Personas – Getting to really know your Customers

When you are building your product, how well do you know your customers?  Can you visualize who they are?  Do you understand their motivations?  How do you know you have requirements or user stories for all of the various customer types that you have?   By knowing who your personas are for the product or solution you are building, can help you answer these questions.   

Personas represent specific users and act as examples of the types of users who would interact with it. Most products have several personas that use the product in different ways. Examples of three personas for a product are the regular user, power user, and administrator.

• The regular user uses only the basic user interface functionality.
• The power user needs more detailed interface functionality to handle more sophisticated work.
• The administrator needs back-end installation and maintenance functionality.

All three use the product differently, and different features are built for their respective needs. Personas are a powerful way to guide your decisions about functionality and ensure that you are, in fact, building functionality for each persona. Personas are a key ingredient in the way that user stories can be presented. Including the persona in a story description provides you the point of view (POV) of a user story and defines who that user story is for.

I recommend that you establish a description for each persona. This description is typically illustrated as a fictitious person that represents a real role. It will include the knowledge, experience, and activities of that role. By writing a persona as a fictitious person with a name, this makes the persona easier to imagine and relate to, as in the following examples.

Consider establishing personas for your products so that the functionality can be better understood and help you build a product that better aligns with your customer needs.  Finally, personas offer four distinct advantages. 

• The team understands the users better, which helps guide decisions about the functionality they need. 
• User stories can be written to include the persona to ensure the personas have requirements suited to them. 
• Testers can create acceptance tests and use cases that support personas. 
• Based on their personas, the Product Owner knows who can give the best feedback and therefore whom to invite to the reviews or demos.  

You can read more about Personas in the book entitled Being Agile in Chapter 17 in relation to customer reviews and demos and Chapter 18 in relation to writing effective user stories. 

Calculating your Team’s Target Velocity

In an Agile world, using empirical data helps a team understand their pace (e.g., in regards to the Agile Principle of sustainable pace).  Sustainable pace is a concept that attempts to identify the reasonable amount of work a team member can complete while still being able to sustain that pace indefinitely while remaining engaged, innovative, and enthusiastic.  A key question is, how does a team know the amount of work they can do?

One way to do this is to capture a team's actual velocity.  A team's velocity is the amount of work a team can do in an iteration or sprint that meets a quality criteria such as Done Criteria.  The work is usually captured in several requirements or user stories each with an estimate or size in story points. The total story points of user stories completed in a sprint is an example of a team's velocity.  I'm using story points in this article as the example.  A story point is a scope measure which is equivalent to a unit of effort, complexity, and risk associated with the work.  The question is, how does a team determine their pace or target velocity (depending on the word you want to use) for the next sprint. 

There are several ways to approach this and using the empirical data from the previous sprint’s actual velocity is a good start.  It is up to you to determine what works best for your team and context:

• The simplest way to calculate the team’s target velocity (TTV) is take the previous sprint’s actual velocity and use this as the team’s target velocity.  An example if in the previous sprint, the team's actual velocity (TAV) is 120 story points, then for the next sprint, the TTV will be 120 story points.   
• Another simple way to calculate the team’s target velocity is take the average of the previous sprint’s actual velocity.  As an example, if the previous sprints’ TAVs were 80, 90, 110, 100, and 120 story points, then divide this by 5 and the TTV will be 100 story points. 
• A more complicated way is take the previous sprint’s actual velocity, plus credit points for completed effort of unfinished work, minus points that team members will be away on holiday, vacation, training (aka, out of office).  As an example, if the previous sprint’s TAV is 120 story points, then take credit for completed effort of unfinished work as 9 (3 points for 3 unfinished user stories), minus 10% of the previous sprint’s TAV due to the Thanksgiving holiday or 12 points, bringing the total to 117 story points (=120+9-12). 

As an aside, when your team is first starting out, you will not have any empirical data or previous actual velocity to work with.  In other words, you will have to guess your team's target velocity.  However, the good news is that because the sprint is often only 2, 3, or 4 weeks long, your team will not have to wait long to learn the team's actual velocity.  This can then be used as empirical data to help you calculate your team's next sprint's target velocity.  

In whatever way you decide to calculate the team's target velocity, ensure that the previous sprints’ actual target velocity is applied in some manner to bring as much empirical data into the calculation.  Also, attempt to apply a consistent calculation from sprint to sprint.  From there, inspect and adapt as appropriate.       

A great Agile book - Being Agile: Your Roadmap to a Successful Adoption of Agile

Being Agile is your roadmap to successfully transforming to an Agile culture. In this unique book, veteran Agile Coach Mario Moreira advises new and current adopters how to implement a robust Agile framework that emphasizes Agile values and principles over the mechanical elements. This book focuses on the business benefit of implementing Agile which focuses on delivering customer value and having a positive impact on revenue. 

This book begins by explaining that in order to truly cross the Agile chasm, there must be a transformation to the Agile culture that focuses on delivering customer value.  Mario shows maturing early adopters how to bridge the chasm between going through the motions of “doing Agile” and genuinely “being Agile.” 

It then delves into the business benefits of Agile and the often missing discussion that Agile supplements your strategy to help your business succeed.  The book highlights the important objectives of customer and employees matter, another area that often is underserved.  It briefly discussions some of the methodologies (including Scrum, Kanban, DSDM, Lean, VFQ, and XP), and the roles a team and organization can play within an Agile context. 

After a high-level synopsis of Agile, Mario reminds us that Agile is nothing more and nothing less than a set of values and principles.  This book delves deeply into a focus on the Agile values and principles.  This book dissects each value and principle that conveys whether they are really exhibited within a culture.  These values and principles must be observed, believed, and translated into actions as an important to precipitate a cultural shift. The book emphasizes the importance of keeping the values and principles always in mind.

The author then plunges into the nitty-gritty of the deploying Agile in a manner that will better achieve an Agile transformation.  He does this by introducing the reader to the Ready, Implement, Coach, and Hone (RICH) Deployment model.  The rubric of readiness engages and begins conditioning the mind toward the Agile mindset as well as focusing on the areas that need to be considered as you are embarking on your Agile journey.  He asks you to consider such factors as:

·         Evaluating team candidates for skills, behavior, and willingness 

·         Assessing Stakeholder buy-in and engagement

·         Determining Suitability for applying Agile

·         Identifying measures to see if you are Agile and if you are deriving the business benefits

·         Establishing a customer validation vision to engage in the critical customer feedback

·         Implementing Agile roles and identifying those best for these roles

·         Establishing an adaptable and scalable Agile framework

·         Determining your User story writing and grooming approach

·         Understanding story points for sizing and establishing a relative sizing framework

·         Establishing Educational needs and building an Agile community

·         Constructing Done criteria and how it helps with quality

Implement focuses on the timely application of agile elements within a team or organization while still maintaining emphasis on the Agile values and principles. Coach focuses on on-boarding teams, coaching teams and management through initial implementation, grooming in-house talent, ensuring Agile values and principles are a focus, while acting as a navigator on the path to Agility. Hone emphasizes the inspect-and-adapt model where periodically the current state is reflected upon and opportunities for improvement identified and acted upon.

This book is geared toward Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Team members, product managers, project managers, middle, senior, and executive management in software engineering and development divisions and enterprises.  Learning opportunities include:

·         Comprehending Agile values and principles with an in-depth discussion on each principle and how they may be exemplified within an Agile culture.

·         Advocating a framework in which values, customer engagement, employee engagement, and an Agile framework can lead to an increase in sales and productivity, incorporated in the Agile Value to Incentive Differentiator (AVID) framework.

·         Presenting a methodical yet adaptable approach toward Agile transformation, encapsulated in a Ready–Implement–Coach–Hone (RICH) deployment model that can help establish an adaptable roadmap toward your Agile destination.   

·         Introducing the importance of an Agile Customer Validation Vision that emphasizes a disciplined approach to engaging customers and gaining their valuable customer feedback

·         Providing a mechanism for evaluating your level of alignment to the Agile values and principles, encapsulated in the Agile Mindset Values and Principles (Agile MVP) Advisor.

·         Promoting a special focus on value-added work (VAW) that features customer work as valuable and an accompanying value capture metric.

·         Introducing Gamification concepts to engage and motivate employees toward Agile behaviors with the goal of achieving an Agile transformation

·         Advocating a change in your IT governance toward collaborative governance and performance review process places a focus on team rewards. 

This book ends with three case studies—stories of a smaller colocated project, a medium distributed project, and a large distributed team—to help you understand how the readiness activities, deployment approach, and commitment to Agile lead to different results. This book can help you focus on truly “being Agile” and gain the business benefits of doing so.  What will your case study look like?  Let this material in Being Agile help you achieve a successful one.

How do you reward within an Agile Team culture?

The primary notion of rewards within an Agile culture is that the team shares the success or failure of the work they are doing.   The driving principle is that unless we all succeed, none of us succeed.  There are advantages for rewarding at the team level.  Rewarding by team promotes the Agile team culture.  Team rewards promote and encourage team members to help each other out.  Trust is built when individuals must come together to share information and collaborate. This can work well except that it leaves no room for individual focus and can leave some top performers feeling underwhelmed.  So the question is, is it so simple to say that we “only” reward as a team?

It is true that some team members will align with the Agile culture quicker than others.  Also, some team members will, in fact, contribute more than other team members.  And maybe sometimes, it is important to acknowledge exemplary work when it occurs.   However, individual rewards can lead to unhealthy competition.  Past leaders who have been constantly rewarded for being the superstar will have a hard time with a team reward approach.  Under-performers may find it easier to lay low in an Agile team and just do the minimum.  By providing more reward to some team members could lead to a feeling of jealousy and resentment.   This is problematic in not only an Agile culture but any culture.  

Ultimately, you do have to remember that you get the behavior you reward.  If you give reward at the individual level, you will get a level of competitive behavior and a willingness to place personal achievement over team accomplishment.  If you reward at the team level, you will get a level collaborative behavior that places team accomplishments over personal achievement.

Team Reward Approach

Within an Agile context, rewards should be supportive of the team culture.  The question is, what does a reasonable reward structure look like?  First it is important to acknowledge that answer isn’t straightforward.  It depends on your context and situation.  As a suggestion, consider starting by making at least 50% of the reward based on team collaboration and success.  Then over time increase the team reward part to make it a major part of the rewards, and still leave a small percentage available to acknowledge individual growth, exemplary work, and more adaptive alignment to an Agile culture. 

Not all Rewards are Created Equal

What is meant by reward?  Not all rewards are created equal and a reward for one person can mean something difference from one person than another.  To some employees, reward means money in the form of a merit increase or bonus.  For others it can mean advancement and more responsibility.  Yet for others it’s the ability to have freedom to work on what they want.  As part of self-organizing teams, you can have Team members recognize each other.   For example, during a Sprint retrospective (if this is being applied), the first part of this event can be where team members recognize each other for their help, assistance, helping the team drive forward, complete stories, and more.  

Team Reward must Live within a Team Culture

Maybe the answer is not as simple as instituting one type of reward system or other.   Maybe this can only work unless it fits within a broader context of focusing on the culture.  For Team rewards to be effective, a company’s culture must embrace the team concept.  Maybe it has to first start with understanding people’s natural tendency toward an Agile culture and team environment.  Maybe there has to be an understanding of people’s willingness to adapt and align with Agile.  If individuals and/or management are not really willing to adapt, they may not be able to handle a team-based reward system.  In order to handle the competitiveness, potential jealousy, and other harmful attributes, the best scenario is when team members understand and believe in the Agile values and principles and in particular, the principle of self-empowered teams.  Ultimately, the reward system that best suits your needs can be driven by an Agile principles but it should be adapted over time as your organization adapts to the Agile team culture.   

Agile’s Little Secret – It Makes You Money

Agile tends to be introduced at the team level and it’s the Agile teams who are expected to adopt Agile.   While there is various amounts of buy-in from management, some don’t seem to understand that it takes an organization to embrace Agile in order to gain the business benefits.  In other words, management has a strong role to play including adapting their behavior, embracing the Agile values and principles, and leading a culture change, in order to gain the business benefits of Agile.  It requires significant buy-in to achieve a culture change.  But this doesn’t always seem to happen. 

Some of this is not management’s fault.  Part of the issue is that Agile gets introduced to them is various ways – as a way to improve productivity, as a way to speed up development, as a way to increase quality, but in most of these cases, those introducing Agile to them fail to mention the significant buy-in they need to make.  While each of these ways have different levels of merit, it often doesn’t convey enough of a reason for management to motivate a change in their behavior and their organizational culture.    

   

How about changing the message?  Though there are many benefits for going Agile, it occurred to me that to get serious executive/senior management attention and buy-in to Agile is to give them a reason that is near and dear to their heart.  Explain to your management that Agile can increase revenue—in short, it can help them make money (or more of it).  In my experience, this gets them to actively listen, versus the passive listening they may exhibit when they think Agile is an engineering method or something the engineering team and others must do.

Yes, Agile can lead to an increase in customer sales, ergo an increase in revenue. This is all true if the organization is truly allowed to “be Agile”.  This means that teams continually demonstrate working software to customers and they are allowed to continually adapt their requirements to customer needs.  Then teams can more closely align with what customers find as valuable.  The more value customers see in your products, the more likely they will buy (or buy more).  Maybe, just maybe, if you convey that Agile can make them more money, they will listen and buy-in to what it really takes.     

In Agile, do not let “Fast” be your Driver

If your primary focus of using Agile is to build a product fast, then you may be missing the point of Agile.  Agile values and principles guides you to build the most valuable software based on the needs of the customer with high quality and in a timely manner.  Notice I did not use the word “fast” but instead I stated that it should be provided in a timely manner per the needs of the customers.  While building it fast can help you fail fast, "fast" should not be your primary drive and imply less focus on quality and adapting to the needs of the customer.  

Building the wrong thing fast is like driving a dragster that races off the motorway when the road twists and turns as they often do.  Instead an Agile racing car is like a Porsche Turbo that has great suspension, performance, quality engineering, and handling that can handle the twists and turns of the road.  The twists and turns represent the changes in customer requirements.  Also building a product fast with poor quality does not help the customer or your business in the long run. 

If you really strive to build customer value, then you need an Agile values and principles race car that will help you deliver what the customer wants, when they want it, with high quality.  If you can do this, then they will buy the product or more of the product, increasing the likelihood of remaining loyal to you, and helping you grow your business and they receive value.    

What happens in the Retrospective stays in the Retrospective!

The Sprint Retrospective is the last event in Scrum occurring at the end of the sprint.  It is a private and safe session for Scrum team members only and facilitated by the Scrum Master. It is used to identify what went well, what did not go so well, and what can be improved.*  It is important to discuss what went well so that you can celebrate successes and when the team feels certain things are going well. 

A sprint retrospective promotes continuous team improvement.  The areas that did not go so well are rated by the team as to which were the most problematic.   The team takes the top 2 or 3 of these problematic areas and identifies the root cause.  Root cause analysis ensures that the real challenge is uncovered so the team crafts a solution that will resolve the problem.  An improvement action is established for each problematic area. Then the team commits to a couple of these improvement actions to be worked on in the next sprint. 

The retrospective is an opportunity for the Scrum Team to reflect on the past sprint’s activities including team dynamics, processes, tools, and culture.  It supports the Agile principle of self-organizing teams.  In order to really get to the nitty-gritty of the problem areas, sometimes “dirty laundry” needs to be discussed. This includes taking a hard look at the problems.  

In order for the team to feel comfortable in airing problems, the team needs to feel that they can trust each other.  Team members must believe they can discuss problems knowing that anything said will stay in the room.  If what is discussed in the retrospective gets communicated outside of the room, folks on the team will be less likely to raise and discuss problems.  And discussing and resolving problems is what the retrospective is all about.  This is why it is important to discourage outsiders, particularly any managers of the team members from attending these sessions.  When outsiders attend, you often see far fewer real problems get raised.  Outsiders may not understand the context of why a team made a decision or did something a certain way which can lead to inappropriate judgments.

The retrospective only has value when the team discusses problems in a sincere manner, has a safe environment to discuss problems, and provides a strong commitment to resolving the problems to the benefit of the whole team.  So keep all of this in mind when you hold a Sprint Retrospective and remember, what happens in a retrospective stays in a retrospective!

* An alternative approach is to discuss what we should stop doing, continue doing, and start doing.  

Right-sizing Documentation in an Agile World

Within an Agile context, there is a focus on right-sizing documentation.  This is a response to the bureaucracy that has led to large volumes of project and product documents which are often left unread, are out-of-date the moment they are complete, and seem to have little value to the team.   On the other hand, I have heard folks who are in an Agile context say that no documentation is needed.  The truth is somewhere in between.    

One of the values in Agile is “working software over comprehensive documentation”.  This does not mean that there is no value to the item on the right, but there is more value to the item on the left.  The key is right-sizing the documentation.  Right-sizing means that the level of effort applied to write and maintain the documentation plus the value of that written document should have a greater return on investment (ROI) then not having that information readily available (i.e., the effort it would take reconstruct the information and impact of not having that information for current decisions).   With that in mind, here is some high-level guidance on right-sizing documentation. 

• Documentation should be living and evolutionary and not “sitting on the shelf”.   Move away from the notion that document is “final”.
• Consider some documentation to live at the product level where it may naturally evolve from both sprint to sprint and from release to release. 
• Documentation should take on a collaborative nature.  It should not be written by one person to perfection, and then shared with others.  It should instead be shared often during draft to gain input   
• Update your documentation continuously as new things are learned.  If you learn something that can impact the team or help with decision-making, go to the document and update it. 
• Focus on just barely good enough documentation and avoid big upfront details which typically means a lot of guessing and wasted time.   Barely good enough means document what you currently know.  If you no longer need the document, it is reasonable to retire it. 
• Be concise and lean.  Write in succinct prose and add bullet points if reasonable.  Avoid long and flowing prose which may lose the reader’s attention.
• Documentation can take many forms.  It is not only a Word document, documentation can live on a wiki, in the Agile planning tool, as comments in code, and much more
• Document decisions.  Knowing the decisions helps those who must maintain the product and understand why things were decided or done in a certain way.   
• Realize that there is a difference between internal and external documentation.  External documents may be a User Guide or document that gets delivered to the customer.  These should be considered as “working software” and follow the rules of the done criteria.    

What might get documented in an Agile world?  The major documentation comes in the forms of user stories and epics.  This includes writing the user story in canonical form, with details, and acceptance criteria.  Technically, another significant form of documentation is the code itself. It should be written in team agreed coding standards with appropriate comments that specify what the code does (or simply and clearly enough that don't need explanation) and why it was written a certain why.  Remember that code needs to be maintained so if someone has to "figure out" what you wrote and why in order to support the code, then it is problematic.

You should consider lean versions of your architecture, coding, and test strategies that help inform the team of ways of working. Impediments that require effort to fix should be documented.  Items such as coding standards, an overview of your working processes and policies, done criteria such also be documented and shared. 

What do you think of this guidance?  Do they make sense?  Do you have any other tips?