← Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Stop Teaching and Start Doing—The Secret to Agile Adoption in Construction | Felipe Engineer-Manriquez
00:19:06
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- [00:04]
A
Hey there agile adventurer, just a quick question. What if for the price of a fancy coffee or half a pizza, you could unlock over 700 hours of the best agile content on the planet? That's audio, video, E courses, books, presentations, all that you can think of. But you can also join live calls with world class practitioners and hang out in a flame war free and AI slop clean slack with the sharpest minds in the game. Oh, and yes, you get direct access to me, Vasko, your Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. No, this is not a drill. It's this Scrum Master Toolbox membership and it's your unfair advantage in the agile world. So if you want to know more, go check out scrummastertoolbox.org membership. That's scrummastertoolbox.org Membership. And check out all the goodies we have for you. Do it now. But if you're not doing it now, let's listen to the podcast. Hello everybody. Welcome to one more week of the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. And this week we have a whole special week about agile in construction with Felipe Engineer Manriquez. Hey Felipe, welcome to the show.
- [01:26]
B
Hey Vasco, thank you for having me here. Appreciate it and I love the work you're doing. Early on I was listening to your show, there wasn't a lot of content for Scrum Master. So super appreciate and happy to get started and share as much as we have time for.
- [01:43]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And we will share a lot every day this week with a special story. Let me tell you about Felipe before, before that he's a best selling author, international speaker and host of the EBFC show. What does that stand for?
- [02:00]
B
Stands for easier, better for construction. It's a throwback to Shingeo Shingo's early lean concepts when he was teaching Taichi Ono how to co create the Toyota production system. And in his way it was easier, better, faster, cheaper and I have adopted it for construction to be easier, better for construction.
- [02:20]
A
Very good, very good. So check it out. The link is in the show notes the EBFC show a force in lean and agile. He helps teams build faster with less effort. And this build actually literally means build. And he trains and coaches change makers worldwide. And he wrote Construction Scrum to make work easier, better and faster for everyone. So Felipe, that was a short intro. Tell us a little bit more about yourself and how did you discover lean and agile for construction in the first place?
- [02:55]
B
Yeah, no problem. I was working on very large complex construction projects and at that time I know you can't tell from my beautiful gray hairs now how long I've been in the business, but I'm approaching about 30 years in construction. Half. Half of my career. I had no idea that Agile existed. Even though the Agile Manifesto was published in 2001. I didn't know that. This is not something that you learned on the job or in school. Didn't learn anything about lean until about 10 years into working. And I was getting burned out, like, literally burning out, working seven days a week. I was working over 10 to 15, sometimes 16 hours a day. And at that time, right before I discovered Lean, I was probably commuting about six hours a day, three hours in the morning, three hours in the afternoon, and the. The worst traffic in the world, which is Los Angeles traffic, and. And somebody who's doing a presentation at our company. And they presented. And I can't remember what they were talking about, but I remember that their team was extremely happy. They weren't tired. And I was thinking to myself, like, why am I working so hard? Like, what are they doing differently? And I approached the speaker afterwards. His name was Mike. And Mike said, I'm adopting Lean for manufacturing into construction. And there's a whole movement of this practice that's been going on since the 90s. Would you like to learn more? And I was like, absolutely. And I got involved and that put me on a path of learning and growth. And I picked up Agile probably within a year of making that switch where I started discovering there were different things. And then I came across Jeff Sutherland's Red book from the art, doing twice the work and half the time. And I went through that book at a record like three days because, remember, my commute was so long, I was listening to it first on Audible. And after about this first chapter, I bought a hard copy as well. And by the weekend, I was starting my first Scrum board, and the rest is history. Totally transformed my work, my reach. I was able to help teams and transform myself first and overcome my own failures and limitations and all these terrible bad habits that are just so common in an industry where everybody's busy. You're rewarded for looking busy. Meetings were constant. Progress was garbage. Like, no progress.
- [05:31]
A
That sounds just like it.
- [05:33]
B
Yeah, it was like. And I'll tell you, like, we in the construction industry love Gantt Charts to death, and we are almost religious in our belief in how these schedules predict the future.
- [05:45]
A
I can see that.
- [05:46]
B
It's just not so.
- [05:48]
A
Yeah, well, I wrote no estimates with a special nod to the whole Gantt chart religion in it. So I can totally relate to that now in that journey, I'm sure there were a lot of interesting experiences, many about success, as you've already talked about, but some about failure. And that's okay because we all learn and we need to share that learning. So what's one story of failure from your experience that taught you what you now know is a very important lesson as a facilitator, as a Scrum master, and as a leader in construction projects.
- [06:23]
B
Yeah, and I will say, like, you know, now I teach Scrum now. And your work on no estimates I actually found through Twitter. And that was, I'm not on a Twitter. No one knows even what Twitter is today. It's X now, but it used to be Twitter. And in those early days of Twitter, I realized there was a raging debate between people that estimate in time and people that just task and size in a consistent way. And the no estimating. You were in the no estimating camp. When I teach Scrum masters, even now, I, I tell them like with a caution, like, this is, this is one way where people estimate with time using like complex things like Fibonacci sequence, Scrum playing poker, blah, blah, blah. And then there's a whole other camp of people. And I am so glad of the work that you do. And I also do not estimate in my work. I right size and same size and I use these proxies and I tell people like, I'm a simple, I'm just a simple general contractor. Like for me, counting my tasks as one is the easiest algebra and math I'm going to do rather than doing the more complex.
- [07:31]
A
It's accurate enough, often much more accurate than even story points. So why not do it?
- [07:36]
B
Absolutely true. One of my early mistakes, Vasco, when I was getting started with lean and agile and Scrum was trying to teach other people and this is like a. Is not intuitive. And I tell change makers today I said, we now advocate a ninja Scrum approach where you will embody the processes, the tools and do the things that are required to get the good results. But at no time did you stop and start teaching people. And I used to make that mistake so many times. Like I tell people now. I was like, look, I, I was working with people and I forgot a couple key things. Number one, they don't have the enthusiasm and love for these new ways of working like I do because they didn't understand the problem that they were in. And so my mistake early was to stop and move into teaching mode too soon. Now I wait until people actually pull for teaching if they want to learn. Like I will do Scrum and, and even where I work now, I work on multi billion dollar portfolio projects and teaching is part of my job. But I don't default to teaching teams first and I use a whole body of lean tools and I usually work as a facilitator, embodying these tools, showing the practices, helping teams stand these things up. But I don't stop and teach unless they pull for the teaching. In the early days, every, every time we'd start to go use a tool, I would go into like teaching mode right away and it would just turn people off. And what I realized is that they were working to whatever level of productivity before I got there and they would be continuing to work the same if I didn't exist. And it's almost disrespectful to people to come in and tell them the way they're doing things is wrong and that you never want to take that approach as a coach you'd rather. And it's better now to act as a guide and go along with them and show people the way.
- [09:40]
A
Let's make that crystal clear because I think this is a very important lesson, one that I've learned countless times. I didn't make that mistake only once. I think people will benefit from you giving us a real life story of what, what the contrast is.
- [09:57]
B
Yeah. So I was, there was a team I was working with as this is a large project and this is a mistake just like you that I make all the time. This is because I have these skills and these experiences. It's very easy for me to just stop and teach and I'll tell two stories in parallel. One with my son. So my son, like everybody knows that knows my, my story. Like I started Scrum, the first team that I ever had in Scrum was me and my son, who at the time was like four years old. And I, a four year old can only absorb so much. And so we, I went through the SCRUM process with him in a day and we just made sticky notes and put on the back of his door to make a plan to do things. And he was resistant immediately when I said what, when I labeled what we were doing immediate resistance and, and I needed to practice with somebody in a safe way so I could take it to work. I was on a project and needed to take it to that project. And it wasn't. That's the project where I'd already made that mistake of trying to teach some of the lean tools. And now I was going to come with some agile tools. People looked at me and, and the week before as I was reading the red book, they were like, hell no. And the resistance was absolute, absolute. And so I, I went about using Scrum with my son on the weekend and I got through the process, achieved amazing results with him. We did way more than even what our little tiny Scrum Sprint planning session was. And it was before going on a holiday. And then when I got to work the next Monday, I went about implementing that approach with that team and that's a team that had already resisted me because I was trying to teach them these lean tools. It was a small team of seven. And I wrote about this in my book, in part three of my book where I go to implement the Scrum process with change orders. This is that team. And, and I'll name, I'll name names like. Nate was my boss at the time, senior project manager and he had, he wanted nothing to do with Scrum. People will figure out that you're doing something different and they will Google and tried to understand from Google search results page in seconds and see that this is a software thing. We're not doing a software thing in construction or this is an IT thing. And I've heard IT people, just so you know, Vasco I t people because I've coached IT people as well and they're like, this is a hardware thing, we're not doing this in hardware. Or, or when people Google me for construction Scrum and I'm helping a manufacturing team, they're like, this is a construction.
- [12:30]
A
Thing, we don't do this it's not invented here syndrome.
- [12:34]
B
Exactly. I even talked to one of the, one of the authors of the success of Toyota and I'm just forgetting his name right now. And he was saying at, even at Toyota same thing happens with people. And so with this team, Nate in particular, my boss at the time was like, absolutely, we're not doing this. And if we would stay, if we would have stayed doing what we were doing, we were starting to work overtime because the Gantt Chart said we should and we were, we were self performing concrete and it wasn't working. And this is a schedule that, as a young project manager I had a lot of influence on that project because I was one of the PMs. Every day that we worked during this part of the project, we actually lost a day. And this phenomenon happens on a lot of Gantt Chart run projects where you work a day but you don't gain any time on your critical path and you fall behind and we were in that classic pattern. Now I've come to learn, Bosco, after that project, I've been involved in project recovery, and I've done that for over 12 years, where I just go to projects that are failing, and I can tell stories about that. But this is my failure story with this team. Once I stopped trying to teach and just. Did the system just perform? Like, did the planning myself, talk to the contractors, expose the work, make things visible. I had the changes. Only one contractor. I was managing about $25 million worth of scopes at the time that I was having this failure. And then as I was turning it around, implementing a scrum board in my office, embodying the things making work visible, going after problems in a systematic way. One project manager out of the 15 that I was managing on these different trades, it was the theater. We're doing a theater and a performing arts center, and it was the specialty rigging pm. Let's say his name was Tom. He was the only one that stopped and said, you. This is radically different type of management than traditional project management. What? He's like, what are you. He's like, what are you actually doing? And he was in my office, and he was a. A type of pm, this type of specialty work. He travels all over the world. And he was saying, like, never seen this ever before. He's like, we've never come to a project where people held their promises and, like, just acted truthfully. I was like, this is how bad construction is.
- [15:03]
A
I'm just gonna take a clip of this. This part of the interview and send it to a couple of people that I'm working with because they need to hear this.
- [15:10]
B
Yeah. And. And Tom said. He's like. He's like, the things that you do are really simple. He's like, how is it so effective? It doesn't make. It's counterintuitive because I never push dates on him where I was like, my peers. Like, at, you know, the office that I had, I had PMs on both sides of me. I had a concrete PM on the right of me, and then to the left of me, I had the mechanical, electrical, plumbing, pm. And I had every other trade. I had all the. The misfit trades that nobody wanted. I had all the interior theater rigging, the interior framing, the site work that nobody wanted, that nobody cares about the offer. I took all the things that nobody wanted on purpose because I wanted to really test how lean and agile can work together and make a difference on this project. And I will say, without teaching I was in a meeting with Nate not even a year later, and we were doing a postmortem on the project and they asked, we used through all the trades and I eventually helped the PMs to the right and left of me because they got in trouble and they needed help. So I got to help without teaching them again. They didn't want teaching. They didn't want to learn how this thing works. They just wanted the results. And I think that's something that a lot of people forget. And that's what Dr. Jeff Sutherland says all the time. He's like, if you don't actually ship product at the end of your sprint, you're not even doing Scrum. You're just doing like Hollywood Scrum or you're doing fake Scrum, which is a whole other topic we could get into.
- [16:38]
A
And we will get into that, I'm sure, in the rest of the week. So stay tuned. Felipe, thank you very much for sharing that story with us.
- [16:46]
B
Well, thank you.
- [16:50]
A
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