Hidden Agendas

I guess they said that because I use Unified Process terminology during my agile coaching sessions. It's not that I'm a big fan of UP -- it's a tool like anything else. I just need some handy dictionary of things to talk about when we're talking technology development. Saying "your emergent behavior is lacking" doesn't seem to me to be as helpful as "I notice during Inception that getting a problem statement and stakeholder agreement seemed to be an issue."

They're both true statements, perhaps involving the exact same situation, but one has a lot more descriptive power to it than the other one. Teams emerge solutions around problems that they can clearly define and understand.

I must confess that I have an affinity towards descriptive words. I don't know if that qualifies as an "agenda" or not. I know my use of the words "use case" seem to strike fear into many a heart of agilistas everywhere. But I take that as a lack of understanding about what I'm talking about. When I say "use case", I don't mean a big honking piece of paper: that's the use-case specification. I mean describing what you want the system to do in terms of actors, goals, and a narrative. Last I checked this is exactly how we would talk about any type of system behavior. We might do it over coffee down at the Starbucks. Or on the other hand, we might have a really complex project that requires a lot of behavior conversations and lots of people who can't all meet at the same time. In that case, I might keep things on a card, or a form, or in a set of emails. Don't confuse the format of what you are doing with the thing itself.

I think the most interesting part of being accused of having a hidden agenda is that it happens so much. When I was working with a large organization on a multi-million-dollar procurement project, most of the players had -- you guessed it -- hidden agendas. The guy from distribution didn't want to do things the same way as the guy from the far east. The guy from headquarters wanted to consolidate as much information as possible, while the field offices wanted more flexibility in meeting demand. Et cetera.

So everybody had a hidden agenda. Except me, of course. My open agenda was to get the team honestly talking about their problems and making headway towards resolving them. I'm a hired gun. Sometimes the best thing you bring to to the table as a hired gun is that you're only in it for the fun and the money. What do I care if the guy in the main office is happy or not. If my client is happy we did the best we could, and if the team acted effectively, life is good.

People who have worked with consultants know that there is more to the story. Hired guns like myself are paid to also look for strategic sales opportunities by the companies that send us out. So sure, I look for things that might help my bosses do some more sales one day. "Working more at the program level in this area. Might learn some things about some of the pain points they're having here." went one of my recent emails to the pointy-heads back in the main office. But I'm not a salesman. I can certainly convey observations, but heck, I don't think that understanding the customer's pain points constitutes any sort of breech of trust. After all, my company is supposed to understand where the pain points are. That's our job. The better we understand it, the better we can help fix it.

If I cross the line to actively talking about selling stuff, I cease to be truly independent. So as much as possible I don't go there. Heck -- I'm not much good at it anyway. I find that when I'm really excited about some product or solution I'm about as subtle as a bull in a china shop. So I guess I'll never be salesman

In this case, I think the "agenda" complaint here more has to do with process religion. Once you "get the fever" of some new way of doing things, such as Scrum, pretty soon all of the normal religious processes follow. We must set up an orthodoxy -- determine who is with us and who is not. We must evangelize to all of the company. We must "eat our own dog food" which usually translates to having a hammer and viewing the world as a large nail. And yes, we must have witch hunts. Because if we've got the religion, we've got to condemn those who don't have it.

I exaggerate, of course, but large process adoption has a very religious feel to it. I'm almost positive that my "hidden agenda" has to do with using UP concepts when my teams get into technical trouble. To this accusation I plead guilty as charged.

You see, I grew up professionally in a world where I didn't get to pick my processes. Each client and company I worked for had different ways of doing things. As a consequence, I don't place a lot of faith on books, authors, or trendy ways of doing things. As I mentioned in my last post, processes and philosophies are ways to get to the solution inside the time box, not the solution in themselves.

So as I recently told a team that was kicking off Inception, being Agile doesn't mean that we're not having any process. Not at all! Instead, being agile means that we have every process you can possibly imagine.. It's just that "having the process" might mean talking about it for like, 10 seconds.

Teams that recognize risk and act on it effectively use all kinds of recipe books and processes. They just use them in a way that makes sense.

There. My hidden agenda is revealed.