What did i learn trying to migrate teams from legacy to modern?
- 1. WHAT DID I LEARN TRYING TO MIGRATE TEAMS FROM LEGACY TO MODERN? Matteo Emili matteo.emili@live.com | @MattVSTS | mattvsts.blogspot.com
- 2. WHAT ARE WE GOING TO TALK ABOUT TONIGHT? PEOPLE BEHAVIOURS PSYCHOLOGY
- 3. WHO AM I? • Systems Engineering Advisor @ One Identity • Microsoft MVP – Developer Technologies • Professional Scrum Master 1 • Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist: Team Foundation Server • Technology enthusiast
- 4. IT USUALLY DOES NOT MATTER…
- 5. …BUT THIS TIME IT REALLY DOES.
- 6. SO, WHO AM I? • A person with many interests • Fast learner, always looking for something new to try or discover • I run a sizeable homelab and home network • Soaked in the technology community since…pretty much ever • Started blogging at 17, speaking at technical events at 19 • Microsoft MVP at 20 • Always been into architecture, quality, ALM more than code for its own sake • Spoke about DevOps on the Microsoft Stack (WinOps?) for the first time in 2012
- 7. PROFESSIONALLY? • Self-taught software developer and tinkerer • Started working as a Software Developer while in High School (three afternoons a week) • Code was ‘fine’, but writing it right was more interesting for me: quality, testing, architectures, … • I’ve been the go-to ALM person for years, everywhere – TFS was my cornerstone • I worked on several transformation projects, of all sorts, in many industries
- 9. WHO DOESN’T LIKE PATTERNS? • The idea came speaking with Giulio Vian and other members of the GetLatestVersion.it community • We regularly ask ourselves questions like ‘How would you tackle this? How can I come out on top of that?’ with general problems ranging from technology to business matters • While we all gave out many different answers, I realised there are patterns that keep repeating all the time, especially in transformation projects • So I started digging in the world of psychology, and I opened a Pandora’s box
- 10. DEFINE TRANSFORMATION! A “legacy to modern” transformation can be: • Virtualisation effort • Waterfall to Scrum/Lean/Whatnot • Zip files to Version Control Systems • Excel to Jira • Manual weekend deployments to Continuous Delivery • ALM/DevOps stack consolidation • Practice establishment • Monolith to microservices • …
- 12. TECHNOLOGY DOES NOT MATTER
- 13. TECHNOLOGY IS JUST A TOOL
- 14. THEY ALL TRY TO DO THE SAME
- 15. CHANGE
- 16. COMPANIES ARE MADE OF PEOPLE
- 17. PSYCHOLOGY LEADS TO SUCCESS
- 18. WHY? SAY HELLO TO THE HUMAN BEING A pretty bleak picture to be fair… • Fear of change • Innate risk avoidance • Tribal knowledge • First-hand experiences vs collective knowledge • Relies on bias and beliefs • Suffers from peer or performance pressure • …
- 19. IT’S NOT ALL LOST
- 20. WE ARE HUMAN BEINGS TOO
- 21. THERE ARE SOME SOLUTIONS
- 22. EXAMPLES?
- 23. ALM STACK CONSOLIDATION Company ABC decides to consolidate all the ALM stacks across the company to a single-vendor solution, unifying years (decades?) of intellectual property under the same roof It is a huge company-wide effort that is going to massively improve how software is developed internally Scenario #1
- 24. A PRACTICAL EXAMPLE • Atlassian Suite+Trello+Excel+Custom & SVC+CVS+Git+SourceSafe • Everything moved and consolidated on TFS • It is a *huge* change • There is a level of investment required
- 25. WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN? • People are going to complain • Some departments are going to raise a level of resistance • A few people are going to protest because ‘my things have been moved! I cannot find anything here/in this mess!’ • Someone could potentially make your life really hard • I also saw some examples of sabotage over the years…
- 26. WHAT IS LIKELY TO HAPPEN? • Resistance can be really weak, or passive • It is usually driven by ‘tribe leaders’ • People are going to follow, mostly because of innate instinct (“If it works…”) • Also important: change implies reset, starting again from scratch • We are not used to it
- 27. WHAT COULD HAPPEN? • Internal competition to shine the most • Volunteering for support or help • Rush to get it quickly out of the door and carry on as normal
- 28. WHAT DID I LEARN?
- 29. WHAT DID I LEARN • Leverage tangible results • Timing is essential, but don’t rush things • The incremental perception is key • Show knowledge bridges wherever you can • Delays are normal and they happen – nobody is going to get mad about it
- 32. WHY IS IT SO IMPORTANT? • Incremental, iterative approaches are the ones that play on the individual’s motivation • Short timeboxes and a continuous flow of deliverables make the team feel in control • Positive vicious circle: the team feels in control and make decisions based on their own pace and esperience • This is where you can actually use tribal knowledge to your own advantage – a self-managing team is clearly going to be more productive than a top-down-led team • Also, it is the only way of defeating Parkinson’s law
- 33. PARKINSON’S LAW?
- 34. WORK IS LIKE IDEAL GAS…
- 35. …OR BUREAUCRACY
- 36. WORK EXPANDS SO AS TO FILL THE TIME AVAILABLE FOR ITS COMPLETION
- 37. NO MATTER WHAT, YOUR TEAM IS GOING TO BE ‘BUSY’
- 38. OVER TIME, THE ACTUAL VALUE PRODUCED BY AN ‘ALWAYS BUSY’ TEAM GOES DOWN
- 39. REALLY? • If your team is always overbooked, the actual quality of the deliverables is going to be low • Bugs will be continuously added and technical debt is going to go through the roof • If your team has spare capacity (but still adhering to Parkinson’s law) it is going to focus on trivial things • Deliverables will be very light and there is going to be an emphasis on the small changes brough forward In both cases, value is low
- 40. WATERFALL TO AGILE Company Y123 decides to jump on-board the Agile bandwagon, ditch its inefficient Waterfall-based process and move to Agile It is a top-down effort where management wants to catch-up on the trending market topics to prevent the company from remaining behind its competitors Scenario #2
- 41. A COUPLE OF RED FLAGS HERE…
- 42. …THE AGILE BANDWAGON… …MOVE TO AGILE…
- 43. …A TOP-DOWN EFFORT… …MGMT WANTS TO CATCH UP…
- 44. PANIC-INDUCED REACTIONS & HEAVY-HANDED APPROACHES
- 45. HOW TO MAKE IT WORK? • A quick (often informal) training is more than enough to get started with Scrum • Scrum is excellent for this as overhauls everything while retaining a strict timeline • No need for comparative evaluations at this stage, as it is mandated by the top anyway • Take a portion of a product and start creating a backlog • The collaborative effort makes the move from planning to delivery straightforward • Scrum is just the starting point. Lean? Scrum? Scrumbut? It is all up to the individual team after that
- 46. WHERE IS THE MAGIC? • Team morale here plays a key role • Software development is a team effort • People should feel motivated and excited, not depressed because of another management mood swing • Agile methodologies put everybody on the same level, so diverse individual contributions are really invaluable • The burden of deciding how to move forward is taken away – it is actually a positive point • Improvement can be carried forward based on tangible experience
- 47. IT IS OFTEN DOWN TO THE BASICS
- 48. THE PERFECT STORM • Imagine a situation where a company wants to invest in telemetry (both reactive and proactive) • There is an X amount of people in the ‘Telemetry team’ • The management team believes it is going to be really effective: a combination of data-driven decisions and artificial intelligence so that R&D time can be wisely invested • What is *actually* going to happen? Scenario #3 (fictional)
- 50. THE LESS, MORE • Cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is • Also, people of high ability incorrectly assume that tasks that are easy for them are easy for other people Source: Wikipedia
- 51. THE LESS, MORE • Common examples are found in people just out of school/university, but pretty much everybody can be affected • It is surprisingly common in another category of engineers: people that have worked for a long time with legacy technology and they are suddenly exposed to something completely new • The solution is fairly easy: a paired induction at on-boarding time or internal mentoring as required • It is usually a good sign, of a person that is motivated to improve after losing the illusory superiority
- 53. THE MORE, LESS • Psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a "fraud“ • Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving othersSource: Wikipedia
- 54. THE MORE, LESS • Extremely common in high-performance software engineers • The reason behind this is that personal standards are usually way higher than company standards • Peer-reviewing is extremely commonplace in the industry, fuelling the syndrome • Media coverage contribute to it, and not in a good way… • It is quite dangerous, as fighting it can lead to burnout
- 55. THE MORE, LESS • Tackling this as a change factor is not easy • Nobody is going to tell you “I feel I should not be here” • The best way to indirectly approach the problem is to leverage on internal feedback funnels (standups?) • People will feel motivated and compelled to contribute, leading to better awareness • Unfortunately it is not a straightforward process
- 57. I AM ONLY HUMAN, AFTER ALL… • People will naturally be polarised with or against the alpha-type elements in the team • Telemetry analysis is something that should be as automated as possible (hence the rise of proactive telemetry) • As the process is data-driven, the mix of one of the above ‘syndromes’ with an alpha-type personality means that the outcome of the work done by the ‘Telemetry team’ is going to be skewed • There is no real way out here, not even leveraging processes – it is bound to happen
- 58. COMPETITION
- 59. I AM ONLY HUMAN, AFTER ALL…AGAIN! • Two human beings sharing a repetitive task will most likely become competitive • As the level of competition rises (especially if incentives are on the line) the number of false positive will rise • Also the other way around – if there are negatives involved, the overall level of reported items will be lower than expected • Never, ever, introduce competition within a team!
- 60. A COUPLE MORE TO REMEMBER
- 61. PUTT’S LAW
- 62. A BINARY SITUATION • Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand. • Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion.Source: Wikipedia
- 63. A BINARY SITUATION • Many technical people don’t want to be promoted to ‘management’ roles • On the other hand, there are people who are average on a technical role but they sport a good business acumen or people management skills • It is the duty of a good company to identify these people and let them express the best they can • The company can eventually only gain from such an approach, leveraging on people’s best skills and having a motivated team Source: Wikipedia
- 65. INCOMPETENCE?! • A person who is competent at their job will earn promotion to a more senior position which requires different skills. • If the promoted person lacks the skills required for their new role, then they will be incompetent at their new level, and so they will not be promoted again. • But if they are competent at their new role, then they will be promoted again, and they will continue to be promoted until they eventually reach a level at which they are incompetent. • Being incompetent, they do not qualify to be promoted again, and so remain stuck at that final level for the rest of their career Source: Wikipedia
- 66. COMMON OCCURRENCE? • It looks like it goes hand in hand with office politics • Common in heavily structured companies • There isn’t much one can do about it – yet… Source: Wikipedia
- 67. QUESTIONS?
- 68. THANKS!