Amplio Is a Includes a Set of Capabilities and Patterns

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This post is part of the foundation for the Amplio Capabilities and Patterns Project. Sessions are part of the free Amplio Community of Practice which has weekly sessions at 8am Pacfic Tuesdays.

What Is the Structure of Amplio

Amplio helps teams and organization create a set of agreements on how to work together.

It does this by providing a set of capabilities that ?are used to maximize the creation of value. Examples of these capabilities are “identifying critical stakeholders’ value, success criteria and constraints”, “having an intake process” , “planning”, and more. There are about 30 capabilities at the team level and 50 at the organization level. Not all capabilities have to be addressed to be effective and many are being met to different degrees already.

The key is to identify which capabilities are not being done well and to create a plan for improvement. Amplio provides a GPS to identify where you are and how to improve.

Capabilities are organized as artifacts, agreements, responsibilities and practices.? Practices create, use, and modify the artifacts, agreements, and responsibilities. For example, “iteration planning” (a practice) will create an “iteration plan” (an artifact).

Capabilities are described in terms of their objectives. For example, “iteration planning” has the objective of creating a plan for the work of the iteration about to be done. The structure of a capabilities depends upon its type as shown below:

Artifacts

• What it is used for
• How to create it
• Who is likely to use it

Agreements

• The purpose of the agreement.
• The form for the agreement.
• Who the agreement is between.

Responsibilities

• Why we need this responsibility.
• What needs to happen.
• The typical roles associated with these responsibilities.

Practices

• What is the purpose of the practice (e.g., creating an artifact agreement responsibility doing an action).
• Who is involved in the practice.
• What artifacts, agreement and responsibilities are used, created or modified by the practice.

Amplio Includes a set of capabilities to enable create a set of practices tailored to the organization using it.

Providing a set of capabilities required to be effective enables the creation of a set of team or organization-wide agreements across all people involved. In other words, these agreements include which capabilities are most important. The capabilities foster conversation about what needs to happen.

This shift from a framework of practices to follow to a set of capabilities that are useful and the agreements around meeting them may at first appear subtle, but is very critical.? Consider Edgar Schein’s insight that “we don’t think and talk about what we see, we see what we are able to think and talk about.” This means that if it’s not in our vernacular, we don’t even see it.

?No framework of practices can be complete. If we focus on the framework, we won’t be thinking and talking about things outside of it.

?Which means we may not see even obvious solutions. Talking about capabilities, however, opens up deeper and broader conversations – even “what other capabilities do we need?”? Since capabilities reflect the work we need to do we can discover any missing ones by looking at our value streams.

Identifying Which Capabilities Need to Be Improved

We need to focus our energy on improving those capabilities that will make the biggest impact on our ability to create value. Amplio provides a diagnostic tool (called the Amplio GPS) to do this. It is called a GPS because it helps you identify where you are, where you want to head and how to get there. Instead of calling the path to get there a “roadmap” however, it is called an improvement backlog because we recognize that as we improve, we will need to continuously update your path of improvement.

Manifesting the Capabilities

It would be easy to state how to implement each capability. This is the normal path taken by popular frameworks. For example, the “planning capability” could be stated to be manifested by using “sprint planning.” But this presupposed a solution before you know all of the factors, or forces, involved. What’s more effective is to provide the people involved in planning with the factors to attend to with an understanding of why they are important and have them decide what would work best.

Using Alexandrian Patterns to Manifest the Appropriate, Fit For Purpose, Practice

In A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander’s approach to design is to look at the whole and decompose it into its components creating clarity on the relationships between the components.

“Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.”

This has been paraphrased into “patterns are solutions to recurring problems in a context.”

Patterns provide a solution to a problem by attending to the context the problem is showing up in and the issues involved.

An Amplio pattern is described as follows:

• Name
• The context ?in which the pattern is used.
• The objective of the pattern.
• The forces present.
• The core solution – this is the basis for the actual solution which is arrived at by attending to the forces in the given context.
• Capability(ies) it belongs to.
• Related patterns.
• Potential implementations (risks of the implementations).

An Example to Illustrate Capabilities, Patterns and Implementations

Consider the capability “planning.’

The planning capability discusses how to plan the next step of work we’re going to do. There are four different patterns associated with it in the Amplio System.? These are:

• Iteration planning – this is for a team planning from 1-4 weeks out. Similar to sprint planning. This is used when you can plan ahead without a large number of interruptions.
• One-day timebox planning – this is when you plan for only one day. This can be used anywhere.
• Multi-team planning – this is when multiple teams work together on creating a product.
• Big-room planning – this is when several teams work on several products together

Walking though deciding how to do planning

We start by having decided we need to improve our planning or we’ve decided to create a new way of working.

We first look at which planning is most appropriate for us to use.

In this example, let’s say we are new to Agile, we are creating a new product and we have relatively few interruptions.? With these circumstances we’d likely decide on iteration planning.

Remember patterns are solutions to a problem in a context and provide you with the forces to figure out how to best implement them. The most important forces of the iteration planning pattern are:

1- How close to fully-cross functional is the team?

2- How much work comes in due to maintenance?

3- How much work comes in due to interruptions from product owners or other people?

4- How well do you understand the requirements?

5- Is this a new product or an enhancement to an existing product?

6- How frequently can the team get from customers?

7- How big are the stories to be done?

8- Is what's being built this iteration releasable?

Using these and the factors for effective value streams, the team decides how they will do planning based on what will work best for them.

Take a few minutes and imagine a situation you’ve been in regarding planning. Remember what was going on and how you decided to do planning. Would having considered these issues be helpful?

The bottom line is Amplio provides you a mechanism to find a more fit for purpose solution than just taking the predetermined solution given.?

Using Capabilities and Patterns to Improve Your Scrum

If you’re already using an approach, you can use Amplio to improve it as well. Let’s say we’re doing Scrum.? Let’s walk through this scenario.

In this case we’ve already using sprint planning (called iteration planning outside of Scrum). Now we could just rethink how we’re implementing sprint planning, but we have another opportunity as well. We can see which pattern sprint planning is an example of. In this case, it’s the ‘iteration planning’ pattern. Since iteration planning is part of the planning capability we can look to see if another planning would be better.

Let’s say we do this and decide that “one-day timebox planning” would be more appropriate. Deciding to use multi-team or big-room planning is pretty obvious. But since choosing between iteration planning and on-day timebox planning is not always clear, Amplio provides a collaboration board to help you with this. See Sprints, Daily Timeboxing, Flow and Cadence.

Once we’ve decided on one-day timebox planning we decide how to implement it using the provided pattern. This process is shown in the next figure.

Other Thoughts

While Amplio enables the ability to tailor a framework to your needs, you can start as easily as a predetermined framework if you want to. For example, since the practices of Scrum are in Amplio, as are the practices in most Agile frameworks, you can ust dial in their practices as a starting point. This makes it quicker to start, but it won't be as good a fit as you can get with just a little work.

The Agile Industrial Complex has convinced people that Agile is hard to do right. That few people have the right mental attitude. Agile is about doing the right things in the right way. It's not some holy mantra. But the cost of training is 5 to 10 times what it should be for individuals. So few folks learn what they need to. I'm up to changing that with my Amplio University. Six months of live training for $995.

Three accommodations made decades ago that still plague agilists and make short-term training both ineffective and excessively expensive.

Supporting Posts

These are posts I've written that will eventually go in the book. I am just listing them here for now.

What’s the difference between patterns as solutions to recurring problems and patterns a la Alexander.

What’s been learned in the 3 decades since the creation of Scrum

How to use inherent simplicity to remove the four major impediments to a successful of adoption of Scrum.

#Amplio #Patterns