also enables coworkers to see what people are working on and then pitch in where they can…”

Thanks, David, for your popularization of and explanations of Theory of Constraints thinking. They are more relevant today than ever as people in organizations everywhere look to transform their work.

Now that my Beyond Agile book has been published, I would like to thank some people who helped shape its content and ideas. Alistair Cockburn and Joshua Kerievsky helped me appreciate the balance between people-focussed activities and effective processes.

“...Agile approaches combine a mixture and equal balance of people and process approaches to delivery. One way to picture these interwoven elements is like the twin strands of DNA. In figure 4.1, we see a blue thread of people elements such as empowerment, collaboration, and team decision-making, mixed with gold process elements such as backlogs, prioritization, and short iterations.

If you have not noticed it before, agile approaches weave people elements and process elements together through the agile mindset, values, and principles. For simplicity of understanding,  we pull these elements apart to talk about them individually, but in reality, they are inextricably linked and self-supporting, like the blue and gold elements shown in figure 4.2.

The people and process elements are present in all views of agile, no matter how you slice it. Also, they are in an equal balance. This is not a matter of coincidence or hidden code, but rather the sign of a balanced system. Let’s look further.

The Agile Manifesto has two values focused on people and two focused on process:

When we examine the 12 Agile Manifesto principles again we see six focused on people (shown in blue) and a counterbalancing six based on process (shown in gold).

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
8. Agile processes promote sustainable Sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
10. Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.
11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. 
12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Let’s examine the frameworks of Alistair Cockburn’s Heart of Agile and Joshua Kerievsky’s Modern Agile, first looking at the original models and then superimposing views of people and processes.

In Alistair’s Heart of Agile model, the Deliver and Improve process concepts are complemented by the Collaborate and Reflect people-focused concepts. Likewise, Joshua’s people-focused Make people awesome and Make safety a prerequisite are balanced and complemented by the ideas of Deliver value continually and Experiment and learn rapidly.

Both models are evenly balanced between people and process advice; this fact, along with their clarity and simplicity, is what makes them both powerful and compelling.

We should always be aware of these two elements in the tools and approaches we use. Additionally, looking for a healthy balance of attention within teams is a useful diagnostic. People sometimes have a personal bias or natural aptitude for the people side of things, or for the process side of things. So why not ask the team if they think the system is in balance and, if not, what they suggest to restore to balance any imbalances?..."

Thank you, Alistair and Joshua. Your insights and skills in distilling ideas have helped many people increase their understanding of collaboration and teamwork.

Last month I did a 20-minute overview of my new Beyond Agile book for the Washington D.C. Lean-Agile MeetUp group hosted by Sanjiv Augustine.

I outline how Beyond Agile grew from studying high-performing teams and trying to distill what they did differently than most other teams. In the video, I cover Agile Myopia, Buffet Syndrome and the need to drop agile processes when they no longer bring enough value to warrant their use.

I would like to thank Sanjiv and the entire team at LitheSpeed for hosting me and allowing me to share this video with you here.

Anyone interested in my Beyond Agile book can get a paperback or electronic version here.

It has been 10 years since the PMI-ACP exam was created, and I published my PMI-ACP Exam Prep book. I recall the Steering Committee meetings where we discussed what we believed was necessary for agile practitioners and team leaders to have experience in and an understanding of.

Since then, the exam has been updated a couple of times based on Role Delineation Studies (RDS) and Job Task Analysis (JTA), which is how PMI surveys practitioners and asks what techniques are commonly used. However, the core content has mainly endured unchanged, which is testimony to its usefulness.

I remember discussing the scope and goals for the credential among the committee that comprised: Alistair Cockburn, Mike Cottmeyer, Jim Cundiff, Jesse Fewell, Mike Griffiths, Ahmed Sidkey, Michele Sliger, Dennis Stevens and PMI researchers.

In addition to an agnostic understanding of Lean, Kanban, Scrum and other agile approaches, we also agreed people should know about the basics of servant leadership, conflict management, team decision making, and coaching. So our scope included more than just Lean and agile; it had a little leadership and emotional intelligence.

At the time, someone suggested a three-tier credential consisting of something like Agile Basics, Agile Journeyman (journeyperson), Agile Consultant that mirrored Shu-Ha-Ri. PMI leadership rightly reined this in, explaining it was a good idea, but how about we just focus on getting the basic level credential created for now.

PMI was correct to focus on the universal fundamentals. As we get into more advanced topics, there is no single correct answer. So, topics like agile scaling frameworks, strategies for motivating teams, the pros and cons of different leadership approaches that get deeper into agile, leadership and emotional intelligence were never tackled but are topics that my blog readers know I care deeply about.

My new Beyond Agile book is my exploration of these topics (plus others.) I dig deeper into unlocking the power of individuals and teams. How can we encourage better engagement, focus on the project goals, and ditch non-value-add mindsets and processes? These are based on my experiences and research.

You likely won’t agree with everything I suggest, and that’s fine; not everything will work for your situation. However, I am confident you will find many valuable concepts and connections between ideas you thought about separately before.

As the book title suggests, it goes beyond agile. Sometimes the best way to tackle a problem might be with a plan-driven approach. Agile Myopia is the mistaken belief that every project situation has an agile solution.

I am more of a pragmatist. Sometimes, the best way to assess and analyze risk is with the risk management process from plan-driven project management approaches. We may then choose to implement the risk responses in an iterative, incremental way via our backlog and spikes, but that again is being pragmatic.

My previous post mentioned a disconnect between teams being agile and the highest-performance teams I was able to work with. These high-performing teams hardly discussed agile concepts or paid much attention to the agile ceremonies, although they lived the mindset emphatically. Often what set them apart was the deep industry experience and knowledge they had gained, making them trusted partners within the business groups they served.

I set out to define what sets high-performing teams apart and outline the steps to replicating them. There may be no formula but I did uncover a set of knowledge, skills and thinking tools people can use to chart their own course. It represents the What’s Next beyond the ideas in my PMI-ACP books and provides a broader landscape to explore. I hope you enjoy it.

I am excited to announce my new book “Beyond Agile: Achieving success with situational knowledge and skills“ is launching. It is available now from RMC in paperback or electronic form here. This post explains the name and motivation for the book. Future posts will profile the content.

Background

Since helping create DSDM in 1994, I have been working on agile projects for 27 years. In that time, I have personally been a member of around 30 teams, coached and consulted with about 400 organizations and taught agile to over 2,000 team leads and project managers worldwide. Statistically, most were around average, a few were really dysfunctional, and less than 10 were exceptionally productive.

Problems

Around 8 years ago, I noticed many capable teams were adopting agile but still not being very productive. They had embraced the mindset and were doing all the right things, but success still eluded them. As someone who had dedicated their career to spreading the word about agile and helping organizations adopt it, this was extremely concerning for me. What were they doing wrong? What was I doing wrong?

Researching Successful Teams

So I went back to study the small number of exceptionally productive teams to look at what they did differently. While they understood agile remarkably well, they did not emphasize its use. Instead, they used a clever mix of agile, leadership, emotional intelligence and industry-specific knowledge to get the work that needed doing today done.

Patterns and Results Emerge

Patterns emerged, and I explored further. Using these techniques, I was able to help organizations turn around struggling projects and programs. As a result, we outperformed expectations, delighted stakeholders and won a PMI Project of the Year award. One organization documented our approach and submitted it for tax credits in the Canadian research and development SR&D program. It was successful, and they received several millions of dollars in tax credits. The Beyond Agile Model was developed, and this book documents the components.

The Obvious, Non-Obvious Need to Remove Process

The Beyond Agile Model has agile at its core; it also layers in additional ideas while encouraging teams to discontinue practices that no longer add sufficient value. Since there are only so many hours in the day, focussing more effort on delivery requires dropping other activities - even if they are agile. It was obvious once I saw it. The most productive teams I studied spent more time delivering and less time on agile ceremonies and other tasks. The non-obvious part was learning what to drop since it varies from team to team, and the book explains the process.

In future posts, I will explain some of the core ideas. Until then, I just wanted to let you know the book is finally done and available here.

This article explains what a risk-adjusted backlog is, why they are useful, how to create one and how teams work with them.

What is a Risk-Adjusted Backlog?

A risk-adjusted backlog is a backlog that contains activities relating to managing risk in addition to the usual features associated with delivering value.

Agile projects typically prioritize the backlog based on business value or perceived needs. The Product Owner or business representative prioritizes the backlog elevating the highest value features to the top, so they get delivered first.

Taking an Economic View of Decision Making

Prioritizing based on business value is an example of the lean concept of 'Taking an Economic View of Decision Making.' In deciding which feature to develop first, those with the highest economic value are selected. Taking an economic view of decision making has a couple of advantages.

We intuitively know that a successful agile adoption requires more than copying agile practices. It needs more than just working in short iterations and having daily stand-up meetings. But can we label those missing ingredients?

You may have seen the “agile iceberg” model that shows the visible practices agile teams perform as the tip of an enormous iceberg supported by a mindset, values and principles. However, terms like “values” and “mindset” are intangible and difficult to reconcile with traditional skillsets.

Organizations fail when they try to switch to an agile way of working by just implementing the visible agile work practices without the invisible supporting components. They fail because they are missing two key elements:

When should we be using an agile approach for our project? The agile convert might claim “Always,” just as the predictive enthusiast could scream “Never!” For the rest of us, more objective tests and selection criteria are useful.

Agile suitability tools are nothing new. DSDM shipped with one in 1994, and the Agile Practice Guide published with A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide)—Sixth Edition has one as an appendix. However, this article is about short cuts, a single question that can provide a good indicator for suitability—a litmus test for agile approach suitability.

Common Destination, Different Directions
The whole “agile versus traditional” debate is mostly unnecessary when we step back and take a broader perspective. Everybody is trying to get to the same destination of successful outcomes and happy stakeholders. However, it is when we start discussing the “how-to” path for achieving these goals that passionate debate occurs. This is because “the path” does not exist. There is no single right approach; instead, it depends on the environment and project at hand.

We can learn techniques for running traditional, predictive projects and adaptive, agile ones. Then, based on the situation, use the appropriate approach. Sometimes a single process is sufficient; sometimes, a hybrid might be necessary. So, the next logical question that pops up is, “What are the project environmental factors we should be evaluating, and which point to predictive or adaptive approaches?”

Dolphins are easier to track than submarines. They surface more often and are usually within view of where you last saw them. Subs, on the other hand, can disappear for months or years at a time, and it is difficult to tell where they have gone.

What does this have to do with project communications? Has Mike finally gone mad?

These are valid questions, so let me explain. Many traditional project management deliverables have agile alternatives. For instance, a product backlog is somewhat analogous to a work breakdown structure. A release roadmap contains many of the elements of a Gantt chart. Yet we rarely see agile communications management plans. Why is this?

We all know the theory: Communications are critical to project success. You have probably heard advice such as communicate something “five times in five different ways” for it to stick, but why is it so hard?

If people would just listen—or read what we send them—then communications would be easy, right? This may seem a reasonable assumption, but because we are part of the system, we are also part of the problem.

The winds of change were strong before the COVID-19 pandemic. Driven by three macroeconomic trends, the need for projects and project managers was increasing. These three trends are:

1) Accelerating rates of technology adoption

2) The switch to alternative energy sources to maintain GDP and meet emissions targets

3) Infrastructure projects for population growth.

These movements occurring together were spawning an explosion of projects to turn ideas into reality. This increase in project demand was christened The Project Economy by PMI in 2019.

To be fair, these trends and strategies for handling them had already existed for more than a decade. Globalization and business transformation have been discussed extensively. Eric Ries documented his lean startup methodology in 2008 as a way for organizations to adapt and experiment with new ideas and perform market tests. It provided a framework for rapid adaptation and customer-centric design that is baked into many of today’s strategies.

Project managers generally like plans and estimates so we can forecast when things should be done and how much they may cost. It helps manage client expectations and answer the type of questions they ask, such as "When will it be done?" and "How much will it cost?"

So, when project managers hear about ideas such as "let's stop estimating," it can trigger a knee-jerk reaction. It sounds lazy and avoiding the hard work of having to estimate. It can seem like people want to shirk their responsibility and accountability. First, those lazy agilists wanted to stop doing documentation; now they want to stop estimating too!

There has been a debate raging since 2012 about the use and value of estimates on agile projects. It has spawned the #NoEstimates hashtag, a website, a book and countless blog posts and conference presentations.

Like many radical ideas, when we dig into “no estimates” thinking, there are some good ideas, sound logic—and a whole heap of misunderstanding around it. This article sets out to unravel some of it.

Is infighting damaging your team morale and retention? Do you know what types of conflict are healthy and which are not? When you do intervene, do you have a strategy, or just ”wing it” and hope for the best?

People have different ideas; this diversity helps us overcome any individual shortcomings. It also means conflict is inevitable on projects. Whenever we have people contribute different opinions about a solution, there will be some level of conflict. Minor disagreement in the pursuit of a better solution is positive and welcome. Persistent bickering and personal attacks are destructive and need to be addressed. So how do we do that?

How does work from home impact our use of agile approaches? If co-location is no longer possible, can we still be agile?

Yes, of course we can, and in many ways, now we need to be more agile than ever as we try new approaches, learn and adapt how we work. However, let's address the co-location question and look at agile practices in remote work situations.

This is not a post about rich people now able to visit their second homes after the lockdown, instead, a revisit of the concepts of decentralized work being the new way of undertaking projects.

In 1980, Alvin Toffler’s book The Third Wave introduced the idea of “The Electronic Cottage” as the modern workplace where information technology allows more people to work from home or wherever they want. Toffler was a futurist and businessman who did not get the attention he deserved. Even though Accenture identified him as one of the most influential voices in business leaders (along with Bill Gates and Peter Drucker), we do not hear much about him.

It is a dilemma. We need to move forward. Not just to make progress on projects, but also to give people something else to focus on beyond the tragedy and fear filling the news.

At the same time, we need to be sensitive to how people have been impacted. We need to demonstrate support and empathy. We need to be available to listen and help wherever we can. We need to step up and be professionals.

Context
More than ever, context is king. How to respond and lead in your environment will depend on how your project and stakeholders have been impacted. There is no universal best response. All I can do is offer some tips for consideration. You can then decide if they apply—and how to implement them for your environment.

People are smart, resourceful and inventive. We are also dumb and irrational. This combination makes forecasting nearly impossible.

People build cities, express themselves through art, and push forward our understanding of the world through science and logic. At the same time, they exhibit cognitive bias and often behave in ways that defy this same science and reasoning.

The simultaneous application of logic and defiance of logic is part of what makes humanity rich and complex. It is also why predicting how the world will change after the COVID-19 pandemic contains much uncertainty. Some effects will be the sensible results of events and reactions. Others will be nonsensical reactions (like hoarding toilet paper) due to cognitive bias. These factors will intermingle and interact with new yet unknown events to create a tomorrow that is impossible to calculate.

So, while nobody knows how our future will be different, we do have some ideas to help make an educated guess.

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I am available for remote work. If you like the ideas on this site or in my books, please get in touch, I would love to discuss opportunities to work together.

Details

Long before the COVID-19 crisis, I reduced traveling for consulting and training due to family health issues. I have worked mainly from home for the last five years and have been fortunate to stay busy. Now, because of COVID-19, a couple of my regular clients have suspended operations, and I have some spare capacity.

Please get in touch to discuss consulting, mentoring, courseware development, and writing opportunities. My email is [email protected]

Gray areas occupy the transition from one world to the next. Neither black nor white, predictive nor agile, project managers are increasingly finding themselves in the gray area of hybrid project management. This can make us feel uncomfortable since we are neither faithfully following either approach—instead living a compromise between seemingly different value systems.

We could get uncomfortable, guarded and hesitant to embrace the reality we face. Or, we could welcome it, use it to our advantage and share the benefits/trade-offs with anyone willing to listen. This second option of embracing, using and sharing is “playing in the gray area,” a term I learned at a recent workshop I was giving. It nicely summarizes the idea of accepting and making the most of our reality rather than uncomfortably accommodating it and mainly keeping it to ourselves.

Do you wonder how to stay current in your PM role? 

Is your industry evolving so quickly that one day you might no longer be required? 

With the rise of AI, agile, and empowered teams, are project managers even needed anymore? Maybe, but not for the reasons you might expect.

Some people say we cannot manage what we cannot measure. I say we cannot solve what we cannot see, or at least visualize somehow.

Projects are problem-solving exercises. The entire project is one big problem. We might be building a new product; that's a problem to solve. Or we might be trying to create something well understood but within a challenging amount of time, to a tight budget, and demanding specification. Or we could be moving our organization forward through a change initiative. These are familiar project environments that are puzzles or problems to solve.

Then within this large problem environments, we have hundreds of everyday challenges to answer, too. "How are we going to manage without the installer today?" or "The pilot group has requested 400 changes, now what do we do?"

It’s easy to believe that work breakdown structures (WBS) have been around since the pyramids were built in Egypt, and that product backlogs are new inventions by youngsters in too much of a hurry to plan correctly. However, like most things, the truth is more complicated.

In 1957, the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) approach was created by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) and described organizing tasks into product-oriented categories. However, they did not use the term “work breakdown structure” or WBS until 1962 when DoD, NASA and the aerospace industry published a document about PERT that described the WBS approach.

Meanwhile, in 1960, Tom Gilb described his Evolutionary Value Delivery approach (or Evo for short) that is widely accepted to be a forerunner of agile approaches. Evo contains principles such as:

In his best-selling book Drive: The Surprising Truth of What Motivates Us, Dan Pink explains three attributes (Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose) that people need to feel satisfied and motivated at work. It is a great book, but we can do more. Drive only gets us started. As project managers, we can do more to help the people on the projects we manage.

Remember, Nobody Wants to Be Managed

This is the third sample from my new Kindle book “Agile Illustrated: A Visual Learner’s Guide to Agility”. The book is a graphical introduction to the agile mindset and servant leadership behaviors for working with agile teams. If you missed the first two samples you can find them here and here.

Also, just in time for Christmas, Agile Illustrated is now available as a physical paperback book. So if you prefer to hold a physical book rather than read a Kindle book you can now get your hands on a copy. Or, if you would like to give a copy to a manager or executive who is unlikely to read a normal length book on the agile mindset and how to support agile teams then buy them a copy as a gift.

At just 88 pages and mainly pictures it is a quick read that explains the agile values, principles and servant leadership behaviors needed to support agile teams. Available from your local Amazon online store, the US link is here.

Today we will review Team Performance. The Team Performance domain includes Team Formation, Team Empowerment, and Team Collaboration activities. (Anyone taking the PMI-ACP exam should expect to see 18-20 questions on this topic.)

Here is a mindmap showing all the tasks, we will then review them one at a time.

 Team Formation

 Task 1 – Jointly create team norms

Some fundamental changes are coming to the PMP® exam. Currently slated for January 2021, the content and composition of the exam will be completely revamped. As described in the new PMP Exam Content Outline, PMI commissioned a research study into trends in the project management profession. This study, called the Global Practice Analysis, investigated which job tasks and approaches people frequently use.

The job task analysis identified the knowledge and skills required to function as a project management practitioner. Now the PMP is changing to better reflect these practices; here are some of the major changes:  

Organizational agility is the ability of an enterprise to change direction, realign and succeed in volatile, uncertain business environments. It requires sensing emerging trends and actively listening to customer requests, then acting on this information and making the changes required to position the organization for where it needs to be in the future.

Small organizations can change direction quickly because they have fewer people or processes to change. Most medium to large-scale organizations have considerable mindset inertia in the form of strategies, multi-year plans, in-flight programs, and projects, etc. When fundamental change is required, it can be difficult to turn these large elements that have gathered their own momentum through the day-to-day behaviors of staff.

Here is the second sample from my new Kindle book “Agile Illustrated: A Visual Learner’s Guide to Agility”. The book is a graphical introduction to the agile mindset and servant leadership behaviors for working with agile teams. If you missed the first sample on the Agile Manifesto, you can find it here.

Today we will revisit the Declaration of Interdependence. A lesser-known cousin to the Agile Manifesto, the Declaration of Interdependence was created in a few years after the Agile Manifesto to describe how to achieve an Agile Mindset in product and project leadership. It describes six principles essential to agile project teams. We will review them one by one.

 1 – We increase return on investment by making a continuous flow of value our focus.

Amaze your customers; keep giving them what they ask for!

Over the next few weeks, I will be featuring samples from my new Kindle book “Agile Illustrated: A Visual Learner’s Guide to Agility”. The book is a graphical introduction to the agile mindset and servant leadership behaviors for supporting agile teams.

Let’s start with the Agile Manifesto:

The Agile Manifesto was created during a meeting in February 2001 that brought together a number of software and methodology experts who were at the forefront of the emerging agile methods. Let’s look at the values one by one.

Value 1 – Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools

While processes and tools will likely be necessary, we should try to focus attention on the individuals and interactions involved. This is because work is undertaken by people, not tools, and problems get solved by people, not processes. Likewise, products are accepted by people, scope is debated by people, and the definition of a successfully “done” project is negotiated by people.

What will help set up a project for success is an early focus on developing the individuals involved and an emphasis on productive and effective interactions. Processes and tools can help, yet projects are ultimately about people. So, to be successful, we need to spend the majority of our time in what may be the less comfortable, messy, and unpredictable world of people.

Value 2 – Working software over comprehensive documentation

This value speaks to the need to deliver. It reminds us to focus on the purpose or business value we’re trying to deliver, rather than on paperwork.

Thanks to everyone who downloaded my new eBook “Agile Illustrated: A Visual Learner's Guide to Agility” you made it #1 Amazon Hot New Releases for “Technical Project Management”, along with #1 Amazon Best Seller in “Computers and Technology Short Reads”, and even #1 Amazon Best Seller in “PMP Exam” - which is odd because it is not even about the PMP exam.

I am excited to announce a new eBook “Agile Illustrated: A Visual Learners Guide to Agility”.

It is a short, graphical overview of agile and agile team leadership published as an Amazon Kindle eBook.

Using mind-maps, cartoons, and short summaries it covers the agile manifesto, the declaration of interdependence for agile project management, and each of the 7 Domains and 60 Tasks covered in the PMI-ACP exam.

It is short and light read but a powerful study aid for anyone preparing for the PMI-ACP exam. It also serves as a great executive summary for instilling an agile mindset and teaching the leadership behaviors to serve agile teams. With over 70 illustrations, mind-maps and cartoons it engages spatial and visual memory making the points easier to recall and explain to others.

If you think in pictures and like to see how ideas fit together this will be a valuable resource.

Please join me on Thursday, September 12^th for the PMI Organizational Agility Conference. This free, online event for PMI members awards viewers PDUs. I will be presenting on the topic of becoming a Change Resilient Professional.

As rates of change increase, building strategies and skills for adapting to change are becoming more important than ever. We will explore beyond agile models and the power of a “Yes, and…” mindset. I will be profiling the increasing pace of change and what the best organizations are doing to keep up with it, drive it forward, and future proof their employees.

There is a great lineup of presentations scheduled for the day. Check out the full program and register here.

In my last article on Incubating Innovation, we explored the culture and mindset of accountable experimentation. This article focuses on actionable tools and approaches.

Within agile frameworks, the team retrospective is the primary workshop for planning and evaluating experiments. Yet most team retrospectives I see are broken.

Teams spend too much time recording viewpoints and information—but not enough time reviewing or planning experiments. It is common to see the majority of the time spent gathering what went well, what did not go well, and appreciations. Yet where’s the focus on experiments, the learning process and trials for the next iteration?

Phew, the wait is over! I have been wanting to talk about this for what seems like ages and now the official announcement is out! If you have ever been frustrated by the PMBOK Guide now here’s your chance to fix it.

We are looking for volunteers to write and review the next edition of the PMBOK Guide. However, this will not be just an update, instead a radical departure from all previous editions aligned with PMI’s new digital transformation strategy. That’s all I can explain for now, but more details will be announced when I can say more.

Meanwhile, we would like people with knowledge of the full value delivery spectrum (waterfall, hybrid, agile, lean, etc.) to participate.