Recently I saw a video from an agile conference(1). I have looked at the video because of two persons appearing in that video: Dave Snowden and Alistair Cockburn. Dave Snowden is co-author of DSDM and Alistair Cockburn is creator of Crystal methodologies(2). In that agile meeting, where the term agile was coined(3), these 2 methodologies were represented also.
When looking at this video I noticed one remark, made by Alistair Cockburn, which made me sad, he said: “…….is like Crystal Clear, completely irrelevant…”. Is it irrelevant? For me and my team members surely was not. We have applied Crystal, recently, 2 times:
- A project started at the end of 2016 and ended in February 2018;
- A project lasted for 3 months at the beginning of 2017.
I noticed that is hard to use a way of working which is different than the dominant way of working, in this case Scrum – but I think this would have happened also if dominant methodology would have been something else, because is about people, not methodologies. I noticed that some people, calling themselves Scrum Master or fully devoted to Scrum, if I can say so, were disturbed by this and I do not understand why. I say this because Scrum has its roots also in Toyota Production System, in this sense I try to imagine a great line manager or a Kami-sama(4) who will avoid learning/investigating/exploring/experimenting something just because “that’s how things are”…
But let me tell you why Crystal proved useful to us:
-it helped us to respond promptly in a multi-ontologic(5) space → we had the properties ( frequent delivery; reflective improvement; osmotic communication; personal safety;focus; easy access to expert users; technical environment with automated tests, configuration management, and frequent integration) as guidance then techniques followed;
-It was like a cognitive activation that allowed us to be agile, but also to be pragmatic and solve the problems we had. And yes they, my team, realized they can be agile by other means;
-It helped us to face that volatility is needed ( well actually will appear unannounced) sometimes in projects, although the trend -in my circles – is against volatility;
-it helped me to think at the granularity(5). I mean how things (techniques, events, formalities) combine. With Scrum, on how was applied and enforced upon on us, we saw we were like paralyzed ( all was very rigid like being strait-laced. What mattered was velocity and predictability. Things were done but without the knowledge of why. We had to put stuff in sprints because we had to fill in those sprints and a lot of energy was lost with that.We were trying to solve something, but is not that we had clear list of the things to be done; it was about creativity, investigation, experimentation, observation. Yet we knew that at the end of each month things, important things, had to be delivered. Delivered, and as far as I was concerned without useless pressure and fully aware that those things will/might fail and they failed, and it was/should be ok to fail; but things went ok also because of those preceding failures among other things. A short answer would be that people respond to something based on patterns of the recent past experiences, whether good or bad )
-I like to say that it also solved a sociological problem. In a way, Scrum is becoming ironized, unfortunately, especially Scrum Masters – as I said is about people and how prepared they are and even more their desire to be prepared. Members of my team have had very bad experiences with that kind of Scrum and begun to doubt the religiosity which surrounds it.
I was very proud, that in a monthly meeting, when a presentation was made regarding the ways of working, Crystal was there – in a list of 8 or 10 projects. I think 50 people saw the Crystal in that slide. And when I had the occasion I spoke about Crystal.
Those lines above were written when the big project was in danger of not “receiving the final acceptance”. I was calm because anyway our work was in production already, each month our work was delivered in production and things were ok. And if things were not ok we responded fast. Is important to make this note, because usually the description of something differs depending on the outcome – in this case the outcome was rather a sad one. The lines above were reviewed by all the team members. And finally, things are ok, it seems.
Crystal is relevant for me, and it was for my team. Each time an intern is assigned to me I’ll take care they will know also about Alistair Cockburn, Jim Highsmith. So maybe Alistair Cockburn work is not lost, for me it matters – I know I am just one person but I am :).
In the next post I’ll detail a little bit the how.
(1) AgileByExample 2017: Discussion panel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTZlLBUo1gE
(2) Alistair Cockburn, “Crystal methodologies”, http://alistair.cockburn.us/Crystal+methodologies
(3) Manifesto for Agile Software Development, http://agilemanifesto.org/
(4) Craig Trudell, Yuki Hagiwara, Ma Jie,”Humans replacing robots herald Toyota’s vision of future”, http://www.livemint.com/Companies/B53nQRpNGDTrVMYrcD1RBK/Humans-replacing-robots-herald-Toyotas-vision-of-future.html
(5) Dave Snowden, “Multi-ontology sense making; a new simplicity in decision making“ http://cognitive-edge.com/articles/multi-ontology-sense-making-a-new-simplicity-in-decision-making/
(6) Dave Snowden, “Granularity”, http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/granularity/