Agile India.

As you might already know, from 1st Oct 09, I’ve joined Industrial Logic full time. I’ll be based out of Mumbai.

Over the last two years, I’ve done various training and consulting gigs (part-time) for IL. Now we feel we can take this relationship to the next level.

My primary responsibilities at IL would be:

• Setting up a small office in Mumbai (1-2 Biz Dev/wizardsMarketing Wizards + 2-4 Developers + 1 UX Designer)
• Contribute content on diverse topics to Greatest Hits, IL’s elarning product
• Help build the elearning platform (in near future, hire some kick ass developers to join this initiative)
• Continue handling in-person training and consulting in Asia (in near future, build a small team to help out)
• Help position IL and Greatest Hits in Asia (marketing elearning to working out an INR pricing, etc)
• Continue building a thriving community of craftspersons in India (and globally)
• Globally, continue pushing the envelope on true agility and bringing unconventional ideas to software development.
• Above all, have fun and learn from THE experts

Recently I read Esther Derby’s blog post on Five Reasons to Hire a Coach for Agile Teams. While I agree with all her points, following are the questions or concerns running through my mind.

• What are the risks involved when hiring a coach?
  • What is success ratio? How many teams you know (not heard of in some cooked up report by a consulting company or a tool vendor) who are successful adopting Agile with a coach’s help? And how many teams do you know who have failed trying to adopt agile without using a coach? Let me clarify, when I say adopt Agile, its not about a bunch of practices. Its about continuously evolving the process to make it lean and more efficient and more enjoyable.
  • Can any coach do or do we need a special type of coach? Point I’m getting at is, your chances to succeed is based on the quality of the coach and her experience.
  • In my opinion your chances of failure is much more if you hire an average coach from outside who does not understand the business, organization and team context & culture.
  • The big problem we face today is we don’t have a good way to know if someone is a good coach or not. What are the chances you’ll end up hiring the right coach? Its not sufficient if someone is a certified professional. In some cases, its not even sufficient if someone has written a couple of books.
  • Also in my experience, ability to connect and influence the team members is very important. A good team member is in a much better position to achieve this than any average coach from outside.
• How sustainable is the model of hiring a coach?
  • What happens when the coach leaves? Is the team evolving their process or still using what the coach put together?
  • Hiring a coach from outside might speed up things. But I’m not sure if people will be able to understand the rationale behind doing certain things. In my experience failure is a great learning tool. Taking more time to achieve something (and in the process failing a few times) is not bad, it make something more sustainable and scalable.
• Can you teach/coach someone to be agile? Agile has been around at least for the last 10 years, what are the chances one or more coaches can change that? (I’m not saying its not possible, I’m trying to highlight that its not simple. It involves organizational transformation and change in individual’s mindset).

My advice is before looking for a training or coaching, do sufficient homework?

Recently I’ve been getting a lot of request for Agile Training and Consulting. Unfortunately the expectations from the training are not clear for me. Most people approach me saying, “we want a TDD training” or “we want a Project Management training“. Once I start talking to them & their team (or even worse sometime during the training), I realize the topic we’re discussing is not their biggest issue. I get a feeling that most organizations have not done their homework to figure out what they really need and how they should go about it. They might have heard somewhere that ‘blah’ will help them and they want to jump on it.

Few months ago I started doing readiness assessments before my trainings. (I’ve also started doing assessments after my training so see if the training was effective.) But I have realized the assessment is not enough. So I’ve started asking the following questions even before the assessments:

• What kind of issues your organization is facing currently and do you think Agile will help you? If yes, why so?
• What is the current strength of your development team? How experienced is the team with software development? Does your team understand all aspects of software development?
• What is the current process you follow? In other words, from the inception of an idea to the delivery of the same, what are the various steps and people involved?
• What is a day in life of a team member (one per role please)?
• How do your stakeholders (including customers) perceive your team/organization? Currently how do you gather feedback from them?
• How would you rate the technical know-how of your team? Are they able to quickly resolve technical challenges and respond to changing priority of the business?
• Is your team/organization open to trying out things that might seem non-intuitive/illogical? For Ex: Letting the requirements evolve during the project, not freezing them? Letting tests drive your design?
• And so on …

Luckily a lot of organizations don’t get back to me with answers for these questions. This is really good for me, because this acts as a filtering criteria. I feel I would have wasted my time training/coaching this team. There are others who are in much more need and are more receptive to what I’ve to contribute.

I get lots of queries for Agile Training in India. Good number of people approach me saying, “We already know TDD, we want advanced TDD training”. And it turns out that there are gaps in their Object Oriented thinking itself.

While I would really want to help these folks, if the expectations are not set right on both sides, it becomes very difficult to be effective.

To address this issue, since last few months, I’ve been sending people a readiness assessment for all my training courses. For example for the TDD and Refactoring workshop, I send them a programming assignment.

The problem used for the programming assignment is a decent sized problem statement with some user scenarios. Ideally it takes me at least a week to implement this problem. I ask the organization to pick 3-4 people from their target participants and ask them to solve this problem. Since they are clear that its a big problem, I ask them to prioritize the most important features and build those. I request them not to spend more than 4 hours on solving this problem. Once they solve the problem, they email me the code along with all the tests. I review their code and give them a detailed feedback.

Based on the feedback, I propose a training program. Then we mutally agree upon the agenda and objective for the training. This is proving out to be a very effective way to come up with a customized/tailored training ciriculum for each team.