Monthly Archives: July 2012

Deep Gorilla: To Succeed in Agile, Follow the Money

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Deep_ThroatDarkness threatened to swallow me whole. The elevator doors had opened up on a scene right out of a classic horror film. The underground parking garage was plunged into the depths of darkness. Light was limited to a few lights pouring out pitifully small pools of illumination. The scattered light contributed to making the darkness even darker. Facilities was working on the “intermittent power issues with all diligence” but that didn’t change the fact that our parking garage currently resembled a set from some bad horror thriller.

Just like my mood.

Oh, sure, the Icarus team was doing awesome. They’d taken to scrum like a politician to a fundraiser and their performance was amazing. As a proof of concept it had been an earth shattering success. As a catalyst for change, it had run straight into a brick wall of resistance. “Oh it worked fine for a small project, but it will never work on a real product.”

It was time to throw in the towel. I’d given it the old college try and carried the water. Now it was time to take my marbles and go home….

The distinctive click of an iPhone unlocking and the sudden glow of the screen revealed the dark outlines of a figure. Cloaked in the inky blackness and wearing dark clothing, It was difficult to tell where the figure left off and the darkness began. He had an almost looming presence, as if he were greater in size than me. Greater in size than any man. Wait a minute, was that a black coat, or that was that fur?

“Hogarth!?!”

My gorilla lifted his iPhone to lips, the glow of the screen lighting up half his face and plunging the other side into deeper shadows. “Shhh, no names. We’re you followed? “

“Followed, what on earth are you talking about?”

Hogarth leaned back and turned his head from side to side scanning the darkness of the parking garage. Apparently satisfied there was nothing in the nothingness , he looked back at me. “If Percy knew I was here it would be bad for both of us.”

“Percy?” I wracked my brains trying to think of anyone in the company named Percy. “Wait a minute, you mean that Elephant you play poker with?”

Hogarth nodded, “Percy Liddy, he’s accounting’s Elephant in the room. His skin is so thick, nothing can get through to him. We were at a company once and the stock fell ninety-five percent in four hours. He just stood there, unmoved and perfectly calm. One of the monkeys from legal asked him what his trick for not panicking was. Percy responded that the trick was in not minding.”

“Hogarth, what are you going on about? I’ve had a long day and I just want to go home and drown my sorrows in reruns of Gunsmoke.” That’s all I really wanted to do. I was exhausted and tired of running head first into the brick walls of agile resistance. The company executives just didn’t see the value. It didn’t match their vision of the world and so it didn’t have a chance of succeeding. I was stuck, completely stalled, I had no idea who to talk to that would actually listen and could support an agile adoption.

“Follow the money,” Hogarth said .

I blinked at him. “What do you mean, follow the money?”

His bucket sized head gave a shake, “I can’t tell you that.”

I puzzled at what he had said. Follow the money. Besides being a way over used movie quote, what the hell did it have to do with anything. Then I understood. Okay I understood what he meant, I didn’t understand why. “You mean I should talk to Finance? Are you crazy, they pinch sawdust just to make more pencils.”

Just then Hogarth’s iPhone turned off, plunging our corner of the garage into total darkness. A few seconds later, from even deeper in the darkness I heard his voice whisper, “Just follow the money.”

Shaking my head I turned on my own iPhone, to light my way to my car. Accountants as the key to going agile, was he serious?

AGILE SUCCESS? FOLLOW THE MONEY….

Crack the shell on your average enterprise class company and you’ll find so many agile antibodies if could overwhelm even the most robust agile coach’s immune system. Once you move past the small company, you start running into all sorts of adoption anti-patterns. Enterprise companies have been doing things the way they have been doing them for so long that inertia will keep them going for the next century. Without some way to show a tangible benefit, that makes sense to the C-Suite executives, we are going to continue to run into challenges at the higher end of corporate mindsets.

Pat Reed and Walt Wyckoff may have just given us the tools to break down the walls around the C-Suite. I attended the July session of the Bay Area Agile Leadership Network. There, Pat and Walt presented an Agile Accounting Model: The key to Enterprise Agile. I knew of Pat and had attended a talk of hers early in my agile journey. So despite being a failed art major, I confronted my fears of finance and went to see what I could learn. I’ve spent the last decade working in Enterprise class companies and I’ve seen first hand the challenges of trying to take agile from a tolerated experiment to the accepted way.

I admit I was dubious. I also admit a lot of that doubt was tied up in my own lack of finance knowledge. In some industries, project management has its hands all over the budgets of their projects. In my entire Silicon Valley experience, I’ve never been in a company where budgets and project managers ever had more than a passing acquaintance. I wasn’t alone in the room either. Basic concepts like Expense versus Capitalization are things most of us understood, but only just.

It wasn’t until the break out exercises that my Aha lights started going off. Working with Walt on how to explain the benefits of agile to accountants, we made a break through that the same explanation used to the accountants could be change the minds of the C-Suite.

Again, I’m no accounting genius, so bear with me here.

First off: Expense vs. Capitalization for dummies, by a dummy- Expense means you have to subtract that money from your balance sheet right now. If the project expense is three million dollars, that’s three million less profit for this quarter. Capitalizing allows you to spread the cost over months or even years. IT does this with computer hardware all the time. You don’t drop $100K for a server on the Q3 bottom line. Instead you divide the cost over the life of the server. So a server expected to last four years costs the company $25K a year, for the next four years. (Go check with a real finance person on this before taking it to the bank.)

Now to the benefits:

You can capitalize your Product Management (And more of development and deployment):

In a standard Waterfall lifecycle, everything that happens before coding starts (officially starts with the project commit)and after it ends, is considered an expense. Only the direct development effort is considered a “material” part of the project and can be capitalized and then only after it ships.

In agile, design and development are often tightly inter twined. If you are making proof of concepts then you can capitalize. If you’ve read Lean Startup, remember the guys who started the smart concierge service. Now think about the fact that they could start capitalizing their product the minute they had that first paying customer. This was months before the first line of code was ever written.

Agile can let you release more often. This allows you to start your capitalization faster.

Instead of releasing once every eighteen months, a successful agile can be shipping customer releasable product as fast as every month. You can start capitalizing faster, so you spread out your costs faster.

But wait, Enterprise customers don’t like frequent releases. And what about proof? You have to convince the accountants you can really ship.

First off, there is almost always one customer who will take your release. And all you need is one. So long as one customer takes the release and puts it into production then you have a shipping product and you can start your capitalization.

As for trust, it’s not a quick road to make a major change. Go to accounting right now. Tell them, “In the next twelve months we’ll make a shippable release every quarter and we’ll find at least one customer to install it. A year from now, we will come back to you and ask that we be allowed to Capitalize our development process from the start of Sprint 0.” In other words. Show them the money first. Prove you can walk the walk.

It can allow you to Capitalize your services

I didn’t get this one as fully as the other two. Ron Lichty, an agile coach and author of “Managing the Unmanageable”a soon to be released book, raised this and by the nods from Walt I know it made sense. With so many companies offering professional services (consulting) along with their products, this could be a huge win.

A word of caution: Beware the dark side.

Okay, so let’s go back to that Lean Startup use case. They haven’t written a single line of code. The product doesn’t exist yet. Instead they are manually doing everything their automated concierge service will eventually do. The CEO and CTO meet every week with their one customer. And yet they could capitalize all of this, spreading out the cost of coming up with this product over several years.

If we give Wall Street new and creative ways to report profits, we will also have to be very certain we instill in the C-Suite the rest of the values of agile and Stoos. If we don’t, we could end up at the wrong end of a shell game that makes Enron and Bear Stearns look like table stakes at church bingo night.

Umm, I’m not following you.

Yeah, what he said, only I don’t trust your data.

Fair enough. I’m not sure I followed it all either. I’ve since started watching Khan Academy’s videos on Core Finance, to raise my own knowledge of basic business accounting. Don’t take my word for it.

Hear it from the Speakers: Pat and Walt will be presenting their findings at Agile2012. For those of you in the SF Bay Area, I know that Silicon Valley ALN is trying to get them to come and speak later this year.

Review the Slides: Bay ALNhas their slides posted to their Meetup page.

Google it: “Pat Reed Agile Accounting” will find you older examples of the presentation. I don’t know how much it has evolved over the years so this probably is your last option.

Imagine a world where the bean counters were asking the CEOs why the company wasn’t using agile development?

Imagine…

You can’t have your Gorilla and eat it too

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“Augggh!!!!” I pounded on my keyboard in abject frustration and began hurling every single curse I knew at the screen and the faceless IT drones I knew had made my life a living hell.

Hogarth opened a single eye and stared at me from the corner. Arms crossed over his chest and chin tucked to his arms he had been happily dozing in the late afternoon sun that poured into my office. He didn’t say anything. He just fixated me with an unblinking deep brown eye.

I pointed at the computer. “There did it again! They updated the shared space and now I have to reinstall the damned plug in!”

My gorilla ponderously lifted his head. Crinkling his blunt forehead, he now fixed me with both of his eyes. The unblinking gaze seemed to say “And?”

“And it’s annoying!” I snapped, looking for some kind of support to justify the seething anger I was feeling.

Hogarth just looked at me, unmoving and unblinking.

“Okay, I know, I know. It only takes two minutes to update. It’s not the end of the world.” I clicked the okay button and leaned back in my chair. “Still, you’d think they could stop fixing the site every other day.”

Hogarth reached one leathery hand up to scratch his nose.

I rolled my eyes at him, “That’s not fair!” I retorted. “Yes, it was broken. Yes, the old architecture meant we couldn’t do a fraction of what we had before. But it is still annoying to have to install all these updates.”

Hogarth turned to look out my open door. I followed his gaze to see the project burn down chart on the wall opposite my door. Turning back to him I gaped. “What? You think trying to convince corporate to release our product twice a year, instead of every eighteen months is the same thing. “

Hogarth shrugged,  “If the shoe fits, don’t call the kettle black.”

Wha.. Oh….

 

Is the Agile Pot calling the Firefox Kettle Black?

The other day I saw something I found disturbing. Mind you, complaints on Twitter is nothing new. I wouldn’t be surprised if more than half of all tweets are someone complaining about something. So I’m fairly inured to seeing tweplaints. When the first complaint about “Oh look, another Firefox update.” I ignored it. Then I saw the second one.

What got me was not the complaint itself. No it was who was making the complaints (or retweeting in one case). Both complaints came to me by way of people I consider  part of my “Agile/Lean” follow list.

Seriously?

Agile principle three is “Deliver working software frequently…” Principle 6 states “Working software is the primary measure…” Similar maxims exist within XP and Lean. I was just at an agile meetup where the speaker was outlining a way to get corporate behind quarterly releases in an enterprise environment. Lean Startup talks about Minimal Viable Product and getting in front of the customer as quickly as possible. Then you pivot or persevere again and again.

And we are complaining that Firefox is iterating?

Really?

 So let me think on this…

  • You can just click no. It takes two seconds.
  • You can just click yes. It takes about two minutes on most computers.
  • I don’t know about you, I know I’ve never bothered to pay attention to what they are fixing. My guess is some of the things are pretty important and I care about them. I’m just too lazy to ask.

And

How much of what we are complaining about has to do with the fact we have to take some kind of action as opposed to it being done automagically?

  • Have you looked at your Win7 Installed Updates list? The list of security and hot fix updates is staggering. And I am really all together clueless because Windows happily does the updates in the background and usually I only know because my computer reboots in the middle of the night every so often.
  • Do you know how annoyed I get at having to always update my iPhone apps? Do you know why? Because I have to do it manually. My wife’s Android has an option to automatically update apps. I have all her apps set to do that.

Firefox is following some of the key tenets of agile, release of often, always seek to improve. I don’t know if they are an agile shop and sure, they could be a little better on communication.

But really? Does anything who believes in agile, lean, XP, kanban or Stoos have any place complaining that a company is trying to make their product better? Just because it’s an annoyance to us?

Okay, maybe you’re all right. Clearly we don’t want to annoy our customers by fixing or improving our product quickly….

Do you have a plan for the gorilla on the floor?

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“More data, I need more data.” I was staring at my desk, taking in the papers I had meticulously arranged to fill nearly every bit of open space.  For all it was, I knew it wasn’t enough

My ninety day plan was going perfectly. I’d interviewed all the key customers to the PMO office. I’d interviewed everyone on the project teams. I’d interviewed all our vendors. I’d interviewed the customer service manager and then his team leads. I’d read every process doc I could find on the website. I’d read the previous versions of the product lifecycle to see how it had evolved. I’d taken the basic new hire training and then I’d signed up for the sales new hire training.

And I needed more data. I didn’t want to make any mistakes. I was going to make damn sure my ninety day plan was perfect! What else could I do?

“You could interview the janitor.”

Hey.. That’s right I hadn’t interviewed the maintenance staff… Wait a minute! “Hogarth!”

I looked up just in time to see my gorilla sink down beside my brand new fichus tree. Ignoring me, his deep brown eyes contemplated my fichus tree for several moments before a leathery hand reached out to snap a branch free.

“I’m trying to figure out the next step in my ninety day plan, do you mind?”

Hogarth calmly nibbled on the branch, neatly stripping a leaf from the end of the branch. Without looking at me he mumbled. “Hundred and fifty day plan…”

“What?” I turned to look at my wall calendar. My eyes flicked over the months doing the mental math. “How has it already been five months?”

Hogarth shrugged. Pulling a piece of bark out of his teeth he said “Don’t look at me, I’m just the gorilla in the room you’ve been stepping over.”

“What?”

“It’s advice real estate agents give. When you buy a fixer upper, you make a list of all the things that need to be fixed. And then you fix them.” Hogarth said.

“What does that have to do with the gorilla in the room?”

“Well technically it’s the dead body in the room.”

“WHAT?!?”

Hogarth turned his placid eyes towards me. “If you have a dead body on your living room floor, after six months you stop thinking about having to step over it. It’s the same thing with a fixer upper, after six months of dealing with the leaky faucet, you get used to it and it doesn’t get fixed.”

“You’re telling me I’m a leaky faucet?”

“When was the last time anyone came to you for anything?”

Wait, now that he mentioned  it… Ah man…

 

YOU BETTER HAVE A PLAN, AFTER THE PLAN

In 2010 I wrote the Ninety Day Gorilla. In that Hogarth and I got to listen as poor Bob (not Bob the Product Manager, this was Bob the other project manager) was let go. What was his crime? His crime had been to try and make changes to fast. He hit the ground running and tried to fix everything as soon as he started. Poor Bob ended up alienating people and getting on the wrong side of the political land mines he didn’t even know were there.

Bob didn’t have a ninety day plan. He didn’t follow the cardinal rule of “Do no harm in your first ninety days.”

Bet you, though, that Bob wouldn’t have ever been accused of being useless. Sure, people hated his guts. But he got stuff done.

There is a follow up rule to the “Do not harm” rule. That rule is “Have a plan for the next ninety days.”

You see, the ninety day rule isn’t a magic bullet by itself. You don’t spend those ninety days sipping coffee and watching the chaos unfold around you. Peter Taylor, the Lazy Project Manager, never advises sitting in the comfy chair during the early part of a project. Those first ninety days are when you gather the information and build the trust you will need to make a difference.

You’re first ninety day plan is something you have ready on day one. During the next ninety days you need to build your plan for the next ninety days. There is no magic formula for this next ninety days. It depends on what you learn and the trust you build in the first ninety days.

What is important though, is you don’t want to be the dead body everyone steps over. If you haven’t done anything after six months, then no one will ever expect you to do anything.

Get off the floor and get out the door.

Does a Gorilla by any other name still smell?

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Or- What’s my title? 

I stared at the words. And all I felt was a complete and total lack of enthusiasm threatening to overwhelm my very being.

–  Project Management Professional  –

How… dead. I just didn’t have any feeling for the words. Words that described a good portion of my professional career. Words that had gotten me where I was, only to leave me feeling flat and listless. I sighed. “Oh well, it’s not like the words make the man.”

I moved my mouse over the “Ok” button and prepared to commit to another 1000 business cards. One thousand cards that described me about as well as calling the Bugatti Veyron Super “just another car.”

“Why don’t you just change the title?”

Oh, great, Hogarth… I looked up from my computer screen only to find my office completely empty. Blinking I started to wonder if I’d taken to imaging my imaginary gorilla.

“Nope,” came his rumbling voice from behind me. Turning about in my seat I watched as Hogarth squeezed his way through the window to my office. The third floor open window.

“Hogarth!” Would I ever get tired of saying that? Yes, I already had. Would I ever get to stop saying it? One remains eternally hopeful. “Why are you climbing in my window?”

Pivoting to put his feet on the floor he rolled his eyes at me. “Because I’m a gorilla, duh…” Moving past me, making a beeline for my fichus he said, “Besides the elevator is out of service and you need a badge to use the stairs.”

Sigh, I did ask. “Hands off the fichus!” Hogarth turned to give me a pained look. “Why are you here?” I asked.

“Why not?”

Sigh. I decided to ignore him and turned back to my computer. I had a 1000 business cards to order.

“You know,” Hogarth drawled. “I’ve been thinking about a career change.”

Okay, that got my attention. Maybe he’d decide to take up flying and would be so busy with flight school he wouldn’t be around to bother me. “Oh?” I said hopefully.

He nodded, turning to run a hand across the small wooden conference table beyond my desk. “Yeah, I was thinking of being a beaver.”

“You can’t be a beaver, you’re a gorilla!” I snapped. Now he was just being silly and I didn’t have time for silly.

“What? There some law that says a gorilla can’t change careers?”

“Hogarth, being a beaver isn’t a career, it’s a species. You want to be president of the US then more power to you, but no amount of wishful thinking is going to make you a beaver!”

Hogarth turned around and gave me one of those smiles. You know, the one. The one that tells me I’d just walked right into the lesson he’d been trying to teach me. “You’re right. I’ll always be a gorilla, can’t fight birth. So were you born a project manager?”

Yeah, that smile…

 

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Regular readers will recall that I’ve recently been at the SFAgile2012 conference. Something I didn’t cover in my prior blogs, on that conference, was my own loss of words to describe just what I did. When you’re surrounded by a room full of agile and lean visionaries, coaches, inspirational and thought thinkers, describing yourself as a “project manager” not only feels inadequate, it can make you feel unclean. My twitter handle didn’t help me feel any better. When I first joined twitter, I was damn proud of my PMP certification and it made perfect sense to use JBC_PMP. When in a room full of people who  think agile certifications are not worth the paper they are printed on, imagine how one feels to advertise that you have that “waterfall” certification.

In short, I find myself unsatisfied with the description and title of Project Manager (or Program Manager).  It’s the title I’ve held for the majority of my professional career and still hold in my day job. This isn’t a new dissatisfaction,  I have grappled with this before in the “Armchair Gorilla.” In the comments of that blog Tobias Mayer ‘s suggest it was time to change what I called myself and while I realized he was right, I didn’t have a good term to use it its place. Like it or hate it, it’s the title of common use and HR doesn’t argue about paying me.

Attending SFAgile 2012 made me question all this again. This was in no small part from attending Tobias’ talk on “The Why of Scrum.” In this talk he expands on his earlier blog on Scrum not being project management (see below). Again I was left me hanging by loose ends. I can’t argue with Tobias that the strict PMBoK definition of a PM doesn’t have a lot of purpose in a pure agile shop. Thing is, where does that leave me? I’m not an engineer turned PM. I’m not a Wharton MBA with business plans spewing forth from my mouth. I’m an ex-art student, customer support guy who grew into a role that most people call project management. So is there a place for me in this emerging world of radical lean agile management?

Yes, yes there is. Because I’m not my title, I’m something else. The question is what? You really need to go back to “Armchair Gorilla.”  and my “I’m R2-D2 ” blog to get my full discourse on what I see as my role. The short form is I’m the guy who helps the team be excellent. It’s not my job to be the super star, it’s my job to help the team be stars. This can take many forms, from dealing with the overhead process (past a certain size, nearly all companies have “process”) so they don’t have to, facilitate communication, battle IT to get the servers back up, or even make a double cappuccino with a twist of lemon if that’s what’s needed.

The question is: What the heck do I call this role?

Let’s take a look at the language we use, and the problems inherent to them.

Project: Even in the lean and agile space we still end up defaulting to this word most of the time. It is a catch all word that sums up “what the heck are we doing?” as well as all the overhead baggage needed to put a product out to the customer. The biggest flaw I see with this word is that to often it is equated only with the development effort. A project starts when the developer starts to build and ends when development is done. Projects are so much more. From the first idea to the first delighted customer is all part of your project.

Unfortunately the word also has a fair amount of negative baggage tied to it. The word project summons up visions of rigidity, sequential flow, punishing process and all manner of ills that can befall the creation of something that delights the customer.

And “program” has pretty much all the same baggage, so let’s just lump it all on one baggage train for now.

Manager: We only have to look to Dictionary.com to see the first glimmers of the problem.

“A person who has control or direction of an institution, business, etc., or of a part, division, or phase of it.”

Notice the distinct lack of the word “people?” One of the other definitions points to the word “Manages” and the 3rd definition for Manages is

“to dominate or influence (a person) by tact, flattery, or artifice.”

Ooh! I get to DOMINATE! Yeah!. My people are just assets like my computers. Can I start calling our Health Care provider “People Tech Support?”

The word manage has come to imply control over people and that’s a huge problem. Manager Tools has long maintained that “Role Power” is a flawed tool for good management. You need to have a relationship with your people if you are going to be successful. Just by their very title, we set managers up to fail from the get go.

Project Manager (Program Manager):  I know! Let’s take two words, that  already have issues, slam together and we’ll be bound to have recipe for greatness, right?

No, no you won’t.

Even if we don’t acknowledge all the bad baggage that has grown up around this title, we’d have a hard time justifying the use of the title to define this role. The title has no human factor in it. There is nothing about the title that talks to the important work that this role does. There isn’t anything in the title to indicate you are there for the team.

Project Leader: “Take me to your leader.” When the alien ask you this, I don’t think they want you to take them to an effigy of MS Project. You can’t lead a project, because a project isn’t a person. Add to this, you’ve got the hole leader issue. You see I own a horse. That old saying of “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink?” It’s a load of horse poop. If a horse doesn’t want to move, you aren’t moving it, at least not in a straight line (we won’t get into horse training here, wrong blog). Instead I tend to think of this role as more the person who asks the horse “where’s the water?”

Team Lead: A title that has become synonymous with “un paid” psuedo-manager. The best coder is the team lead. Not because of any skill with the team, just because he can crank out more lines of good code in a day than anyone else. Let’s just leave that one on the cutting room floor and move on.

Project Lead: We can leave Project Lead in the same cutting room pile as Team Lead. It’s got the same issues, on top of not having any people focus.

Coach: “Put me in coach, I’m ready to go.” Coach is a good word. In the literal sense it is someone who trains, though really a coach is more of someone who helps to bring the best out of you. The problem comes when you try and modify it, in order to give it more description.

  • Project Coach: “Come on, Gantt chart, give me ten more sit ups!” You can’t coach a project, so this doesn’t work to define this role.
  • Agile Coach: “But our project is waterfall.” Very limited in its scope.
  • Lean Coach: “Let’s burn off those calories.” See Agile coach.
  • Waterfall Coach: “This is your barrel, the entrance to Niagara is over there.”

Coach might be a good word, the question is “Coach of what?”

Facilitator: Another great word. It’s issue is more in the baggage of its other uses. Facilitating a project planning session is just what this role should do. Facilitating conflict between the teams. Facilitating communication with the stakeholders. Like a good catalyst, a facilitator causes activity to happen, without itself being effected.

The worry is that the title has a well established place in the business world. It is considered a specialist and not an “always there” job role. Can it rise above these preconceived limitations?

Project Coordinator: We already have beaten the word project into glue. The word coordinator, on its surface seems like a good word. Non-threatening, more passive than active, implies working with things outside oneself. When you dig in though, there are two things you run into. The first is the baggage. In the formal project management world, a project coordinator is an low or entry level position. Project coordinators work for project managers. This kind of baggage makes it a bad term to use for this role.

Then we look at the dictionary and are forced to scratch our heads. “Coordinator” points to “coordinate,” which points to “coordination.” This in turn points to “coordinating” or “coordinated.” Which points back to “coordinate.” Circular logic and I still don’t know what your job is!

Scrum Master: Tobias Mayer (@tobiasmayer ) wrote a great blog titled “Scrum is not Project Management” to which I wrote the reply blog “Armchair Gorilla” where I  ended up agreeing with Tobias (after much gnashing of teeth). This blog is really an extension of that thread.

However the question at hand is if this title serves to describe the role. The answer is, “no, it cannot.” First off is the word scrum. Unless you are using scrum, then it isn’t an appropriate word. Second off is the word Master. Anyone who knows anything about getting a CSM certificate knows that you are a master of none. Most likely the entire title came about as a riff on “Master of Ceremonies.” Unfortunately it has lost that connection and the title of Scrum Master, even in the narrow confines of Scrum Teams, has dubious value.

Servant Leader: I’m pretty sure I’ve put down in writing that I love the essence of this title. Having started my career in customer support, I have always held onto the roots that I am serving my customers in what ever job I do. And who my customer is can be very broad. I think of my team as my customers. If I don’t help them, I have failed my customer.

I just don’t like the title itself. Servant is tied up in centuries of toil and oppression. Am I the team’s serf? Do I polish their shoes and lay out their best coat for the evening meal? And then the word Leader has its own issues.  As I touched on above, it has connotations of being “in charge” when the reality of this role not about being “in charge,” it’s about empowering.

Agent of Change (Change Agent): “Secret agent man, secret agent man…” Other than the obvious need for another gratuitous joke, this is a term we need to tackle as Change Agent has become a common term now. But what does it mean? I saw a great comic that had a person and death. The person said “Oh, no, it’s the Angel of Death.” To which Death replies “I ‘ve changed my name to Agent of Change.”

I don’t know, “change agent” just seems a bit too disruptive. It tends to  make me think of a less flattering term that I’ve been called in the past (for polite audiences we’ll call this term “Fecal Aggregator”). Change agent implies that things need to change, when sometimes you just need to tweak or adjust. To grab onto the Lean Startup parlance, change agent would seem to always imply “pivot” when sometimes you need to “persevere.”

Sweet suffering succotash! Where does that leave us? 

Yes, finding a name for what we do isn’t as easy as it looks. In fact I don’t have the answer (Put the slings and arrows away). What I do have is the next step in the exploration.

Of course if you’re reading this, you know I’ve styled myself as “The Gorilla Coach.” It works only because of the web site and the blog I’ve created over the last few years. Because of Hogarth, I have a great conversation starter when I answer people’s “what do you do” question with “I’m a Gorilla Talker.”

Thing is, I don’t think Gorilla Talker is something that will work on broad scale. For the limited nature of myself and this blog, it works. When coaching people, it works. When talking to someone in the 55,000 person company that is my day job, it kind of falls a little flat.

So…

Catalyst Agent / Catalyst Coordinator / Catalyst Coach:

The word Catalyst has some interesting definitions. Two, in particular, stands out to me.

  • “something that causes activity between two or more persons or forces without itself being affected.”
  • “a person whose talk, enthusiasm, or energy causes others to be more friendly, enthusiastic, or energetic.”

“Without itself being affected”: I like this! For one it implies I’m not using myself up. Too many projects have I poured my heart and soul into, only to be left sorely wanting in the end (or laid off in one case, despite the project being a complete success).  For a another, it means I’m not the focus. I’m helping others, not directing others.

“a person whose talk…”: I so want to be this person. That just sounds like the coolest job description in the world.

“What do you do?”

“I cause others to be friendly and enthusiastic.” It reminds me of a Manager Tools quote (which I shall now proceed to butcher) that goes something like “I’ll trade 90% expertise and 10% enthusiasm for 90% enthusiasm and 10% expertise any day.” If I can bring the best out of the team, company, project or product, then I’ve had a great day.

I just don’t know if I’m an Agent, Coordinator or a Coach. Should I be using a spy camera, holding a clip board or blowing a whistle? One thing I do know, my Twitter ID no longer fits me. So with a nod of thanks to the old, I welcome in JBC_GC as my new handle.

 

What do you think of being a Catalyst?

 

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