On the Way to Agile Transparency: Climbing the Big Wall

You may have heard of Reinhold Messner. He is one of the world’s top climbers and he did not gain fame due to his personality (some argue he has lost his mind) or his PR skills, but because of his improvised, one-of-a-kind climbing style. He is the mountaineer who developed the agile climbing model. Ascend solo. Use no oxygen. Improvise routes. He wasn’t modest about his achievement: “As far as the public is concerned, since 1978, my sensational climbs - Everest without oxygen and Nanga Parbat solo - are unsurpassed” (1). Indeed. Agility is a good way to get there from here: whether you are climbing a mountain, or building software.

Agile development methodologies mean a lot of things to a lot of people these days, and most of these have to do with making life easier: as a business partner, you may want faster time to value and lower development costs. As a Director of Software Development, you may dream of a people-centric model, minimal methods and maximum collaboration (2).

Transparency is a major dynamic associated with agile development. At the roots of the people-centric model advocated by agile development is a philosophy of collaborative, non-punitive accountability that can be defined as transparency. Thanks to their social methodology, agile projects offer better transparency to clients, business partners and corporate decision makers. When broken down, this concept consists of management components such as individual responsibility, commitment, and accountability. Peter Drucker’s definition of individual responsibility in his book “A Functioning Society” aligns smoothly with the transparency model agile supporters believe in: “Responsibility is both external and internal. Externally it implies accountability to some person or body and accountability for specific performance. Internally it implies commitment. The Responsible Worker is not only a worker who is accountable for specific results but also who has authority to do whatever is necessary to produce these results and who, finally, is committed to these results as a personal achievement.” To paraphrase, Agile methods advocate transparency, not to be confused with lack of accountability. As Stephan Haeckel (1999), director of strategic studies at IBM’s Advanced Business Institute, has observed, “Organizational responsiveness comes from giving individuals and groups the freedom to behave in ad hoc ways to respond to unforeseen circumstances. For this reason, organizational roles are defined in terms of accountability for commitments to particular outcomes, rather than in terms of activities.” If we are going to build a hub organizational structure and manage outcomes rather than activities, then there needs to be a mechanism for teams within the project structure to manage their commitments to each other. Rather than have the project manager keep up with and manage all inter-team dependencies, the teams need to accept that responsibility themselves, just as development teams commit to customer teams on features.” Team leads should continue to exercise traditional management, leadership and coaching practices and perform reviews based on each employee’s contributions and performance. In the lack of such understanding and team protection an environment of fear and witch hunting may become unavoidable, and that’s a sure way to kill any well-intended process.

An organizational philosophy of transparency, when correctly implemented, can make an impact. Recently a friend shared with me a neat little solution they’ve developed to track Agile projects – they call it the Agile Project Management Dashboard. The system in place is ingeniously simple yet very powerful. Each developer, analyst or tester involved with a particular project is asked to enter the status of their tasks to a shared spreadsheet located on a network drive. Later on a Share Point process picks up the updated files and generates a neat project dashboard bundling important information such as:

• Color coded project health status
• Iteration and release estimates and current percent done
• Percentage deviations from original estimates
• Completed and remaining stories

Acknowledging that one of the key concepts of agile methods is transparency, my friend set a system where the root cause of every problem is exposed early and decision makers get a sense of the life cycle of each project an any given instant. In highly collaborative and transparent teams like this, it is important to take the time to educate top management about the implications of constant visibility. In the case of the dashboard, it is paramount to convey the right message to upper management: namely, that this dashboard is an internal status tracking tool and nothing more. Many organization fall into the trap of attaching accountability to simple tracking tools such as this one, and hence risk reducing the level of collaboration and individual responsibility. Some places go even further to tie employee performance reviews based on some metrics generated from transparent tools such as this. In an open dialog environment such as an Agile project, top management should be well aware that increased transparency should not come at the expense of holding individual team members accountable of things they may have little control over. Honesty seems to go a long way of establishing credibility and contributing to the transparency of any team. This was emphasized by my friend and also once expressed by management guru Jack Welch. Welch asserts that “…leaders establish trust with candor, transparency and credit. When leaders do not do this, they foster an environment of suspicion. No one really knows what is happening. As a result, the network of people within the organization begin to work at cross purposes from one another. It is important that critical candor be constructive. That it is not just to put someone in their place, but provide them a way to move to a different place. When you have that kind of communication stream going on, the sharing of credit becomes much more motivational. Honesty begets motivation to improve and perform at your best. The leader though must model this genuinely for it to be effective.”

It may be argued that agile is to software development what globalization is to Ford and GM – agile development promises to shrink traditional boundaries by advocating a social, people-centric model that derives its power from commitment and dedication. It seeks to enhance productivity by introducing faces into what used to be an anynomous code production chain. Transparency and trust coupled with governance and accountability increase visibility and encourage collaboration. When special care is taken to balance the newly increased visibility with non-punitive accountability, great results will be achieved. In the end, anyone can climb that big wall, if they chose the path of trust and transparency.

(1) Retrieved from: http://www.jerberyd.com/climbing/climbers/messner/. Messner is also cited at The Agile Web Design Manifesto, An Introduction, by Emily Chang and Max Kiesler.
(2) A definition of agile development can be found here