Feedback loops and an example of oblique mechanism
What if nuanced might help to 'nudge' and nurture a culture of meaningful conversations?
I thought this could be a nice sequel to my previous post. Also, a fully practical one with an example. The insight came from an interaction with Bruno Mata, who has been producing very useful and practical material (unfortunately only in our native language, Portuguese, so far) for Agile Coaches (or Scrum Masters, whatever official title you can have to help teams and organizations to do Agile software delivery, ultimately).
We had a bit of back and forward on limiting WIP (work-in-progress/process) and how there are different ways to do it. Truth be told, if you are doing Scrum and have Sprints, that is effectively a way to do it, although I would argue it to be not a sophisticated one… nonetheless one…
I mentioned that I have learned not to bother too much about making that limit explicit. Bruno argued that without an explicit one, you will not fully have a real pull system. I counter-argued that I see slightly differently, that if, for instance, you simply have an agreement that new work can only be started once something else is finished, the effect is the same, you are keeping WIP in check and you are only pulling when capacity is available.
It is a bit of a WIP limit in disguise, I don’t deny it. But is not an explicit constraint as with a number. Some may argue is an explicit policy – I grant that. Still a more nuanced mechanism which ultimately acts more as a feedback loop and operates in a rather ‘oblique’ fashion.
I kind of like that. Hopefully my last post made a convincing case of why I think that is interesting and (often more) robust.
And here is the ‘punchline’ of why I think that is often more interesting than putting an explicit number as a constraint: effect is similar, but without risking nurturing a distracting conversation about whether the WIP limit should be ‘X’ or ‘Y’ or ‘Z’… Possibly also, experimentation might be smoother, you just agree that in certain moment we will deliberately deviate from the agreement, or the other way around, not start something new despite having finished something else.
Put in other words, it makes the meaningful conversations all about what truly matters with no potential distracting one around a number which would be quite misleading since:
The number, or limit, which will work for a system is context dependent.
You can only find a balance through empirical trying and tuning.
Chances are that number might evolve and need tuning on a more or less on regular basis.
There is a drawback which is relevant and can make scaling more difficult: it is just easier to implement a number and make the compliance with that even supported by tooling and all of that. I am not sure that is enough of a constraint once you put all in weight and think of how the advantages I mentioned can be ‘embedded’ to a culture of much more mature and meaningful conversations.
by Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact.