How Really Simple is Simplicity?

Why this Agile principle is not as simple as it seems…and why it is a must


 
"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen…and reduce all other things in proportion."
– Henry David Thoreau

"Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential." This is one of the twelve essential principles behind the agile Manifesto, and I think it is one of the most critical and challenging for people and organizations attempting Agile.


Why stress simplicity?

Just what makes this principle so critical, anyway? I mean, when we say "maximize the amount of work not done", are we advocating laziness? Of course not, but I would say we are advocating efficacy. Increased efficacy – maximizing output for a given input of effort – means we are producing the most value for a customer with our expenditure of effort. And simplifying what we do…our processes, our code, our communication, any use of our time…will maximize the amount of effort we can focus towards producing quality product for the customer above anything else. And that is one of the value propositions of well-practiced Agile…maximum output for a given input. Simplifying software can also make it more flexible to extend and adapt, easier to maintain, and easier to learn for new team members. But simplicity itself can be hard at first.


Natural or unnatural? Science or art?

Our lives are getting more complicated every day. It seems to be a natural tendency for us to allow, or enable that to happen. Think about it…do you find it more of an effort to simplify, or complicate? A quick search on the term "simplify" on Amazon's book list yielded more than 1,300 books on the topic at the time of this writing. Want more proof that we crave help in simplifying? Think of the Staples "Easy" button. One of the more successful ad campaigns in recent memory was so successful, I contend, because it speaks to such a cross-section of our society that struggles with an overly-complex business and personal life. And every generation says that, in their youth, life was simpler (I'm even doing it now, with my own kids). It's actually become "outside the box thinking" to focus on simplifying. In fact it isn't natural, so it isn't easy…it takes focus and effort to simplify. And it is an art, rather than a science, because the answers aren't prescriptive. Ultimately, the answer to maximizing simplicity is between your ears – it's how you think and how you approach situations. You have to actively look for the simple answer, the simple solution. If you don't, when you finally step back and take stock of what you've built – system or process – you may have that "Rube Goldberg moment"…the realization that what you've built is something very complex to accomplish the very simple.

Example (click to enlarge):

Recently, I was watching the Discovery Channel series "One Man Army." It's a reality show where contestants with backgrounds in the military, law enforcement and extreme sports compete in various challenges for the title. In one challenge, they had to breach a series of barriers using only the tools provided. The barriers got progressively more challenging including a cinder block wall they had to breach with a sledge hammer while being sprayed with water. By the time they got to barrier 5, the contestants were adrenaline-charged and bent on destroying anything in their paths. At this point, the host said "what they don't know is that the door on barrier 5 is unlocked, and they only have to try the handle to move on." How often do we assume in our work that the answer to a challenge has to be complex…it couldn't possibly be that simple…could it? Yes, it could.



How to do it

While, as I said, the answers aren't prescriptive, here are a few pointers and concepts to keep in mind as ways to simplify your practices.

• Focus on simplicity…continuously. The importance of diligence can't be overstated. As I noted previously, our natural tendency is to make things more complex. Things will consistently drift in this direction – you'll see it if you watch for it – so keeping this a continual daily focus is important.
  
• Challenge your assumptions. Don't assume complexity is a forgone conclusion. Established processes, legacy code, tools and procedures…all are likely to remain static and unchanging unless questioned. One note of caution: I'm not telling you to go raise Cain across your organization and change the world overnight. Start with even your own practices and see if there are opportunities to simplify. You might find you end up leading others towards this way of thinking by your example.
  
• Framework, not process. Agile frameworks like Scrum are indeed simple in structure…even deceptively so. Resist the temptation to extend and augment them with more process. Again, some people will tend to add on additional processes to their Agile practices over time, assuming something so simple in structure can't be effective. Don't be one of those people.
  
• User stories. User stories are so powerful in capturing users' needs precisely because they are so straightforward and focus on what the user wants to accomplish, not what "the system should do" or the technical implementation should be. Use them as they were initially intended…as a starting point for a conversation between customer and implementation team. Try them, trust them, and practice face-to-face communication for requirements, and you will be amazed at the rapid rate of sound understanding that develops.
  
• "POW" modeling. I won't name them, but there are one or two modeling software programs out there I just can't stand to work with. They are complex, awkward, and by the time you've built the model being discussed in a meeting, creativity, flow, and some aspects of the design may be gone. Instead, I like to use Scott Ambler's "POW" modeling…the Plain Old Whiteboard. Quick, simple, dynamic…and just pull out a smart phone, snap a picture and email it to the team and/or stakeholders and *poof* you have model documentation.
  
• Manual task boards. My experience is that this is consistently the first Agile practice that nay-sayers change to something more complex. "Seriously…we build software. We can come up with something slicker than post-its, can't we?" "This looks like a children's classroom…can't we clean it up a little and use something electronic?" Now, I like electronic ALM tools, and there are several terrific ones out there. They will do a great many valuable things for you and make many aspects of your Agile life easier. But replace the good old post-it task board? Sorry…no. The effectiveness of a manual task board is in itself worthy of a separate post, but for now, trust me. I have lived it personally. Buy stock in your favorite office supply store or sticky note manufacturer. Then, go buy a ton of them and use them, and promote their use with others.
  

These are just a few tips on practicing simplicity. I would love to hear and share yours, and your views on the subject, as well. So as always, I welcome your comments and questions.


Editor's note: In my Agile meetup group, we're exploring the twelve Agile principles, one per month, over the course of 2012. If you are in town, please join us.

Team Reward Systems in Agile

"You Get What You Measure."

It's football season again, and as a long time player, it's my favorite time of the year. But this year is extra special for me, because my son is playing his first year. I was interested to see that his coach gave out helmet stickers as awards for doing well, but they were not allowed to put them on their helmets! For my son playing soccer, they each get a star if the team wins and extra stars for special on-field performance on defense and showing teamwork, but not for scoring goals. It all makes me think back to my last two years playing in high school, and how really true it is that "you get what you measure."

In those two years, we had two very different head coaches. My junior year, the head coach gave out helmet stickers for everything. If you scored a touchdown, you got a sticker. If you scored the extra point, you got a sticker. If you made the "hardest hit" of the week, you got a sticker. If the long snapper and holder didn't fumble any snaps during the game, they each got a sticker (but wait, wasn't that just their
job?). It went on and on and on. And as the season wore on, some helmets became just covered with stickers, while others were pretty bare.

My senior year, the new head coach (an assistant the previous year) changed all that. Nobody got any stickers unless we won the game. When we won, every player on the team got one sticker, period. The only other stickers were given out by the head coach: two or three each week, to seniors that exhibited effort above and beyond the call and served as examples for others to follow. It came the night before the game, along with a handwritten note from the coach about how great you were doing. It was very special to get one…I still have mine in a scrapbook.

The interesting point was that these two very different rewards systems, with essentially the same team, yielded two very different behavior systems. In the individual reward model, the game-within-the-game became how many stickers you had. It spawned individual focus, jealousy, backbiting, and hero behavior. All of these were counter to teamwork, pulling on the same end of the rope, etc. "I'm about to get tackled, but why should I pitch to my teammate? If I do, he might score and I want the glory myself." With the team reward system, it became about the team winning, not about individual accolades.

In Agile, we want to foster this same team-based cohesiveness. We want the team pulling together, looking for what they can do to make the iteration succeed. There should be no such thing within an Agile team as "I succeeded in my iteration, but you failed in yours." But especially here in the United States, we have built compensation models based on individual performance: reviews, raises, bonuses are all based on individual achievement. Cultural analysis also reveals this: in Geert Hofstede's Five-Dimension analysis of national cultures, the United States rates extremely high (91%) in orientation towards individual achievement. Certain European cultures show an affinity for group achievement, and Agile coaches working in Europe report it being much easier to foster a team-oriented mindset.

When your Agile team members are under individual reward models, those same issues I saw on our football team will show up. Hero developers can put the project at risk trying to crank out lines of code without communicating and coordinating, working on tasks that aren't visible to make powerful stakeholders happy. Struggling team members can hide their challenges, fearing being called out and losing out in their performance review rather than asking for help. Backbiting and jealousy among team members can cause them to avoid helping another team member to "save themselves" (watch the scene in Titanic when the ship first sinks). Team members will not have the spirit of chipping in to do whatever is needed to succeed, but instead you may see the "it's not my job" behavior. (If you're looking for behavior patterns we want in Agile team members, I wrote about that in my blog "Are Your Teams 'Wired for Agile?'").

Changing your rewards system to a team performance-based system will be an organizational challenge, and not one that can be handled at the team level. As an Agile champion in your organization, you should need to engage management and Human Resources to look at structuring a model that will foster the kind of team behavior we want. Here are some suggestions to consider:

• Iteration Success Rates: Team members all receive the same bonus based on successful iteration completion rates. You might set a standard that if a team successfully completes X% of their iterations in a given timeframe, each team member gets a bonus.
  
• Non-monetary compensation: When money is the only motivator, you will keep cohesion and loyalty only as long as the pay rate stays "high enough." But people are motivated by more than just money: consider offering paid training or conference attendance to advance desired skill sets, or free time, or team outings to increase camaraderie.
  
• Team-based reviews: Reporting managers are likely not on the ground on a daily basis with their reports, when those reports are on an Agile team (in fact, it's a dysfunction if they are). As such, they aren't the best positioned to provide feedback from the trenches. But fellow team members are. Gathering feedback on every team member form every other team member can give managers a good, holistic view of how each person is contributing to team success. The large sample size can also help smooth out backbiting that can occur between team members that don't get along and may snipe each other in reviews.
  
• Team-awarded "MVP" Awards: Much as my senior football coach did, award exemplary performance awards to team members that go above and beyond the call. But instead of the manager deciding who gets these, have that decision solely in the hands of the team. Being voted an award by your peers will often mean a lot more than by a committee or manager.
  

These are but a few steps you can take to foster team cohesion and a teamwork mindset. Just remember to stay away from tons of helmet stickers.

As always, I welcome your comments.

Story points: Who gets the Credit?

How getting caught up in the accounting can make us miss the point

My cell phone rang and it was my Agile coaching compadre on the other end of the line, exasperated. Uh oh, time for an Agile intervention.

He had a team that took on 10 points of user stories in a sprint, but only finished 3 points. Now they were planning for the second sprint, and they were starting in a hole with work to complete on the 7 unfinished story points, plus another 10 points of work they were taking. They were trying to keep their average velocity at 10 points per sprint. I asked him what they were going to do about the credit for the 7 story points that spanned the sprints?

"They're going to get credit for them in sprint 2, since that's when they completed the work." Well, he couldn't give them credit for the points in sprint 1, since they weren't completed. That was the right answer there. I asked how much of the work was left over for the stories. "About 10% left, all testing" was his answer. Hmmm…OK. Something was bothering me about that. The majority of the work on these points was done in sprint 1, but they weren't completed in sprint 1, so the credit couldn't go there. But to get full credit for 7 story points in sprint 2, when only 10% of the work had to be completed, wasn't striking me as kosher either. What about partial credit in each sprint…90% credit (6.3 points) in sprint 1, and 10% credit (0.7 points) in sprint 2? Well that seemed like ridiculous mathematical gymnastics, and besides, it would send the wrong message to the team: that it's OK to NOT finish work in a sprint. 

This team was indeed in a box. They had already completed most of the work (and wound new code deep into the existing code base) for those 7 story points. They started all of them in motion at the same time in sprint 1, too, (the Scrum Master should have advised against this) which had limited their flexibility to move some back to the product backlog. So now, it had to be completed.

We continued debating the issue and trying to decide where the points should go. They had to go somewhere, didn't they? And then it hit me.

Those 7 points go nowhere. 

No credit. But they DO have to complete the work. "Well, that's an answer that everyone will hate" was his response. They probably will, but its tough love for the Agile team. And here is why I think it's the right thing to do.

What are we measuring with story points and level of effort? First off, it's NOT "time tracking." It's not meant to be a measure of how the team spent their time. What we are measuring is business value delivered. Stories are worth nothing to the business if they are not completed. We want teams to start a sprint entering into a commitment with the Product Owner that they are taking on work, and will finish it in the sprint. Of course, there are times during a sprint when work takes longer than expected and teams can't finish everything they committed to, but that's when the Scrum Master facilitates communication with the Product Owner to move the lowest priority not started items back to the product backlog, ensuring that whatever stays in the sprint can get to "done." I covered this in a previous blog post.

You honor the commitment, but story point credit and velocity has predictive value in measuring how much work the team starts and completes. Since this was not the case with this work, no credit is given. Would everyone (team, Scrum Master, Product Owner) hate this solution? Sure, but it makes for a great retrospective topic, and a lesson learned for the future.

So how do you, as a Scrum Master or Agile team lead, avoid having this happen in your teams? Here are a couple of tips:

• Use solid velocity measurements in sound planning: Scrum Masters should use velocity as a rolling average, not a single number, and in concert with good capacity planning (vacations, holidays, other commitments, other drag factors) help keep the team from "biting off more than they can chew" in their commitment in sprint planning. This is precisely why I feel you don't get credit for partially completed stories at all…it provides no predictive value.
  
• Minimize WIP: The fewer number of stories a team has in flight at any one time, the greater their flexibility to adjust and move not started stories around without having wasted effort and having to unwind code from the codebase.
  
• Inspect and adapt daily: No matter what, keep the daily standup sacrosanct and effective. It remains the team and Scrum Master's primary channel for surfacing and mitigating potential problems before they become real issues.
  
• Practice "tough love" servant leadership: Remember, a Scrum Master is not a manager of the team, they are the coach and protector of the process framework. The coach does not take the field; he/she observes, advises, supports, and puts the team in a position to succeed. And by practicing tough love like in the example here, a Scrum Master helps the team, and him/her self, learn a valuable lesson from a mistake they are unlikely to repeat in the future.
  

As always, I welcome your comments.






 

Effort Estimation is Child’s Play

Our schools are teaching Agile techniques to 2^nd graders.

My 2^nd grader asked my wife for help with his math homework. As soon as she heard the word "math," she said "go ask your father." He brought it over to me. They are learning about weights and measures and how to use scales. He showed me his homework and said "dad, I don't get it. What is this?" I looked at it and smiled. "Well," I said, "that's what dad teaches grown-ups to do every day at work. You're learning about effort estimation."

Here is his actual homework sheet:

Each example gives you choices of absolute measurements (pounds), BUT you don't have the tool to weigh each object. Instead, you're relying on past experience and knowledge to estimate the weight. Have you ever held a baby? Probably, and even if not, you know they are a lot closer to 8 pounds than 20 or 70 pounds. And while you've certainly never weighed an elephant, you know from your visits to zoos and circuses that they are huge, and your experience with objects that weigh 100 pounds or 500 pounds tell you that an elephant is certainly much more than that, so given the choices, 11,000 pounds is easily the right answer.

This is essentially what we do with effort estimation in Agile product development. We are asking team members to measure how much work is required to complete the product feature, not how long the work will take. And the measurements are not on an absolute scale, they are on a relative scale, meaning "how much work is this item, relative to the amount of work the simplest item you can think of is?" When we start using effort estimation (BTW, a.k.a "story points" or "effort points") we have teams baseline on a common simple activity in their domain, and use that as the base measure. After they agree on what that is, all other features are measured relative to that baseline.

Many, if not most, Agile teams use a numerical scale called the Fibonacci scale to measure effort. The Fibonacci scale is named after Leonardo of Pisa, who was known as "Fibonacci" (son of Bonaccio). He introduced the concept to the West in the early 11^th Century. These are the typical Fibonacci numbers used for effort estimation:

1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 40, 100

Without getting into a doctoral dissertation in mathematics, let's just say it gives you a scale with steps that increase in magnitude as you go up, so when you have to decide between two of the larger numbers, it's not so fine grained. Seeing it graphically really helps. Here is a "Fibonacci spiral" which you get by making boxes with areas the same as the Fibonacci numbers, and drawing circle arcs corner to corner, and connecting them:

And where else have you seen that shape in nature?

The increase in step values forces you to choose the closer "bucket" rather than argue over minutiae. And that's why it works so well in effort estimation…it forces you to "pick one!" and not get bogged down in the details, which is the point of effort estimation…the right amount of detail at the right time. We use it early on in the process, before you can know all the detail you would need to know to get down to estimates in hours.

Pick Your Measure

Here's one of the great things about effort estimation in Agile…you don't have to use Fibonacci. It's hard enough, when we're used to a professional lifetime of giving estimates in hours or days, to mentally switch to measuring effort. If your team is having a hard time with Fibonacci, and divorcing a numeric measure from absolute time measurements, don't use it. It's only important that your chosen measure has relative sizing that the whole team can relate to; it doesn't have to be numeric.

Teams have used T-shirt sizing for effort estimation (Small, Medium, Large, eXtra Large). I'm coaching a team right now that uses sea life: guppy, salmon, dolphin, shark, whale, Kraken. ("Release the Kraken, Jim!"…props to you). I even heard of a team that measured stories in "Frito bags." Why? They baselined a 1-Frito bag story on the amount of work it would take this one developer (who ate Fritos all day, every day) to complete while eating one bag of Fritos. You really can use any scaling method like that.

But in the end, remember to focus on simplicity. Effort estimation doesn't have to be difficult, They are teaching the concept to 2^nd graders.

As always, I welcome your comments.

Why People Don’t Read Your Tweets

Look out: you may have lots of followers on Twitter, but c'mere, I'll tell you a secret: people may not be reading anything you post.

It's no revelation that social media has exploded in popularity. According to recent research, Social Networking will be a more popular communication channel than voice by 2015. While Facebook is huge, for my money, the number one player in the world of the quick update, especially on mobile devices, is still Twitter.

Recently reported to be valued at $4.5 billion (with a "B"!), Twitter isn't going away any time soon. Although, my personal open note to Twitter: please remember what you do best, and don't try to change to an all-stop-shop. I'm a big fan of apps that focus on one thing or area and do it well.

When I first downloaded the app I use for Twitter on my phone, I was checking it every time the alert sounded that I had new tweets. But pretty quickly, I noticed some patterns in frivolous tweets that started irritating me...so much so, I usually ignore the notification now. And that's no good for anyone: people with relevant tweets are not getting their message out to me, and I'm missing out on potentially great information. Instead of giving up, though, I decided to tell you about some practices in tweets that bother me, and will cause me to ignore or even "un-follow" people. These are patterns I try to avoid in my tweets, and I think you should as well.

Patterns that will get you un-followed on Twitter:

1. Failure to understand your audience - Is your Twitter account a professional account, a personal account, a marketing account, or news account? Your followers started following you presumably for a reason. Keep your posts relevant to that reason. For a great success story, look at the account "s**tmydadsays." His name is Justin, and he does just one thing with his account. He focuses on the funny. His Twitter bio says it all:
   "I'm 29. I live with my 74-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down s**t that he says"
   And he's parlayed that into a book and television show deal. At the time of this writing, he has over 2 million followers. And what I find even funnier is that HE is only following ONE person...LeVar Burton. Even that is just funny. He understands his audience.
   
2. Frivolous Personal Updates - This is related to pattern #1, but deserves its own mention. This has even been lampooned in TV commercials:
   
   People following your professional Twitter account likely don't care that you're "sitting on the patio." I pulled up a frightening number of results just searching the phrases "at the laundromat" and, even worse, "thinking about nothing" on Twitter.
   
3. Personal Conversations - Holding a lot of conversations with another user, that your followers aren't a part of, gives them only half the conversation. You're leaving them out and cluttering their tweets. Use Twitter's Direct Message function instead. Then, it stays between you and the recipient.
   
4. Running Commentary – You should tweet the important tweets, but avoid a long string of tweets on the same topic. Sometimes, people will sit at an event and continually tweet about what they're watching or doing. I'm not complaining about pearls of wisdom from the speaker (which I would like to hear too, assuming I'm not there myself), or pictures of the action. Those are great. I'm talking about the commentary without substance, like this:
   1. 5:32 p.m. "Boarding the plane to L.A. now"
      
   2. 5:35 p.m. "A guy just sat next to me"
      
   3. 5:38 p.m. "Closing the airplane door now."
      
   4. 5:39 p.m. "I hope my flight will be on time."
      
   5. 5:40 p.m. etc., etc., etc…
      
      

These are my biggest pet peeves that will make me un-follow someone on Twitter. What are yours?

Agile – It’s Not Just for Software Development Anymore

2011 marks the 10 year anniversary of the Agile Manifesto, and it's a good time to examine where the movement is headed. In February, 2011, there was a gathering at the Snowbird Ski Resort in Utah, sight of the original Manifesto creation, to do just that. While I understand that there were some views at that event that Agile is really just about software development, there were thankfully other voices that endorsed Agile as values and principles applicable in general terms, and not just in the area of software.

My view? The Agile Genie is out of the bottle.

Agile is not a methodology, it is a way of thinking and being. The values of the Manifesto articulate where to focus attention and effort to make sure we create product that provides maximum business value the quickest. Agile's simple, but elegant, tenets are inspiring the Agilists among us (of which I am one) to look for new ways to apply them and engineer new solutions in areas, I suspect, were not even on the radar in Snowbird in 2001.

Scrum is by far the most popular Agile methodology in use today, and is technology agnostic. It is a lightweight Agile project management framework that focuses on building a releasable increment of product (not just software) frequently. Working in short increments, an empowered, creative, cross-functional team collaborates with a business owner, and each other, to ensure they are producing quality product while constantly adapting to the changing world around them. Why does it work? Agile embraces a simple concept that we all accept as fact in our lives: "The Only Constant is Change." The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that about 100 years before Plato was in his prime. I use that quote in each presentation I do on Agile, and every time, every head in the room nods. However, for a notion that is so universally accepted as a truth, we traditionally practice project management techniques that try to predict, measure, and engineer that constant out of our reality, and ultimately often fail in the attempt. To me, it only makes sense to practice management techniques that not only accept change, but capitalize and thrive on it.

The notion of using Scrum outside of software development isn't new; Scrum co-founder Jeff Sutherland and his wife described how she used Scrum to run her church. There are success stories of marketing companies utilizing Scrum to deliver marketing initiatives, indeed to address "marketing crises." People have even used Scrum for wedding planning. At my firm, we use Scrum practices and Agile principles to run not only our development projects, but internal operations and our own marketing efforts as well. And in the interest of full disclosure, the favorite anecdote about me around the office right now is that I used Scrum to help my family prep to host company for Christmas this year. Yes, it's true.

The Agile Genie is out of the bottle. Like a platoon graduating from basic training, we have learned what our instructors had to teach, incorporated the values, and are now taking it to the next level and growing beyond their control. And this is a good thing. The Agile "revolution" is kicking into high gear, crossing boundaries to new horizons, and people are beginning to jump on board.

So why not you? Why not now? Come check out what Agile can do for you.

As always, I welcome your comments.

Planting the Flag – The Power of Vision

If I asked a random member of your organization to state the goals of the organization for this year, could he or she do it? Could they name even one goal? What if I asked "how does what you're doing today advance a strategic goal of the company?" If their answer is "I don't know" or, even worse, "I don't care," we have a problem. Not a problem that will keep you from being good, but one that can prevent your organization from being truly great. What is lacking is a Vision.

Architecture of a Vision

So what do I mean by a Vision, and why does it matter? I'm not talking about a mission statement, I'm talking about a goal…but it's more than that. To be effective, a Vision should have the following characteristics:

SIMPLE

"Any fool can make things bigger, more complex... It takes a touch of genius-and a lot of courage-to move in the opposite direction."  - Albert Einstein

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." - Leonardo da Vinci

A great Vision statement should be clear and simple. You shouldn't have to be an industry insider, or a senior executive, to decipher it. So we don't want a statement such as "Develop, deploy, and manage a diverse set of scalable and strategic knowledge management tools to serve our customers, improving the possibility of overall satisfaction among our diverse customer profiles." There's a lot wrong with that one, not the least of which is it's not simple. How many tools do we need to deploy to be successful? What does it mean to "improve the possibility of overall satisfaction"? Is it enough that it's possible that our "customer profiles" will be more satisfied, even if they're not actually more satisfied? As an employee, would you be able to tell when you had achieved the goal?

MEASURABLE

"The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror." - Hans-Georg Gadamer

Effective Vision statements describe a goal that can be measured. We can tell objectively whether or not it has been achieved. They should also have a deadline or target date. Open-ended, nebulous statements with, at best, subjective success criteria make it impossible to tell whether or not the organization has achieved the vision. Here's a good example of an immeasurable vision statement: "To experience the joy of advancing and applying technology for the benefit of the public." Simple, yes…but measurable? How would you measure the "joy" of a company? And the goal is to "experience the joy"…so if we experience it, and don't sell much product, have we achieved the goal?

INSPIRATIONAL

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood..." - Daniel Burnham

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." - Henry David Thoreau

Bold, inspirational Visions move people and organizations to push the envelope. Some of the very best ones set goals that may even seem somewhat impossible at the time they are presented. In 1987, Apple produced this video illustrating their vision of what computing in 2010 could be. It is a concept called the "Knowledge Navigator," a tablet-type device presenting amazing power for the user to interact with the device through speech recognition, research data from multiple sources through an integrated multimedia search engine, simultaneously accept and make voice and video calls, manage appointment calendars, etc.. To put this vision in perspective, 1987 brought us the following advances in computing: Windows 2.0, the introduction of Microsoft Works, and the creation of VGA. To say the Knowledge Navigator seemed "somewhat impossible" in 1987 is probably an understatement, but what do we have in 2010? We have high speed wireless internet, cloud computing, and the iPad.

The Connection in Agile

So how do we tap into the power of a Vision in Agile practices? Once we have a leader who establishes the simple, measurable, inspirational Vision, try creating a "Vision Backlog"…analogous to a Product Backlog, a Vision Backlog can be created and revisited quarterly or annual basis by senior management, and contain the same elements as a product backlog item: the clear statement of the goal, acceptance criteria so everyone knows how to tell when that goal is met, and effort sizing to measure how much effort each item will take to complete, relative to the others. A Vision Backlog could have even just two or three items in it. Then, we can tie product backlog items to vision backlog items, assuring the product features we build serve a strategic vision of the organization. Break those product backlog items down into tasks and hours for a sprint, and you have a chain of evidence from the task to product backlog item to vision backlog item of how much work, and time, it takes to realize that vision.

The Perfect Vision

I have given a few examples of Vision statements that are sub-par. So has there been a "perfect" vision statement? On this 50^th anniversary month of John F. Kennedy's inauguration, I would say he takes the award for the most perfect Vision statement in at least the last 100 years:

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." – John F. Kennedy, May 25^th, 1961

The statement is simple. Everyone in the world could understand what it meant.
The statement is measurable. It's very clear that if we landed one man on the moon, and returned him safely to Earth, before January 1, 1970, that the goal would be met.
The statement is inspirational. It's hard to imagine a more impossible, incredible goal than flying a human safely to another heavenly body for the first time in history.

Yet ordinary people followed that vision, that "castle" that JFK built in the air. They put the foundation under it, planted the flag on lunar soil, and achieved the goal.

Bravo, Mr. President. Bravo.