You Have a Problem, and CA Press it Ain’t training Agile Performance Companion ebook improvement available Agile Performance Improvement demonstrates the mutual benefits that accrue to the A worlds of performance consulting and agile software development when the values and g principles of both are blended synergistically under the guidance of practitioners skilled in both. the agile performance improvement model blends the principles of human i l performance technology with the frameworks and practices of Agile. the result is an e approach that maximizes the value of interactions among the consultant, the work team, and the customer. Unlike traditional end-to-end waterfall processes, agile performance P improvement delivers value continuously and in small increments, relentlessly focusing on e outcomes of value to the customer. Building on structures of Agile that are used in software r development, such as Scrum, the agile performance improvement model considers the f human component of holistic solutions in establishing a continuous stream of value. o Bob Winter, a performance consultant, was the product owner for the corporate r education scrum supporting an agile transition initiative for hundreds of engineering teams. m From this cross-disciplinary experience, he discovered that the two cultures, two languages, Agile and two methodologies of performance consulting and agile software development are— far from being incongruent, incompatible, or irrelevant to each other—in fact ideally suited a to complement and support each other. Being agile improves the effectiveness of the n performance consultant, and applying the lessons of human performance technology c improves the effectiveness of software development teams. e in Agile Performance Improvement, Winter teaches performance consultants how to apply agile principles, values, and methods usefully to the tasks of optimizing i human performance in areas of practice not only adjoining but also well beyond the m Performance realm of software and it engineering, such as corporate learning solutions, human resources systems, and non-software products. Conversely, he shows engineering teams p immersed in an agile environment how to boost their performance using the principles and techniques taught and cultivated by performance consultants. the author, who has r worked extensively on both sides of the traditional divide, recounts entertainingly but o informatively how both sparks and fur can fly when geeks encounter “people” people. v After reading this book, business executives, team members, agile practitioners, and e performance consulting practitioners will be able to do the following: improvement m • Apply agile engineering practices to the design and development of learning solutions and non-software products e • Apply the analytical techniques of human performance technology to the n solution of any business problem involving human capabilities, including software development t • Leverage the agile performance improvement model to maximize the value of interactions among product owners, work teams, and customers in any product or process area • Avoid the common pitfalls faced by teams transitioning from traditional W the new Synergy of Agile and Human work methods to Agile i n t Performance technology e r www.ca.com/capress C ISBN 978-1-4842-0893-9 Shelve in Information: 53999 A Software Engineering/Software Development CA Press User level: P r Beginning–Advanced e CA technologies (nASDAQ: CA) provides it management solutions Companion eBook s Bob Winter ttho astu hpeplopr tc uasgtiolem beurssi nmeasns asgeerv aicneds .secure complex it environments Seeo nla $s1t 0p aegBeo ofokr vdeertsaioilns 9781484208939 s For your convenience Apress has placed some of the front matter material after the index. Please use the Bookmarks and Contents at a Glance links to access them. Contents About the Author                                             ix About the Technical reviewer                                   xi Acknowledgments                                            xiii introduction                                                  xv chapter 1: Agile and human Performance Technology             1 chapter 2: The Basics of human Performance improvement       15 chapter 3: The Performance consultant’s Toolkit                 47 chapter 4: The Basics of Agile                                 85 chapter 5: The Agile Software engineer’s Toolkit                121 chapter 6: Agile Performance improvement                    149 chapter 7: Proving Value                                     173 chapter 8: continuous improvement lore                      199 glossary                                                    221 recommended for further Study                               233 index                                                       237 Introduction this book addresses a pervasive and potentially devastating work problem: failure to deliver value. As an advisor or consultant, do you find yourself recast by your client as an order taker? As a project manager, do you struggle to deliver high-quality output in a timely manner? As a member of a development team, do you find yourself being industrious in the pursuit of delivering things that nobody cares about? As a product owner, do you seek better ways to articulate the impact of your team’s output? for answers i turn to the colorful histories, foundational principles, and practices from two disciplines: Agile and human performance technology. the hybrid is agile performance improvement, which embraces a collaborative approach to the pursuit of business results that the two professions share. You don’t have to be a corporate training person or a software engineer to apply the lessons of agile performance improvement. Any individual or team producing creative output can apply it. i draw from a variety of pursuits to illustrate the method—from running a restaurant to running a car rental agency, from home improvement to skateboarding and beyond. As well as being a foundational exposition of agile performance improvement, this book is a call to action for like-minded people to band together to change the way we work. there is some serious business in here, but i consciously keep the tone lighthearted. After all, learning to work together toward shared success is some of the most fun you can have. C H A P T E R 1 Agile and Human Performance Technology The Twain Shall Meet This book is dedicated to those who by their daily acts of courage sustain the advance of freedom and bring closer the day of its absolute triumph. —Jim and Michele McCarthy, Software for Your Head1 Agile performance improvement blends the best of agile software devel- opment methods with the best of human performance technology (HPT).2 The two systems share an ambition to remedy the most profound failures of popular methods. 1Jim McCarthy and Michele McCarthy, Software for Your Head: Core Protocols for Creating and Maintaining Shared Vision (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2002). 2Also known as human performance improvement. 2 Chapter 1 | Agile and Human Performance Technology Traditionally, software development projects cover time horizons stretch- ing to months and years. Such “waterfall” projects typically run over budget and late, often missing the window for usefulness. Agile methods promise to deliver value through small, potentially shippable product features developed within short iterations. Corporate learning consultants (and other service providers) constantly battle expectations from their customers to be “order takers.” Following this well-worn but unfortunate path is to consign their teams to a cycle of industriousness in the pursuit of producing worthless things. The application of principles and methods of HPT ensures rigorous front-end analysis and defines solutions that achieve a clear and quantifiable outcome. Everyone in software engineering knows about Agile, and most practice it. They don’t know much about HPT. When practicing Agile faithfully and well, they deliver faster. Imagine if, by applying the practices of HPT, they could more often deliver features their customers cared about? Human resources and learning professionals know about HPT, and most prac- tice it. Most don’t know much of Agile. Imagine if, by applying the practices of Agile, they could deliver their products within weeks rather than months? Agile performance improvement enables teams to focus on the highest-value work, continuously improving its ability to frequently produce high-quality output. Objectives of This Book An objective is a description of a performance you want learners to be able to exhibit before you consider them competent. An objective describes an intended result of instruction, rather than the process of instruction itself. —Robert Mager, Preparing Instructional Objectives3 In the learning business, we talk about objectives all the time. Mager’s definition emphasizes a focus on performance leading to results, which will be a theme in this text. Let’s discuss how the reader can hope to improve performance and get better outcomes. 3Robert F. Mager, Preparing Instructional Objectives, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Fearon, 1975). Agile Performance Improvement 3 After reading this book, business executives, team members, Agile practitioners, and performance consulting practitioners should be able to do the following: • Apply agile engineering practices to the design and devel- opment of learning solutions and nonsoftware products • Apply the analytical techniques of HPT to the solution of any business problem involving human capabilities, includ- ing software development • Leverage the agile performance improvement model to maximize the value of interactions among product own- ers, work teams, and customers in any product or pro- cess area • Avoid the common pitfalls faced by teams transitioning from traditional work methods to Agile This book primarily appeals to professionals from the worlds of software development and human performance improvement, but any work team that creates things of value can apply the ideas presented here. The idea of examining the two practices in this way came to me several years ago when I found myself in a new position as an internal learning consultant supporting a large software engineering function. My professional background was primarily in HPT, but Agile was about to take over my life. The company was in the midst of a multiyear initiative to transform hundreds of teams to agile methods, and our learning department was working in Agile as well. So my constituency, my team, and I were all learning Agile at once. On my first day of work at the company, a veteran colleague greeted me: “Bob, welcome. I would like to spend some time today introducing you to our department and the agile transformation initiative. But before we get started, take that tie off.” I wasn’t at the software company for five minutes before I had learned my first lesson. A Tale of Two Conferences All I ask is that one may be compared with the other; that they may be placed side by side and fairly examined. That which is of heaven will then be confessed. That which is not so, must naturally be condemned. —Edward Kenealy It’s spring 2014. I’m fairly certain that I’m the only person who attended both THE Performance Improvement Conference in Indianapolis and the Global Scrum Gathering in New Orleans (Figure 1-1). These are the signature annual 4 Chapter 1 | Agile and Human Performance Technology gatherings for the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) and the ScrumAlliance, respectively. The conferences themselves were com- parable in size, conference format, and cost. Both were more of an educational event than a trade show, and I learned a lot at each. Both were well run, and I plan to return to them again. Figure 1-1. A panel discussion at ScrumAlliance’s 2014 Global Scrum Gathering in New Orleans. My observations from those two conferences, held just three weeks apart, crys- tallized the idea for this book. Agile and HPT, as two distinct principle-based approaches, are appealing, sensible, and surprisingly compatible. Important distinctions do jump out, and I will examine them along the way. Who Are These People? To understand agile performance improvement is to understand the typical profiles of people in these two disciplines. The agilists and the performance improvement professionals draw on their own rich histories and grow through the cultures of their respective professions.4 After attending enough of these conferences (or any recurring gathering of like-minded people), you 4An agilist is one who practices the techniques of agile software development. There is no equivalent pithy term to describe the practitioner of HPT. Agile Performance Improvement 5 start to see the people converge around a common ethos and terminology. Table 1-1 compares the professional profile of a typical ScrumAlliance con- ference attendee with that of a typical ISPI conference attendee. Table 1-1. Profiles of Typical ScrumAlliance and ISPI Conference Attendees Compared Theme ScrumAlliance ISPI Field Software development Corporate learning and development Current profession External Agile consultant, Internal performance trainer, or coach consultant or academic Before becoming a consultant, Software engineer Instructional designer I spent years as a(n). . . . Impressive credentials Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) ISPI Certified Performance Technologist (CPT) Certified Scrum Coach (CSC) Academic degree (PhD) (from ScrumAlliance) Primary source of credibility Experience Research The authoritative PDF The Scrum Guide, by The Certified Performance everyone has read or pretends Ken Schwaber and Technology Standards, to have read Jeff Sutherland by ISPI The ScrumAlliance crowd included software development professionals from large and small work environments. There were quite a few people who actu- ally develop software using Scrum, but most attendees seemed to be Agile trainers, coaches, or consultants. Most presenters came from the ranks of the latter, touting their credibility as hardened veterans of the software business and ScrumAlliance certifications. The ISPI attendees were primarily consultants and other professionals from learning or other human resources disciplines. The presenters are a balanced mixture drawn from academia, corporations, and the military. In addition to ISPI credentials, most presenters express their credibility through their academic qualifications. ScrumAlliance and ISPI are not the largest professional societies in the respective fields; they are more specialized and cast a less wide net than the largest affiliations, the AgileAlliance and the Association for Talent Development (ATD). ScrumAlliance focuses on Scrum, which is the most popular Agile development framework but only one of many methods of Agile. ISPI is specific to the practice of human performance improvement, as opposed to ATD, which covers all of the disciplines of learning and development. 6 Chapter 1 | Agile and Human Performance Technology Name-Dropping at the Conferences Common to the respective histories of Agile and HPT are pantheons of bril- liant and sometimes colorful characters. You will meet a few of them as I introduce concepts and techniques throughout this book. These prominent figures have one thing in common: they all have books. Table 1-2 lists the signature books of a few innovative and influential thought leaders from each field. These names and titles are often invoked at the respective conferences. Table 1-2. Comparison of Revered Figures of Agile and HPT Contribution Agile HPT Awesome keynote speaker Kenny Rubin, author of Aubrey Daniels, author of at 2014 conference Essential Scrum, A Practice Bringing Out the Best in People: Guide to the Most Popular How to Apply the Astonishing Agile Process Power of Positive Reinforcement Wide-ranging and Succeeding with Agile, Serious Performance Consulting well-done introduction by Mike Cohn According to Rummler, by to the discipline Geary Rummler Breakthrough treatment of Coaching Agile Teams, Performance Consulting, by essential interpersonal skills Lyssa Adkins Dana Gaines and James Robinson For the hard-core student Refactoring: Improving the Preparing Instructional Objectives, Design of Existing Code, by by Robert Mager Martin Fowler Seriously deep book Agile Software Development: Human Competence: Engineering Principles, Patterns, and Worthy Performance, by Thomas Practices, by Robert C. Martin F. Gilbert The short list of distinguished figures in Agile might surprise nonsoftware readers. They have all written great books and are popular conference speakers, but they are not household names. There are a number of figures in technology who have achieved pop-culture status. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison come to mind, but you will not hear their names at ScrumAlliance confer- ences as often as you will those of the Agile luminaries. The elders of Agile started their groundbreaking work only two or three decades ago, so just about all of them are alive and active. ISPI has been around for more than 50 years, so many of the founding fathers of HPT are deceased or retired. Their names and work carry on. The ISPI conference has a warm family feel, with a notable amount of hugging and laughing. The most distinguished presenters are extraordinarily approach- able and collegial. There are no household names here, either.