Steve Neiderhauser

Amazon and Scrum

In this article, Alan Atlas describes how he helped Amazon adopt Agile.

I like his tip for Agile growth.

Amazon's success with Scrum validates one easy, frictionless way to begin a Scrum transition.

1. Establish stable teams
2. Make Agile and Scrum information widely and easily available
3. Give permission to adopt Scrum

Systems Thinking

The LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) framework gives an overview of Systems Thinking. In systems thinking you consider the effect of a decision on the entire system. For example, if a manager tells a software teams to complete a project in half the time while delivering the same number of features, the developers will likely take shortcuts that actually delay the project. The systems thinking article explains that when managers at Microsoft put pressure on developers, the developers pulled out their secret toolbox.

...the many practices related to hacking out dirty code (no tests, no reviews, ignore known defects, copy-paste programming, poor design, …) to apparently deliver a feature faster. You see, developers also have quick-fix reactions for their problems.

The developer tactics had a delayed effect, and as the project progressed, features were added at a much slower pace.

How Lean Startup Works

In Eric Ries latest book, The Startup Way, he teaches companies how to use Entrepreneurial Management to drive long-term growth. As part of that effort, Eric provides an overview of the Lean Startup method.

1. Identify the beliefs about what must be true for the startup to succeed. We call these leap-of-faith assumptions.
2. Create an experiment to test the assumptions. This initial effort is called a minimum viable product.
3. Think like a scientist. From each experiment, learn what's working and what's not. This unit of progress for startups is called validated learning.
4. Take what you've learned from the experiment and repeat the loop. This iteration is called the build-measure-learn feedback loop.
5. On a regular cadence, decide to make a strategy change (pivot) or stay the course (persevere).

The goal of Lean Startup is to find the fastest path to realizing the startup's vision.

Here's a nice summary of The Startup Way.

Keys to Team Collaboration

From the excellent book Sense and Respond, the authors share these key changes that enable sense and respond teams to collaborate:

Create autonomous, mission-based teams

Use cross-functional teams

Build dedicated teams

Support new work flows

Co-locate teams

Be careful with remote work

Limit outsourcing

Hold retrospectives and employ minimum viable processes

The first three bullets talk about the importance of teams. Perhaps that's because the team is the atomic unit.

If a company tries to be more efficient and breaks the team down into individual resources and assigns people to multiple projects, the team's atomic structure decomposes. You no longer have a team. The ability to collaborate, or to do many of the activities associated with agile development vanishes.