Case Against Scaling (Scrum Gathering Berlin)

Luottamuksellinen Copyright Reaktor 2013

Copyright Reaktor 2014

Case Against Scaling

Back to basics with your enterprise transformation

Sami Lilja Reaktor

Twitter: @samililja


Pick a piece of paper and a pen.

Think about software / IT projects you have been working on.

Based on your experience fill in the blank:

A project is a big project when it has more than ___ people working on it.

How big is big?


The Beef


Solving the wrong problem

Source: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/806573


Finding the right question

The way we formulate the problem, limits our space of potential solutions

Meetings take too much time

vs.

We have too many meetings

Coordinating between parallel projects is not effective

vs.

We have too many parallel projects

People lack motivation

vs.

Work environment, the system, decreases motivation


The problem is not that we lack ways to scale Agile.

The problem is not that we fail with Agile in large organizations.

The problem is that we are large. Size does matter.

Scaling Agile?


Economy of Scale

Scalability

Size

Co

st

of

over

head

Sublinear = Scales well

Highly repeatable “How many?”


Labor-intensive work


Knowledge work?


When doing knowledge work in Large Scale, the key question is

not “How?” – it is “Why?”


Organizations getting bigger


Pear-shape organizations


But, hey.. •  Do you say companies should not grow?

–  No, I am not saying that

•  Do you say companies should only do small things? –  No, I am not saying that

–  But.. small batches are better than large batches

•  Are you against the frameworks that promise Agility in large-scale? –  No, I am against doing large-scale development

–  However, the frameworks take “large scale” as given and do very little to reduce that


What makes us Big? Large organization or

project

Fear of transparency

“We need lot of different competences”

“Relative overhead is smaller”

Complex systems

Separating action, feedback, knowledge and

decision making

Big projects need lot of people need big

projects need …

“Adding more people will speed us up”

Lot of unfinished work (WIP)

Silos in organization

(Conways’s Law)

Belief in Economies of Scale

Failure Demand

Short-term (Project) thinking


The root of all Evil I

Work-in-Progress


Work-in-Progress

•  How many things your organization is currently working on?

•  How easy it is to get dedicated people / team to deliver customer value?


Hey, but.. •  Work-in-Progress and Little’s Law are

about time through system

•  What does this have to do with project size?

•  Large amount of WIP helps to create unnecessarily large projects –  When time-through-system gets long, some

organizations add more people to gain speed

–  People are split to work on many parallel projects. Getting X people worth of work takes 10x more people


Work in Progress

•  Most organizations have too many things going on at one time, because –  People are costly: Fear of <100% resource

utilization

–  It is easier to start things than complete things

–  Large projects require lot of people require large projects require lot of people..


Work in Progress

•  We underestimate the overhead that Work-in-Progress causes

•  In reality, large WIP causes huge and costly problems –  Delays

•  time-through-system = Work-In-Progress / Velocity

–  Queues and synchronization problems

–  Internal Failure Demand •  Meetings, coordination effort, waiting, re-work, …


Sami’s Test #1

•  Think about predictable demand that comes to your organization –  Support request, creating a new service,

ramp-up of a project, fixing a bug, …

•  What would be the fastest completion time for such work in your system, if you could do anything to make it happen?

•  If your current performance is lower, why is that? What causes delays?


Quick review

•  Pick a person near you, form pairs or triplets

•  In your small group, have a 2 minutes discussion about –  What topics have been covered so far?

–  How do you feel about these topics?

–  What concepts have been significant to you?

–  How could you use these in your work?


The root of all Evil II

Failure Demand


Value demand

Adds value from customer point of view.

Something customers are willing to pay for.

This type of demand we want.

Failure demand

Failure to do what customer needs

Bad quality, wrong product or service, delay.

No product or service.

Missing either what or how customer wants

Can account up to 80% of work


All demand is considered work

Source: http://www.limebridge.com.au/page/Learning_Centre/Cartoons/


NE

W IT

SY

ST

EM

!

Failure demand: Not only bugs

Value for user

Fail

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

“PRESS 1 IF YOU CALL ABOUT..”




Internal Failure demand

Do we need this process?

What thinking created this?


Hidden Failure demand

Value Demand (Project work)

Failure Demand (Bug fixes etc)

Other

The Plan

Value Demand (Project work)

Failure Demand (Bug fixes, meetings, waiting, coordination)

Other

The reality


Dysfunction

Something in the design and management of work that is causing problems.


Institutionalized Dysfunction

Problem that is resolved by adding processes or management actions and then focusing on actions rather than the original problem.


Institutionalized Dysfunction and Agile Manifesto

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.

Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on

the right, we value the items on the left more.

Slippery slope to institutionalized dysfunction


Sami’s Test #2

•  Assume you could freely choose the smallest possible number of people to implement the product or service.

•  How large would that group be?

•  If such group is significantly smaller than your current development project, why is that?


Quick review

•  Pick a person near you, form pairs or triplets

•  In your small group, have a 2 minutes discussion about –  What topics and issues have been covered so

far? –  How do you feel about these topics? –  What topics or concepts have been

significant to you? –  How could you use new learning in your

work?


THE WAY OUT?


What makes us Big? Large organization or

project

Fear of transparency

“We need lot of different competences”

“Relative overhead is smaller”

Complex systems

Separating action, feedback, knowledge and

decision making

Big projects need lot of people need big

projects need …

“Adding more people will speed us up”

Lot of unfinished work (WIP)

Silos in organization

(Conways’s Law)

Belief in Economies of Scale

Failure Demand

Short-term (Project) thinking

None of these are Laws of Nature. None of these are imposed on you.

These are the results of thinking.

And we can get rid of these if we

want.


Putting things in perspective

•  Up to 80% of work in organization is Failure Demand

–  What if you could reduce it, just a little bit?

•  Significant amount of work in project is caused by large amount of WIP

–  What if that improves as well?

•  Keep in mind the pear-shape organization and super-linear cost of scaling…


Size

Co

st

of

over

head

Sublinear = Scales well

Reducing project size by X% decreases costs by a lot more than X%

X%


But hey, …

•  “You are overreacting. We all know large scale may not be the best solution. But it is usually unavoidable. And it works”


It is not perfect but it works

If it works, don’t fix it - American Car manufacturers, 1970s


Sami’s Test #3

•  OK, let’s assume you’ve done everything to limit WIP, remove failure demand and reduce complexity

•  Still your project is Large(-ish) .. At least 3x bigger than “by-the-book” Agile project

•  Doing things in large scale is the only option. And you want to do it Agile.

•  Have you done a very successful small end-to-end Agile project before attempting a large scale Agile project?


SCRUM AT LARGE SCALE


What is missing from this picture?

I can not see the customer here..


What is missing from this statement?

What if the demand comes from end user?

What if we are creating a service?


Asking the right question

•  “How can I make Scrum work in my organization and my projects” –  Coaching, Teaching, Inspect and Adapt

•  “How can I fulfill value demand from customer using Scrum” –  Coaching, Teaching, Inspect & Adapt, …

–  Study and understand demand

–  Design and manage work against Value Demand!


Forgetting customer

•  Forgetting customer may lead to tunnel vision –  Creating backlogs for teams rather than for

customer need

–  Having unnecessary dependencies between teams (and product owners)

–  Internal failure demand: synchronization, prioritization, waiting

–  Lack of purpose: Backlog represent “work” instead of “Customer need”


Customers, users

Customers, users

Demand

Demand

Value for customers and users

Value for customers and users


BEYOND SCRUM: �SOLID FRAMEWORK�

� HTTP://SOLID.REAKTOR.FI


•  Three different levels and frames for thinking –  Note: These boxes are not

separate organizations

•  Purpose of Solid: Help organizations design and manage work so that value demand from customer is fulfilled

•  Solid helps organizations to find the right questions


Strategic Level provides understanding about markets and customer needs. It helps to design workflow and value delivery system.

Thinking frames

•  Systems Thinking

•  Outside-in perspective

Tactical Level aims to find the right products and services. It also provides tools to manage investment (project) portfolio.

Thinking frames

•  Customer development & Lean startup

•  Data science

Operational Level looks at value delivery flow in order to maximize the Return on Investment.

Thinking frames

•  True Agility

•  Kanban, Scrum, XP


Summary •  Attempts to do knowledge work in large

scale are likely to fail –  …or at least suboptimal way to create products

and services

•  Main reasons for being large –  Lot of parallel work-in-progress –  Inability to see and remove failure demand –  Fear of fast feedback and transparency

•  Large Scale is a System Condition •  In order to change System Conditions, we

need new thinking –  We need to find better questions, not just good

answers


solving the right problem?

We are engineers. We are trained to solve problems.


Ways to deal with a problem

Absolution: ignore a problem and hope it will solve itself or go away of its own accord.

Resolution: employ behavior previously used in similar situations, adapted if necessary, so as to obtain an outcome that is good enough.

solution: discover or create behavior that yields the best, or approximately the best, possible outcome, one that "optimizes" the situation.

Dissolution: redesign the system or its environment in such a way that it eliminates the problem or the conditions that caused it

http://results2match.com/ackoff-again-4-different-ways-of-solving-a-problem

Case Against Scaling (Scrum Gathering Berlin)

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