Agile Business Coach

Agile Leaders

I seem to be reading more about leadership these days. I am struck by the number of books (maybe my reading is skewed) that promote the concept of leader rather than manager. They (the books) also seem to think that the dominant form of organisation where managers tell people what to do are failing. A common theme that is coming out is one where the leader is a servant of the team. I think this is something that fits nicely with the Agile principle "We value people over processes", however perhaps we need a new principle. "We value leaders and coaches over managers".

Servant as Leader

I am reading Synchonicity by Joseph Jaworski as it was recommended to me by a colleague. Initially I was unimpressed by the book. It feels a bit like the Celestine Prophecy, a little bit new agey. Just now though I read a chapter which introduced the idea of "The Servant as Leader". This really resonated with me. The best leaders I have worked with are the ones who are serving the group rather than leading it. Similarly, the best coaches are those that serve the learning of those they are coaching. The best coaches also happen to be into learning in a big way themselves. (By the way, I have upgraded Synchronicity from as "Sell" to a "Buy"> Never let it be said that I don't admit to my mistakes)

A quick request to the Google God and it appears there is a "Servant as Leader" website.

Robert Greenleaf, the man who coined the phrase, described servant-leadership in this way.

“The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. He or she is sharply different from the person who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. For such it will be a later choice to serve – after leadership is established. The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.

The difference manifest itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer , is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or, at least, will they not be further deprived?”

Taken from the Servant As Leader published by Robert Greenleaf in 1970.

Am I alone

For the past few days I have been trying to find Blogs or Websites by other Agile Business Coaches / Analysts / XP Customer.

So far I have turned up nothing. Even google seems to fail me on this point.

Am I the only person in the Agile Community that is keeping a Blog on the Business Coach / XP Customer role? I hope not.

If you know of a Blog, please let me know.

Learning and Coaching

Today I took my sons to the Natural History Museum in Albertropolis.

What struck me was the similarity of the blue whale's skeleton to the human's. Both have a head at the top of a spine. Both have booth arms (fins) and legs (fins). I imagined the whale's skeleton morphing into a human skeleton. It didn't need that many changes. I realised thst I was learning about vertebrates. It gave me an insight into taxonomy of life. It gave new meaning to learning and coaching. As I was showing my boys (actually we were there for my wife's nephew as our boys are too young to appreciate this) about the diversity of life, I was learning myself. We are all learning and coaching at the same time.

XP Day 2003 Photos

Andy found photos of us taken by Tom at XP Day 3 on Tom and Mary's website.

Below is one of Andy (left) and me (right) running a session on the XP customer.

Heaven and Hell

In Dee Hock's "Birth of the Chaordic Age", he refers to the theology of the Chaordic organisation. Heaven is purpose, principle and people. Purgatory is paper and procedure. Hell is rules and regulations.

It feels very similar to the Agile Principles.

Coaching and Leading

I am currently reading Dee Hock's "Birth of a Chaordic Age". He states that there are four levels of management. These are ranked in order of importance.

1. Manage yourself.
2. Manage your boss.
3. Manage your Peers.
4. Create the environment where your subordinates can do the same.

It made me reflect upon learning and coaching. Before we can coach someone else, we must really know how to learn ourselves.

My "C" Question

To prove that I'm a dinosaur. The other language I know is C.

My favourite question is. What are the 5 ways to iterate in C.

Answers in the comments. I expect lots of you to get this one.

My Favourite SQL Question : The Answer

Given a table called tab1 that has a single column called col1 that has the following contents:

col1
----
A
A
B
B
B
C
C

Write a single SQL statement that removes all the duplicates and leaves the following contents:

col1
----
A
B
C

The "SELECT distinct col1 FROM tab1" returns a distinct list but it does not remove the duplicates. To remove the duplicates, you have to use a DELETE statement. But what do you delete? There is no way to differentiate each row.

This is where it gets really nasty. You need to know about ROWID in Oracle which is a hidden primary key on all Oracle tables.

As Clarke suggested, you need to use a group by as well. One answer is:

DELETE FROM tab1 t1
WHERE t1.rowid NOT IN
(SELECT MAX
FROM tab1 t2
GROUP BY col1)

Serendipity

I heard about Seth godin for the first time last week after following a trail of from a link that Alistair Cockburn had posted to the Agile Project Management yahoo group. I bought his book and read it this afternoon.

It was sunny and I was feeling good so I decided to try and work out how to add links to my Blog. This I did. One of the first people I added was Clarke Ching. I then spent an hour catching up on Clarke's Blog only to discover he has just been mentioned in Seth godin's new book.

Is this weird or just another manifestation of Scale Free Networks.

Personal Persistant Store

Just reading a great paper about "The Social Life of Paper". (Found it on Clarke's Blog). The paper resonates with my theory that the documentation that Business Coaches produce should be their own persistant store. They should write documents to order and store their own thoughts. They should be written for themselves and not for other people. This should take a lot less time than if they write the documents for, in many cases unknown, others.

Selling Simple

I just read Clark Ching's post paradox: people value complex design, rather than simple designs.

I recently encountered a situation where a technologically superior and simpler solution lost out to a weaker and more complicated design.

The problem was that the buyer saw the complicated design and thought "Wow. these guys must be good.". In actual fact the simple design had started complex and been refactored to a more elegant solution.

From now on though, we market the design by showing the client a complex design. Then we point out the problems with the design and finally show a simple and elegant design. This shows the client that we too can do the complicated stuff but we prefer to do "simple and elegant".

In case you are wondering. I have spent all afternoon reading clark's Blog. It is well worth a vist.

New Yahoo Groups

Brian Marick has started a

new yahoo group for Customers etc.

This group is to serve those people whose role on an agile team is to guide the project. They're called, variously, "customers", "product owners", "business experts", "Goal Donors", etc. It's a really hard job, so this group is for those people to ask questions, share ideas, and describe their experiences.

A typical conversational thread might start with one customer saying, "I am having real trouble explaining my stories clearly enough that they're really 'done' when the programmers think they're finished. For example, <...>. What do other people do?" Then other people on other projects will share tricks of the trade.

This group isn't only for customers. Having worked with customers on past projects, programmers, testers, and managers can help other customers today. But this is not a group about customers; it's a group for them. The acid test for posting should be: "Will my words, read today, help some customer on some project do her job better?"

Thanks to Clark Ching for pointing this out on his blog
Blog

My Top Ten Books

Managing to edit my Blog has resulted in a rush of blood to my head. I have now added my top ten books to my Blog.

As I was compiling my list I noticed that I read most of them in the last year or so. It is probably because I am now associating with more interesting people and the books they recommend are better.

Alternatively it could be that I only just learnt to read.

Why I reference Amazon.com

If you click on any of my book recommendations, you will notice that it goes to Amazon.com rather than Amazon.co.uk which is what I use. The reason for this is simple, Amazon.com has the "Look Inside" feature which allows you to browse through a book.

I trick I've discovered is that you can search inside a book for page numbers. It means you can read a good chunk of the book before you decide to buy.

Its a confidence game

The Business Coach role is all about confidence. I have been ill recently and it has really knocked my confidence. I find it harder to do my role as a business coach and I find myself lapsing into the Business Analyst Role.

The business analyst traditionally focuses on documentation as their deliverable. The business coach aims for the much harder task of building knowledge in the project members.

As a business coach I normally try to stay in the "Dont Know/Don't Know" section of my
knowledge management model. This is uncomfortable as you are constantly working on the edge of your knwoledge where you are least confident in the material. It is easy to look a fool in this area. Because my confidence is lower than normal, I have been playing safe and staying with stuff I know well. As a result I have been spending most of my time in the "Know/Know" section.

It has taught me a valuable lesson though. It takes more courage to be a business coach than it takes to be a business analyst.

Seth Godin's Purple Cow

I am currently reading Seth Godin's Purple Cow.
Seth Godin is a marketing guru. What amazes me about the book is that it is pretty much based upon Geoffrey Moore's
Crossing the Chasm. It suggests that the product or service should be remarkable (A purple Cow) and then the marketing should be targetted at the Early Adoptors (From crossing the Chasm) who will sneeze the product (Idea virus, another Seth godin book) to other people.

An interesting read. Worth a visit to the library but I'm not sure about the book store.

XP2004 and ADC2004

I'll be going to
XP2004 and
ADC2004 this year. If you going as well, let me know and we can meet up.

I'll be on "The XP Customer" panel on Tuesday at XP 2004. I'll only be there for the day so grab me straight after the panel and we can retire to the bar.

I wont be doing anything at ADC other than listen to far cooler people than myself. If you are looking for me, look for the loud mouth Brit or alternatively ask at the ThoughtWorks booth and they will send you in the right direction.

ADC last year was truly amazing. I learnt so many things my brain hurt. Spend your training budget on ADC and meet the people who wrote the book (literally).
Check out my Blog on ADC
here.

Blog Update

Anyone visiting my Blog will have realised that when it comes to technology, I am a bit of a bluffer. (The sad thing is that I have a computing degree.) For over a year the only link I've shown has been for Joe Walnes who hosts my Blog.

Well today I finally sat down and worked out how to edit my Blog rather than just write entries on it. And the amazing thing is that it is easy peasy. Saying that, I have yet to work out how to put graphics up.

I am looking for other Blogs that are on a similar theme to my own. i.e. I'm looking for some friends to reference in the world of Agile / Business Coachy stuff. Let me know if you have a Blog that I should be looking at.

My favourite SQL interview question.

I was just reading Darrell Norton's Blog about the
Ultimate Resume. I always use the same question to find out how much someone knows about Oracle SQL.

Here it is.

Given a table called tab1 which has a single column called col1 which has the following contents:

col1
----
A
A
B
B
B
C
C

Write a single SQL statement that removes all the duplicates and leaves the following contents:

col1
----
A
B
C

It is amazing how many people think it is dead easy. "Just select distinct col1 from tab1" They say. It is not that easy.

I'll post the answer in a couple of days time.

Lets see who can come up with the answer before then. Post your answers as comments.

Fun eh?

Zen Buddhist Text

The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labour and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both.

Core Principles and Software

You will note in my core principles that there is no mention of software. This is because they are meant to be around in a hundred years time when software may well be obsolete. Instead developers might be using bioware or mindware to create solutions.

Core Principles

I am reading Jim Collins's
Built to Last.. It talks about great companies having a set of core principles beyond making profit. It suggests we all think about what our core principles would be. The core principles for my company would be:

The most effective consultancy in the world at helping organisations to be Agile.

Agile companies are innovative AND efficient.
Agile companies embrace change AND control.

(Notice the Genius of the AND rather than the tyranny of the OR O'R or OVER.)

The entire company will take responsibility for every engagement.

The company would charge a fair price for its services based on its results.

The company would be a family of equals based on trust and respect.

Employees would be treated in the same way as we would treat a member of our own family. The company would be supportive and caring.

The company would employ the best in the world at helping others to be agile. It will respect specialists and generalists and prize those renaissance individuals who are both a generalist and a specialist.

The company would be open about everything.

Company employees would be the best learners and coaches around.

The company would respect employees that wanted to put the company before their personnal life and those who wanted to put their family before the company.

The company would be a force for good within the community.
The company would help the community to be Agile.

I would like to reflect on these points.

Agile companies are innovative and efficient.

The opposite of Agility is stagnation and inefficiency. We also know inefficiency as "muda" or waste.

Agile companies embrace change AND control.

Whilst Agile Software methodologies embrace change, they also embrace control. They just place the control in the hands of the sponsor rather than a plan.

The entire company will take responsibility for every engagement.

The company fails or the company succeeds. The company will ensure that the project is properly staffed and bring the appropriate experience to bear on every assignment. There will be no hourly rates or bums on seats.

The company would charge a fair price for its services based on its results.

Mr 10% would pay the bills. It is likely that the consultancy would have one of the highest fee rates in the world based on performance fees. If 4 consultants help a client saves $100 Million, then $10 Million is not a high price to pay.

The company would be a family of equals based on trust and respect.

Families are about support. No single member of a family fails alone. Any member of the family that needs assistance will receive it.

Respect would ensure that employees do not take up time of other people unnecessarily. Trust would mean that employees are allowed the freedom to pursue their tasks without unnecessary interference. Employees would respect the trust placed in them and ensure that they never fail because they did not ask for help. All employees would trust a request for help and respond accordingly.

This would be a single generation of a family without any heirarchy. People would be respected for their ability to perform a role rather than for having authority.

The company would self organise around the tasks that need to be performed rather than any fixed authority.

Like all families, new members to the family would be taught the principles and practices of the family by an older member. In return, they may help the elder member when they have trouble looking after themselves.

Unfortunately there will always be "divorces". Whenever these occur, the family would be supportive of the person leaving the family and would try to maintain a healthy friendship with the person leaving.

Employees would be treated in the same way as we would treat a member of our own family. The company would be supportive and caring.

When someone needs help, the company would be as supportive as another member of that persons real family.

The company would be open about everything

Their would be no secrets within the company. Everything including salary would be open to all family members. There would be no skeletons in the cupboard. A healthy environment that celebrates failures and learns from its mistakes would be promoted.

The company would employ the best in the world at helping others to be agile.

Nuff said.

The company will respect specialists and generalists and prize those renaissance individuals who are both a generalist and a specialist.

Certain situations will need generalists and others will need specialists. The company will deploy the people needed to achieve its results rather than place bums on seats. Trust and respect will ensure that the right people are in the right place at the right time. A generalist will not try to do a specialists role without the support of the specialist.

Company employees would be the best learners and coaches around.

It is my observation that the best coaches I have come across are also the people that are most passionate about learning new things. They are both learners and coaches. They help the company and the community learn through their experience. Their knowledge is bounded within a circle. Outside the circle is that which they do not know and the circumference of the circle represents those think they know they do not know. The more they learn, the greater the the circumference of the circle and the more they realise they do not know. (Idea stolen from Plato.... I think). Excellent Coaches rarely say "I've learnt enough now, from now on I'll teach others but will not learn anything myself."

Everyone would be a pupil about some subject.

Employees will not be forced to learn things they are not interested in. Nor will they be forced to coach.

The company would respect employees that wanted to put the company before their personnal life and those who wanted to put their family before the company.

The company will allow employees to work long hours. It will also allow employees to reduce their hours below a traditional week to recognise that there are people at different stages of their career. It recognises that the more experienced members of the community can achieve more in a small amount of time than those who have more to learn. It also acknowledges that those with the most experience may also have other commitments such as children that need more of their time.

The company would be a force for good within the community.

The company will not take any assignment that results in damage to the environment or society.

The company would help the community to be Agile.

Nuff said.

Life is Learning

Last week we officially kicked off my current project. (Even though I've been working on it for about three months. It certainly is not agile. The developers are a far off mirage hovering over the muda desert. ). We had to draw a coat of arms that introduced ourselves. One of the others said that instead of a coat of arms he would share his philosophy with us. He produced a statement from a Zen Buddhist that expressed his philosophy. I will get a copy from him but to paraphrase. The whole person should not separate work and home life but to carry themselves as one through both.

This got me thinking about myself and my work. I see my role as an agile business coach being that of a learner and coach. I do not see the distinction between what I enjoy doing at work (learning and coaching) and what I do for pleasure (learning and coaching). At home I learn from my children and coach them in basic skills like walking or crawling up stairs. I learn lots about learning by watching my mother in law with my children. She has a genuine joy in teaching the boys some new trick, and the joy is infectious. They love learning from her and learn more because of it.

Unfortunately at work there is less joy. The people I am working with are less open to learning anything new and want to rigidly follow a (waterfall) process. It is hard to get my colleagues to try out Agile Analysis (i.e. business coach) practices. They focus on the documentation rather than the communication or coaching. I'm continuing to follow my own practices but it would be more rewarding if I could coach the others in the ways of the business coach. Perhaps over time it will happen. Like drops of water falling on a stone the business coach practices will eventually break through.

David Meier's excellent book
The Accelerated Learning Handbook says that the first stage of learning is to get people into a happy state which will mean that they are more receptive to learning. How right he is. Its something I'm learning from my children and their grandmother.

Business Value Article

Andy Pols and I have just finished an article on Business Value. It can be found on Andy's

Agile Business Coach page.

Options Book

The standard text on options is
"John Hull's Options, Futures and Other Derivative Securities".

Risk and Uncertainty

Uncertainty in the financial markets is managed using derivatives, mainly optoins. If you are a pension fund manager who is worried that the stock markets could fall too far, you would buy a put option that creates a floor that limits your losses. Of course, the fund manager knows that the option will have a price that reduces his return but it is a cost worth paying to protect against a significant down side.

In financial markets, Risk is uncertainty about where prices might move. Risk is measured by a number of methods but it is managed with derivatives.

Risk on an (IT) project is also about uncertainty. All risks on IT projects can be expressed in terms of uncertainty of profit. Risks either result in delays to the project which delays benefit and hence reduces profit or they result in additional expense which also reduces profit.

Project managers should use options to manage their uncertainty. They should also acknowledge that they need to pay a premium for their options. The options might increase costs on a project but they will limit significant downsides.

Options 101 Part Two

Another type of option is the "American" option. This may be exercised at any point in time up to the maturity of the option. Remember that the "European" can only be exercised at the maturity of the option. An interesting property of the American Option is that it is never optimal to exercise the option prior to maturity except if the underlying is about to pay out a large dividend. This has an important consequence for "Real Options". It is never optimal to exercise an option early. In other words making decisions before you need to on a project destroys value for the project. Project Managers who make decisions to in order to show progress on a project are destroying value.

Consider the following scenario that we are all too familiar with in the IT Projects World. Company X needs a new system to manage Blueberrys. There are several vendors in the market. An initial survey of these solutions indicates that only five are serious contenders. On a traditional project, the project team would make a decision to select a single solution as soon as possible. They would then perform the due diligence on the single solution and specify the additional changes needed to the product. An alternative options based approach would be to perform the due diligence on all five solutions and then make the decision as late as possible. The additional cost of performing the due diligence on the other solutions should be considered as the option premium to cover the uncertainty in the requirements which will only be fully known at a later date.

Options 101 Part One

I make a number of references to options throughout my Blog but what are they. My background is in financial seervices and financial options are a huge business. An option is "The Right but not the Obligation to buy or sell an asset at a predetermined price".

There are four classifications of options:

1. Exchange traded options
2. Over the Counter (OTC) options
3. Embedded Options
4. Real Options.

I will explain what each of them are and then move on to the use of real options in project management.

Exchange traded options are the most widely known. These are options traded on The Chicago Board of trade (CBOT), NYMEX, LIFFE and other financial markets. These options are normally based on equitues (stocks), interest rates and commodities. Two parties anonamously enter into an option ( a buyer and a seller ) via the exchange. The seller of the option charges the buyer a premium for the option. The standard options are European Puts and Calls. ''European" means that the option can only be exercised on the final date. A "Call" grants the option buyer the right to buy the underlying at a fixed price and a "Put" grants the option buyer the right to sell the underlying at a fixed price. These are normally valued using the Black Scholes equation.

Over the Counter or OTC Options are entered into directly by two parties, the buyer and the seller. These options are similarly based on equities, interest rates and commodities as well as exchange rates. Once again the buyer is charged a premium by the seller.

Embedded options are those that occur "naturally" within trading agreements between two parties. For example, where the buyer of bespoke software has the right to buy additional functionality at a fixed price. Normally the seller of the software and hence the option does not charge for the option.

Real Options are used as management decision tools. They are used to value decisions. Once again the Black Scholes equation is used although the Harvard Business Review recently contained an article on using the Cox Ross Rubinstein model as well.