Agile inceptions - blending the async with sync

Summary
Inception is the process by which agile teams get the information they need to start building software. While synchronous workshops are a major part of this process, there's value in blending in asynchronous techniques as well.

1. First, use "remoteness" to liberate you. Make your inceptions lean. You can uncover non-urgent information later.
2. Look for opportunities to go asynchronous in all four stages of the inception journey - information gathering, preparation, facilitation and showcase.
3. Surface relevant information well before the meetings to make the meetings themselves more productive.
4. Use a baton-pass pattern to stagger preparation and synthesis activities across team members in different time-zones.
5. Lastly, remember that being asynchronous is a means to an end. The goal is to guide our intuition and make better decisions.

When you start an agile project, it’s a time of great flux. You have a set of ideas you want to execute, but no coherent plan yet. Exceptions aside, most stakeholders want answers to a few questions.

1. What’s the shape of the solution? We answer this question with a backlog, site blueprints, logical architecture diagrams, and a proposed tech stack. 

2. How big is this piece of work? Usually, teams answer this question with an estimate of size for the highest priority backlog. Story points are the most common measure of size, though there are teams that use other sizing techniques.

3. How long will it take? Agile teams typically use a notion of velocity; i.e. how much work they can complete within a specific time-box (such as a two-week sprint), to predict how long it’ll take to deliver. 

4. How risky is the plan? Technologists are wonderful, insane optimists. To temper that optimism, we use techniques such as contingency planning to help the business understand the uncertainty associated with the plan.

Agile inceptions help answer these questions. They’re a set of activities to help you get your project on the road. Now remember Mr Miyagi? It’s all about balance in communication. Given the time-boxed nature of inceptions, mixing synchronous and asynchronous communication is an effective approach. In today’s post, I want to tell you how this can be a mighty good thing for your project.

Remote inceptions allow you to simplify the process

Back in the day, inceptions were an elaborate song and dance. In my role as a consultant, I’d travel with my colleagues to a client's office in another country. We’d team up with some onshore colleagues and work out of a room in the client’s office. The client representatives themselves would travel from all across their country for the inception. Since we had to make the most of travel and the fact that we’d made our client book off space and time, we’d cram a bunch of sessions and workshops into this synchronous time together. Not all sessions were essential to starting the project. They could wait, but we’d go “Oh well, why not!”. 

Remote inceptions lower the stakes for an inception. You’re not travelling and no one else is. You’ve not blocked space on a client site. Now you can focus on the most important questions you need to answer to start your project. Everything else can wait. Not too bad, eh? You can now be quite radical about how lean you make your inception. My colleague Paulo Caroli wrote an entire book on lean inceptions - use that as inspiration.

Asynchronous and synchronous activities in the inception journey

The four key phases of the inception journey

Synchronous workshops are a major part of the inception process. We use them to gather information or make decisions. Workshops are meetings as well. And what do we say about meetings? They are the last resort. So everything we’ve already discussed meeting best practice holds good. Preparation and synthesis are just as important as workshop facilitation. Before we discuss workshop mechanics, let’s understand what the broad journey of the inception looks like.

1. Information gathering. By the time you start an inception, you should know what you’re trying to build. This information and its rationale emerge from a discovery process. Regardless of who conducts this discovery, you need to gather and study this context to align yourself with the business. I recommend doing this part asynchronously. 

2. Preparation. Once you consume information from the discovery, your team will know what questions you need to answer before you write the first lines of code for this project. It’s time to line up those questions and start planning activities and meetings to gather information so you have answers. This is also when you collaborate with the client to agree on the agenda, who needs to be in each meeting, and how you expect to work together. While you should have a few meetings to get to know each other and kick-off a working relationship, a lot of this work can happen asynchronously. 

3. Facilitation. Most of the folklore around inceptions focuses on this bit. And I admit this is an important part of the process; especially to surface disagreements and to reach consensus. While most of this process is synchronous, I’ll explain shortly why you need to blend asynchronous methods to make these workshops effective.

4. Showcase. Last but not the least, an inception culminates in a showcase of outputs to all stakeholders. Inception showcases can also represent a go/no-go decision for the project, depending on the costs and complexity you uncover. Assuming you get a sign-off, this represents the starting point for your project. Even with this meeting, it’s good practice to share outputs asynchronously for everyone to study. The showcase can then be all about acting on those outputs.

As you’ll notice, every activity in the inception journey has the potential to be at least partly asynchronous. What about those workshops, then? How do you make them effective?

Prepare, synthesise and validate instead of starting from a blank slate

Repeat after me. 

“Complex problems need deep thinking.

Deep thinking benefits from asynchronous work.”

You need an inception because you’re dealing with a relatively complex problem. As we’ve discussed already, complex problems benefit from writing things down. In an inception, you may not have the time for people to create documents and consume them; though I argue we should try that approach if your clients are open to it. However, even if your clients aren’t yet onboard with an asynchronous way of working, you need to balance deep thinking with synchronous collaboration.

Prepare, facilitate, synthesise, repeat

This means that as against starting your workshops on a blank slate, you need to bring some inputs to help facilitate the discussions effectively.

1. What information do you already have from the discovery or directly from the business to inform the questions you’re trying to answer in the workshop? Organise that and make it visible to everyone in the meeting.

2. What information have you synthesised from other workshops that apply to this meeting? Make that visible as well.

3. Finally, as a team of technologists, do you have a point of view about how to act on the information? Share that with your attendees too.

You can put this information on a collaborative whiteboard, using a visual facilitation framework of your choice. Alternatively, you can also do a version of a six-page memo to have everyone consume the background information in the first few minutes of the workshop. You’ll notice that when everyone starts from a shared understanding, you’ll arrive at decisions faster than otherwise.

Make time-zones your ally

Facilitating inception sessions with a cross time-zone baton pass

If you’re working across time-zones and have a team offshore and another onshore, working asynchronously can be an immense advantage. You can sequence your sessions in a way that the team in each time-zone facilitates on alternate days. That way, each team has the time to synthesise the outputs from their workshops without worrying about running the next set of sessions. It can be the perfect baton pass. 

If you’re all offshore, and you have a strong facilitator on the client side, you can orchestrate the baton pass by even asking clients to anchor some sessions. We’re all one team, remember? For consultants who’re used to doing it all by themselves, this may seem like an unrealistic utopia. Then again, if you simplify the workshops by organising inputs asynchronously, you can de-skill facilitation in a big way.

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Daniel Kahnemann

“Intuitions are better and more accurate if you delay until you have all the information organised and you have a profile of the information.”

As I close this piece, I want to point something out. Being asynchronous is not the end in itself. It’s a means to an end. It makes the inception meetings effective. These meetings are a way to either surface information or to arrive at decisions. Be intentional about blending in asynchronous activities into this process. That way, you can synthesise information and use that to guide the team and your stakeholders’ intuition and decision making. 

Agile product development often has recurring discoveries and inceptions. Some of these may run in parallel with your development process. So the next time your team runs one of these activities, stop to think how the asynchronous techniques we’ve discussed in this post can enrich the outcomes you derive from the exercise.