Stuff I'M Thinking About

Johanna Rothman is a prolific writer on management, product development, and personal development. She even writes fiction focussing on fantasy and crime genres. I have many of her non-fiction books, and there isn’t a dud among them.

So it was with great interest that I approached this new book. It is short, only 148 pages, and something you could knock off in one sitting over the weekend. You’ll do that, but also find yourself using it as a reference book right away.

This is a book about lifecycles, feedback loops, and managing risk. A lifecycle is a model of how work gets done. Rothman cover four main types of lifecycle: serial, iterative, incremental and combination. She then goes on to talk about truly agile approaches, and methods to increase agility regardless of how you work.

The book opens with a story of a colleague who’s taken a course online. The course says it is teaching agile but is teaching nothing of the sort. Rothman calls it out right away as fake agility, and does not take her foot of the gas for the remaining pages.

Agile-in-name-only is the problem—we’ve adopted the words used in agile, but the principles and practices just aren’t there. Because agile seems to be failing, there is a push to return to a waterfall approach. The author wryly notes that those people haven’t really left the waterfall.

Rothman takes issue with plucking the word Agile from the “The Agile Manifesto for Software Development”, and using it as a noun. She uses the word agility instead, to describe a state of nimbleness. ‘Agile’ is reserved, used in this book as an adjective to describe a team or culture. I like that she made this choice up front, as it helps the reader avoid cognitive dissonance later in the book as she describes different development lifecycles.

The first chapter reveals something many of us have know for a while—that fake agility has become the norm. She contrasts traditional organisations and teams against agile ones, and the difference between resource efficiency and flow efficiency. There is some guidance on how to spot fake agile.

The second chapter looks at how an organisation’s culture and risk profile will drive the lifecycle approach. This is useful context for the remaining chapters, as it provides an overview of the forces at play.

Moving to agility is, at its core, about overcoming the forces that drive us back to command and control regimes.

Chapters 3 through 6 look at the 4 types of lifecycles. Each of the chapters goes into detail on each—how the lifecycles usually plays out, what the pro and cons are, how feedback loops work, and what risks the lifecycle is seeking to mitigate.

One insight I will reveal from with in these chapters is the following:

“The more often the project can release the product, the less other people will want to control the work.”

I put the book down after reading this and went for a walk. There are deep behavioural insights in this one sentence that are worth exploring.

Each of these chapters ends with a ‘remember this’, a section recapping the main points covered in the chapter and giving advice on how to make that lifecycle work as well as it can.

Chapter 7 considers agile approaches, and starts with an outline of the characteristics of the Agile team. Rothman then looks into how best to implement agility, and examines the eternal Kanban versus Scrum question. The last part of the chapter looks at agile approaches to hardware projects.

Chapter 8 focusses on how to increase agility regardless of your lifecycle. Rothman notes at the start of this chapter that if we want more agility, focus on reducing the the number and duration of unplanned feedback loops. Earlier in the book she identified out-of-control feedback loops as an issue in all the lifecycles, so this is another key insight.

The book continues with advice on how to reduce the out-of-control loops, being more collaborative, and some final thoughts on reducing fake agility. In the last case, she suggesting picking just one project and using this as a test-bed to try out the techniques from the book.

So, fundamentally, this is a book about models, or lifecycles, and feedback loops. It is full of insights and actionable advice based on the author’s practical experience with the lifecycle models during her career, and experience gained from her consulting practice.

Its value also comes from documenting the lifecycles we are all so familiar with in such a concise manner, and in a way where we can ‘see the system’ we are part of just a bit better. And hopefully in seeing, we can do something to move those systems down the path to agility.

I recommend this book to anyone involved in the business of making products.