Episode Transcript
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In the agile
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world, there's lots of emphasis
on incremental delivery of value.
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Agile, of course, is short for agile
software development,
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and in many areas of software development,
it's possible to do frequent releases
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and for customers to experience the value
of what you're building as you go.
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You don't have to wait
until everything's done to release it.
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This is great for your ROI.
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It's great for reducing risk.
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It's great for learning as you go.
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So you're more likely
to build the right thing,
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and it makes a huge difference
for motivation.
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Meaningful progress is motivating
when you're shipping frequently.
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There's a natural force
to prioritize value early.
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If you want people to use this new thing
that you're making, it needs to provide
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clear value for them.
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This causes us to do the complex stuff
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early, too,
because complexity correlates with value.
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New stuff for humans is complex.
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And that's all great.
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But we often find ourselves
working with clients who are attracted
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to some of the benefits of agile,
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but who, for one reason or another, aren't
able to release incrementally.
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Maybe there's a hardware component
involved and manufacturing
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and everything around that means they're
just not going to ship a little at a time.
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Or maybe the regulatory burden on
every release
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is a high fixed cost
that precludes frequent releases.
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Whatever the reason,
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once you give up the idea of incremental
releases, it's easy to drift
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back into a traditional project
management approach.
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You may be working in iterations,
but you're giving up a lot of the benefits
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of agile.
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In this situation, it's hard
to reason about how to sequence the work.
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Why focus on complex, valuable things
early on if you're not going to ship them?
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Wouldn't it be more efficient
to work in dependency order?
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Shouldn't we just plan the whole thing
and build it the most efficient way?
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In other words,
traditional project management.
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With sprints.
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There's one mental reframe
that we've found useful for this to help
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people get aligned around
the best sequence of the work,
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even if you're not going to ship
incrementally.
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But before we dive into that,
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the humanizing works
Show is a free resource sponsored
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where we help organizations get better
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at leadership, product management,
and collaboration.
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Visit the contact page on our website.
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Drop us a comment
with your thoughts on today's topic.
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Okay, here's the reframe that aligns
everyone around the best sequence of work
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to get the benefits of agile.
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Whether you're shipping frequently or not,
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it's this earn green.
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Let me explain.
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If you've been on a big project
managed in a traditional way, you've
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probably experienced stoplight or green
yellow red status reporting a project
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or aspects of the project get their status
reported as red, yellow, or green.
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Green typically means something like
the project is going
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according to expectations
or on schedule or under budget.
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Yellow is things are off track for budget,
timeline or whatever,
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but we're handling it
and red is we're way off track
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and don't have a plan
for saving the project.
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We're in crisis mode.
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When a project gets started.
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Everyone's feeling hopeful.
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Nothing new has emerged yet.
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You're feeling good about the plan.
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So what's the status? Green.
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But objectives.
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We're facing every risk
we're ever going to face on the project,
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whether we know it or not.
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Uncertainty is as high
as it's ever going to be.
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All our assumptions are untested.
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With that reality, what's our status
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thing?
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Thanks for going.
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I've seen this play out firsthand
for over a decade.
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I was a program manager at Adobe, starting
in a junior role and eventually becoming
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the group program manager
for the company's
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flagship product at the time,
the Creative Suite.
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And in that position,
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I oversaw the coordination of hundreds
of professionals across dozens of teams,
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all working towards
major product releases.
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Once we set plans during our early phases,
the job shifted
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to tracking status across all those teams.
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And we use exactly this approach
that you just described.
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For the first several months of status
reports,
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everything was green or maybe yellow.
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And then as the project entered
its final stages, green projects
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were like clockwork.
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Tick over to yellow and yellow projects
would plummet to read.
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The entire organization
would start shifting into crisis mode.
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We called this phase the end game.
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And if that description doesn't
send chills down your spine,
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you probably haven't
lived through many of these projects
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frequently.
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After we released these, we would do
postmortems, and at the postmortem.
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We'd vowed to plan better next time,
and then we'd repeat the pattern.
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Better planning didn't seem to help.
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Green at the start of a project,
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when you're carrying around
all the things that could go wrong,
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looks a lot like denial,
or at least unfounded optimism.
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But what if we had to earn green?
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You don't get the green status
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until you've taken active steps
to de-risk the initiative.
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What would you do?
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Well, you'd tackle the most important,
most risky stuff.
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First, you'd try to prove your ability
to achieve
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the core value of your initiative
as early as possible.
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You'd validate
your most critical, riskiest assumptions.
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That, it turns out, is exactly how
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we want to sequence the work
to get a lot of the benefits of an agile.
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One of the key reasons
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agile gained traction at Adobe stems
directly from this approach.
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When the first teams
effectively adopted scrum,
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they tackled risk and complexity
head on from the outset.
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And then by the time they reached that
endgame phase, they were smooth
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sailing, having mitigated
all the major risks and issues.
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These teams weren't burning the midnight
oil in crisis mode to ship their products.
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Their success caught
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the attention of other teams who wondered
about what's the secret sauce over there?
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And that's how agile began
to spread throughout the company.
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That Adobe
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story highlights how this benefits
different roles.
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If you're a project manager
who wants to see things delivered on time
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and wants to see risks mitigated,
Earn Green gets you what you care about.
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Risks
get tackled early and confidence goes up.
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There's no more seeing everything
blow up in the final ten.
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If you're an agile advocate
like I was at Adobe Earn, green provides
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a compelling way to explain
your prioritization and slicing approach.
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Agile approaches boost confidence
that you're building the right thing
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and doing it early and often,
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even if the rest of the organization
hasn't fully embraced this way of working.
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You can still chip away at risks
within your spear of control.
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By adopting this approach,
you'll avoid constant crisis mode
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and can be assured you're delivering
high value, high quality work
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that'll benefit your customers
and the business.
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Now, using the Earn Green approach
requires two key skills.
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The first one is being able
to recognize complexity.
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The complex assumptions are the ones
most likely to blow up your project.
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If you've ever experienced things
going great for about 90% of your project,
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and then the last ten blowing up
and becoming the second 90%
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you've experienced,
what happens when you start with
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the things you can analyze
and work your way into the complex stuff.
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There are some uncertainties
that you can analyze your way out of.
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There are others that you have to test.
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It's tempting to do
the ones you can analyze first,
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because it feels like you can think
about the others while you make progress.
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Unfortunately,
that's also the most risky approach.
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It's exactly the wrong thing to do.
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So if you can recognize the complex
uncertainties and assumptions in advance,
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you can focus there and avoid
having it blow up on you later.
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The other key
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skill is being able to untangle complexity
and size,
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taking on the complex, valuable
or risky stuff first.
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Can feel like it
gets in the way of showing early progress
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and having quick wins.
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Turns out, though, complexity
and size can be uncoupled.
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It's possible to start with thin slices
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through the core complexity,
which is the best way to earn green.
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We did a webinar with Miro
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a while back on our feature
mining technique for doing exactly this,
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and we shared a template
so you can do it with your team.
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We'll put a link to that
on the episode page.
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Now, you may be thinking
if I report to my execs
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that are just started, project is red,
they're going to freak out.
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There goes my career.
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You're not wrong.
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I actually made this mistake early
in my career, before I realized
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the political implications
of showing up with a red project.
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I thought I was being clever
and highlighting the work
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we needed to do early on
to reduce the risk.
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Turns out, in many organizations,
you're reporting on your competence
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as much as you're
reporting on your project.
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Which, by the way, keeps things
green way too long.
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But don't worry, you don't have
to literally change your project status.
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This can just be a thought
experiment to help you shape your work.
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And then when you do show up
with a Green status report,
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you'll be able to have confidence
it's accurate.
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The earn green approach
isn't just a clever trick,
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it's a fundamental shift
in how we think about organizing work.
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It helps bridge the gap between
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traditional project management
and thinking and agile approaches.
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But we're aware it's not a one size
fits all.
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Every organization and project
has its unique challenges and constraints.
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So if you're curious
about how this approach might work
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in your specific context,
we'd love to explore that.
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You can reach out to us
at Humanizing Work.
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We're always eager to discuss
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how to make ideas like this
a reality in different contexts.
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You can find us at Humanizing Work.
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Com to continue the conversation.
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Don't wait for your next project
to hit that endgame crisis.
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Don't settle for unfounded optimism
disguised as green status reports.
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Instead,
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make your projects earn green by tackling
risk and complexity from the start.
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Thanks for listening
and we'll see you next time.
