Richard Sheridan (Cofounder and CEO, Menlo Innovations) wrote Joy Inc to share insight into all XP practices that worked for his Org. Here is what he has to say on how Daily Standups, Estimations, Show and Tells, big visual boards worked for them.
How to spot unnecessary meetings? Do not tell your team you are going to be late for the meeting. And do not go. If they ended up waiting for you, chatting about weekend, and dispersing after 30 minutes, then kill the meeting from your calendar. The team is there only because the boss told them to be there.
At Menlo, we eliminated unproductive, joyless meetings from our process. We have replaced rules, bureaucracy, and hierarchy with predictable rituals, ceremonies, and storytelling events. These have a clear structure and clear expectations for every participant.
Typical corporate bureaucracy uses rules to limit the sharing of information and decision-making power. It establishes boundaries that cannot be crossed. Most of the Org concludes it is not allowed to participate, so it doesn’t. While we still have a few strong rules that frame our rituals, storytelling, and artifacts, they are acceptable and honoured because of our shared belief system. Our rules contribute to the human energy of our culture rather than steal from it.
The Daily Standup
This ritual is in place of unproductive weekly status report meetings. Occurs every day at 10 AM regardless of who is in the room. Takes 13 min or less.
Rituals should reinforce cultural values. Our standup meeting is democratic and inclusive. No one is running the meeting. It is intended to be valuable to everyone, not just management. Team members contribute as much or as little as they see fit. There is no requirement to contribute anything when it is your turn. On any given day, some have more to say than others.
Introverts?
Cube farms simply magnify the stereotypical social awkwardness of introversion, rather than capitalising on its benefits.
Most visitors assume Menlo will work only for extroverts. However, majority of Menlo-ians self-identify themselves as introverts. This makes sense:
- Introversion supports the deep thinking needed to solve complex problems
- Introverts prefer fewer, deeper relationships
- Introverts are often better, active listeners
Estimation: Predicting the future
Typically, estimation is a job for management. At Menlo, all estimates come from the team that will actually be doing the work. 4, 8, 16, 32 or 64 hours are the only estimates allowed. We are only seeking a good guess. But, estimation is one of our most important conversation! Our quality advocates are a part of our estimation ritual as well.
Every org has to predict the future based on incomplete information. By doing this as a group while thinking out loud with one another, our estimation process creates safety and reduces fear of the unknown. This practice also builds our capacity for sizing new projects. Because we practice estimating every week, the team is seldom fazed by diving into new domains.
Show & Tell: Where Rubber Meets Road
The sponsor has an idea in mind as to what the outcome of the work will be. The team also has a picture of the outcome. At Menlo, we resolve these two competing mental pictures in a weekly ritual with our clients that we call Show & Tell.
Show & Tell is a critical interaction. The client gets to discuss the project with the people who actually did the work. The people who did the work can hear and see the client’s emotion in response. We want the team to see and feel the full range of emotions, rather than have it described to them later in a managerial interpretive dance.
This is also in line with “Making mistakes faster,” one of our founding philosophies.
Human communication is fraught with the perils of misunderstanding, miscommunication, and unstated assumptions. These perils are the foundational basis of most relationship problems. What one side sees as obvious, the other can’t even comprehend. For us, the only way to knock down this wall of misunderstanding is to get the players together and put them in a structured ritual that involves touching and seeing the technology under development.
Planning Game: Forcing Hard Choices
At Menlo, we steer a project’s direction with our client using a weekly planning game. Using the “Planning Origami” technique, PMs guide our client through the effort of placing folded paper story cards on planning sheets that physically represent both time and budget. The folder story cards represents the features and time estimate as determined in the earlier estimation ritual, and the planning sheets represent amount of time available each week.
This simple exercise facilitates the most important conversations and decisions that a client can make to keep its project on course.
In this weekly conversation, the basic questions of project management must be worked through without ambiguity.
- What’s in and what’s out?
- What comes first? What is next?
- What fits into the plan this week?
- What can wait? What can’t?
- Is there a less expensive alternative to implement this feature?
- Is anything missing?
- Do we really need this?
All of these points and more will be discussed between the client and our PM. Often, the client will bring others along to represent competing voices within their own company.
By the time the planning is done, work is authorised.
Work Authorisation Board
Once the planning game is completed, a PM assigns one week of selected story cards to individual pairs assigned to the project. This is done through the WAB. These visual displays are obvious even to a visitor.
If a pair runs out of cards, they help others. If everyone is caught up, they can move on to the “pull ahead” cards.
Sticky Dots: A Real-Time Status Report
As pair partners begin work on a story card, they put a yellow sticky dot on the card under their names. When the pair thinks they are done, the card is labelled with an orange dot. This is signal to our quality advocates. The QA pair will talk with the programming pair and the four of them review the completed work in what amounts to a mini show & tell. A “completed” card is labeled with a green dot.
If the work is not satisfactory, a red dot is used with explanation of the failed QA status. The original pair will return to that card at the earliest convenient time, put another yellow dot over it, and the cycle begins again.
A lone piece of yarn stretched across the board is moved down, day by day, every morning. If we are right where we thought we’d be on any given day, we’d see only orange and green dots above the string and no yellow. If there are some yellows, it’s clear who may need help from others as the week progresses.
Visible Artifacts Encourage Cooperation
We put visible reminders about our process and culture out in the open. Using walls this way avoids the plague of “out of sight, out of mind.”
If we are discussing something important, and if there is a big visible chart pertaining to it, we can stand up and start pointing and arguing — no one is arguing from memory about an ambiguous conversation from last month’s meeting! For the programmers, this might be a DB schema. For designers, these might be mind maps, persona maps, prototype designs. For the company, revenue, expenses, profits.
We also use the highest part of the walls at Menlo for important cultural reminders. Not industry standard motivational posters, but rather handi-crafted posters than reflect our most important cultural reminders. Like “Make mistaks fastr.”
Storytelling is a Cultural Conversation
You may believe your company is not compelling and that a tour of your company would be boring. No matter what you do, you have stories from your work life — fun, interesting, compelling stories. Experiment with storytelling as a part of your culture. If you can get the world to start telling your company’s stories, you will reinforce your mission every single minute of every single day, even when you are not in the room.
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