Abstract
As an agilist working out of an internal support function, the performance consultant is the product owner. The performance consultant learns from Scrum, SAFe, and other Agile frameworks the importance of backlog refinement and prioritization, so that items of the highest value to the customer are done first. Conversely, the product owner in traditional Agile fields such as software engineering can learn from the performance consultant. The what of the product owner is clear, but there is a gap in the Agile thought leadership around the how. The performance consultant's toolkit as presented in this chapter provides direction for how to field requests, how to interact with customers, and how to approach analysis of human performance.
Over and over, we shall see that only when we have made a proper analysis of accomplishments and their measures will we have any sensible reason to concern ourselves with behavior.
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Notes
- 1.
Thomas F. Gilbert, Human Competency: Engineering Worthy Performance, Tribute ed. (Washington, DC: International Society for Performance Improvement, 1996), p. 72.
- 2.
Product owners can also turn to the fields of product management and sales for methods for interacting with customers.
- 3.
A model of performance is documentation that describes standards for behaviors and other environmental support that a person needs to exhibit to do a job. Most workers and managers are familiar with various presentations of the behavioral component of performance. These include competency models, job descriptions, procedure manuals, step-action tables, and the like.
- 4.
When referring to the people to whom service is provided, HPT people usually say “client,” and Agile people usually say “customer.” Throughout this book, consider the two terms interchangeable.
- 5.
By capability, we mean the total skill set that the workers possess—all of the performance they are able to deliver. It’s more than behavior. As Gilbert showed (Chapter 2), work environment factors contribute heavily to enabling performance.
- 6.
Dana Gaines Robinson and James C. Robinson, Performance Consulting, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2008).
- 7.
I realize you haven’t even read the email in its entirety yet, much less heard my analysis, but I have to point out something in this email that I love. Will is unambiguous about wanting a training course, which is fine. But he speculates on the methodology (“online”) before he has told me anything other than the fact that he has a “new” team. You have to respect the request, but this positioning is a reminder of why people like Will need me. I can help here.
- 8.
Years ago, I was an instructional designer at a large bank. The subject-matter expert started talking about things I didn’t understand. I said, “Well, I’m not sure I understand everything you are saying. I’m new to banking.” In response, the expert gave me some great advice. “I’ve been doing this for ten years, and I still feel new to banking. You won’t get very far with that as an excuse.”
- 9.
The inspiration for that paragraph was my experience talking to agilists at the ScrumAlliance Global Scrum Gathering in 2014. Real engineers in the field have great learning agility. They constantly have to learn new tools in order to remain relevant and, frankly, they do not want to spend days, or even hours, going to training every time a new tool is introduced. This is a key source of resistance (or worse) that I hear from engineers with respect to training. If one person gets trained on a new tool, that person can go back and tutor the entire team very quickly. Who has time to wait around for a training class to materialize, and then go to a class? Makes sense to me. The days of engineers going to training to learn which buttons to press on an application are quickly heading into the rear view mirror. If you need to go to an 8-hour class to learn how to use an application, it must not be a very well-designed application.
- 10.
In ISPI language, this is called determining the need or opportunity.
- 11.
With all due respect to the (unnamed) requester here, “LMS-style course” is not a curious way to describe a learning intervention. For readers who do not know, LMS stands for learning management system. An LMS is the gigantic application that houses and delivers training courses and maintains records of all of the classes that everyone has taken. A charitable description of a typical LMS would be an inelegant monstrosity that causes many headaches. Sometimes when I’m browsing the Internet, the browser will serve up ads that ask “Do you hate your LMS?” In some environments people equate LMS with e-learning. So in the case of Rhonda Zizzle, she meant that she wanted an e-learning. But to think of a training course as being created in the “LMS style” is to picture Frank Lloyd Wright designing a house in the “cinderblock style.”
- 12.
From the Principles behind the Agile Manifesto. Read more about them in Chapter 4. http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html .
- 13.
I won’t digress too much on the format of the log itself, but let’s just say that this was about the most bad-assed spreadsheet in the history of spreadsheets. She had formulas, feeds, charts, and pivot tables. I’m not easily impressed, but I dig pivot tables.
- 14.
Rhonda calls them best practices, but essentially they are rules. In the interest of developing rapport and not sounding like a smarty pants, I choose not to split hairs on this point.
- 15.
Not really. I’d like to say that Difficult brought me in after one of the higher-ups read my accounting of comically bad customer service on my blog. But really, I’m just dreaming about what I could have done for them.
- 16.
I will not provide a full description of the analytical methods used here. They are covered elsewhere.
- 17.
Executive-level is the key here. I’m surprised how many people fail to keep things simple for busy executives. We want to give them information that is relevant, thought out, and easily consumable. There may be copious backup data for each of your assertions, but keep that in the background. You can make it available to them. They know how to read.
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Winter, B. (2015). The Performance Consultant’s Toolkit. In: Agile Performance Improvement. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-0892-2_3
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