Quality, heroes and sustainable pace

As we have seen, Agile development is a complex environment which depends on individual skills.  It is also true that quality is at the heart of great products.  Clearly, quality and complexity can conflict, and we need to manage work in a way which ensures and promotes quality as well as developing features of customer value.  Successful technology teams are ruthless in their application of processes related to ensuring quality. This is behind one of the principles in the Agile Manifesto.

The problem with heroes

Leadership plays a powerful role here.  Many organizations take a “hero” model for leadership.  The leader is egotistical with a high opinion of themselves.  They see their main role as promoting their own career, and it is important to them to be seen to be right.  In the early stages of the organization, heroes thrive.  Deep down, we are conditioned to like heroes, whether your personal preference is Beowulf or Luke Skywalker. 

From whatever culture you draw your heroes, there’s something in human nature that responds to a person with an impossible task, a battle against overwhelming odds and perhaps a final piece of luck that snatches victory from the jaws of defeat.  Organizations are no different here.  They are typically full of inspirational figures who are presented as “larger than life”.  These are often founders who struggled in the early days of the company but pulled through to success against huge odds.

Heroism doesn’t scale

Unfortunately, the organization may eventually discover that heroism is not such a good way to operate as you scale.  Even worse of course is the possibility that the organization never does discover this.  A “hero culture” implies that key activities are routed through a small number of key individuals.  However, we are trying to build in scalability.  How scalable is a culture built on individuals?

If it becomes normal and acceptable that an external individual steps in to manage each crisis, then crises become acceptable to the team.  Those external individuals are typically seen as “special” or differently skilled.  This acts against team empowerment because teams come to believe they need someone else to help them. This puts us back in the domain of Scientific Management – workers needing managers to solve their problems.

This becomes more embedded as the organization becomes more established and creates more of its own legends of past events.  Today’s teams are measured against not against achievable goals but against the exaggerated heroic deeds of a “golden age”.  Eventually an expectation develops that a hero will appear in any difficulty. We need to drag the organisation back from this view.

Sales Hero

When an organization is a start-up, they will often be led by a “Sales Hero”.  The leader pushes for feature development at all costs.  The team is small and the customers have to be supported.  The result is the teams respond by delivering more and faster.  If the start-up is successful they will be acquiring customers and pulling in revenue.  There is little thought of the long term consequences.  The leader, of course, looks great.  The organization is hitting its targets.  Of course these may not be the right objectives longer term.

The doomed hero cycle

This of course is not sustainable.  One change that becomes obvious as the organization grows is the impact of those past decisions.  Quality starts to diminish due to technical decisions which are not scalable and neglect of known issues.  Eventually it reaches impossible levels. 

There is an inevitable crash.

Perhaps productivity collapses as the team cannot make any new changes.  They find that the code is so fragile that even the smallest change introduces errors.  Or quality plummets with constant incidents on deployed products. 

The team is pulled onto constantly supporting customers and fixing issues with their installations.  Or problems in the code mean that releases become slow or impossible.  The roadmap falters as testing and releasing a new build starts to take weeks.

This sounds over-dramatic, but it was exactly where one organization I worked with found themselves.  They felt they had an issue with planning.  The reality was they had an issue with quality.  They had scaled fast with good business success but little attention to process or testing.  When they released a new product release, it would pass internal testing, but fail customer trialling.  This led to defects and rework, in parallel with feature development for the next release.  The end result was that the company was virtually unable to make an effective roll out of the product.

Crisis Hero

When the crash happens, the “Sales Hero” may already have moved on.  However, the next leader becomes a “Crisis Hero”.  They pull everyone together on a quality drive.  The leader ruthlessly defers the roadmap until the problems are addressed.  Again, the hero saves the day, but the roadmap is now delayed and the customers are unhappy.  Inevitably the next hero focusses on roadmap delivery and the cycle starts again.  This destructive cyclical behaviour sets an organizational culture which is very hard to overcome.

Good practices

Our objective should be sustainable pace development.  The oscillation should be avoided.  The need for heroes is itself a negative indication. 

As a leader you should be thinking how you can support your teams. This means delegating decision making to the lowest viable level. It means encouraging teams to assess quality issues and address technical debt on an on-going basis through Sprint Review and Retrospectives.

A fundamental principle of Lean is that if we are to make quality work we must build it into the system.  And we must also build it into the management approach.