Situated Geekery

The urgency principle is a favorite of mine because it’s so clean and so general:

Most resources on most important story,

Least resources on less important story,

No resources on unimportant story.

Teams dig this principle because it’s one of the easiest for agility noobs to grok. It also has the advantage that it forces managerial magical thinking out in the open where it can be addressed.  Most geeks won’t yet see that this principle requires them to make engineering efficiency subservient to business efficiency, so they’re generally pretty happy about the whole urgency thing.

Coaches, modeling as ever, have to use the urgency principle on at least four types of story:  the project, the technique, the environment, and the team.

The Most Important Project Story

Coaching isn’t classroom work, which is what makes it so cool.  As a coach, you are in and of the fray.  That means you have to concern yourself with the most important project story, just as any other team member.  Actually, you’ll spend more time thinking, talking, and defining most important project stories, because as a coach you’ll have had much more experience, and the team will want your help and your approval.

You’ll want to know not only the most important story, but also the five next most important stories.  Knowing the near-term agenda will give you time to keep the incoming stories as crisp, clean, and vertical as they can be.

The Most Important Technique Story

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, teams that are just starting agile practice will need to develop agile practice skills. For instance, test driven development alone presents myriad new techniques. During the intermediate stage of your own coaching career, you’ll probably think of the new techniques as both easy and obvious, but they’re not. Many of these techniques make gigantic changes to the everyday world of a developer.

You’ll want to know, at any given time: what is the most important technique for the whole team to be building?

The Most Important Environment Story

To a startling degree, humans are where they live. Knowing the most important environment story is thus critical to your success. Notice that environment is only partly a physical matter.  Getting the right chairs and the right sized space and the right distance between pairing stations, these are all potentially the most important environmental story.  But there’s more to it than that. Getting  the build right goes under this rubric, too. Optimizing any usage of e-tools, maintaining information radiators, controlling the stand-ups, and so on, all of these are environment stories.

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The Most Important Team Story

And then we come to the best and the worst part of being a coach.

We work with humans. Humans are not terribly rational, and they’re not terribly predictable, and they’re not terribly self-aware, but humans are often terribly bad collaborators.  (I’m already on record with the controversial notion that coaches have to like people. I stand for motherhood and apple pie, and I’m not afraid to say so.)  The most important team story is the one that enables the team to move forward as a team.  It is usually the one that time alone won’t solve. Remember Weinberg: it’s always a people problem.

Identify the most important team story by finding the worst collaborations in your team.

The Most Important Coaching Story

Question: How is it possible to have four most important stories and still be honoring the urgency principle?

Answer: it’s not. We strongly disapprove of priority ‘buckets’ around here. I offer you these categories not as priority buckets, but as story-generators for a coach’s practice. Try writing down three stories from each category and sorting them en masse. Once you’ve done that, pick the top one and invest your resources.

Here’s a pro tip: make your most important coaching story visible to the team.  Put it on a card and put it right next to the team’s iteration stories. Let them in on it.  The team will help you solve it, if they know you’re working on it.

The most most most important story for a coach is to always keep your own stories sorted by their importance.

Coaches live or die by the urgency principle.

Tags: Advice, coaching, urgency