← Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Xmas Special: Investing in Software: Alternatives To Project Management For Software Businesses With Vasco Duarte
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Xmas Special: Investing in Software: Alternatives To Project Management For Software Businesses With Vasco Duarte In the grand finale of the “5 Wishes for 2025” series, Vasco Duarte tackles the chaotic nature of software development and why...
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Vasco Duarte
Hey, how are you doing? I'm Vasco Duarte, your host on the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. And I've got some exciting news. So right now, as I record this, I'm holding in my hand the signed contract for our very first Global Agile Summit. We're all in and I couldn't wait to share this news with you. So mark your calendars. May 18th, 20th of 2025 in Tallinn, Estonia. We're gonna have a transformative experience. We're putting together an event that is all about real life Agile. It's not theory or buzzwords. It's practitioners sharing what's working, what's making an impact, and how they've overcome challenges that you too will have to face, or maybe even facing. Right now, we're bringing together the best stories in Agile. From product leaders to engineering wizards to business visionaries, these will be stories that will inspire you to action. This isn't just another conference. It's a chance to connect with the people that are shaping the future of Agile. And here's the best part. Right now, we're in our super early bird phase. And that means you can grab tickets at just 25% of the final price. Look, that's not just half off, it's half off of the half off. It's an incredible deal for our dedicated community members, just like you listening to this right now. So at the summit, day one will be all about hands on workshops. And days two and three, we'll dive into leadership, product strategy, coding, testing, and everything that makes Agile thrive in organizations. Right now remember, these are all first person, real life stories. Now whether you're a leader, a developer, or part of a consulting company, this event is built to take your Agile game to the next level. So don't wait. Go to globalagilesummit.com and grab your ticket. Today, let's all make 2025 the year agile truly transforms your teams, your business and our industry. I'll see you all in Tallinn. And Remember, go to globalagilesummit.com and get your super early bird ticket right now. It only be available until the agenda is announced, so don't wait. Grab it right now. Right now that that's out of the way, onto the episode. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the final episode of our Five Wishes for 2025 series. I'm Vasco and today we're talking about butterflies, chaos, and why project management is like trying to predict the weather. Spoiler alert. It doesn't work very well. So this is a topic I'm really passionate About. I'm so passionate that I might go in a couple of tangents during the recording of this episode, and for that, I apologize in advance. There's a lot riding, though. Here's my thinking. Software development requires a management approach that fits its constraints. And on that note, let me introduce a piece of trivia that I never thought I would have on a podcast episode. Project management is actually younger than the Finnish Korva pusti, which is like a cinnamon roll in Finland, by the way. And true story, I looked it up. But even though project management is such a young profession, we somehow treat it like it has been around since the pyramids. We hear people say all the time, oh, but project management is kind of a human nature pattern. It's like if you're a human, you have a project and you manage it like a project. I wonder if these people really think that way. I shudder to think what their real life would look like if you lived with them. I mean, can you imagine looking at everything as a project? Oui. That might be hard. But let me tell you a story. It's about a different type of thinking, so bear with me for a second as I explain this story. There was this guy named Edward Lawrence back in 1961. He was playing with weather models at MIT, probably because Boston weather wasn't confusing enough already. So what he discovered eventually would create the opportunity for a new science to emerge. We call it complexity science, chaos theory. It has many names. And that finding really changed how we started to understand the world around us. It even created new philosophies. So here's what happened. Lawrence was running his weather model and it was the end of the day. He was probably getting tired, and he. He took a printout of the values of the model at that time, and he went home. And now imagine this. The model is fully understood because it was created by him, Lawrence, in a computer. The value, the state of the variables is fully understood because Lorentz had a printout of the model and wrote the numbers down. But when he came back the next day, he. And he restarted the model with the same numbers. He noticed a huge pattern of deviation. Like, you know, in the beginning, the model kind of behaved almost the same, but then suddenly found another state and started to deviate from the previous day's results. And of course, Edward Lawrence thought this was a bug. Investigated it, I'm sure, but eventually came to the conclusion that what had happened was that while the computer was storing the variable with six decimal places, it only printed it out with three decimal places. I mean, we're talking about a difference that is smaller than 0.000. That's three zeros. One. That difference is so small that there's no weather instrument, at least there wasn't at the time, that could be that precise. So imagine you have a model and the inherent precision that the model needs to behave predictably isn't available. Right? Think about that. Now you might be thinking, okay, but what does this weather model have to do with software? That's a fair question. Let me get back on track with this. Well, here's the idea. Imagine that a product owner says, hey, just make this tiny change. And suddenly as you look at the code, you realize that the whole system needs refactoring. And I know you have seen this. These are called rewrite projects and technical debt. And we talk about this all the time. Now what Lawrence discovered was what eventually came to be known as sensitivity to initial conditions. Right? A small change in the initial condition can have a massive impact over time. And project management does not have in itself the tools to capture the state of the world around it in such a detail that it would reliably deliver the results it was supposed to deliver. Especially not in software, which is the industry that I know and study all the time. So project management is like trying to predict the weather, but you know an exact day, an exact time five weeks in advance. It's just not possible. I mean, we have more or less an idea of what the weather will do in the next two, three days, but there's just too much uncertainty to predict beyond it. And the same happens with project management. I mean, think about it. Projects assume that we know everything up front. They assume we know the scope, the timeline, the people involved, the outcomes that are expected. It's like trying to plan a whole year of meals. On January 1st. Oh yeah, on October 23rd, I'll want some sushi. Really? Are you sure about that? Oh, and by the way, it might be that the sushi restaurant isn't open that day. Project management just cannot, and it's not fair to assume it could capture the state of the model, the system that we are looking at. So software development in enough granularity and then model it accurately enough to be able to predict beyond the next few days or weeks or, you know, very high level ideas, never what we are going to do, what each team is going to do on a week by week basis. And it tries to do this. I mean, there's a tool for it, it's called the Gantt chart. Okay, but here's where it gets interesting, some of you might say, okay, yeah, but agile helps, because, you know, agile is what the industry, software industry that is, has come up to help tackle this problem of lack of predictability and lack of adaptation to changes in plan and so on. But Agile is only a small part of the solution. Agile is like having a weather forecast for the next few days. It doesn't give you the weather forecast for the next year. Project management tries to, but it fails. But, and this is a big but, very often we end up having Agile use like project management, just disguised, right? It's like trying to plan everything, trying to detail everything that needs to be done, and then we just slap scrum on top of it and hope it's agile. Well, it can't be, because one of the fundamental aspects of Agile is that we are constantly assessing what is happening and we are adapting to that information. That adaptation, inspect and adapt cycle is not incorporated in project management, at least not in any significant way that would help us in project management. In software delivery, right? So when we think about software delivery, things are changing all the time. Project management requires all that information to be funneled up to a point where all of the decisions are made and then those decisions are cascaded down to the teams. This is just too slow and inefficient. And in fact, when we look at software organizations, we already see that no one really uses project management like it was designed to be used. So here's my. For 2025, I have this four point manifesto. First, fund software, like as if you were investing in the stock market, you put bit by bit over time, not all at once. Then we need to think like investors. As we put money into the stock market, for example, into a feature or a delivery or an epic, we evaluate as we gather more information if that EPIC or feature is likely to deliver the value we expect. This is what I call a bet, and that's a technical term. We make bets, right? And we need to evaluate if the return that we expect from that bet holds over time. If it doesn't, we should stop that bet. We should not continue to invest in features or epics that we don't believe will deliver the value we expected it to deliver. So we need to think like an investor, not a project Manager. Then point three is experiment by default. We've already talked about the 24 hour experiments this week and this is a key enabler for us to adapt. It is indeed unlocking the agility, because it's not the agility only at the team level. Experimentation Gives us agility at the portfolio level. And this is key. When we think like an investor, we need to be thinking, thinking about creating adaptability at the medium to long term plan level, not just at the team level. And then we need to give teams end to end ownership so that they can quickly validate assumptions, give us information about what bets might or might not deliver value, and then help us make decisions of where to put our effort. Because all, all organizations have limited amount of time, money and people that they can deploy to achieve a certain objective by thinking like investors and funding software like if we were investing in the stock market, we open the possibility to be adaptable or agile at the portfolio level. Experimentation or experiments give us the information we need to make those adaptations. And the end to end ownership at the team level allows us to deploy that ability to experiment much faster and much widely, much more widely, so that the whole organization can be collecting information and deliver that information to the decision makers. Now, many of you will be still working in organizations that have project management offices and therefore have that type of process already in place. And it's going to be hard to change. And I totally get that. The goal here is not to change everything in one go. Let's start, for example, by running experiments, collecting information early and delivering that information to the decision makers. Whether they are ready yet to make decisions based on any information that is collected early in the project, that's up to them. Right? But we can start providing that information. So if you're a Scrum master, I would work with, or an Agile coach or a product owner, I would work with the team to enable this end to end ownership and running experiments. So collecting information that allows us to know whether we are on track and able to deliver on the promise of that particular feature or epic. Let's start there. That's the first wish. But then we need to have agility at all levels of our organization. We need to provide that information to the portfolio owners and hopefully move away from projects into investments looking at features and epics as investments that are constantly evaluated for value. And then of course, we keep the ones that work and we drop the ones that don't. This agility really helps teams thrive because this is what Agile and Scrum specifically was created for, right? To give teams end to end ownership and to provide value at every step of the way. And there are quite a few organizations already working this way. We're negotiating with some of the people that might be coming to the Global agile summit in 2025 and some of the stories will for sure be about how organizations are looking at their software development much more like an investment rather than project management. If you want to know more about these stories, you can join us at the Global Agile Summit 2025 that will be in Tallinn, Estonia. Check out the super early bird tickets that are currently available during Christmas and early January@globalagilesummit.com and get a 75% discount. This is it. Once we announce the agenda, that discount will be gone. So make sure you check out globalagilesummit.com and get those tickets now. So remember, butterflies don't follow project plans and neither does software development. That's why agile emerged as an approach in the first place. All right, so this wraps our five wishes for 2025 series. Thank you for joining me on this journey. I hope to have inspired you to do something different when you go back to work in the new years. And let's make sure that 2025 is the year where we move our industry forward. So stay agile, my friends and I'll see you all in Tallinn. We really hope you liked our show, and if you did, why not rate this podcast on Stitcher or itunes. Share this podcast and let other Scrum masters know about this valuable resource for their work. Remember that sharing is caring. It.