Well it turns out the “controversy” about AgileExams turned out to be the biggest of misunderstandings.

The Testimonials Were Authentic: Several of AgileExams customers contacted me and revealed the root cause of this confusion is the fussiness of PMI.org’s online certification registry:

• The name on the testimonial may not be the same format as the name in the registry (e.g. Joel Bancroft-Conners explains you can find his name by searching ‘Bancroft’, but not ‘Conners’)
• There are occasional delays from passing when a candidate passes the exam, until they are listed in the system.
• Most of all, candidates may choose not to be listed in the registry (which beguiles me, since the whole point of a certification is to assert to people that you’ve accomplished a structured learning program)

However, there are some bitter hard feelings left over. Joel posts an excellent analysis of the situation: The issue is not the issue. Apparently Yes, the testimonials may be authentic, but that didn’t stop the controversy from happening. In any crisis management situation,  (e.g. Joel cites The Toyota Prius), the response to the crisis often matters more than the core problem.

Privacy is not an effective crisis management response for public issues: In response to the issue, the owner of AgileExams has asserted his privacy by removing his LinkedIn profile from the internet, and personally asking me to refrain from using his name, which I have done. Yes, he has the right to his privacy, but only if he choses to remain in the private. Once you go out into the public with a product, you offer some of your privacy in exchange. Some examples from last night’s Republican debate show the point. Newt Gingrich blasted the press for highlighting the personal nature of his marriage. He made the point that some things are personal, and not related to public life. But then Newt promptly forgot his got high-and-mighty position when he questioned Mitt Romney about not releasing his tax returns. It turns out if you run for public office, you lose some of that right to privacy. Likewise, if you release a product online, then you have to expect the public scrutiny of 2 billion internet users.

Personally, I’m glad the service was exonerated. It further validates the efforts of the 515 project managers who earned the certification. Also, I believe the service made a substantive contribution to the community. So, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry that AgileExams had the misfortune to endure this controversy, but alas sometimes it is the price one has to pay to be successful.

Today, the Agile journalistic blog AgileScout.com posted a discovery that testimonials for the PMI-ACP exam prep service, AgileExams.com, may be engaging in some false advertising.

Controversy 1: Several of the testimonials come from people NOT listed as PMI-ACP certificants. PMI offers a public registry on its website, which allows employers to verify whether someone has the PMI certification they claim to have. Curiously, several of the customers quoted on AgileExams.com are NOT listed as certification holders. For example, the site quotes Jonathan Daly saying “…your site made the real exam a breeze”, but Daly is not listed in the PMI-ACP registry. Granted, PMI offers certificants the option of NOT being listed in the registry, for privacy reasons. But granting permission to be quoted, and then not granting PMI to list you in the registry seems odd.

Controversy 2: The advertised customer success rate is a bit naive. The post also reveals that AgileExams.com asserts that of their customers who actually took the the PMI-ACP exam, a full 97% passed. Unfortunately, PMI provides no way to tabulate failing candidates. Instead, AgileExams.com offered an open call for its customer to self-report whether they passed or failed. Not surprisingly, only 3% of his survey respondents admitted to failing the exam. As a trainer myself, I have received 0% of my own customers saying they failed the exam. Yet, I’m not naive enough to assume that nobody failed. I can only know for sure that nobody is willing to admit to their trainer that they failed.

Controversy 3: The site offers little in the way of Agile reputation . The site owner, [name omitted], is a relative unknown in the agile space, and some skeptics want some information as to who is involved in the product’s creation, and how it was put together. However, other people have commented directly on the blog post that they care less about this, and more data about the product’s effectiveness.

Summary: In the end, what looks like a juicy controversy may just be some circumstantial misunderstandings. Here’s how AgileExams.com can clear all this up:

• Update the website with testimonials from candidates who are listed in the PMI-ACP registry.
• Update the website to focus on the LinkedIn testimonials: http://www.agileexams.com/linkedin-group-testimonials/
• The site owner can post an open letter on his website explaining who worked on the product (including the associated AgileBOK.org), whether they bring any agile expertise to bear, and the methodology they use for building the site.

In my opinion, some simple website edits can quell this controversy, and also build the product’s reputation at the same time.

What about you? What do you think of the website’s product, and the claims it makes about the product?

Shortly after my last post, my website got hacked. At first, it seemed like a minor glitch: Visitors clicking from google would be redirected to a harmless directory site. However, I was rather occupied with significant business travel, while also relocating my family. I simply didn’t have the time to investigate it. Well, it snowballed into a full-blown crisis, and I re-learned some old management lessons along the way:

Lesson 1: Root Cause Analysis. I consult and train and advice people on the “5 whys” technique, but this time it got personal. Here’s why:

The hackers likely got in through an outdated plugin, BECAUSE the plugins were not updated to the latest versions,

BECAUSE my technophile webhost (Dreamhost.com) does not auto-update the latest versions of WordPress blogging software I use,

BECAUSE my technophile webhost is designed for people who are sufficiently on their technical game to do those update themselves, which did not happen,

BECAUSE I did not do those updates,

BECAUSE I am lame.

When YOU are the root cause of operational or project failure, it can be very personal.

Lesson 2: Always have a backup plan. As I was cleaning out all the corrupted files, I inadvertently deleted all my blog photos. Fortunately, Dreamhost has a restore feature that allowed me to recover those files. THEN, when I moved my blog to WordPress, the change in DNS entries caused my emails to get lost. Fortunately, I had alternate emails that people could use to contact me…and…fortunately, those emails were setup for most of my online services. But in reality, my good fortune was made possible by a little backup planning. I chose my webhost based on its multi-restore features, and I chose my emails to be redundant in case I lost access to them.

Lesson 3: Adapt to the changing reality.  I’ve been a customer of Dreamhost.com forever, but it’s time for me to move on. If I am the root cause of this failure, then I need to resolve the risk of causing this same thing from happening again. Dreamhost is a web host designed for technical people who know how to “ssh into a bash shell and grep for which files contain strange commands”. That used to be me 10 years ago, but not anymore. As a father of three, business coach, and entrepreneur, I’m not longer the geek-o-phile I used to be. So, I’ve moved my blog over to wordpress.com, where it’s a little bit more automated and idiot-proof.

In the end, management theory only matters when it has impact on the real world. This time around, I have been taking my own medicine. QUESTION: how about you? When have you had to take your own management or leadership advice?

A full four weeks ago, I saw Malcolm Gladwell keynote the PMI Global Congress in Dallas. Here was his opening point:

The paradox of innovative organizations is that they are followers and borrowers, not leaders and innovators

Malcolm Gladwell offers provocative observations on innovation

He followed that point with an avalanche of examples:

• During Bekaa air battle in 1982 (http://bit.ly/nee2Aa), Israel was the first to use drones, awax radar, and SAM missiles at the same time. These were technologies pioneered by the highly funded, innovation-oriented Soviets; then developed by the Americans with budget oversight and “get the job done” culture; finally utilized by a crisis-motivated Israel with no R&D budget at all. He found this example in the military innovation book by Adamsky
• The mouse and the Graphical User Interface (GUI) were developed at the storied Xeroc Parc project in Palo Alto. Steve Jobs famously took that GUI and did what Xerox could not do: launch a commercial product with the technology (i.e. the Mac). It was a beautiful product and business success. But it was Microsoft who modified the technology into Windows, the most commercially successful operating system of all time.
• Friendster is the one that lays claim to the first pure-play social media pioneer. MySpace matured Friendster’s breakthrough idea, and sold out to News Corp for a half-billion dollars. Now we all talk about Facebook as the king of social media and its multi-billion dollar valuation.

Here is the myth-breaker: being first to market with a fresh new idea, does NOT correlate to success.

Zen-PM takes a snapshot of Malcolm Gladwell's innovation talk at PMI Global Congress

The pattern is that innovation is carried out by three successive parties:

• First, The Inventors, who typify the innovative culture with big investments, and pioneer a new product, technology, or service.
• Then, The Implementors, who have less to invest, and focus on how to operationalize, productize, and monetize that invention.
• Finally, The Tweakers, who have very little resources, and make minor adjustments that transform the invention into a revolution.

Google is a company founded by tweakers of Lycos & Alta Vista. Sony ebooks were first, but Amazon dominates because they had the chance to see the impact of e-readers and then make adjustments. Finally, the iPad came along and introduce a tweaked tablet PC as a new challenge in the ebook space.

“Steve Jobs was always follower and borrower” The resurgence of Apple over the last 10 years, is based on his ability to tweak the PC, tweak the portable music player, tweak the blackberry, tweak the tablet PC, and now tweak the cloud.

…and if that wasn’t enough, he pressed further:

“Innovation at its best is a mass phenomenon, not an elite phenomenon.”

Gladwell’s asserts that the industrial revolution happened, because the West had an historical boom of dabblers and tweakers. James Watt was an implementor, only doubling steam efficiency; the anonymous tweakers increased it by another 500 times. Alexander Graham Bell’s voice-over-wire was only one of many contemporary tweaks of the telegraph’s signal-over-wire. Think of wikipedia. Think of crowd sourcing. Think of the old fashioned “suggestion box”.

It was a fascinating talk, and of course, wildly entertaining. Gladwell is a great story teller; memorizing an outline of his talk, offering just enough detail along the way, and adding energy throughout. Even his crazy hair helps amplify his enthusiasm.

But the talk would serve as the first in a personal series of innovation a-has. I’ll post those other reinforcing moments shortly. Until then, I leave you with this final quote and question: “Nimble adaptive organizations are mutually exclusive of innovative organizations.” Put another way, which kind of company do you work for? I’d like to hear if you think you are an ivory tower organization, or one that ruthlessly applies what already works?

I’m excited to announce that I’m writing a book to help agile practitioners earn the new PMI-ACP agile certification. 4 years ago, I started by helping PMI launch the Agile Community of Practice. Then 2 years ago, I worked with some great experts on building the certification program. Now, this book is the next step in my journey to encourage project leaders to grow in their understanding of Agile project management.

Also, this book will benefit from a lot of talent. I’m writing the book with my good friend Hiren Doshi. We’ve engaged visual communication experts Take-Action.com to illustrate the book, and have brought on some good editors.

Our target is to complete the book by the start of 2012, but anyone who’s written a book knows there are challenges to that. For example, people are beginning to post their initial feedback on the exam, which may cause a lot of last minute changes to what information is most helpful.

Also, You can go to the official website and download a free sample chapter to see what we’re trying to achieve.

So here is my question: What would you like to see in a PMI-ACP exam book?

I started working in India full-time in August of 2010. As an American, I had a suitcase full of expectations and assumptions. After a year of working with Indian IT professionals side-by-side, it’s time for a few reflections and observations.

Scrum in India is HOT. Some 18 Months ago, there was only one reliable vendor offering Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) training in all of South Asia (Pete Deemer of GoodAgile.com), and he was based in Singapore. Now, there are three Certified Scrum Trainers based in Bangalore (Pete, myself, and Vibhu Srinavasan of Solutions IQ), and a Certified Scrum Coach in Hyderabad (Madhur Kathuria). Added to that mix is a spike in agile events, such as the quarterly Scrum Bangalore, the mulit-city Agile Tour, and the upcoming Agile India 2011.

India’s Talent is a Strength. There is an obsession in this country with education. Driving from my home to the airport, I see two to three DOZEN billboard adds for bachelors and masters programs. The kids that score highest on standardized scholastic exams are featured in front-page newspaper articles. It then extends into the professional world. An amazing 2010 book called The India Way highlights the dramatic difference between American and India with regards to talent. In America, companies find talent, but Indian companies develop talent. When I joined large companies like Bell Atlantic or Lockheed Martin as a young engineer, my orientation took 2-3 days. Here in India a new hire can spend up to 6 weeks in skills development training. But it doesn’t end there. Most large firms have a “learning & development” organization that hosts dozens of training programs at a time, which employees are required to take as part of their annual appraisal process. What that means is engineers in India are hungry. They are eager to learn and try new things if you let them. By far and away, Indian teams leave my agile training even more energized and motivated than their US counterparts.

Infosys boasts the world's largest employee training center

India’s Talent is an Impediment. All that positive energy around engineering talent comes to screeching halt after a few years of professional experience. Over the last 30 years or so, the West has fostered the concept of the technical career track. For example, at Marriott headquarters in Washington DC, I met a really smart yet simple man who retired in 2009 as a life-long Cobol programmer with a happy family. In India however, that would be considered a wasted life. If you are still programming after 5 years of experience then something is wrong with you. You should have been promoted to the higher-paying and higher-prestigious management role, where you could then provide a better life for your children. I had one test manager tell me to my face, “Taking the role of an agile team leader is a demotion, and my career won’t be able to survive that.” Yes, there is talk of a technical career track in India, but it usually means getting promoted as an architect or a professor who has long since stopped programming and now tells other engineers what to do. Also, all that free technical training is a set of golden handcuffs. As a provider of IT certification training, I hear many questions along the lines of “Why should I invest in my own career advancement, when every company I’m interviewing is promising me similar training at no personal cost?” This all adds up to a dramatic gap between mid-level engineers and strong senior engineers like Robert Martin describes as the crux of software craftsmanship. Those engineers do exist, but you should expect that your Indian agile teams consist of many motivated, but relatively junior engineers.

Global IT infrastructure is an impediment. Without a doubt the largest shock I have experienced is the atrocious support that multi-national software teams receive from IT infrastructure departments.

• Some of it is simply multi-national business. The parent company in the West has its network domain, and the subsidiary in India has its network domain. Because they are two different companies, the workstations and servers often are not directly accessible to each other without jumping through VPNs, firewalls, and removing servers.
• Some of it is cost pressure. One of my clients does not even issue proper workstations to its engineers, but instead has them remote into Virtual Development Instances. Shared virtual development workstations will save a few thousand dollars on hardware costs, but it yields competition for system resources, and more network latency on my coding and testing.
• Some of it is just mean. Another client of mine is doing iOS development, but the IT department only supports Windows PCs on the network. One would think simply to do a manual sync of the source code to their macs, using a USB pen drive. BUT, the USB ports on their company-issued PCs are disabled “for security reasons”. I won’t say the hack these guys used to get their work done, but let me tell you it would make any sysadmin shiver in his bones.

Regardless of the reasons, it all adds up to wasted productivity. I estimate that Network latency + system resource latency + manually doing what a computer should do = 30-40% loss of engineering productivity. I blame the Fortune 500 CIO for this. His executive mandate is to cut costs, without regard to the ten times great loss of productivity and employee satisfaction. This means if you are dealing with distributed teams, expect IT infrastructure to be your number one issue. Worse than the time zone. Worse than the culture differences.

Everyone is doing it. Another misperception in the west is that only a small syndicate of evil CIOs have shipped jobs overseas. Here in Bangalore, a casual drive down along outer-ring road road will reveal the following firms: IBM, Perot Systems, CapGemini, Tesco, SAP, GE Healthcare, Oracle, Cisco, Intel, Accenture, and Dell. And that’s just eastern Bangalore. Other cities in India feature firms ranging from John Deere (Pune) to Microsoft (Hyderabad). After trading stories with my colleagues, I have learned that a surprising plurality of Agile coaches have made at least one visit to India in their career.

Even India is doing it. One American colleague asked me over dinner, “Jesse how do you respond to the challenge that, as a business agility coach in India, you are an accomplice to India’s sucking technology jobs away from America?” I was stumped by the question at the time, but the more I see of global IT, the more complicated the picture has become. For example, all the top Indian outsourcers have a significant footprint in the US (Wipro has 14 offices across the US), and one of them is even headquartered in the New Jersey (Cognizant). The biggest shock came way back in 2004 when India’s largest Telecom, Bharti Airtel, “reverse outsourced” its IT to IBM for $700 million. But now, it’s getting even more complicated: Last year, Airtel hired the New York based IT giant again, this time to support the Telecom’s expansion into 16 African countries. During the 2012 election season, we will hear a lot of politicians calling for a ban on outsourcing. But doing so may actually have a domino effect on current jobs in their own districts.

I’ve got other observations lingering around in my brain, but these are the first I wanted to share. What about you? What differences have you seen between the Western and Eastern approach to IT work?

People often ask me whether Agile PM is a good fit for their project. In general, I tell them that delivering more value to your sponsors, sooner, with higher quality is always a good thing. However, pursuing those goals is not devoid of risk. I warn people about three key pitfalls when choosing to “go agile”.

Overhead
Agile PM is not for free. Many project managers assume that agile means no planning and no documentation. Imagine their shock when they find that a standard agile framework employs no less that 4 levels of planning (daily, iteration, release, project) and a full suite of artifacts called backlogs (product, iteration, impediment, risk). Complex projects need a certain amount of coordination to be successful, and an Agile approach is one that merely seeks the right balance of the right amount of process to manage those projects. However, if your project is instead a small, simple, low-risk affair, then the overhead may not be worth it. A certain investment of time and resources are required to implement the discipline and rigor that Agile frameworks require. Before you go Agile, be sure your project is sufficiently risky and complex to merit that investment.

Truth
Agile project management is not a silver bullet; it is a magic mirror. It does not fix your problems, but rather reveals your problems in such painful clarity that you are compelled to actually address them. When the complexities of a 1-year project are compressed down to a 1-month increment, there is no longer anywhere to hide. For example, if you have a talent problem, iteration deadlines will be missed consistently until you build more skills. If have a negative team culture, forcing people to work together across silos will cause more pain until you attack team dynamics directly. If you have a track record of generating defects, you will have more embarrassing customer demos until you implement tighter quality practices. Beware. When so many problems come to the surface, the PM will often get the blame for introducing this Agile craziness. Agile PM is designed to help project managers tell the truth with empirical data. As it turns out, people are often not able to handle the truth, and will instead shoot the messenger. Before you go Agile, be sure you are prepared to handle the truth when it is revealed.

Change
Those familiar with the WYSIWYG acronym (“what you see is what you get”) will enjoy another. WILIWIK: “What I like is what I know”. Many people around us simply don’t want change. The pain of the known seems safer than the risk of the unknown. Methodology expert Alistair Cockburn has identified this as a human failure mode in project management. Anxiety will grip project managers when they learn the chosen agile frameworks does not explicitly highlight the project manager role. Annoyance will come from isolated ivory tower engineers who must now attend meetings with those pesky sponsors who pay our salaries. Protests will arise from requirements analysts who must now prepare feature specifications every month, rather than only once per year. Change is hard. Before you go Agile, be sure you understand the dynamics of the changes you are about to introduce.

Agile is not for everyone. Its overhead is best saved for high-risk complex projects; its truth-telling requires courage; it’s differences demand a disciplined approach to change. Understanding these pitfalls can make the difference between Agile failure or Agile success.

Since PMI announced its Agile certification program a couple months back, there has been a ton of activity. Here are some specifics:

• Chatter – The PMI Agile Community about the certification has featured some good dialog (PMI Members only link) about what it means. The most interesting is a webinar debate between Alistair Cockburn and James Shore on the pros/cons of certification. PMI members can download that webinar for free.
• Momentum – PMI’s CIO gave at talk at last month’s Scrum Gathering conference in Seattle, where he revealed that more than 6,000 professionals have already registered for the pilot program. That’s more than triple the number of certification holders for PMI’s last 3 certifications COMBINED (PgMP, PMI-RP, PMI-SP). In case it wasn’t obvious already, people want this.
• Training – Yes, I have built a PMI-Agile curriculum, which is being field-tested right now in India. But there are some other trainers that I am very excited to see also building a curriculum, including Ahmed Sidkey in Egypt, Mike Griffiths in Canada.
• Resources – With a new landscape, comes experimentation. Some early offerings are starting to show up, from flash cards, to practice exams, and even some pre-published books. AgileScout has been reporting on some of these, so keep a look there as well.

As one of the people who helped shape this program, I’m pretty excited about the buzz. Given that the mission for this program is to increase the awareness and adoption of Agile PM, I’m already seeing an ROI on our efforts.

Technical Risk Runs Deep

The observation comes from scrum expert Colin Bird. Colin is one of the most gifted agile architects in the world, and often rants about the mismatch between industry standard quality practices and true technical risk. His point is this: “why do we spend so much money on testing through the GUI, when 90% of the risk is underneath the GUI?”.  It’s an intriguing question.

A standard application can be divided into three sections: the unit or module level, the integration level where those modules interact, and the GUI that exposes the behavior of all that integration. Where do most of the defects come from? Below the GUI. But consider that large tech companies hire dozens even hundreds of testers, clicking through an application, to be the primary counter measure for technical risk. Yes defects are found, but when when you consider the salaries of those manual testers, the licensing fees for those automated GUI testing suites, and the performance cost of going through all the tiers…the cost of finding those defects can be staggering.

Instead, agile engineers know to invest in low-level quality techniques like unit-tests (aka TDD), real-time peer reviews (aka pair programming), code consistency (coding standards), proper design patterns (refactoring). Low-level quality techniques also address the integration of stand-along components or services. These could include design-by-contract tests, or automated acceptance tests (using FitNesse or Selenium).

Let The Team Decide Its Risk Management

As a team lead, agile coach, or ScrumMaster, how do you hammer home this point? As an Innovation Games® Trained Facilitator, I am a big fan of collaboration games. During a session with a team at Cisco here in India, I adapted a game call Prune-The-Product Tree. The intent was to have the team explore technical practices on their project, in a collaborative fashion. Here’s the instructions:

1. Draw a triangle, divided into 3 tiers (UI, Integration, Unit).

2. Tell the team to think of every quality technique they can think of

3. For each technique, post a sticky note onto the area it addresses

4. Here’s the interesting part. After 5-10 minutes of listing all the techniques, ask this question: “Will all these techniques fit into a single iteration?”. The team all answers in unison, “NO!”

5. Then tell them to choose which quality techniques will fit in the current sprint, while also remove the most technical risk and achieving the highest quality.

 

This final step is where the gold is mined. Team members have to negotiate which practices best address the quality iceberg. There will be strong opinions. The testers will prefer the GUI-driven techniques, because that is generally how they are trained. The agile types will ask for all the code-level techniques, even though they’re the only ones trained to do them. To help get to some reasonable consensus, you may announce some caveats (“Don’t worry about lack of training or tools for certain techniques. Pick the ones you think will work best, and we’ll get you the support you need.”

Then you take a step back and declare this iceberg is our “Definition of Done” for the next iteration. If there are problems, we can discuss adjustments during the next retrospective.

“How much up-front planning should we do? How many people should we hire? How many meetings, documents and procedures do we need?”

No matter what field or what project, we all face the “how much?” questions over and over. To avoid getting bogged down, project managers should heed three golden rules: Just Enough, Just in Time and Just Because. I first heard these from Mike Griffiths, PMP, one of the earliest council members of the PMI Agile Community of Practice, when we were struggling with a lengthy document. After much debate, Mike interrupted with a seminal insight in agile efficiency: “When it comes to documents, I coach my teams to generate just enough, just in time and occasionally just because. I think this document fits the last category. Our client has asked us for this document, and even if we consider it excessive, the project will simply never get launched unless we use it.”

Let’s take a closer look at these three tenets of agile productivity:

GOLDEN RULE NUMBER 1: Just Enough. Only do enough prep or support work to achieve the primary goal of delivering business value. The problem is that we so easily intertwine this work with the bottom-line deliverable we’re paid to generate. With that confusion comes the temptation to do more prep and support work than is necessary or required.

Yes, we need a project roadmap, but rather than spend time building a yearlong plan down to the hourly resource requirements, we’re going to provide just enough detail to communicate a vision to stakeholders.
Yes, our IT staff needs some technical direction, but rather than waiting to architect every layer of every interface of every system up front, we’re going to provide just enough direction to get started.
Yes, we need to pass the certification and accreditation audit. But rather than defensively launching an avalanche of paperwork, we’re going to collaborate with the auditors to deliver just enough documentation to satisfy them.

GOLDEN RULE NUMBER 2: Just in Time. You could be crafting lightweight documents, lightweight architecture and lightweight processes—and still be doing all that lightweight work way too prematurely. Of course we could need that architecture component, but let’s invest the time to implement it only when we know for sure we’ll need it.

Of course we’ll need a detailed action plan for next year’s project phase, but let’s devote time to crafting that detailed plan when we get to that phase.
Of course we’ll need to generate some documentation, but let’s wait until we get the documentation requirements before we waste our time on unnecessary write-ups.

GOLDEN RULE NUMBER 3: Just Because. This is the constraint that keeps us grounded in reality. I know the 40-page template violates “just enough documentation,” but we’re going to use it, just because we won’t get sign-off without it.

I know forecasting the full project cost up-front violates “just-in-time planning,” but we’re going to do it, just because we won’t get funding without it.
I know triple-entering our hours into the timesheet system violates “just enough administration,” but we’re going to do it anyway, just because we won’t get paid if we don’t.

The next time you’re faced with a dilemma over “how much” of something you should do, rely on these three rules to generate an agile response.