Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Tag: project management

  • Kanban Basics

    I often say that you can implement Kanban in your team in a single afternoon. That’s how we did that after all. So when Andy Brandt asked me to do Kanban Basics webinar I expected that preparing it would be pretty simple. How long can you talk about few-hour-long task?

    Well, it wasn’t as simple as I expected.

    Kanban itself is very simple. But telling people they should visualize workflow, limit work in progress and measure the flow isn’t really all the basic stuff they need to know. After a while it always ends up with questions how we do this and how we do that.

    What limits should be set on board?
    What happens when a bug is found during testing?
    Should sticky notes be moved back on the board at all?
    How cycle time is measured?
    What happens when the limit is reached?
    What to do when emergency task pops up?
    How to cope with multiple projects?
    Is feature-by-feature deployment mandatory?
    How estimation is done?

    That’s an interesting observation – I often deal with most of these questions at the end of my Kanban presentations, no matter if I cover basic or advanced material. After giving it some thought I decided this would be a good starting point to prepare Kanban Basics presentation.

    What I ended up is presentation below. It covers a bunch of scenarios visualized with (surprise, surprise) Kanban board. Additionally I used Scrum as the reference to make a basic Kanban description easier to understand.

    Kanban Basics

    If you have some basic questions which seem to be omitted in the presentation, please leave a comment. I’d be happy to both answer the questions and update future versions of the presentation.

    If you speak Polish feel free to watch the recording of the webinar.

    Also, check The Kanban Story series as it reveals all the details of Kanban implementation in my current team.

  • How to maintain backlog?

    In one of recent postings I asked you how big your backlog is. My argument was that trying to enforce small backlog size is counterproductive. Although small backlog is easier to manage throwing things away from it just to keep it small isn’t the best idea.

    However that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do some backlog maintenance from time to time. What more, applying a few simple rules can help you to manage backlog easily despite its pretty big size.

    Keep epics, split late

    Sometimes we add to our product a big story. An epic. It is actually pretty interesting example in terms of sizing backlog. Why? Well, no matter if you split the epic into a list of smaller stories, i.e. sized similarly to your typical features, or keep it big you add a huge piece of work. A piece, which usually makes sense as long as it is completed as a whole. So yes, you need quite a capacity to add the feature, no matter which approach you choose. What do you do if your backlog is limited?

    Anyway, my advice is to keep epics in backlog as long as possible and split them in the last responsible moment. It is aligned with agile late design approach but that’s not why I advise you so. Actually as long as you don’t start working on the epic there’s no reason to keep a dozen of sticky notes on the board instead of a single one. It’s enough for you to look at epic to know roughly what is to be done. You will need more details when you start development of first epic-related feature so no need to worry at the moment.

    It is easier to reprioritize the epic over and over again if it’s in one piece. And reprioritizing is the most common task when it comes to managing backlog.

    Groom from time to time

    If you have spacious backlog you will face this situation on occasions: you will find out that one or more features waiting in the backlog are no longer relevant. Maybe you’ve changed the goal of your app or you abandoned industry which was addressed with the feature or you just don’t have a faintest idea why you wanted to build the damn thing in the first place. Either way it’s time to forget about it.

    Grooming backlog is a great occasion to do that. What exactly grooming is? A simple process of reviewing all features in backlog to verify their relevancy. Yes, if your backlog is big it takes time. But after all this is the way to make it at least a bit smaller, thus more manageable. And you don’t do it every week as you don’t change general plans for your product that often.

    Group features

    There’s an observation which can be helpful as well. Unless we work on maintenance project where priorities are usually set by the client we tend to build groups of similar features and not randomly choose one from here and another from there. Grouping features which are similar or features which touch the same parts of code can be helpful in terms of prioritizing work. Once done you can just throw in another feature from the group instead of scanning through the whole backlog to look for a relevant task to put in todo queue. That is as long as your general priorities don’t change.

    Grouping features also helps in prioritizing whole backlog. Instead of considering each and every feature separately you decide on a group which means you use the same time to judge a dozen of tasks you’d use to judge a single task otherwise.

    Dealing with big backlog isn’t that hard after all. All you need is some order and a few rules which help you to organize a long list of tasks somehow.

  • Specifics of Voluntary Projects

    Recently I told you about TEDxKrakow and how great idea it is to get engaged in a project like that if you want to get some experience in project management.

    No one commented that voluntary projects can’t be exactly the same as typical commercial projects even though I pretty much expected to hear this kind of argument. I did because it would be well-grounded. Voluntary projects are specific because, well, they are voluntary.

    OK, so where are differences?

    • No managers. No one is a boss. No one can just tell others they have to do something. There is no easy path. You have to earn your power before you can use it. People won’t start listening to you just because you are able to talk loudly. You have to show that you are doing at least as much by yourself and/or earn their trust before you start shouting your orders all over the place.
    • More talking. Talking is easy, talking is cheap. Unfortunately talking doesn’t get things done. People tend to throw great ideas as long as someone else is supposed to make them real. Unfortunately it sometimes turns into much talking and little doing as there isn’t really a business client who would make quick decisions on what is must-have and what is nice-to-have. A pretty good playground for doers I’d say.
    • More freedom. Unlike in typical projects you actually choose what you’re going to do. It’s like the open auction – I have this and that tasks unassigned, who’s going to take them over? Specialization works pretty similar though – we tend to choose things we are competent at and avoid those we suck at.
    • It’s easier to shine. In voluntary projects no one wants to get all the credit. After all it isn’t a place where people are going to build their whole careers. Chances are good that your effort will be properly credited. Just choose your tasks wisely and then deliver what you promised to deliver. Since in voluntary projects over-promising is just as common as in all others it should be enough to make you stand out.

    There is one more thing. It is real fun to be a part of this kind of project. But, after all, I’m not sure if it is a general rule or TEDxKrakow I used as example is fun to work on or fantastic people I met in this venture made it so. Or maybe all above are true.

    And if you haven’t yet registered to this fine event do it while you still can.

  • Hyper-Productivity Is Not an Issue

    These days wherever you move you hear a lot of buzz words. People manager, are you? There’s one for you. Oh, you are more into leading projects, I understand. Try with hyper-productivity. You will definitely hear it here and there. Well, maybe it is a way to go?

    For the sake of this discussion let’s consider there are no well-grounded doubts about figures standing behind the idea. Let’s consider hyper-productivity was never called bullshit. Let’s consider you can make your team hyper-productive, whatever this might mean. But before we come to this I have a question.

    Why, the hell, won’t you make your team just productive in the first place?

    The problem I see over and over again isn’t with teams which are performing very well and struggle to improve even more. The problem is an average team can hardly be called productive. Just productive.

    We keep wasting our time because we organize our work poorly. We face way more interruptions than it is necessary. We don’t really care about making our estimates a bit better to avoid panic (and counterproductive) rescue actions at the end of the project. We hire, and then keep, people who don’t give a damn about learning. We promote wrong people who are living proofs of Peter’s principle. We keep making stupid lists of examples just to prove the point which everyone agrees with from the very beginning (well, that might have been wrong example).

    No, hyper-productivity isn’t an issue. If we were able to make average team just productive we’d see hyper-productivity paradise. If you want to optimize system performance you don’t make champions even better – you work to get average majority to another level.

    So don’t tell me how to make my distributed team hyper-productive. Give me an advice how to make a bit more fun out of our mundane tasks or help me improve my recruitment skills instead.

    Hyper-productivity shouldn’t really bother us, even if it isn’t just a buzz word.

  • Learning Project Management Basics

    A question about starting career in project management is heard pretty often. A question about value of different project management certifications usually follows.

    There is a bunch of standard answers for these questions. Apply for junior role in project management. Attend a course. Help your PM in her job. Get a certificate (this or another). Buy and read a stack of books on project management etc.

    I have another answer. Actually the answer isn’t exactly mine. I’ve ruthlessly stolen it from Scott Berkun.

    Go, run a project.

    “How? I mean I’m yet trying to get project management job, remember?”

    Pretty much everything which happens around you is a kind of project. If you invite a group of friend for a dinner it is a project. If that doesn’t sound like a real project think bigger. Maybe you can organize vacations for friends?

    “Yeah, and what do I learn from such a simple thing?”

    Don’t tell me it’s easy – I’m just finalizing sailing trip for 25 people. And, believe me, friends aren’t the best clients you can find around. It requires the same skills you’ll be using once you get your PM job to organize this kind of trip.

    “Maybe that’s a nice idea but I don’t have 25 friends.”

    That sucks, man. But you definitely have some non-profit organization which would appreciate some help in their projects. And they do have a lot of them. And they’d love your help they’d get for free (non-profit often means non-paying too).

    “But, you know, this whole non-profit stiff isn’t really something I’d like to work on.”

    Um, you think once you are a project manager you’ll be able to choose projects you like and reject those you don’t. I have a bad news for you. You won’t. You know life isn’t as nice as they told you.

    “OK, but how it helps me to learn project management?”

    You basically organize a group of people to do what you want. They come to a meeting point. They go to target place where they’re warmly welcomed by your hosts. People know when they can go watch latest World Cup match and when they should bring you a cold beer in exchange for organizing this great trip. Earlier everyone paid you their share of costs so you could have paid for your shelter.

    This isn’t much different from project management in real world. You make people doing what you want. They work on a project tasks of your choice. Everyone knows when they’re free to learn new technology and when they should focus of finishing before deadline. Earlier people agreed on plan of splitting tasks and build a schedule etc.

    “What about all the formal stuff? I don’t have to create technical specifications when I organize a trip for friends.”

    Oh, really? You don’t? That’s interesting… OK, just joking. All the formal stuff will differ among companies so it isn’t so important anyway. Of course you should know what WBS is and understand how to find critical path, but that’s not a rocket science.

    What more usually candidates for project management positions lack practical knowledge – lack of understanding of some technical terms isn’t so common.

    So go, find a project and run it. After all there aren’t many things which would match your friends thanking you for a great trip and asking whether you’re organizing it next year too. This single thing is worth the whole effort. The funny thing is it works similarly in projects you run at work.

    By the way, I’d use the same method to learn leadership.

  • Agile Isn’t Immune for People Who Don’t Give a Damn

    I like presenting. I just love the fact that every time I deliver the presentation I find something new in there. It’s like having tiny epiphanies while you’re talking to a crowd. And I’m sure I wouldn’t have them if I didn’t overcome my fears and didn’t start speaking publicly.

    A thing which hit me last time I was delivering my Kanban Story presentation was how fragile agile is in terms of people who don’t give a damn. In the summary of presentation I make a point that Kanban may not be for your team if you work with undisciplined engineers.

    But what I realized while I was talking it is not only about lack of discipline. It’s about care. In Kanban people have to care about Kanban board. They have to move cards as they progress with features. They can’t abuse limits unless it is agreed among the team and team rules allow to. They should think how they could improve the board. They should keep the board up to date.

    Why it is so important? Because the board is single most important information radiator in Kanban teams. If contents of Kanban board are random you spread random information about project among the team and outside the team. You pretty much misinform everyone around. And now the important thing:

    In Kanban teams anyone can easily abuse Kanban board.

    It’s enough someone doesn’t care. He doesn’t care to move cards through the board or put his marker on task he’s working on at the moment or ignore transition criteria or whatever. Suddenly you have random Kanban board and no systemic tools to deal with the issue. People versus Kanban 1:0 at halftime. If you want to know how the match ends, well, you’ll have to read the blog in future since it is a subject for another post.

    It’s already half of A4 page and I haven’t really mentioned agile in general. Only Kanban. Kanban this and Kanban that. Don’t I have something else to say? Well, I do, thanks for bearing with me so far.

    One of reasons why Kanban is so easily abused by people who don’t give a damn is the fact that Kanban prescribes close to nothing. But enough of K-word. Scrum is more formal. Actually Scrum is pretty formal approach if you ask me. How it deals with the problem?

    A bit better. Stand-ups, time-boxing and planning meetings are all practices which help to deal with undisciplined team members. (I wanted to write “engineers” instead of “team members” but I’ve just recalled there are no roles in Scrum besides Scrum Master, Product Owner and Team Member and I prefer not to be killed by some Scrum extremist.) With these practices it is easier to make someone stick to convert folks who don’t care. If you work with Scrum you can’t work without time-boxing while the rest of the team has 2-week long sprints. You are asked the same questions as everyone else during stand-ups. There is more of a stick in Scrum than in Kanban. (Have I just said K-word?)

    XP goes even further. Rules are surrounding you everywhere, my poor engineer. It almost tells you how to pee. Not in pairs. fortunately If you work with XP and you don’t give a damn you’re probably already fired.

    But let’s face it – how many teams out there use eXtreme Programming religiously? Few. More of them follow just a couple of engineering techniques choosing Scrum as their process base. And even then we have whole variety of Scrumbuts, Scrumbans and Scrumwhatevers.

    Average agile approach in real world, if there happen to be something like that, would cover a very limited number of rules. I’d say that there would be less of them than Scrum proposes. And even then rules are often softened or teams choose those which are less painful to adapt.

    So we come back to the first point. The fewer constraints (aka enforced practices) we have in place the more easily our process can be abused by people who don’t give a damn. If your method base on a lot of common understanding instead of tons of process documentations and a number of strict rules buying all people in becomes crucial. Having few rules means that you give people power to create and adjust your software development/project management approach.

    It also means you give them power to destroy and harm it.

    If you like this post you should thank Michal who took the discussion up on Twitter.

  • Risk Management in Small Teams

    I was taught risk management the classic way. You know, risk log, voting for probability and impact, finding out which risks are the most painful, deciding on mitigation plan, discussing results etc.

    A cool thing in this old-school process is that it activates different members of the team. Even those, who wouldn’t be asked otherwise. Even those, who would tell you that the project is doomed unless you decide to do something about that performance issue found last month.

    At the same time in small teams this kind of process looks like complete overkill. In small teams which deal with small chunks of work knowledge about risks (about everything actually) is often commonly shared. The problem isn’t about bringing individual opinions to the table. The problem is to make risk management as simple as possible yet still effective.

    An easy and powerful approach here is to forget that there is something like risk management at all. At least to the point where you don’t consider having dedicated formal process to do risk management. Instead you incorporate risk management to everyday tasks: stand-ups, retrospectives, demos, planning meetings etc. You discuss potential risks every time you discuss a task or story. You discuss potential risks whenever you feel about it.

    You won’t even need a risk log. If you talk about risks at every occasion you quickly learn how to catch those which may become painful (filtering by type) and those which are likely to hit you (filtering by frequency of mentioning).

    When you keep talking about risks all the time people learn to deal with them naturally as they work on their tasks. Potential performance problem Luke mentioned yesterday? I’ll run some stress tests as I just have a while and maybe Mike would take a look at database as he’s already tweaking it to build that new feature. The trick is we don’t call it a risk. It is just a performance issue. Possible performance issue actually. Luke just thought it might become a problem but in a couple of days the problem will be gone, this way or another. And you don’t need to use the word risk, have a risk log, perform risk assessment, build and implement mitigation plans etc.

    The only thing you need to have this kind risk management in place is a bit of trust and open atmosphere. Oh, co-location and no-meeting culture may help as well but in small teams both are usually in place already.

  • When Kanban is the Best Choice

    Kanban, as any other methodology, isn’t a silver bullet. There are situations and teams when it shows its full potential but there are others where its impact will be limited. Where Kanban suits best then?

    Micro-sized teams

    It is said Scrum works best with teams of 7 or close to this size. Sometimes we deal with smaller groups. 3 people working on a project isn’t something very uncommon. For such micro-sized teams Scrum is often too formalized. You can limit a number of rules you follow and still keep good quality. And you have a bit more time to do the real work.

    Frequent priority changes

    “Walking on water and developing software from specifications are easy if both are frozen.” Unfortunately we deal with a lot of changes as we build software. There are new features; importance of tasks changes, new top priority bugs requires instant attention. Our response is moving to more flexible approaches. We try to avoid BDUF projects. We switch to agile methods employing short iterations. We even make iterations shorter and shorter. It allows us to change priorities frequently. Once every couple of weeks if we take typical Scrum implementation.

    The problem is when priorities happen to change even more frequently. Once every few days. Or even every single day. And yes, there are such projects. Kanban is a great answer for them. Feel free to change priorities every day. As long as it is well-grounded it shouldn’t ruin your project.

    Maintenance projects

    A typical maintenance project routine looks like this:

    1. Whenever high-priority bug is submitted fix it as soon as possible
    2. Low-priority bugs becomes high-priority ones when resolution deadline approaches; then see above
    3. Whenever a client orders change request (CR) and there’s no high-priority bugs – try to do it as soon as possible
    4. If there are more than single concurrent CR ask project manager about priorities
    5. If there are no bugs or CRs do some refactoring or other improvement job

    Sounds like ideal Kanban playground, doesn’t it? That’s typical case of event-driven development (not event-driven programming) where you don’t actually have a roadmap or something but you do whatever new day brings. After all you don’t expect to have a bug submitted tomorrow, or do you?

    Multiple small projects

    Working on several rather small projects or sub-projects with the same team at the same time is pretty difficult. Resources (what a nice name for your people) are usually insufficient since it is harder to synchronize stream of small orders to keep it at the same level all the time and bringing more people just-in-case isn’t the best business strategy around. This ends up with (surprise, surprise) a lot of priority changes and trade-off games. “We can complete this additional project on time but we’d fail to meet a deadline here or there.”

    With standard structured project management approaches coordinating different threads with ever-changing priorities becomes pretty much a hell. What Kanban does is it organizes workflow so the main, well almost the only, thing you should care about is setting priorities at the beginning of workflow.

    Common part

    The common part for all of environments above is they don’t require many constraints to work. Few simple rules which come with Kanban should be enough to get things done. Another common thing is mid- and long-term planning is hard or even close to impossible, which is another problem hardly resolvable with more structured approaches. These two things are the most specific for environments where Kanban shows its full potential.

    This isn’t really a post which is a part of the Kanban Story but if you found it interesting you should like the story as well.

  • Why We Don’t Write Test Cases Anymore

    Almost a year ago I shared an advice to use test cases. Not because they are crucial during testing or dramatically improve the quality of the product (they are not), but because of value you get when you create test cases.

    A confession (and yes, you’d guess it anyway if you read the title): we don’t write test cases anymore.

    We stopped using them and the reason isn’t on the list of shortcomings of test cases. Actually I was aware of these shortcomings a year ago and I were all “test cases are great” anyway. What have changed then?

    We dropped test cases as a side effect of implementing Kanban, but you can perfectly use both if you like. In our case one of effects of switching to Kanban was making our pieces of functionality pushed (pulled actually) to development smaller. Before the switch we had pretty big features which were split into several (8-15) detailed user stories. After the switch we have much smaller features which would make 2 or 3 detailed user stories if we didn’t drop writing user stories at all.

    And the reason for making features smaller was simple – smaller features, smoother and more flexible workflow.

    Initially we were connecting test cases to features, not user stories. It was so because pretty often one testing flow was going through a few different user stories. I told you they were detailed. When standard feature-size went down we realized there’s much less value in preparing test cases.

    Once again: main value of creating test cases is thinking about specific usage scenarios, looking for places forgotten during design. The more complex feature the bigger are chances there is something screwed up. With small features test cases lost much of their value for us since most problems we were able to locate instantly and fix problems without additional technique. And yet the effort needed to create and maintain test cases was still significant. So we dropped the practice.

    It looks like my advice is: make your features smaller, and then you’ll be able to drop user stories and test cases. And I must say it does make sense, at least for me. What do you think?

  • Why We Don’t Write User Stories Anymore

    There was a time when we were writing user stories to describe requirements. I’d say they worked fairly well for us. But we don’t do this anymore.

    We were using user stories as a technique which allowed us to describe bigger chunks of functionality. There was one bigger sub-project or module and it had more than 10 user stories attached (usually closer to 20) and a handful of non-functional requirements. During development we were often going through several stories at once as technical design didn’t map directly to the stories. The stories were more of input to design session and a base for test cases than stand-alone bites of functionality.

    Then we switched to Kanban. One of consequences was we reduced the size of average feature which was going to development. It no longer had 15 stories attached, but it wasn’t a single-story task either. If we were still writing user stories to each Minimal Marketable Feature we would probably have few of them. My guess is 2 or 3 most of the time.

    At this level stories become pretty artificial. I mean if you think about 2 stories connected with one feature, i.e. administrator can configure this magic widget and user can use this magic widget to do, well, the magic, you can pretty much tell these stories intuitively in your head. Writing them down becomes overkill.

    Besides that I think the often cited role of user stories which make usage scenarios completely clear is overrated. If you can talk with developers in language closer to the code, and functionality description is much closer to the code than telling user story, you’ll be better understood. The standard problem here was that functionality description wasn’t precise and it often became disconnected with usage scenarios.

    The answer for this problem is: make features as small as possible (but only as small as they still does any difference). Small features are easy to define, easy to understand (even for a developer) and easy to chew. It is pretty hard to screw them.

    There’s one more reason why I don’t consider user stories as a must-have. If you happened to create software which will be used by other developers or administrators at best, like some magic box with a lot of APIs and command line interface as the only UI, you should know what I’m talking about. If you write stories for this kind of software you end up with a bunch of “as a developer I want to call the magic function which does the magic” stories. Doesn’t API specification make more sense?

    I don’t say user stories are bad. They aren’t. But they don’t add value all the time and in every situation. This is just another practice which should be used only as long as it does make sense in your specific situation.