Agile Is Not New, But It is Useful

Agile advocates are often quite quite siloed in their thinking, many having had little other experience of delivering projects than bespoke software development projects. Many of them are not even aware of the historical trends before the publication of the Agile Manifesto or that they are in fact just participating in an evolutionary trend, rather than a revolutionary approach. Agile owes much to Rapid Application Development or RAD (its immediate predecessor). Often, I have heard them musing about applying Agile to other technologies and industries and wandering whether it is possible. At the same time they miss the fact that DevOps, which extends Agile, is based on manufacturing theory (Total Quality Management, Just-In-Time and Flexible Automation).

Actually, project managers who subscribe to the AgilePM approach, will often use the organisational aspects of agile to run their projects and the approaches used in RAD were not new either. Prototyping was a feature enabled in manufacturing by the use of CADCAM to rapidly design and produce prototypes and Engineers have always been taught that Design is an iterative process. The concepts of Design Thinking originate from academic papers produced in the 1960s, and address many of the technique aspects of Agile including multi functional product teams and evolutionary prototyping and development of innovative products.

But if you want to see Agile organisational constructs such as sprints in action, go to a shipyard. almost all modern shipyards practice modular shipbuilding approaches. They split the overall design into modeles which are constructed and outfitted. These are combined to form blocks, which are then further outfitted. The blocks are then moved to the construction berth, combined and integrated. Work is usually organised around 1 to 2 week production units (although sometimes 4 week ones are used). Testing is continuous and progressive as systems and compartments are completed. Test conditions are part of design. (Does this sound Familiar?). 

Although this practice evolved in the late 60s in Japan and gradually spread, it was in fact learnt from high rise building construction, with each floor of office or hotel blocks treated as a sprint.

Likewise, filming has a similar approach. Up front sketches are used to design each scene. Some work is done with cameras, lighting and film to workout the best combinations to achieve the cinematic affects required (a little similar to preliminary UI design). Scenes become the sprints and are filmed iterativelly to produce what can be afforded and so on. UAT is done with test audiences.

So Agile is not new, it's just slightly tailored to software development, and just like some of the other approaches used elsewhere, it's based on producing a right quality product with the minimum of fuss.

2018 in Digital

Recently, the UK budget was set with a few old fashioned measures for increasing productivity, Investment in Infrastructure and More Money for Apprenticeships.

I then read someone's blog which suggested that this had missed the mark. His premise was that investment in technology usually fails and there is a need to continue to emphasise other traditional business change and simplicity measures such as clear strategic leadership, process design and email de-cluttering. He produced statistics to show that e-mail costs more than the UK's contributions to the EU's budget. Although I thought that this particular commentary missed the disasters caused by poor collaboration by business leaders and the failure to work together as a unified team.

At the same time, a commentary in Forbes suggested that 2018 will be the year of software automation with a sudden increase in the trading of enterprise data sets and a huge increase in the number of data scientists. Although the breaks to this are whether data sets are considered valuable IPR and the need to train up a lot more people in aspects of data science.

Contino and Gartner have identified 2018 as the year of DevOps with DevOps driving Agile (Gartner) and increasing competition between Platform Vendor services between AWS, GCS and Azure as well as the new wild card entry AliBaba. Interestingly, growth rates for all of these services are in the 50-90% p.a. area. Contino also mentioned that there are many new developments not just in the area of containerisation and serverless computing, but also in improved cloud security via projects such as Calico.

Surprisingly, given the recent frenzies, most commentators were muted on the impact of AI and Machine learning. Likewise, no one bothered to mention the rapidly maturing area of wearable technology or the new promises that quantum computing may at last start to deliver.

Overall, the impression is of Lean Digital becoming mainstream whilst other post digital technologies gradually insinuate themselves into leading edge enterprises.

Agile at Scale

In a recent report The State Of Agile 2017: Agile At Scale Forrester stated that DevOps adoption is beginning to drive Agile adoption and that many organisations are adopting both simuultaneously in large scale transformations, i.e. they are going Lean as suggested in the 3rd layer of the DAF Framework (see: The Way of DAU (including the DAF) ).

Additionally, Forrester identifies major impediments:

• Culture & Behaviour,
• Availability and Commitment of skilled product owners,
• Effective Executive Leadership,
• Lack of project / programme frameworks

As key blockers to successful adoption which further re-inforces the Digital Adoption Framework principles and recommended activities for iteratively adopting a digital business model.

Anyone who wants to discuss can find the discussion group here on LinkedIn.

All constructive thoughts and suggestions are welcome.

Agile Business

A recent article in Raconteur discussed business agility and outlined some interesting case studies such as Lego and Volvo which are trying to pre-empt market trends by getting there first. It also mentions Google as the champion of "Failing Fast", without really getting into the ethos of innovation requiring experimentation and an appetite to learn from failure to either tune or abandon hypotheses on what will work in the market place.

It was also interesting that the article quoted a recent CA survey stating that:

87% of executives think that responding more quickly to new opportunities will give them a distinct advantage - whereas with DAU and the DAF, the belief is that you have to identify them and try to get there first. Responding quickly is only enough to keep up.

65% expect higher customer satisfaction and retention - which may be right about satisfaction, if their organisation has adequately focused on customer experience and design thinking, but kind of misses the point that customers are less loyal in the digital market place unless an enterprise maintains its innovation and keeps its image clean (through transparency, ethics, sustainability etc.).

58% expect higher employee satisfaction and retention - which again has some qualifiers around culture (collaboration, empowerment, personal development, communication etc.) design of work and eliminating frustrating nugatory tasks which are endemic in major corporations.

I also thought the author slightly got it wrong when reporting that Agile is chaotic. Agile is in fact highly organised, but it is a good way of coping with chaotic conditions. Anyone who has seen Snowdon's Cynefin framework would appreciate that.

Anyone who wants to discuss this can join the Way of DAU discussion group on LinkedIn.

Agile Portfolio Management

The Agile Business Consortium recently published its book on Agile Portfolio Management. See a recent article here AgilePfM .

Key things about it that are complementary with the The Way of DAU are the insistence of alignment with strategy and value, the emphasis on innovation and collaboration and the highly iterative nature of the activity.

It fits nicely into Layer 2 of the DAF framework.

RIP Net Neutrality

The USA championed anti-monopoly legislation with famous cases against AT&T, Kodak and Standard Oil amongst others. The Federal Communications Commission has now voted to cancel its Net Neutrality Rules which prohibited blocking and throttling of internet traffic or offering "fast highways" to those who pay most.

Whilst one can put forward arguments where paying for performance may be beneficial in certain circumstances, the removal of the rules promotes the situation where companies can (and therefore probably will) act to squeeze out or disadvantage other companies. This plays to the vested interests of large established companies with deep pockets and will constrain the small agile contenders which are the life blood of the current digital revolution. The danger is that this will kill off much of the innovation that the US is famous for.

So there you are, a glorious example of disjointed government simultaneously encouraging and discouraging monopoly abuse.

Quantum Computing and all that

Quantum computing has been "The next big thing" in computer design research since the mid 1980s. Companies like IBM have sunk large amounts of money into the area to develop working demonstrator prototypes of the sub-components required to build a quantum computer. Typically this involves very expensive equipment which uses super cooling technology to support qubit based calculations. Where qubits or quantum bits are based on quantum mechanical states of the polarisation of particles such as photons. The quantum mechanics aspect means that a particle can occupy two states simultaneously (otherwise known as superposition) and introduces a powerful approach to probabilistic computing.

So why all the fuss? Well there are several applications and implications. For example of a bad thing or serious implication, quantum computing computers could easily crack the cryptographics used on most public key cryptographic systems in use today. Pundits believe that it is only a matter of years before a powerful enough quantum computer is available, and then most current encryption technology becomes obsolete, as current encryption relies on the fact that it would take an impracticably long time to crack it using brute force. So there are some start up companies already offering "quantum key security" solutions to security conscious organisations.

More positively, there are other problems which become easier to address. A lot of these are modelling based. Why is this important. Well there's an old saying that "all models are wrong, but some are useful", which really means that computing based models are simplified approximations, based on assumptions and cannot always deal with real life complexity and the range of statistical variation which can occur. An interesting area is climate modelling. Almost all the climate models used today in the "climate change" debate surrounding global warming are wrong. They can't deal with all the variables and elements needed to model climate accurately and most cannot reproduce actual historical climate patterns, if they are fed historically accurate starting point data. Quantum computing could change that (provided that the input data is correct). Today's debates are fuelled by the situation where as I read once "if you put extreme data into a simple model you get extreme outputs which have nothing to do with real life". Getting a tool which accurately models climate would be extremely useful in determining what are the best actions to take to respond to long term climate change trends.

The situation is similar with economic modelling and longer term it is conceivable that quantum computing could accurately model consumer responses to marketing campaigns or even election campaigns. In engineering terms, certain numerical modelling techniques concerned with fluid dynamics, fracture mechanics and stress analysis could also be further enhanced, and the list goes onwards.

Will this change the world, probably, but we do need to think through some of the societal impacts too. Why is it interesting now? because researchers at the university of New South Wales have recently demonstrated a chip which contains all the building blocks for controlling quantum computing, using current technology. So watch this space.

Digital Engagement Surveys

At this time of year, Nimbus 90 performs a survey into technology trends and issues concerned with adoption. This is based on the opinions of 100s of senior IT professionals working in the UK and is part of their symbiotic business model, research funded by suppliers and supplemented by knowledge sharing networking events.

I have just been looking at last years survey report which was interesting in how positive it was. There was a strong focus on re-inventing business models, with a high emphasis on customer experience and expectations.

The thing which really struck me was how few organisations saw a digital model as a cost cutting exercise. Although the number looking to improve operational efficiency slightly out stripped those looking to launch new products.

Key benefits anticipated included innovation, agility, customer engagement and better decision making. Though, quite sanguinely, expectations around customer loyalty were quite muted. Perhaps this was early recognition of the greater volatility of customer loyalty within the digital world when compared with traditional ways of doing business.

The one thing which did not come out was much use of AI or Machine learning. This has been a bit of a theme this year. So it will be interesting to see what comes out.

Also, sponsorship of Digital Programmes appears to be all over the place at the moment with CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CMOs and CDOs all in on the act. Although surprisingly few COOs appear to be involved. Some of this is obviously diue to different corporate structures and sizes. but again it would be interesting to see what happens.

A Day In the Life of a Product Manager

Getting up super early, Marjory K'Ting rushed her breakfast of extra strong coffee and a bagel so that she could catch the red-eye commuter train to Doontung where they were holding today's consumer workshops for the Zeting shopper app, MyWay. 

On the way she read through the latest KPI scores for the current version app. It was showing good overall trends, though she noticed that one of the target segments, for young professionals was not responding as expected to the app. What was going on here then?

On arrival she headed straight to the KafMeUp coffeeshop whose owners had agreed to let them run their workshop in am area set to one side.  There she found Zak, her super keen intern assistant lounging around outside just as KafMeUp's proprieter Ivan Blunt arrived to open up.

Inside they started to set up at their reserved area with signs inviting passersby to drop in and participate in exchange for a free breakast, paid for by Zeting. As they were doing this, Gordan Keek, one of the developpers and Susan Chain (the retail specialist) turned up and started to fill up on pick-me-up sized mugs of coffee.

Just as set up was complete, and KafMeUp's staff were ready to open up, the first customers came in. Zak's role was to meet and greet the customers and invite representative members of the public to take part in the workshop. Arty Tariq, the lead tester then arrived and joined the group, panting heavily as his train had been delayed and he had run all the way from the station to get there on time.

Gordan was their to demonstrate the current prototype for the next release of the MyWay app. Arty would capture their responses, helping refine detailed requirements, design features, usability concerns and identify appropriate test cases.

Marjory and Susan were going to review the current user experience, focusing on a couple of scenarios which had recently been identified as priorities from customer feedback. Before she started, she asked the team to see if they could explore the young professional segment issue as well.

By mid morning, they were exhausted. They had spoken to 50 or so shoppers and office workers who stopped by the coffee shop on their way to work and had a pile of material to analyse. In the taxi, on the way back, Marjory spoke to the team and got their gut feel response from the morning's work. Overall, it seemed that the work had confirmed a lot of their initial research and assumptions, but that there was a perception problem around the app with young professional who did not feel that it catered to their ethical concerns or help with finding green sourced and sustainable products. Also there was a lack of coverage of certain classes of lifestyle service and product which they liked.

She was going to have to address that soon. Which meant another meeting with the solution architect, the analyst and the project manager to see what could traded against these new requirements. Arriving at the office she quickly called up her diary and scheduled a meeting to discuss how to accommodate this within the forthcoming release.

Slipping down to lunch in the nearby deli-cum-eatery she started to think through the implications. Retailing would need to research and add lines. She would have to update the targeting and messaging of the marketing campaign for the new release. The media company used would need re-briefing and she would probably have to present an update to the Integrated Product Team and then she would have to re-forecast the numbers for the current release's performance, the costs of the new release and the anticipated uptake and revenue for the re-defined release. The product road map would also need updating and Oh! she needed to do a quick first impressions adjustment to the forecasts for this afternoon's operating plan review with the CFO and the CMO.

A few adrenalin filled  hours later she had, survived the monthly operating plan review, but with new actions to confirm her gut feel projections with more definitive estimates. Although, it was not all bad, if they met the young professional consume segment's needs and got the message through to them, then there could be a revenue boost of anywhere between 10 and 30%. They just needed to execute well.

Back to planning again, she added all her new tasks to her to do list and went downstairs to see what was going on in the Integrated Product Team's End of Day wash-up. Progress was good, and most of the issues raised appeared to have a doable action, but the bad news was that young Kendra, their graduate app developer had accepted a job offer from GitYrRox and would be leaving next month. 

Now she just had to survive the evenings drinks at the local cocktail bar whilst the ceremonially on boarded the new operations team lead Justin into the team and took pictures of him wearing a funny hat for the internal magazine. She hurriedly, phoned to leave a voicemail for her partner, asking him to leave a snack out for when she got home later that night and headed off into the social fray. ...

This is a mythical story about a product manager in an integrated product team. The aim is to convey a little of what is involved, but also how important collaboration is across the end-to-end process of developing and delivering products, whilst innovating iteratively in a customer focused manner. It's all part of The Way of DAU

Digital Patterns

Most software developers are familiar with the concept of a pattern. They use them to describe types of programming problems which can be solved in the same generic manner.

This was originally developed to support the indexing of re-usable code and trading in 3rd party off the shelf code components, with the idea of improving overall development productivity and quality. The quality aspect arising from the assumption that such code would be designed to be flexible and robust in many scenarios.

The idea was not actually that novel as it replicated the concept of group technology in manufacturing, where a group technology code defines the shape, size and manufacturing characteristics of 3D parts or components. The idea being that groups of machines could be set up to manufacture families of parts more quickly than traditional methods where machines were grouped functionally and work meandered all over a factory between the functional groups of machines. 

Anyway, patterns have become such a useful metaphor that developers will often describe what they are doing in terms of what the pattern is and therefore what tools and approach they are using. Consequently, the concept of patterns has also been adopted to describe aspects of solution architecture and encourage design re-use within enterprises.

So I have been struck recently by the fact that going digital or adopting a Digital As Usual model might be facilitated by certain organisational patterns.

For example, Lean and Agile solution development is usually product and product team based. The product team integrates the viewpoints of several functions involved in developing and exploiting the product typically including users, product owners, analysts, developers, testers and DevOps engineers. This might be called the Product Team Pattern.

Some approaches to delivering digital products also look at mass customisation via standard features. The principle being that a product is constructed from a number of features for which there may be a number of standard options. The product is then tailored to a customer's needs by selecting which features and which options the customer wants. This then gives a tailored product experience with most of the benefits of a bespoke product, but better economics and more consistent quality because each feature and each option is standardised. This might be called the Adaptive Product Pattern.

A recent article in the SLOAN MIT Management Review, Is Your Company Ready for a Digital Future? described a "Future Ready" pattern, in which it identifies a combination of Customer Experience and Process Efficiency capabilities as delivering this type of pattern resulting in low cost innovation, superlative customer experience, modular agility and the ability to exploit data as a future asset. Whilst this complements the thinking in "The Way of DAU", it struck me that perhaps there are other patterns out there which need to be identified. 

Any thoughts anyone?   

The Way of DAU - The best a business can be

Just to let you know, The Way of DAU is now available from Amazon as a paperback. (click on Amazon to see) and the e-version should be available soon. 

This is a deliberately simple book on the quite complex subject of how to adopt a sustainable digital business model. It was inspired by my personal frustration with incomplete models and advice available for Digital Business.

Digital operations have now replaced traditional Business As Usual business models. The Way of DAU promotes 10 basic principles, an iterative Framework (the DAF or Digital Adoption Framework), and positive cultural values to achieve the behaviours needed in successful digital businesses.

The book is based on a mixture of personal experience (in an organisation struggling to reinvent itself) as well as collected best practices. The current edition represents an MVP version. I hope to collect constructive feedback via a LinkedIn Group to drive future releases of the book. (see: The Way of DAU Group ).

Integrated Product Teams - Digital Organisation

IPTs Are Not as New As You Think

I first came across the Integrated Product Team concept in the most traditional of environments, the Defence Industry. Their adoption was one of the major hallmarks of an attempt to revolutionise UK MoD procurement in recent times.

Benefits of IPTs

The best aspect of the IPTs, was not just that they were multi-disciplinary and therefore great at surfacing all the dimensions of a problem, but they also helped break down the barriers of distrust that exist in the Defence Industry. This is highly significant because, the industry has traditionally had a huge gulf separating the MoD and its contractors, due to the insecurity that is encouraged by the Treasury in its pursuit for what it thinks is Value For Money. The Treasury usually takes the stance that the costs are too high and the public sector is being ripped off by rapacious private sector companies, encouraging a general sense of insecurity in the public servants (in the MoD) who are dealing with them. This then leads to relationship problems and behaviours which inevitably stretch out acquisition projects, impact the quality of what is acquired and often results in increased costs. It is a situation which Demming (one of the grandfathers of the Total Quality Movement) would have predicted. As he advocated focusing on quality (driven by customer needs) and continuous improvement, with the philosophy that improved costs and value would follow.

Design Thinking And Agile

The concept of Design Thinking (see for example the UK Design Council's Double Diamond Model for product development) also relies on a similar multi-functional teams to get at what is the real customer problem to address, and then what is the most appropriate product design option for delivering it, supported by iterative design and prototyping to develop a right quality product.

So it is no surprise that the Agile Movement, building on traditional Rapid Application Development techniques of user-centric prototyping, has gradually moved to a Product Team based approach, particularly when the market driven influences of digital companies such as Amazon and Google are taken into account.

IPT Case Study

So I was really interested when SLOAN research into the adoption of an IPT based approach at a major bank was published recently. See: What to Expect From Agile. It has some great practical insights into some of the considerations to take into account if your organisation is thinking of adopting an agile or digital business model.

Digital As Usual - Is Progress Stalling?

Attending a number of exhibitions this year, I have been struck by how little things have changed since last year. Indeed many of the suppliers at their stands have been quite muted in their messages and there has been little indication of much innovation. Overall the impression has been one of "more of the same" and a little "me too" in terms of what they have been promoting.

This year's State of DevOps Report showed increasing adoption of overall Lean (Agile and DevOps) practices and moved the emphasis to leadership as Digital becomes more embedded as a Digital as Usual practice.

The World Quality Report also showed higher demand on QA and testing, but a shortfall on budget and resources. Although it did express the anticipation that budgets would increase soon.

Both reports indicated maturing of accepted practice rather than new or radical changes in approach, or further innovations.

So, although technical progress may not be advancing much, adoption is definitely becomming mainstream.

This I take as confirmation that Digital is firmly mebedded as the new normal.