Agile or Traditional - Productivity Management still has basic roots

Having managed a few initiatives in both agile and traditional settings, I often find people thinking the agile culture enhances productivity many times over the traditional thinking. The principles of collaboration, limiting work in progress, lean thinking over scope, and focusing on value generation may lead one to think that agile is much better than traditional. Still traditional approaches to management don't mean that these processes should be avoided to sow the seeds of productivity. Agility is, in the end, only a mindset to managing productivity towards value generation. In my experience, I have found a few techniques that have withstood the test of time to produce predictable productivity in any team.

1. Manage meetings
There is a lot of practical literature around how to run effective meetings. Instead of going into microscopic details on meeting management, can we not focus on ensuring that every meeting has a clear outcome to accomplish at the end of the meeting? Whether it is a 15-min or a daylong meeting, having a clear outline of planned outcome will establish evaluating the necessity of the meeting in the first place. Not having a meeting unnecessarily or accomplishing meeting objectives earlier releases so much time that could be used for other productive tasks.

This is where agile thrives because it timeboxes all ceremonies and avoids meetings not necessary. Project and Program Management can also apply the same techniques.

2. Correct your course
Whether it is running meeting or managing the client, things don't always go the way you plan! So, plan for course correction? What's the point in all this "Failing to plan means planning to fail" when we fail to apply it in principle! When a meeting goes on a tangent, correct your course by bringing attention to your outline. When customer requests come out that emphasize lack of understanding or you get a project where you don't know the underpinning the technology, make course corrections yourself by taking an initiative to learn the technology!

In the world of Khan academy, Plural Sites, Course Era, Open2Study, Bright Talk, and so many other MOOC - not to mention YouTube or Vimeo - there is plenty of information available already for people to gather information! So, correcting your own course is totally on you and not doing so is taking the team's time away! Be warned, however, that not all information on these sites is correct and credible. Do your own research!

Here is also an approach from Agile where there is retrospective at the end of every iteration! Did traditional approaches ask not to have frequent lessons learned sessions? Absolutely not! It is a restriction that project management forced themselves on and the management failed to react to it. In other words, they chose to learn from the lessons and hence succumb to failure! Furthermore, retrospective is the last moment to capture lessons learned in that iteration. Lessons are learned every day and captured every day! 

3. Focus on Training on "Done" criteria
Having a constant baggage on the trunk creates so much drag in an automobile which slows the automobile and burns unnecessary fuel! That's why we don't drive - at least technically - with unnecessary baggage, right! Doesn't that principle teach us to focus on getting tasks completed! Coming from lean management philosophy, it is a principle of waste in over-engineering anything to the point that it is not getting done! So, project management can extend these principles to apply simple heuristics in managing their WBS or have user stories that apply the INVEST principle.

In my experience, I have always applied the golden rule of no task having a duration longer than the risk that I can live with the task completing. Most often, no tasks are longer than 40 days and some work package are always delivered every two weeks. So, milestones are not 3 months apart! Such thinking still applies earned value principles to make course corrections if a project slips!

Here is where the INVEST principle from agile comes to help where every user story is independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small, and testable! So, don't add tasks just for the sake of adding and use the hammock tasks productively.

4. Establish Stretch goals
No matter how much one knows, there is always room for improvement! This is one of the reasons change management principles advocate continuous improvement. The self-organizing theme behind teams in agile setting really ensures that team members are adequately skilled cross-functionally to pick up other people's task to support the sprint commitment! In a traditional setting, we create unnecessary layers. Every team in a traditional setting should have a stretch goal to learn another team's work and practice. Not only does this avoid central dependency on another, but it also helps appreciate the tricks of trade and appreciate the service level agreements and standard operating procedure enhancing adherence to protocols. It also lets creative juices flow as one challenges the status quo to do things differently! Only by learning more does an individual become part of a group and evolve to be a self-organized team.

5. Use the tools of communication effectively
Although we all appreciate a wrench and hammer have their distinct purposes, we also realize overly abusing the tools for the wrong purposes damages what we are trying to accomplish more than the tool itself. The same analogy goes with the tools. I wish we could monitor the use of the "Reply to all" button that creates so much email for an organization. People reviewing the emails out of sequence, replying to them in random order understanding parts of pieces, and eventually ignoring it will only cause so much productivity loss - time that can be used for other productive tasks. So, learn to manage by walking around, collaborating using better tools, and avoiding creating so much electronic dialogue that provides no clearly documented decision making.

In my experience, these simple techniques have helped build constant productivity regardless of the approach. In the end, what matters is only the results.

Thoughts?

Extreme Productivity: Basic principles to doing more with less

Having been in a managerial capacity as a functional manager and having led several complex programs and projects as a project manager in many industries, I have seen challenges from people on work life imbalance and from organizations for maintaining business productivity by doing more with less. However, in my experience, the percentage of the population that seek continuous growth pursuing the professional certifications or attending the networking events or conferences is slim.  

Having taught more than 150 classes through various academic institutions for adult learners, I observe learners missing classes because the academic institutional policy allows missing 20% of classes or accepting a “C” in their courses as that guarantees employer compensation. So, why should organizations invest in people that won’t invest in themselves by integrating their professional and personal life by managing time to acquire knowledge? By the same token, how could organizations allow mediocrity with a "C" and expect stellar performance? Aren't the organizations then enabling a behavior that allows individuals to be satisfied with the knowledge in their chosen fields that doesn't scale with the growth?

Remember that the growing organizations in the future will no longer be characterized by 8 to 5 jobs but will require one to be digitally connected.  So, waking up to reality to know the demands of your profession is critical for career success. In this blog, I present three simple and powerful principles that I have found useful. I would like to call them “Extreme Productivity” unleashing people’s energy towards what the organizations are going to be looking for in the future amid growing business challenges so that the value the individuals add becomes indispensable.

Principle #1: Look for a role and not for a job

You interview for a job and so getting a job offer is just the beginning. But, if you continuously do what you in your job, you continuously get what you get.  Will the same compensation and career challenge keep you satisfied? Even if you say, “yes,” because of personal challenges, comfort zone, or unwillingness to change, will that be good for the organizational growth that provides for you?  The organization is constantly changing to meet the market conditions and so the conditions under which one got a job can no longer be the same. When the economy shifts and the organization sees the need for sustaining growth with competitive high performers, they look for those that have already proven their multifaceted skills in the organization. It is not time for them to skim the individuals resume for past experiences because current performance paints an accurate picture. They look for those that exceeded their job responsibility and went the extra mile. These members succeed because they look around, prepare themselves early, and take on a role to make themselves useful. This is not a role given by the organization but assumed by the individuals,

Principle #2: Business Impact is measured by results and not the efforts

Sometimes, the business may demand someone to put in more hours. But, from a business perspective, long hours don’t always mean more productivity. It may also mean that you are not doing your job efficiently or expanding the work to fill the time. If ambiguities in task, missing analysis in backlog grooming, lack of adherence to process control, or deficiency in the required knowledge domains surface to the organization, then, one is not only wasting their own productivity but also that of others. Depending on your role, the earlier principle will be extended so that you are becoming efficient by analyzing the market for latest trends and being ready, investing in a tool that the businesses use, learning about the trends being used in your practice to make you more success-friendly, or setting effective time management practices for yourself to manage personal and professional balance.  

Principle #3: Pack value in your day for the team

Everyone must have heard the saying about seeing things from others point of view. Those that really look at productivity will focus first to ensure that other’s time is not wasted. For instance, should the people copied on the email be copied, are those meetings necessary, will that person receiving the task know what to do? When the other person is more productive and you are not, you have just created a producer-consumer imbalance. One can avoid this imbalance and other’s dependency on them by first planning the day others will need those deliverables. This will add time to our schedule. By putting a timebox around activities on what takes less than 10 min, 15 to 30 min, more than 60 min, etc., one can start addressing these tasks efficiently. Readers are advised to an earlier post on Scrumban approach (Rajagopalan, 2014) on personal productivity.

In the end, any professional must be productive to some extent. Everyone believes that they are worth more in money and career status. If this is true, then everyone should understand that their value to the business should always exceed the economic value the business can derive. When that happens, the business will always find new ways to benefit from your talent. The only way to satisfy this equation is when one can be “extremely productive.” In today’s digitally expanding, virtually global, and multicultural distributed workforce, one’s value is constantly challenged every day that can only be addressed by a continuous improvement mentality. Are we ready to take on this challenge? 

How well do you relate to these principles? Please share your thoughts.

References

Rajagopalan, S. (2014). Adapting Scrumban to Personal Productivity. Retrieved from http://agilesriram.blogspot.com/2014/10/adapting-scrumban-to-personal.html

Adapting Scrumban to Personal Productivity

Agile approaches to product development and project management are growing exponentially. I have been a proponent of the lean approaches even at my house chores and recently found that such approaches were discussed even in the Agile 2014 conferences. Unlike Scrum’s requirements to have self-organized teams with timeboxed iterations within which changes are generally frozen and disallowed, the project management approaches do not rejoice the dedicated team. Often, the members may be spread across multiple projects like project managers having multiple projects. So, how do we manage time effectively in multi-project and program initiatives?

An approach that I have found useful is adopting Scrumban to proactively manage myself and build on the team’s innate strengths to empower themselves to do better. Sounds great, but how? Let me explain.

Scrum

Kanban

1.       Scrum focuses on timeboxed iterations with self-organized cross-functional teams. 2.       Team decides on what can be accomplished in a 2-week sprint and emphasizes continuous improvement by retrospectives 3.       The customer representative is expected to be sometimes on-site and be multi-functional with skills in product, project, account, technical, business analysis, etc. 4.       Measure of progress is working software delivery

1.       Team visualizes the workflow in queue 2.       Anyone can pull (i.e., take) any task that is in the queue 3.       Tasks are generally not dependent 4.       Balances work in progress 5.       Reduces waste between tasks

In traditional project management where resources are not procured for the duration of the project or in balanced matrix organizations where projects inherently face wait times, such as in regulated and construction industries, the project team may not be multi-functional. Therefore, it is not possible for any member of the project team to take on any project or tasks within the project. For instance, can a tester write code? Can a database architect develop deployment requirements? Can a project manager be a business analyst? While technically these are all possible in high performing organizations, other organizations may not have resources that have multitude of skills where roles can be effectively merged eliminating waste.

Here is where Scrumban comes to help. It combines the best of both the Scrum and Kanban worlds. Tasks become structured (design a program overview, develop the stored procedure, test interactive voice response for a specific Voice XML flow, etc.) to be executed by anyone within a specific group. The group or functional leader is entitled to provide the guidelines and process direction for continuous improvement reducing cycle time increasing predictability in productivity. Example, regardless of who develops the program or tests the campaign, in the given service level agreement of 5 days, the program will be developed or tested. Yet, workflow need not be limited to changes only between iterations thereby allowing new tasks to be created eliminating wait time and allowing the team to prioritize projects.

While Scrumban is a great alternative where neither Scrum nor Kanban can be effectively applied, I found out that I can use it to manage myself to be productive better in multi-project, program, and portfolio management. I have illustrated this in the above figure. From my point of view, the team is the expert, and I am just a facilitator. So, when the team has been provided with a task, it is in progress (Yellow sticky). Now, what am I doing when the team is working on it?

I don’t need to hold a meeting to check on progress – that’s project management by unnecessary meetings. But I shift my gears to what the team may be requiring next – eliminating all ambiguity for the potential next task. As a project manager, I focus on the upcoming milestone working a step proactively ahead (Blue sticky) and work with the stakeholders to get that ready so that when the work in progress is done, I am servicing the team with the next unambiguous task. This comes in handy when the team is virtually distributed because in such cases where communication needs to be both pull- and push forms, I have time to over-communicate! This is an example of what I label as 6P principle (Proper proactive planning prevents poor performance!)

Now, the more I work at this the more effective I become and so I work another step – 2 steps ahead – and work with the client, product, account or other teams to push them to deliver on their deliverable ahead so that there is no impact to critical path (Green sticky). I stop at 2 steps only because in my mind I am 1 sprint ahead and my agility hat tells me that there may be change coming that I need to prepare for.

Let us take it to the next level. May be the green sticky (Product, account, client, or other teams) can’t do anything because they are waiting on something else. Then, so much of time becomes unfrozen. Immediately, that means productive hours can be provided to another project. This is an approach to doing more with less. This next project could be part of the same program, product, portfolio or a totally different project for a different client or even developing a hobby, helping another team member, writing this article, or dedicating time for a cause. 

This is an approach I have used to timebox all the incoming work so that within the given time available, I am still able to keep multiple things moving!