Not a lost Case with the Agile manifesto

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​Agile Manifesto and Principles for Better Communication
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This post will emphasize some advantages of the Agile manifesto & principles when communication within a project reaching toxic levels. Included in this post is a document with the Case description and the rest of the post is based on the content of the given Case and its difficulties. Throughout this post the following questions are answered or roughly touched relevant for solving some toxic problems in the given Case.

Discussion questions:

1. Why is this case about team conflict? What conflicts do you see developing?
2. How is distance affecting team dynamics and performance?
3. What do you think about the decision to appoint subteam sponsors? What problem can it solve? Which problems might it not solve?
4. In addition to technical skills, what does this case say about the kinds of skills that must be considered when staffing important projects?
5. What kinds of training and development activities would you have incorporated into this team's efforts? When would you have done them?
6. Can this project be saved? Can this team? What steps should be taken?

First of all I want to say that the given case of the Vigilance Project is a perfect example of how important communication is and how badly it is often executed by team managers and project managers. The introduction of the Agile principles were a result of similar cases in the first place and rightly so.

The case is about conflict and mainly about conflict between management and team members. Basically it is a conflict about communication or absence of communication and conflict about how management is approaching and interpreting this communication. To be honest: for me this is a well known and often encountered situation in many organizations and the biggest problems is the project management methodology used and in this case the project manager's role and position in the organization.

The distance between the team should not be a problem and the last years I only have worked with teams where its members were spread around the world. Approaching it with the given project management methodology and the way it is executed NEVER worked in these projects I participated in and hence my role was created in the early 2000: the Agile Coach. We as Agile coach in ALL cases try to clean up the mess left by the situation, project management methodology and project manager described in the given case.

Often we start by eliminating the project manager and in several cases I just didn’t accepted the job when this was not done. The given case is a case I often encountered and still encounter and when certain flattened out transparent communication lines can not be set up and implemented: the project is a failure before it starts and when already a failure, it can not be repaired when these communication changes are not adopted, period.

Let me express for you the Agile manifesto and principles again, from where I will answer the discussion questions. Why am I using this approach? Well, experience tells me that both the Agile manifesto and principles are useful elements for the toolbox of Agile coaching cleaning up the mess of previous hierarchical waterfall bad communicated projects where autocratic project managers made a real mess out of beautiful opportunities.

Agile Manifesto:

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
   1. The teams in this case should have been given the opportunity to communicate with each other as often as possible over following a useless plan and the brain farts of an even so useless autocratic project manager.
   2. Because the teams are distant from each other, regular communication can and often will avoid that teams are going to do wrong things without being aware of it.
   3. They should communicate directly with each other without putting again some subteam sponsors in between. These sponsors can be helpful, but also increase the change of the grapevine effect.
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
   1. When communicating with each other to deliver the right thing at the right moment with the right content, all the extra documentation filling the gaps of communication are less needed and important and these documents are often misused as they are done in the case given.
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
   1. Collaboration with the customer is in the case given more important than collaboration with a project manager or other managers which are not fully aware of the requirements, changes and needs of these customers. It's not about negotiation over text but negotiation about reality and reality is in the communication and collaboration. Again, the given project manager is a very dangerous one costing the company an immense amount of money and just by replacing this person much money could be saved.
4. Responding to change over following a plan
   1. When communication is present and executed changes are recognized early in the process and opens up opportunities to react to them instead of following the changes in the head of this useless project manager.

Overall what is needed is training in the above principles and especially communication skills and the dimensions behind it and why they are necessary to save the project. When staffing the project these qualities of communication, emotional intelligence, cultural intelligence, empathy, transformational leadership qualities, servant leadership and situational leadership should all have been part of the considerations when approaching people and assigning them roles in the teams of this project. Especially the management layers and the project managers should have been senior people aware of all the previously mentioned qualities and techniques.

This project still can be saved but only through previously mentioned implementation of the Agile elements with emphasizing the communication qualities needed and with down principles in mind. Short text is added to these principles to relate them to the given case.

Agile principles

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
   1. When implemented in the case it would have been clear early in the process that things went wrong and the elements causing this could have been addressed and properly made part of the communication.
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
   1. The project management methodology used, the project manager, the management team and the communication strategy implemented in the case given is a certainty that the project is a failure from the start. Harnessing change and making it part of the communication strategy can prevent many future misery in this project and should be implemented as soon as possible.
3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
   1. In this project when software would have been delivered frequently, it would have opened up discussions because the crappy software and database structure that would have been made visible early in the process. The lack of communication and how it was used and implemented made it a toxic environment.
4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
   1. Probably this is one of the most important ones for this case. It was absent, it was miserably implemented and executed and it was a stupid exercise of the autocratic hierarchical French pre-revolution Lodewijk activities of the Royalty called upper management and toxic floor walker project manager.
5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
   1. Another very important one. The initial motivated people within the United States were Golden members but made mudd by management and totally demotivated toxic bottles of anti-matter making the project a failure where they could have made it a huge competitive success. It is incredible to see how management stupidity has made a mess out of something with high potential.
6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
   1. Do Scrum meetings regularly as done in Agile projects with daily standups, reviews, retrospectives, refinements, backlog management and dividing the work in short adaptive cycles. As much face to face between teams as possible without the emotional disturbance of management.
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
   1. Nowhere I see this mentioned. When It would have been implemented in the given case, it would have been clear that the progression was dangerously low and misguided. All the dimensions of the Agile principles and manifesto must be made part of the toolbox of all the key stakeholders of the project: otherwise it will end up in frustration.
8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
   1. There was no constant pace and the only constant pace was the overall growing frustration of the team members. Again, being able to get this constant pace you need Agile trained people aware of all these processes and especially the project manager must be eliminated as a role and the Agile coach and facilitator should have been created and implemented to the letter.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
   1. There was technical excellence and a good design from the previous database project which was not used, ignored and its members frustrated. In fact, this alone was enough to make this project a total disaster. Emotional intelligence, cultural intelligence, empathy and transformational leadership could have created an environment where everyone was highly motivated doing that extra step, going the 8 miles and the available qualities would have been exploited optimally.
10. Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.
    1. This is also a crucial one and can only be used and executed when all available knowledge is being used to the max and this can be done through the communication techniques being mentioned and explained throughout this post.
11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
    1. In this case the teams were no teams and when they tried to become teams the project manager, again -  a very costly and dangerous person, dismantled or demotivated them. Initially there were the right people with the needed skills and experience to be made self-managed teams and I’m sure that excellent products and artifacts would have been produced. Not extracting the qualities of your team members and available workers is doomed to create failures.
12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
    1. It’s interesting to see that several times especially the American members tried to improve quality and transparency through communication and they went to great lengths to reach that goal. Again, the project manager is the multi-million dollar man where all those millions could have been put in the people and product and where this miserable autocratic useless person doing project management where he should have been doing cleaning the streets of Paris totally messed up a great opportunity. A great case and a great lesson for things to come for many organizations.