XP Day: Coaching self-organising teams, Joseph Pelrine

AKA "zenzen wakari-masen"

AKA "how to be a manipulative bastard without anyone knowing"

But first... slime mold. Japanese scientists recently got one to solve a small maze, through cells self-organising. They communicate by secreting pheromones.

But we are not slime mold!

We don't think rationally, unless we're autistic. Our subconscious follows a first-fit (not best-fit) pattern matching algorithm based on past experience, which the conscious mind rationalises according to the dominant discourse. Our ancestors saw danger and ran; to do this fast, evolution optimised to bypass the conscious mind.

What is self-organisation? Amongst primates, it's the fight for alpha-male dominance: probably not the kind of self-organisation we want unless you're the alpha. What are the models to understand how teams work?

(Discussion exercise around how far we let a team self-organise)

There are 2 general directions to the questions Joseph placed on the board: type X personality (believes "most people are lazy, leave them alone and they'll do nothing"), and type Y (believes "working can be like learning, and fun, people left to their own devices will achieve great things").

One issue in getting a team to self-organise is letting them do this. One direction to take is making small changes and seeing how they go.

RUP: "the sound a project makes when it crashes against a wall".

RUP has a built-in mechanism: if it goes wrong, you got the process wrong. There's a similar problem with self-organisation: an organisation that doesn't work right is the fault of bad management. There is a theory: what if the organisation is dysfunctional but still doing what it needs to do? Most companies say "the customer comes first"; rubbish, the CEO does in practice!

The theory is that the main purpose of any organisation is to provide for the needs and desires of a group of people in that organisation. Look at AIG: got government bailout then sent its managers on a half-million dollar retreat. We need to get support at a high level when bringing agile in.

I propose to take this idea a step further: if you have a dysfunctional team, what would they be if they were doing exactly what they should be doing? Kurt Levin, the father of social psychology, theorises that

B = f(P,E)

i.e. behaviour is a function of a person and their environment. He tried to explain psychological interactions in terms of the mathematics of topology. We talk about self-organisation, but who or what is the self? Self-organisation of a system is the interactions between the agents of a system.

For example, at Christmas our 25y.o. son is visiting. My wife treats him like a child, but tries not to. The system has defined a set of roles that need to be played; we will gravitate to acting out these roles.

In a team, we play roles. Remove the pessimist from a team, and someone else takes up the role. It goes further: there are ghost roles. Ever get the feeling in a meeting that people are being careful about what they say, that there's someone else in the room?

These roles get set up by a self-organisational process. How do we get to a point where the fight for alpha-maleness doesn't dominate this process?

The answer lies in chicken soup: made from all sorts of ingredients. You need more than ingredients though, you need heat. For most people who aren't chefs, heat is boolean. A good cook learns to play with heat. To make people a good team, you need to do the same, to effect a change from outside - without working directly with them.

Consider these stages in the cooking analogy:

• Burning: feel threatened, panic, burn out.

• Cooking: the target level, where heat is high enough that ingredients blend but retain individual identities. You can still taste the carrot in good chicken soup.

• Stagnating: what was once soup is now a substrate for bacterial growth. In a team, this is where discipline stops: documentation isn't being written, meetings aren't being attended, etc.

• Congealing: where norms are established ("this is how we do it around here") and change is difficult.

• Solidifying: where change isn't possible.
  

The trick with self-organisation: determining where the team is now, what models can we use for them, what can we do with these?

So, looking at models, the equation for gas in a confined space:

PV = mRT

T: temperature
R: a constant, forget it
m: molecules of gas in the enclosed area
P: pressure
V: volume

Compress the gas and temperature rises. Increase amount of gas and the same happens. This gives us two easily understood variables: the size of our timebox and the number of tasks we have to do. With a large timebox and 1 task, there's not much stress. With 30-40 tasks there's more stress. Similarly if the number of tasks is fixed and the size of the timebox increased, people get more relaxed. Parkinsons law: tasks grow to fill the size of the time available.

The temperature is proportional to the number of people in your team: its' easier to stress out 1 person than a team of 20.

Teams will naturally cool down and stagnate. There's a need for constant "heating" (coaching). Capacity-based planning is great, but even if you only commit to a subset of overall work in a given sprint, there's more heat: the team are aware there's more to do.

Creative use of conflict can create heat. In a football team you have 26 on the roster and 11 on the field. Only those on the field get lots of the benefits of being on the team: coaches know this and use this to motivate.

(Exercise on how we view conflict)

Another model from a psychologist who invented the term "flow": being in a state where you're on with yourself and your work. Every person has a set of skills, and meets challenges. When skills and challenges are in balance, you're in flow. It's not an absolute model; wherever you are in skill, there's a level of challenge appropriate relative to you. If challenges are more difficult than skills, you feel anxious. If they're too easy, you get bored.

Challenge: your developers find the daily stand-ups boring. To motivate them, raise the challenge level.

The passive version of this is the Peter Principle: people are promoted beyond their level of competence.

(part 2)

Not all individuals are at the same point. We work on plotting activities and people on the skills/challenge matrix. Joseph theorises that people need to move around across the matrix.

Shows the classic Gorilla/basketball video.

Types of power: reward, coercive, legitimate, expert, referent.

Lots of complexity here, we're playing with many values. So we can't predict the outcome of changes. We need to implement small changes and make decisions based on empirical data. Probe, sense, respond. Inspect and adapt. We can't have fail-safe... we need safe-fail!

Matt Wynne & Rob Bowley, Evolving from Scrum to LEAN

Worked together at BBC Worldwide. Took a well-functioning Scrum team and improved it.

You need an enlightened organisation to do this: "it is possible to divide the work into small value-adding increments that can be independently scheduled" and an enlightened team where "it is possible to develop any value-added increment in a continuous flow from requirement to deployment".

Colocated team of 12, 2 year project.

Scrum was a success story for them. They were first team in BBC Worldwide to do agile; now there isn't a team there that doesn't do some sort of agile.

One key concept from lean is "eliminating waste". Where is time, money, resource, going needlessly? How do you optimise? They saw spending an afternoon predicting lengths of 1-4h tasks to be intensive, tiring, and frequently they found that in week 2 of the sprint their understanding of the tasks had changed. Their estimates weren't reliable, and the session is intense.

One lean concept: "value stream mapping".

They realised their definition of done was wrong. Things were going into tests but not getting tested in-sprint. Velocity had been increasing and suddenly flattened as they had to fix all the bugs. They realised they were missing a better visual representation of the flow: they added stages to their process.

One morning they decided to stop iterating, abandon task cards and burndowns. They started using a kanban board, with tokens representing single user stories. Team process is represented as a series of stages, from concept through to production code: customer desires, analysis, development, testing, awaiting deployment, deployed. Large numbers of tokens in any one stage show where blockages lie.

To replace burndown, team records daily where stories are in this process, on a colour chart. This gives a clear idea of where bottlenecks are in the process: e.g. system testing was at one point overloading the poor tester; too much work-in-progress shown visually told them they needed to limit amount of WIP.

Another lean concept: "stop the line".

The whole team could see the state of the project and cared about it. Continuous integration is a classic example of this: the build breaks and it's fixed immediately.

The after-effects: the team became more disciplined. They'd record checklists of things to keep an eye on from retrospectives. Became more flexible; there's an overhead to working in iterations when it comes to preparing for work. They weren't able to stop sprints when requirements changed previously - is anyone? The product owner was more empowered, she could rearrange priorities at will.

The downside: we miss the rhythm of the iteration and getting everyone around a set of goals. We became disconnected from one another. At Songkick (Matt's new job) they're seeing rhythm elsewhere: in show and tells, in the rate work comes off the production line, etc.

Conclusions: smaller is better, flow beats batch. It takes time to change; it was only in the last 3 months of the project that we reached this level of efficiency. Don't try and do everything at once. Lean/Kanban is not a new religion; be as reflective as possible in your team and organisations.

Question: without estimation, how did you give meaningful assurances of when the overall project would be done?

Answer: the chart gave us velocity for individual stages of stories, so we could extrapolate from that. They stopped estimating tasks, but kept estimating stories.

Question: how would this apply to a product development environment where you want features batched into a release?

Answer: OSS projects release an edge version every day and stable release more often: it's the same here.

People Panel

Chair: Josie Fraser, Independent Consultant
Graham Brown, MobileYouth
Brian Fuchs, Internet Centre, ICL
Paul May, Bluehoo
Luke Brynley-Jones, Trutap
Steve Lawson, Musician/Consultant

JF: What is social media? How is "mobile social" being used? Where are we going with social media? What are people going to be using this stuff?
SL: In the music industry, the broadcast model is dying. Social media liberates us from this. Mobile liberates musicians from "being location tied". Getting my audience to understand there's content on their mobile is difficult. I'm using mobile as a substitute for my laptop: for its immediacy. If you're expecting your audience to be excited about phones you're screwed - it's what's coming through the gadget that's important.

LBJ: (talks about Trutap) Lots of our users are in India/Indonesia. We were focusing on Facebook, but none of the users we interviewed in Mumbai had FB accounts. We spent a lot of time talking to them: 20-30yo, slight male bias, well-educated, happy to pay data charges, wanting chat with their friends, discovering the opposite sex. Location was important to them; in Mumbai specifically, there were transport problems: when you can't see your friends easily, you use your mobile to chat to them.

PM: I'm a has-been mobile guru, wrote Mobile Commerce in 2001, did well in China. 3G didn't all the things I'd written about and disappointed me. I returned to mobile much later when I realised not having access to my email was a problem. Now, no meeting happens when it's scheduled and people contact you every which way. Now we want mobile not to shrink distance, but enrich proximity. Bluehoo is a way of finding people in the room.

BF: I'm more of a developer than a user. Mobile development is the most frustrating thing I've ever done. What is the next generation internet? More decentralised, with a "service landscape" of apps being mash-ups of services. Something about peer to peer networks and scalability.

GB: From our research, looking at young peoples lives in 60 countries, young people don't wake up thinking about our brands or our industry. Only 5% of the information your brain receives is processed. It's the same with youth: they filter it out. There are only 2 industries that call their customers "users". We believe they're listening to what we're saying. I don't think mobile social media is relevant for them: help them get laid. We're caught up in our language.

Simon Rockman: why should mobile carve its own way, why not extend existing social networks?

GB: Mobile is just a part of a wider mix of social media. "How can I look good, how can I get laid".

BF: What kind of community forms around enriched proximity? You'd expect mobile social networks to spring up here.

PM: It's different because people want to be liberated, they want to find new friends. Mobile can be an ice-breaker, helping us start conversations.

LBJ: It's still early days.

SL: People aren't spontaneous enough to want to meet new people via mobile, unless they're dogging. It's about being time-sensitive not location-sensitive - I take the bus instead of the tube because I have coverage. I don't want a new mobile social network, I want a version of Facebook that doesn't look shit on a small screen. It'll get more interesting with widespread media production from phones (i.e. 5G).

Question: do we really have nothing to say for the largest growing group of people in the world, the over-35s.

JF: Is there a distinction between mobile social and social, in terms of age.

GB: Youth are future customers, not the only ones. If you always target the wealthy demographic, your audience are aging out of reach. Banks throw money and loans at students because they know you're unlikely to change your bank account. Mobile is good for forming relationships at a young age, and mobile social media is good at building relationships.

LBJ: In 2000, Age Concern had a vibrant online community - an early success story of social networking. I'm sure there's a niche there.

Simon Rockman: But the devices aren't there.

SL: It's taxonomy. As soon as you have to learn a bunch of new terms you put people off. When I explained twitter as "you can text me and my brother at the same time" she got it.

Question: Are we heading for a privacy car crash, with widespread mobile media production and the tabloids etc?

PM: We seem to have all agreed to be performers. You have to make quite an effort now to withdraw. Maybe we'll see a wider democratisation of celebrity. It's interesting how the bogeyman in your question is Old Media.

JF: I'm working with teaching unions providing advice around education and employees as victims of cybercrime (incl happy slapping incidents). There's lots of assumptions around this stuff: e.g. young/old tech divide. French law to ban happy slapping was a disaster and inopportunely put through on the anniversary of the Rodney King film.

Question: I see lots of people concentrating on cool new devices. The average user has a Motorola RAZR, browsing and using Facebook on it. Is there a danger of focusing on the wrong devices?

LBJ: Our focus was on mid-range handsets that our users have. Outside the UK, ownership of these devices is practically zero.

SL: 1% generate content, 10% share it, 89% consume it. It's OK to target a smaller chunk because they'll talk about it, but the information needs to be redistributable. Yes it's an issue but the way people use content means it's not that tragic.

BF: I like doing LBS and NFC development.

Platforms Panel

Chair: Dan Appelquist
Andrew Scott, Rummble
Sean Kane, Head of Mobile, Bebo
Priya Prakash, Flirtomatic
Jennifer Grenz, ShoZu
Chrisophe Hocquet, Moble/Buddymob

JG: Shozu: "the best way to get shit off your phone"

AS: People use social networks because they add some value. People working in mobile can learn from brands online, who've been through much of the learning curve.

SK: Scratch the broadest itch you can find. Mobile is full of friction. Every time you have to slow down, you lose a broad swathe of users. iPhone etc. are exciting to us. Forget your inner geek. Be less niche, a bit simpler, a bit broader.

PP: Be unsexy. Don't talk about features, talk about the activity you're designing for. It doesn't matter where the problem lies, whether it's network latency etc., users don't care. I'm grappling with crafting an experience in Flirtomatic; when you want to grow and improve the speed and smoothness of the service, it's the small details that matter. What are the things you don't notice because you're so deep into the service.

DA: What impact is flat-rate having on the takeup of mobile social?

PP: We had one user come in to a focus group with 6 SIM cards, using different ones for different times. Thought it was an aberration, but then we had someone else come in doing the same. Users would do what it took to access the service.

JG: We love flat rate. You can put your stuff anywhere.

AS: There's been a chance since operators starting talking about the Internet. Per-minute to broadband is a familiar switch from fixed-telephony days.

SK: Outside of unusual markets like Japan/Korea, mobile flat rate isn't there yet - which is encouraging given the traffic we're already seeing now in these territories. Even without flat rate, we see a 10-15% increase in data traffic per month on some networks. It's important to keep customers after bill shock.

DA: How many of your users are roaming; is this impacting your growth?

AS: Many of our users are mobile. Even amongst my friends, they're choosing to get handsets with roaming because travel is cheap (look at EasyJet, RyanAir).

SK: I see my users moving to roamable services like text messaging when they're abroad. Don't be focused purely on the browser - texting's powerful and works everywhere.

DA: I've heard lots of startups talking on/off-deck vs app-store models. What place for the operator in terms of discoverability.

AS: Operators have to expect the realities. Quote from Mike Short around access to mobile networks being free as "nonsense".

DA: Sean, you're new to Bebo. Where do you see operators fitting into your model?

SK: You have to be on and off-deck. We're in a transition space where percentages of traffic via both are significant: on-deck is holding its own. There's a role for discoverability on deck. It's tough to work with operators, you need demand established already. On-deck has value as we move to an ROI world. Off-deck has its advantages - you can start off-deck and move on-deck.

PP: Operators are useful, having seen how many users come via their portals. They still seem to have strength in attracting users. Recounts quote from users trying to find apps in the iPhone store. If they could get rid of all that unnecessary navigation, noise, banners and curate a decent experience, you should be able to do something decent. I'm surprised this hasn't happened. There's a traditional notion of what a "deck" is... the future is boring, things happen so subtly. Discovery is slow but people get on with it.

JG: There isn't one coherent Valley perspective on this stuff: if you can do both, do both. We go on-deck. We're reaching 10s of millions of clients installed on-deck or on-handset, but we get thousands finding us every day. Discoverability outside operators is on the rise.

SK: We haven't figured out how to make mobile services viral effectively, we've done a horrible job. Typing a URL in or going via a portal doesn't work well.

DA: The Obama app told me people I know from my address book living in swing states who I needed to contact. The other button was "share with a friend".

PP: Lots of folks have "send to a friend", but mobile has many more shared social objects.

AS: But it has to be good, otherwise the sender is spending social capital. Startups: don't waste your time with mobile operators. Don't waste time trying to get on-deck, work on your offering.

JG: Not just cool, but give me benefit if my friend joins it. This is what we're focused on right now. We're doing iPhone because we can guarantee a good experience on it (vs Java). You can't say this on WAP.

CH: Viral is expensive today. You (either the user or the service) need to pay for SMS messages.

AS: This is why we shut PlayTxt down - SMS costs.

CH: Operators are still important today. The app store is interesting, we're coming back to the premium business: people going off-deck but purchasing apps. It's the new walled garden.

Question: ???

PP: Lots of social networks overfocus on network effect. This isn't necessarily enough.

JG: Shozu isn't a network.

SK: There's lots of limitations; things become more important in environments where they otherwise wouldn't be. Maybe a text isn't constantly worth it, but is worth it once per customer.

Question: How do you educate your consumers as to the cost of the service? Flat rate in the UK, great, but in the rest of the world?

JG: Roaming messages help.

DA: Mobile social network support group for bill-shockers?

Paul Walsh: what's your opinion around privacy settings for location-based services? Where's the balance between revealing all and nothing?

DA: And what are the regulatory issues?

AS: <5% of Rummmble use it. You have to offer LBS privacy in case of regulatory reasons; people don't use it.

Audience member: Having worked for Disney Mobile in the US, where tracking children was an issue, what's the minimum age.

AS: We spoke to lawyers, but ended up copying Facebook: 13. But it depends on context of service: we're different to Flirtomatic.

PP: When we started location search, we didn't do anything fancy with it. But when finding people, they didn't want folks who are too close to them - it's a bit creepy. They want fuzziness, there's a social aspect to masking location data.

JG: Our users aren't using it that often. Some users do want to know where they keep a photo.

Question: Operators see mobile social networks as bringing data revenues.

PP: We're working with most operators

SK: 2 years ago operators started engaging with us. They are now.

DA: On metrics: what's the most important think that you're measuring right now as a health check of your business.

AS: Conversion from download to active. We see 3-4x engagement with iPhone than other platforms. Now we have the usage we're increasing our level of virality. How can we make this integral?

SK: Unique users, page views.

PP: Number of flirtograms. Mark (Curtis) has a theory about taking people from registration to using a value-add service.

JG: Churn, defined by active use month by month and maintaining usage.

CH: Click-through rate and love: people buying each other gifts.

David (Trutap): No-one's mentioned Nokia yet, Blackberry?

DA: Are you seeing any embedding?

JG: Nokia is one of our leading devices. Shozu is great on Symbian.

AS: The days are behind us where you'll build a MoSo network. Knowing where someone is should become a commodity. A step towards this is mobile social networks sharing location data between one another; I've been having a few of these conversations so that maybe you can see users from other networks in your searches.

Question: Can you combine "serious mobile" (realtime data etc) with social mobile? Child tracking is coming in for more paranoid parents.

AS: It's about critical mash.

PP: Back at the BBC Mobile, our first app was for the Tsunami. Mostly social now.

SK: There are serious apps for any broad-based social network.

PP: The Baby P case happened recently; much discussion happened on social networks, we had messages from operators asking us not to reveal names. As a social network you need to be more responsible wrt rumours etc. breaking out.

Question: the Met Office have just launched a TV channel with GorillaBox. It's ad-funded, the Met Office has a public service remit to advise re weather conditions.

DA: What's the big thing for you in 2009

CH: Android

JG: Choice

PP: Friends Are Overrated

SK: Ubiquity

AS: Distribution

Ajit has a post, and there's also been some conversation on ForumOxford concerning the recent news about Trutap, which I'd like to comment on. Expect bias: Trutap are a customer and working on their mobile client has kept us busy over the last couple of years. Equally, there are some things I know but can't say here - so you're definitely not getting the full picture from me. I'm not really qualified to talk much about some of the issue he raises, but I'd like to tackle a couple - particularly when he references FP client, Flirtomatic, as a counter-example.

Ajit compares Trutap to other social networks several times, but I'm not sure this comparison is valid; look at the product and you'll see it's not so much a social network as an aggregator of them, as he notes. Inside Trutap today I counted 8 IM transports, 8 blogging services, 2 photo-aggregators, 4 social services, 4 lifestyle services, 3 fun and downloads and 5 sports services. 34 third-party services in total, with more to follow. Social networks aren't competitors to Trutap as much as they are suppliers.

Many people choose to use multiple social networks; I regularly tap into Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and Flickr and I'm not an extreme case. From this perspective, a product aggregating many different internet services sounds useful: iPhone and INQ mobile both try hard to do this, after all. Doing this in markets where the PC may not have a presence, let alone dominate, would seem to be genuinely worthwhile.

But how? The mobile web is a good means of reaching a large audience at low cost, but the raison d'etre of Trutap is to tie together content, messaging, IM and other services into a coherent whole then. This is hard to do within the constraints of a lowest-common-denominator mobile web user interface. Yes, things are getting better all the time with high-end mobile web browsers, but supporting just them won't give you the wide audience mobile web promises. We had version 1 of Trutap on 340 handsets within a few months of launch, making it the widest-ported application we'd ever produced, and version 2 was on 150 handsets within 3 weeks. If you know what you're doing, porting can be managed.

There's a good point in Ajit's post comparing the flexibility of a mobile web service with a deployed application, and this is a factor that's helped Flirtomatic adapt over the years. Updating Java apps over the air isn't a simple as rolling out a change on a web site, so the level of flexibility you get is reduced - but in compensation, you can deliver a superior user experience. Look at how many prominent web 2.0 businesses are frantically deploying iPhone apps (usually for free) which mimic their web properties, and you see a vivid demonstration of the value lurking in better UI. Again, the latest Trutap has an awful lot of flexibility in the content it can deliver; large chunks of the app are completely dynamic and specified server-side.

On audience numbers, 250,000 active users isn't shabby, neither is it stellar when compared to some services out there. Flirtomatic launched in June 2006 and had 225,000 by February 2007, so the performance of Trutap (launching November 2007, 250000 by October 2008) ranks pretty similar in terms of acquisition.

To me what's more interesting is the location of these customers and, as Doug Richard mentioned in his excellent Future of Mobile talk, the preconceptions that we ought to drop as a consequence: mobile in the developing world isn't simply a means for farmers to exchange cereal prices and there's a massive middle class whose aspirations map to their counterparts in the rest of the world.

So I find myself being a bit confused by his post. Does he really expect businesses backed by US hedge funds not to experience knock-on effects from the credit crunch? In a world of many social networks and services, is there not a role for aggregators? Are applications not a route for delivering superior user experiences? And if the demise of trutap was really inevitable, could we not have expected a prediction of it from him before the fact?

If you're interested, there's a piece on J2ME fragmentation and our recent approach to it from Thom and Doug, our Lead Developers, over at Glider Gun...