James King

I had two very different experiences this week, that led me to think more about compliance. I was thinking about compliance as an attitude, rather than an obligation or set of rules to be followed.

I wondered if there was such a thing as “having a compliance mindset”. I did extensive research, but unfortunately AI gave me two contradictory definitions.

• One was bad. It meant just following the rules rather than thinking about why they would exist or what the goal was.
• The other was good. It meant embedding consideration of standards into all the work we do. We automatically consider compliance requirements and risks. This leads to more resilient and safer outcomes.

So with a couple of prompts I was in a quandary and I was too lazy to research further. So my extensive research came to an end.

I did find this article that is worth reading, but know guidance for me that would replace the need to ponder and think things through. https://spor.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Compliance-and-Excellence.pdf

So I am considering the attitude to things. A good attitude to life and work would be:

• Giving due consideration for things like risk, legal obligations and safety automatically because we want to do good work. The opposite would be delivering something without thinking about these things unless explicitly being told to do so.
• Going beyond knowing the rules and how to follow them, o understand the nuances of why those rules apply and how they add value. The opposite would be to simply meet the rule, hit the SLA or follow a testing script.

My two experiences were quite different but I believe they have a common thread.

• At work, we are out a great tool called LinearB, which provides metrics on coding and team delivery. It then reports these metrics with confidence, along with suggestions on what to do, based on the numbers. It is like a mathematical agile coach with great attention to detail and potentially less understanding of context.
• At home, my neighbour’s tree fell into my backyard. It caused very little damage but left dangling (gigantic) branches that could cause damage. It also left a huge mess to be cleaned up.

Let me start with the tree since it is more interesting. The tree, which had been strangled by ivy for years, suddenly cracked an split. With a loud bang, a huge accumulation of trunk, branches and leaves plummeted down into my backyard.

Fortunately, beyond a damaged fence, there was no real damage. So I triaged the mess. I cut away the branches that were leaning on our garage or hanging above our clothes line. Then I looked at the remaining branches and thought better of climbing up to prune them with my small manual wood saw.

Triage done, I decided to go an talk to my neighbour. The tree was, after all, on his property and the damage was, after all, on mine.

I was worried that we would end in a dispute about who would take care of both the safety aspects and the cleaning up. It might have been wise to check on my rights but instead I just wandered around.

My neighbour was home so I told him what happened. He also could have considered the legal requirements for not destroying your neighbour’s property with giant falling trees.

Instead he invited me into his backyard to inspect what had happened. We reviewed what we could see and then walked around to my backyard. Again we assessed things together.

Now came the negotiation about what to do. He opened by saying that he had a couple of chainsaws and some experience with tree maintenance. I replied that I was pretty incompetent with chainsaws but could move debris.

He said he didn’t need me anywhere near the chainsaw and he would take a few days to cut things back and clean up. He also suggested we dump the debris in his backyard and he would slowly get rid of it.

This was a huge relief to me, but I still wanted to speak through the bit about him being under the tree with a chainsaw cutting off huge logs that would presumably then fall down with a bang.

Talking it through we came to a conclusion that met my expectations of my rights but also led to a much better outcome that calling the council, getting some quotes and then debating what to do while the tree patiently waited to fall. The cleanup is still ongoing but the danger has been sorted out.

We also agreed we would both do some clean up of the ivy that was probably a cause of the tree collapsing.

So how does this apply to LinearB?

I was worried about dealing with my neighbour and I felt like I should check what might rights were. Both of these make sense but the real gain came from talking about our shared goals and potential risks and action.

With LinearB we are getting automated measurement of things like sprint predictability, cycle time, pull request size, review time and other things.

Automated means no faking the numbers, self reporting with potential bias. But it also means no context and potential misreporting that leaders see before an explanation is given.

A bad compliance mindset would see this as a threat, just as the “Fixed Mindset” student fears assessments. It means that team leaders are losing some of their ability to be ahead of the news and to control the agenda.

A potential reaction could be to run to the rulebook, debate the numbers and start trying to learn to game them. Obviously this is unhelpful as it would be for the agile coach (me) to simply take the data and provide recommendations from AI without understanding the context.

The agile coach could be communicating goals based on limited understanding of context and then start using the numbers to make all sorts of claims. In return teams could be changing the way they work to make the numbers look good, without really looking to improve the way they work.

This would be an attitude of seeing compliance with the rules as the goal. We know engineers can game numbers and we know agile coaches can be painful and annoying.

But there is not benefit in all that.

The opposite is to take a step back and seek to understand what is actually happening, like my neighbour suggesting we go and look at the fallen tree.

If we seek to understand the “goal of the goal” then we can pursue the goal we want to achieve rather than just make the numbers look good.

So I guess one lesson is that we need to communicate what we can measure. We need to ensure everyone understands that the numbers are great for suggesting where we can look for improvements. But we still need to look at what is actually happening and talk it through. The numbers create an opportunity for a conversation and hopefully some actions. But they don’t replace the conversation or the need to think about improvement rather than mere scoring.

But there is another lesson too. I was worried that my neighbour would take the wrong attitude and I could have gone in well armed to defeat him when he did. But it turned out he wanted to make things better and be a good neighbour.

So the other lesson is to assume the people in the teams also want to make things better and start the conversation at that point.

Talk about the falling tree or the drop in velocity, but then move on to discuss what is happening in what to do next.