Fundamentals: the Key Enabler of Software Delivery and Baseball
Kanban boards and pitching windups are only as successful as your fundamentals
While engaging with new teams, we often hear about how efficiently our team executes. This compliment is always followed by an ask to “borrow our kanban board structure” or “teach their ScrumMaster how to run a stand up”. We always honor these requests - but the results are never the same for the adopting team. Why is that?
Fake It Until You Make It?
As youth baseball coaches in the Washington, D.C. area, we see this all the time. From 2015 to 2021, future Hall of Fame pitcher Max Scherzer was a Washington Nationals mainstay. As he racked up amazing accomplishments1, local kids naturally showed up with pitching mechanics they had modeled after Scherzer.
This created a major challenge for these players to be successful. Scherzer, at the time, leveraged a windup where he looked away from the catcher’s target in the middle of his delivery, as you can see in the following video:
For kids learning to pitch, focusing on the target (the catcher’s glove) is one of the most important building blocks to having a chance to throw any strikes at all. To consistently throw strikes, it must be paired with several other important fundamentals. But even when these players got many of these other fundamentals correct, not focusing on the target hindered their chances of success.
Having to explain that “look like Scherzer, throw like Scherzer” won’t work is hard for kids to understand. He can get away with non-standard approach for a couple of reasons:
Scherzer has mastered the other fundamentals with tens of thousands of repetitions over 20+ years.
He’s a freak among freak athletes. Just 0.03% of Little Leaguers will make the Major Leagues; furthermore, only 1% of those players will make the Hall of Fame (where Scherzer is surely headed). Otherwise said, he is in the top 0.0003% of the player pool for Little League coaches.2
At the crossroads of improve their pitching or stop imitating their idol, two paths are followed. The first group sticks with their form-over-function approach and before long stops getting opportunities to pitch. The second group bears down and works on focusing on the target as well as complementary fundamentals. This takes time, but they methodically improve their performance, and this progress becomes the foundation for subsequent improvement.
What Does That Have to Do with Software Delivery Process?
It turns out having a very efficient process is lot like learning to pitch - the fundamentals are what make it effective. Improving your fundamentals is hard work that takes a long time. In fact, you typically have to pick just one, maybe two focus areas to master before adding more.
While kanban boards certainly help lean software teams execute, simply visually modeling your workflow and current work only goes so far. We’ve often witnessed these boards drastically increase standup length and cause the meeting to lose even more focus and impact. In effect, just adopting a kanban board is the same as looking away from the target while pitching - it’s success theater3.
To resolve this, it is critical to focus on the fundamentals that underpin the kanban board. This includes critically important concepts like lead time, demonstrable progress checkpoints (a.k.a., service lifecycle agreements (SLAs)), and work in progress (WIP) limits, among other foundational building blocks. And that just covers how you run the board. Equally important will be the engineering and delivery tasks that happen during each column - how you define scope, write automated tests, perform peer reviews, etc.
As Hall of Fame baseball player, Tony Gwynn, noted:
Sometimes technique works better than a whole lot of other things.
When looking to improve your process efficiency, put in the hard work and build from the fundamental building blocks. Don’t blindly borrow a technique, even if it is top 0.0003% (our process does NOT meet this threshold). Understand what makes it work and how to incorporate that into your process. You’ll get immediate and continuing improvement that will truly move the needle in the process.
Two no hitters, two Cy Young Awards, a World Series ring during his time in Washington.
Success theater is a term borrowed from Eric Ries in his book, The Lean Startup. He defines this as “…the work we do to make ourselves look successful” (page 54)