The People Part of People, Process and Tools in Agile Development

Jeff: In this post I want to talk a bit about the people side of Agile. The first item in the Agile Manifesto states, “We value individuals and interactions over processes and tools.” When you ask Agile practitioners what this means in a more informal sense and they will say that this means we talk to each other. We really communicate a lot more than we are used to in teams.

Now everyone agrees that we should talk more but there is more to it in my experience. Kent Beck in Extreme Programming Explained talks about values. He talks about communication, honesty, and feedback. These are things that you have to do in interactions with people. Let’s take honesty. Honesty is not, in my opinion, that there is some absolute truth for all to know. Honesty is about saying what is true for you in the specific moment.

Feedback is being able to say to someone when they have done great work and also being able to say when it isn’t working so well. There are always both of these sides to it. It is not all one way. I sometimes see executives talk about communication and they simply sit and talk to you about communication. But communication is a two way street and it requires a level of trust and safety in the group.

Now there are some mechanics in communication theory. For example, Virginia Satir’s communication model makes the mechanics very clear. But if you are not comfortable with saying something to someone then it is not going to happen no matter how good your model of communication. If you do not feel safe in saying something in the team, it will not happen. Good friends build up trust, a sense of safety, with each other over a long period of time. Over time they can say things to each other with a deeper sense of honesty.

I am not suggesting that members of teams should immediately turn into truth-telling machines that are always telling everyone when they are ticked off. I am not talking about that kind of response. But I am talking about teams getting to the point where unpleasant things can be talked about openly.

We discuss in the retrospective process about talking about things that did not go so well. This is one reason why I suggest that retrospectives be kept within the team. The team itself conducts retrospectives and managers and others not on the team should not attend. This gives the team a chance to build a level of trust to gain a deeper level of honesty.

Bill: To pick up on this point. I think that truth and honesty are relative things. For what you are saying I feel you would agree with this. For example, I know this one guy who feels he always needs to say the “truth.” In the process he alienates and hurts a lot of people. He will say things that are his opinion but are also destructive in the context in which they are said. He defends this by saying he just speaks the truth. I think instead, you need to speak an intelligent truth to say things that are constructive and move people forward.

Jeff: I agree. Truth is a subtle thing. It has to do with appropriateness and context. One way to talk about it is to consider the two people talking and include the context so there are three entities involved. In the case of this blog there is you, me, and the context. The context is a blogging mechanism and our readers.

Bill: There is also the issue of establishing the right, credibility, or authority to speak the truth. You need to establish you have been there to really have people accept what you are saying. It is much easier for a member of a group to express concerns about the group than someone from the outside. This gives you some legitimacy and reduces the chance that you will seem simply offensive.

Jeff: Right. So all these things matter in communication. Better teams have higher levels of trust. This enables more profound conversations. They tend to be more efficient. High performance teams know each other better. They trust each other and they need fewer words to communicate. When I work with a team these are the kinds of things I am listening for. I look at the interactions. If you have manager who does not listen, people will not speak. The Meyers Briggs introvert and extrovert aspects come into play here. The high performing team will always give the introvert space to talk. Sometimes with introverts you have to be comfortable not saying anything for a while to give them space.

I wanted to talk about this because we discuss the importance of people in the Agile Manifesto. But often when we think of people we say: did we provide enough food at the right time; are they paid enough; how do they like their office. But there is also the people aspect of team dynamics. These things involve softer values. We know that co-location can be good but you can have a co-located team and still not have trust in that team.

Bill: I am a big believer in this also, both being trained as a psychologist and being part of a lot of IT implementations. I was on a panel at the 2007 Enterprise 2.0 conference that we called, “90% People and 10% Technology. We did this because people always say, well of course it is really 90% people and 10% technology in implementations but in fact they invest funding and focus in the exact opposite direction. At the same time it has been my experience that there is a very positive correlation between the amount of time spent on people issues and the success of the project. But people not get this 90 percent of the time. Why do you think this is?

Jeff: There are several reasons. In the computer software many people got into the field because they were not comfortable with people issues. In some ways software development was an escape for them from interactions with people. I also think it is much harder to measure and show results when you are dealing with the people issues.

Bill: I think this measurement thing is a critical point, especially in the US. We are a measurement culture. We look at wines in terms of Robert Parker’s numbering system that many Europeans laugh at. The numbers can be meaningless but they give us comfort. The people side is hard to measure. In think that what you said about people involved with computers can be true but it also applies to many people involved in business management. They get an MBA and learn to run the numbers. But they not learn how to deal with people. In many situations, it is the business manager who is less oriented to people issues than the IT people.

Jeff: I agree with this. I remember years ago I knew people in the economics program at Berkeley and it was all about the measurement. But perhaps they were not measuring the right things.

Bill: Yes, the balanced scorecard is an attempt to look at a broader range of issues.

Jeff; We have used the balanced score card and 360 reviews with success in Agile teams. Perhaps this measurement should be the topic for another conversation.

Comments

[Carl]

I agree with your statement that reads “We value individuals and interactions over processes and tools.” To learn more about this procrss please read The Power Of Self Separation you can get a copy at http://www.prlog.org/10216360-professor-author-teaches-profound-concept-trust-safety-selfseparation.html or at

http://www.strategicbookpublishing.com/ThePowerOfSelfSeparation.html have a great day

[Derek Neighbors]

We have been talking a lot about this at Integrum. In some ways we are calling it Human Driven Development. Where the focus is on the people involved in developing the software as much as the software itself.

[128gb usb drive]

The constraints on when agile approaches can be used are primarily organizational and cultural, not project types. Some organizations and some contexts are incompatible with agile/lean thinking. When these organizations eventually come up against a strong competitive threat, they will fail to meet it unless they change their values and mindsets. Lean/Agile is at it’s foundation, the fourth industrial paradigm, the first being Craft Production, Factory Production with machine tooling, Automation and Taylorism. These come along every hundred years or so and take a few decades to work through. Each paradigm includes the preceding one and makes it dramatically more productive.