All Eight Agile Wastes of Hanukah

In this series I cover one "Agile waste" for each night of Hanukah.

Kind of like the purported Hanukah miracle, in which one night's worth of oil lasted for eight nights I've made a single idea stretch across eight (now nine) blog posts!

To recap:

1. Low value features (introduction to Hanukah)
2. Handovers (lighting candles)
3. Defects (dreidel)
4. Technical Debt (Hanukah songs)
5. Work in Progress (Latkes)
6. Task-switching (Sufganiyot)
7. Delays (Neyyappam)
8. Human Potential (Gelt)

How about a ninth waste? Norman Bodek has suggested "Managers' resistance to change" as a separate category, but I think I'll save that one for another time!

About the wastes

"All we are doing is looking at the time line, from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing the time line by reducing the non-value adding wastes." — Taiichi Ohno

Lean Manufacturing recognises eight wastes and its worth reading about these in the original manufacturing context. They can be summarised in the DOWNTIME acronym:

• Defects
• Overproduction
• Waiting
• Non-utilized/underutilized talent
• Transportation
• Inventory 
• Motion 
• Excess Processing

Mary and Tom Poppendieck translated the wastes from manufacturing to software development (slides). As with Agile software development, it turns out that most of these also make sense for any form of knowledge work. I've used their list as the basis for this series, and added in "the eighth waste" of non-utilized talent (human potential) to round out the set to Hanukah size.

I trust you have enjoyed the series, and encourage you to visualise your value streams from concept to cash, and start (or continue) eliminating waste!

Eight Agile Wastes of Hanukah: #8 Human potential

Originating in 17th century Poland, it has been customary for parents to give children gelt (i.e. money) for Hanukah.

Since the 20th century this has transformed into giving chocolate coins as a substitute or in addition to the cash.

If they wish they can then risk some of their chocolate coins by playing the Dreidel game (see Agile Waste #3).

Agile Waste #8: Human potential

When we regard human beings as cogs in a machine we cheat ourselves (and them) of their greatest ability: to learn and improve. Moreover, they frequently become demoralised and disengaged.

It is only human beings that can inspect and adapt: they can study the system in which they are part of and eliminate wastes and embrace opportunities.

Many management practices are either anything goes (which works at very small scale) or soul-crushingly bureaucratic. In this hyper-competitive and fast moving era we can and must do better.

By valuing and supporting people, they will become more energised, more productive, and less likely to leave. Replacing knowledge-workers is far more expensive than manual labour, as the time to acquire local and tacit knowledge in a new environment is typically lengthy and will require significant additional effort from existing staff.

What to do instead

There are many approaches to personal, team, and organisational development. Here are just a few suggestions:

1. Reserve substantial time for learning and improvement. As with product delivery, small batches are best: e.g. half an hour or an hour each day, or half a day to a day each fortnight. Blend individual and team learning, and personal and organisational learning priorities. Team-members should have significant autonomy in choice of learning areas. This is more difficult than it seems, but worth it!
2. Embrace the 70 : 20 : 10 model for learning and development: 10% formal training and coursework; 20% coaching and mentoring; 70% challenging assignments.
3. In product development organisations hold occasional hackathons
4. In a software team trial mob programming or start a coding dojo
5. Start a book club and read and discuss relevant books as a team or management team. Nowadays, what with books being so old school, you can also read blogs and watch and discuss relevant Youtube videos together.

Outside of work: For health and character development I personally practice martial arts, but that's not for everyone. Something that will take you on a journey to mastery that is probably not directly work-related is the ticket. Practice something meaningful long enough, and it will eventually influence how you work: here are my 10 Agile lessons from the martial arts.

Eight Agile Wastes of Hanukah: #7 Delays

Neyyappam are another traditional food fried in oil for Hanukkah. These sweet fritters are less widespread than latkes and sufganiyot, and are a specialty of the Cochin jews of South India.

I have not yet had the pleasure of trying neyyappam, but they look to be delicious!

Agile Waste #7: Delays

"A fast game's a good game."

Delays generate numerous kinds of waste:

1. If there's a long delay between planning and doing, conditions will often change, rendering your plans out-of-date.
2. Delays between activities make it more difficult to remember important details, resulting in additional defects (Agile Waste #3) and additional time spent re-learning.
3. The longer something takes to deliver, the longer the wait until benefits begin to be realised.

What to do instead

There are many great techniques for reducing delays:

1. By mapping your value stream(s) from concept to cash, you can identify where the big waits are and focus improvement efforts there.
2. Don't just limit your WIP (Agile Waste #5), limit your queue lengths. Long queues make for big waits.
3. Record impediments that result in delays and prioritise improvement activities to reduce and remove them.
4. Big items take longer to finish. Learn to split them down, and prioritise the high value components.
5. At the individual and team level, organise your work day to maximise maker time — big blocks of uninterrupted time — to help doers get stuff finished by reducing managerial interruptions.

Eight Agile Wastes of Hanukah: #6 Task-switching

Foods fried in oil are compulsory Hanukah fare.

Next up we have sufganiyot (in Hebrew), also known as ponchkes (in Yiddish), a kind of deep-fried jelly-centred donut.

Nowadays you can get all kinds of exotic fillings — chocolate, custard, and so forth — but I stand by tradition (or habit) and go for the jam ones!

Agile Waste #6: Task-switching

Excessive task-switching is a natural extension of having too much Work in Progress (Agile Waste #5). 

If you have lots of things on the go, you will need to switch between them to keep them all moving. Even if some are blocked, there's a cost to periodically checking whether the blocks are still in place.

Every time you switch between tasks there's a switching cost associated with recovering context and focus. Worse, your mind is paying a holding cost for every additional task that's on the back-burner while you work on one at a time. For knowledge work this cost per item is considerable.

Some people wear there purported ability to multi-task as a badge of honour, but this is an illusion. I suspect that they are mistaking the feeling of busyness for efficiency. That's a big mistake.

What to do instead

First of all, prove to yourself that multi-tasking is inefficient and stressful. There are plenty of simple experiments you can do by time-trialling yourself at the same task done with and without task-switching. Here's a good one.

Next, reflect on the insight that (if you are multi-tasking) you are needlessly wasting a huge amount of time and energy.

Finally, start uni-tasking: organise your self to do one thing at a time, or at least fewer things than you did before. Naturally, all the advice on limiting Work in Progress applies here (Agile Waste #5).

You will most likely also notice that by paying full attention to one thing at a time the quality of your work also improves, reducing defect creation (Agile Waste #3) and increasing your work satisfaction.

* * *

If you manage or work in a team reflect on how much more effective (and calm) your team can become if you all stop trying to keep lots of balls in the air, and instead focus on getting a few small pieces of work flowing through the system at high speed.

"The sooner you start the sooner you finish" and "If you want something done, ask a busy person" are dangerously misguided pieces of advice.

Much better: "Limit your WIP" and "Stop starting; start finishing".

Eight Agile Wastes of Hanukah: #5 Work in Progress

By association with the Miracle of the Oil it is customary to eat fried foods during Hanukah.

Latkes are traditional roughly shredded potato cakes and they are delicious.

The key question about latkes is this: salt or sugar? I like them with salt, but as a proud Australian I also enjoy them topped with smashed avocado.

Agile Waste #5: Work in Progress

Work in Progress (WIP) is simply unfinished work. Clearly, unfinished work needs to be brought to completion before it is useful.

Too much WIP causes multiple issues:

Firstly, it hides problems. Having lots of tasks (or projects) on the go at any one time gives you the illusion of productivity: if any one task is delayed you can always work on something else. But this popular strategy hides systemic issues. If instead you reduce your WIP you will now be confronted by delays and inefficiencies and become inspired to understand and remove them, and thereby improve the efficiency of your system.

Secondly, work gets finished slowly. Working on lots of things at once, or even a single large thing, means that everything moves slowly through the system.

Thirdly,  priorities are unclear. With lots on the go the emphasis shifts to getting stuff done irrespective of its importance. Busy-ness rather than delivery of value soon becomes the focus. Ugghhh!

What to do instead

The advice here is simple to state, but easier said than done. Limit your WIP!

Go learn how to do Kanban and/or Scrum — the best known forms of Agile project / productivity management — properly. Both have a focus on WIP-limiting, with Kanban offering more fine-grained control.

1. Visualise your work: e.g. write each work item on a card or sticky note and estimate its size. Split the big pieces into digestable chunks.
2. Limit your WIP: in Scrum we learn how to estimate how much work we can do in a designated (typically one to four week) time-box, while in proper Kanban we place a low hard limit on how many (small) work items are allowed in any work-state at once.
3. Once you hit your WIP limit you will be forced to start saying "no" to additional work (the hard bit!) and that induces some sort of prioritisation of unstarted work. This is healthy!
4. Managing urgent unplanned work is the next refinement. The smart play is to reserve some capacity for unplanned emergencies, but be sure not to allow everything to become an emergency, and appreciate that you may need to put some things on hold when major emergencies occur.

This area of Agile waste management is profound: the deeper insight is that it is better to pursue the fast flow of a small number of small work items than keep busy all the time.

Every system has a finite capacity. That includes you, your team, and your organisation. By visualising work we begin to understand our capacity and this gives us the power to tune our work habits. By limiting WIP we are forced to consciously prioritise, balance delivery with improvement activities, and to appreciate the trade-off between throughput and responsiveness.

* * *

Small latkes cook faster than big ones and the first batch will be out of the pan quickly for you to enjoy. As you fry batch after batch you'll also be able to refine your technique through an iterative approach to cooking!

Eight Agile Wastes of Hanukah: #4 Technical Debt

Following the nightly lighting of increasing numbers of Hanukah candles, it is customary to sing traditional songs. 

Ma'oz Tzur (Rock of Ages) is a popular choice. Here's a nice choral version.

And then there's Adam Sandler's Hanukah song.

Agile Waste #4: Technical Debt

Technical Debt is a metaphor concocted by programmer Ward Cunningham, who also famously invented the wiki. It's a term to help non-technical people and (to a degree) technical people appreciate the insidious consequences of compromising internal technical quality.

What is it? Sometimes (for good reasons or not) developers rush out a feature and do a quick and dirty job. The trade-off here is that the feature is available more quickly to users, but the  the code-base becomes messier and more difficult to maintain, and future feature development will be slower and less efficient.

Here's the metaphor: It's like when you take out a loan. The loan allows you to buy nice things that you couldn't otherwise afford [release new features early], but then you have to pay interest on your loan [clean up the mess you created] as well as pay back the principle [re-write the ill-advised bits of your hackery]. The longer you take paying back the loan the greater the total interest payments [lost productivity].

Technical debt isn't all bad. It makes sense to slam out a fast prototype when you're trying to determine whether a new product or feature is high or low value (see Agile waste #1: Low value features). If it turns out to be low value you can just throw away the code (and not pay back the debt). But, if it's high value the right thing to do is a thorough clean-up or possibly re-write straight away. 

The insidious bit? Once a feature works the internal hackery to get it up and running is easily forgotten; the effects of the debt will bite later and there's demand for other new, shiny stuff right now. In non-engineering led companies especially this effect can be spectacularly magnified over time.

What to do instead

Always reserve some capacity for paying back technical debt. The real trap is to just keep on incurring increasing amounts of debt and lose the attention to technical excellence that goes with keeping your code-base clean and modular.

A classic way of incurring debt is to skip writing automated tests (see Agile Waste #3: Defects). Writing your tests first —BDD and/or TDD style — helps with both the design quality and psychological discipline needed to avoid the technical debt trap.

In an organisational setting a critical role for technically literate leaders is to educate their non-technical leaders about the very real consequences of unmanaged technical debt and together avoid falling into a debt trap. Incur enough technical debt and you'll kill productivity, and eventually your competitiveness.

Finally, here's some excellent advice from Andrea Goulet on what to do if you do find yourself mired in technical debt: Forget Technical Debt — here's how to build Technical Wealth.

Eight Agile Wastes of Hanukah: #3 Defects (and Dreidels)

I joke that Hanukah is the festival in which Jewish children eat fried food and learn to gamble! Hanukah features an iconic spinning top, the dreidel.

Each dreidel has four sides, each with a hebrew letter. Together the letters form an acronym that translates as "a great miracle happened here".

There are rules for a gambling game based on the Dreidel letters, but in my family we just enjoy spinning them in increasingly challenging ways: preferred hand, other-hand, both hands simultaneously, inverted, etc.

Agile Waste #3: Defects

Software defects (colloquially known as "bugs") are instances where the software either malfunctions or behaves in a way inconsistent with its intended behaviour. Famous examples have resulted in lost space-craft, exploding rockets, and death from malfunctioning medical equipment. More down-to-earth defects result in losses of data, financial miscalculation, security breaches. Defects also result in programs that are slow or crash or don't respond to user input.

Designers and Programmers create a lot of defects. The defects that affect end-users and customers are the ones that haven't been prevented or caught and remedied ("debugged"). But unfortunately, in complex software, removing one defect can introduce others.

Finally, software is an automated process, so manual (and mixed automated/manual) processes can be defective too. These too need to be debugged.

What to do

Detecting and fixing defects are important activities, but not intrinsically value-adding, and the rule-of-thumb that prevention is better than cure applies. The longer a defect goes undetected the more expensive its impact and the higher the cost of remediation. The general idea is to move quality left:  it's better to catch defects earlier than later.

Suggestions:

1. Develop less features (see waste #1) as more software leads to more defects!
2. Develop clear specifications via techniques such as Specification by Example / Behaviour Driven Development (BDD)
3. Adopt a modular architecture so that defects can be more easily isolated
4. Rely primarily on lots of automated tests, rather than manual testing
5. Do manual exploratory testing to find subtle defects
6. Write those automated tests at multiple levels (unit tests, component tests, functional tests), to test both technical assumptions and expected behaviour
7. Have programmers peer review each other's code: the fastest feedback loop for this will be in real-time via pair-programming or mob-programming
8. Use test driven design / development (TDD) to improve code quality by writing tests first and "refactoring" code for simplicity and elegance.
9. Run the automated test suite against every change via Continuous Integration (CI)
10. Explore more sophisticated preventative techniques: e.g. Design by Contract (DBC)
11. Generally prioritise defect fixing over new feature development: don't trade away quality

Eight Agile Wastes of Hanukah: #2 Handovers

Each night of Hanukah, the custom is to light an increasing number of candles, placed in a nine-slot candelabra, the hanukiyah. Two candles are lit on the first night of Hanukah, three on second night, culminating with all nine on the eighth night. One candle — the shamash — is lit with a match and used to light the others. Blessings are said, songs are sung, specific games are played, foods are eaten, and so on. More on these later.

How many candles are needed for Hanukah?

2 + 3 + ... + 9  = (2+9) + (3+8) + ... = 11 x 4 = 44

Agile Waste #2: Handovers

The second Agile waste, common in software development and other forms of knowledge work arises from excessive and ineffective handovers. Like the children's game of telephone, where one child whispers a message to another and another until a garbled message arrives at the last child.

Similarly, when the creation of a complex product or service is split between many people in a strictly linear fashion, with documents and artefacts handed from one person to the next, without confirmation and discussion creating feedback loops, misunderstandings are magnified and collaboration and creativity are constrained.

Arranging larger organisations into functional teams and silos institutionalise and slow down handovers, as do excessive role specialisation.

What to do instead

We reduce handovers through increased collaboration.

Suggestions:

1. Develop broad expertise in addition to special skills. Become a generalising specialist or T-shaped person. This will allow you to collaborate and contribute to a broader range of activities.
2. Adopt swarming strategies for work: in software, learn pair programming (two heads are better than one) or mob programming (many heads!). Non-software equivalents abound: e.g. pairs of writers get together to spitball ideas. Don't just pair to solve hard problems: pair to learn new skills.
3. Workshop ideas rather than passing a document around ad nauseam: get all the right people in a room and thrash it out. The more people, and the less skilled they are at collaborating, the more value you will get out of strong and structured facilitation.
4. Work in cross-functional teams rather than functional teams
5. Reduce or eliminate functional silos in your organisation and reorganise around value streams. In technology companies DevOps seeks to remove the distinction between Development and Operations: if you make it, you run it, you support it. If something breaks it's your problem to fix it — and that's a healthy feedback loop!

Finally, just as a single candle is used to light all the other candles on each night of Hanukah rather than each lighting the next relay-style, ensure that your on-site customer or Product Owner is highly available to the whole development team to discuss and clarify nuance and detail.

Eight Agile Wastes of Hanukah: #1 Low value features

Tonight marks the start of the Jewish festival of Hanukah, commemorating in part an ancient miracle in which oil supplies for the eternal flame in the Temple of Jerusalem were running perilously low: there was only enough oil for one day, but that oil lasted eight days — long enough for fresh supplies to arrive — an ancient miracle!

In a modern interpretation Hanukah can be seen as a conservation festival, drawing attention to reducing waste, encouraging recycling, caring for the environment, and so forth.

In this spirit I am going to do a twist on the idea of publishing an advent calendar by recounting "eight wastes" of Agile, one day and one waste at a time.

Agile Waste #1: Low value features

No-one adds product features that everyone regards as low value, but all too often your (or my) bright idea doesn't turn out to be all that great in retrospect. "It seemed like a good idea at the time" is a common refrain, but after the fact is too late, and the damage is done.

Low value features are wasteful in several ways:

1. They steal time from designing, developing, marketing, and selling other, better features.
2. They increase product complexity, increasing maintenance costs
3. Their eventual removal is also costly

What to do instead

The Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) suggests that roughly 20% of features are responsible for around 80% of product value. Those are the features to build, but it's not necessarily easy to figure out which they are!

Therefore: 

1. Apply strategies like Design Thinking and Lean Startup to validate ideas and build prototypes and minimal versions rather than naïvely pursuing a grandiose vision. Then iterate like crazy.
2. Listen to your customers and not the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person in the Office). Use techniques like Hallway usability testing, Customer Research, and A/B testing to validate your hypothesis that a feature really adds value.
3. Explore techniques like user story-mapping, story-writing, service-blueprinting, and impact mapping that help with contextualisation and prioritisation.

Credits

The idea of relentlessly identifying and reducing waste comes from Lean Manufacturing, adapted for software development most notably by Mary and Tom Poppendieck.

How to be a good Agile Stakeholder

The Stakeholder Role

Stakeholders ultimately aim to deliver value to the end users and customers of the organisation, as well as serving complementary concerns, such as staff sustainability and happiness, legal obligations, and organisational effectiveness and profitability.

In trying to serve these aims they will frequently request work from Agile Development teams via the intermediary of the Product Owner, who constructs a single prioritised backlog for his or her team.

Coöperation over Competition

Stakeholders may be viewed as competing with each other for the development team's finite capacity. But a better way to view their role is in coöperating with other stakeholders to deliver maximum value (on balance) per time period, be it a sprint, a quarter, or a release.

Good Agile Stakeholders work with the Product Owner to clarify their needs, which then get queued up in the form of a single backlog.

Key points

1. Participate in collaborative planning and prioritising exercises — especially Discovery sessions — with other stakeholders with the aim of educating about your area, while understanding how it fits into the big picture.
2. Learn about the Agile approach to development: watch (and periodically re-watch) Henrik Kniberg's excellent Product Ownership in a Nutshell [15 minutes]
3. Attend workshops and sprint reviews (product demos) to help plan and inspect the output from the team
4. Help break down large pieces of work into smaller bits
5. Respect the prioritisation process

What about when I need something done now?

Agile teams typically maintain an Express or Expedite lane to allow for emergency work. As a stakeholder you may request truly urgent work via this mechanism, but do not abuse it! 

Although emergency services vehicles can travel fast through traffic, everyone else has to slow down. In the same way, use of the express lane gets the expedited work done faster, but it slows down all other work. Use sparingly.

Lessons on Product Ownership

I interviewed my wife, Andi Herman, who acts as Product Owner for our start-up, youpatch.com, on the big lessons she has learned in learning about how to be an (awesome) product owner.

Understanding the Product Owner role is helpful for stakeholders, who get most of their work done via the Product Owner.

Here's the summary:

1. Shared Understanding: Take the time to develop absolutely clarity of understanding between PO and the team around what is meant by backlog items. Learn each other's language. 
• Why? Because ambiguity leads to wild goose chases and waste.
• Examples, sketches, screenshots, etc. are helpful here.
• Invest the time to express yourself clearly and to validate understanding through discussion
• This is a great reason for the team to write the stories to demonstrate their understanding and the stakeholders to read them
2. Steer clear of micro-management: Understand that although you might envisage one way to accomplish a task, but don't try to enforce that on the development team. They may have better ways. Learn to trust the competence of the team.
• Stakeholders own the Why? of backlog items
• The PO and team collaborate on the What?
• The team owns the How?
3. Prioritisation: Understand that things need to happen in a certain order
• The PO balances business value (ideally cost of delay) with estimated duration when prioritising the product backlog
• The team may somewhat re-order by adding in considerations of risk, learning, and dependencies
• E.g. You can't put the roof on a house before the walls (dependency)

Conclusion

Agile delivery offers a great deal to stakeholders: faster feedback, better quality, and the ability to change course in the light of learning, new ideas, or changing external conditions. But it does demand a shift from giving orders to greater interaction and collaboration, and for most people it will be a journey of learning ... but one that can be professionally and personally extremely rewarding.