Please forgive a some what more personal and indulgent post today; having worked with the team here over the last few months to make the complex and difficult decision to move LP’s online business to London I knew inevitably my own role here would be impacted. Today is my last day at Lonely Planet and so I can’t help then but reflect on the last 12 months, in many ways working here in such a diverse, complex Agile environment has confirmed and refined many of my existing philosophical prejudices about building things, teamwork and productivity.
People need to be your #1 concern – Focus on hiring smart people who fit and enhance your culture. Make sure you understand what motivates them. Don’t be blinkered with building teams of people who are just like yourself, value diversity.
Agile is fantastic when it’s working well – When it’s not it can become a soul sucking zombifying grind. Don’t be fooled, ‘Watergile’ isn’t some awesome hybrid that matches the promised (but rarely delivered) certainty of a traditional big up front design waterfall process with the flexibility and motivation of continuous delivery and improvement from the Agile world.
Conway’s Law is inescapable – Accept this and make sure you structure your application to suit your organisation or vica versa – trying to restructure one without restructuring the other is the road to misery and dysfunction. If you have the luxury of a green fields development then be acutely aware that the way you structure your organisation will inevitably influence your architectural choices.
Having more than 6 developers working in one team is a crucial threshold – As you scale larger than this many of the positive collaborative team dynamics which you have taken for granted up to that level of scale will start to come unstuck. This is something we need to consider and write about in some depth soon – there are important implications when you consider this dynamic and Conway’s Law at the same time.
DevOps is worth it – Right now there is an air of hype around DevOps which reminds me in many ways of the way people talked about XP or Agile in the early days. It’s important to look beyond this and understand the fundamental change that’s driving the DevOps movement; Ops isn’t about installing linux and configuring network interfaces anymore, virtualised environments, automation, monitoring and deployment all require the same engineering approach that writing good code does. Getting your developers working with your operations staff unlocks powerful knowledge sharing both ways.
Certainty and control doesn’t come through measurement and governance – There are 13 different Agile teams working within Lonely Planet, each has their own flavour adapted and optimised over time. Some teams apply lots of traditional project governance, some teams apply classic agile governance (burn downs, burn ups as well as tracking velocity etc) and some teams take a very organic light touch approach. I haven’t observed any positive correlation between governance methodology and the success of a team.
Space, Communication and Distraction – Agile is all about communication; routines and rituals which encourage teams to communicate, tackling issues and problems as well as sharing and learning from success. Our communication culture, physical environment and attitude to multitasking and distractions are less obvious levers which can have a profound impact on our teams and how effective they can be – Lonely Planet has allowed me to observe and work with a variety of teams, styles and approaches solidifying 10 years of puzzling over this one coming to some useful conclusions.
I’ll miss my colleagues, working for a brand I love and Jimmy’s food in the cafe. Next week I’m off to Agile 2011 to talk about Space, Communication and Distractions and then puzzle over what’s next.