Although many don’t like it, all agilists are familiar with the chicken and pig joke that explains that pigs are committed to success, while chickens are at best involved. As we continue to move to larger scale enterprise agile, we can benefit from understanding varying levels of participation and commitment. As such, I use terms like piglets and chigs to describe patterns and anti-patterns of team participation and commitment.Piglets are part time participants that view their role as making a project successful, and act accordingly, despite their part time participation.
Chigs on the other hand, are individuals who look and act like chickens, but whom should really be pigs or piglets. Chigs are often worse then chickens as they frequently focus on finding problems and derailing the project instead of helping the project succeed.
Looking more Closely at Piglets
Long before Scrum became popular, there were concepts like being a member of a Core Team (think pig) or an Extended Team (think chicken). Over the years, many organizations have benefited from another concept; an Extended Core Team (think piglet).
Extended Core Team Members work part time on a project, but they are committed to success. They focus on finding solutions, not poking holes. They are only successful when the projects they are on are successful. To make this delineation clear in the agile community, I have often used the term piglets to describe Extended Core Team Members.
A Typical Anti-Pattern, Security Engineer as Chig
The evil inverse of a piglet is a chig. For example, let’s assume you are developing a new application in a high security environment. Your team works hard to understand the complex security infrastructure, but the custom services for authentication, authorization, and file transfer, along with multiple dependencies on other teams, makes it difficult to get clarity on how to proceed.
Unfortunately, Chuck, let’s call him Chuck the Chig, is the Security Engineer assigned, part time, to your team. The part time nature of his assignment is a problem, but even worse, he is simply not concerned about your project’s success.
Chuck the Chig views his role as telling you why your system can’t go live, without giving you solutions. Here’s a sample conversation that you may have with Chuck the Chig or other chigs like him.
You: How does our app look from a security perspective?Even worse, Chuck the Chig goes back to his peers, and explains just well, how dumb your team is. In short, Chuck the Chig views his role as an auditor, someone who finds problems, not as someone who helps with solutions. In fact, he gets more accolades from his boss for pointing out problems than he does for helping your team succeed.
Chuck the Chig: Not good, I don’t like the authorization mechanism. I will have time in two months to review this again after you fix it.
You: But, as you know, we are due to go live in six weeks, and you have had access to everything since day one. Can you give me a specific recommendation and work with us to fix the problem?
Chuck the Chig: You don’t seem to understand my role. As a Security Engineer, I can tell you what is wrong, but I can’t tell you what to do. You have the detailed, 218 page, document that describes valid protocols and how to leverage our security infrastructure. Read it, fix the app, and when I have time in six weeks, I will check to see if you have done it correctly.
Pulling off the Feathers
The pattern described above is far too common, and it often occurs with individuals from compliance, architecture, privacy or similar groups in larger companies. It would be nice to have full time participation from the aforementioned groups, but this is often not possible. The real leverage point is a commitment to success by those who may potentially view themselves as chigs. They, their bosses, and the organization, must view them as piglets, or Extended Core Team Members if you prefer, and use whatever limited time they have on the project to maximize the chance for success.
Saying this another way, you need to pull the feathers off of the chigs and make them piglets, where pulling off the feathers is a metaphor for removing the false assumption that there job is to find problems (e.g. their job is provide solutions).
Closing and Credits
The example above makes the case for the piglet and chigs delineation, highlighting the importance of being fully committed to project success even when participating only part time.
I coined the term piglets quite some time ago, but special thanks go to Teresa Tierney, a creative individual indeed, for coming up with the “pulling off the feathers” analogy. Hopefully this vivid metaphor will help your team (including those on the Extended Core Team) achieve success.
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12 comments:
Where do Product Owners fit?
Great Post. Referencing from http://blog.tfanshteyn.com/2009/10/i-am-here-to-help-really.html
I like the terms! :)
Sometimes I feel myself as a chig. I often do not satisfied with our progress and express that feeling to the scrum master or dev. team. So I find problems, but often do provide solutions (not always though). Good post. Good terms.
I like your "pulling off the feathers" analogy. There really is no room for Chigs on a successfull project.
In respect to anonymous, and the question about where Product Owners fit, the short answer is that it depends, but far too often they are chigs.
In many cases the PO simply doesn’t have enough time to dedicate to the project and precious little of that time is spent in the team room, with the inevitable result being that they turn into chigs.
For those Product Owners that are chigs, per the post, the first step is to change their focus (e.g. pull off their feathers) and have them commit to the teams success, likely as a piglet.
This commitment can be expressed in many ways. For example, even if they can’t spend more time on the project, they can allocate their time differently, perhaps spending more time in the team room, and less time talking to their peers about how the team has let them down.
Since the PO is a piglet the team also needs to make be flexible.
For example, perhaps the team can work around the PO’s schedule to vary the Sprint Review time, or even day, as necessary, to get their attendance and attention.
So, the chig and piglet classifications provide a richer vocabulary for understanding the problems that many agile teams face, making it easier to identify and discuss the problem. But, I also hope that a better definition of the problem space will help us, as a community, better document success patterns.
Timur,
Thanks for referencing this post, and thank you for your excellent post. I encourage everyone to read it.
I think you said it very well...
"It doesn’t matter how good you are, how good your designs are, or how new your technology is. The only thing that counts is “does it help the other team deliver their product and to run it after delivery.”
Michael,
In respect to feeling like a chig, the first step is to recognize the problem, so you are on your way to piglet status.
I would state, that even as a piglet,it is ok to identify problems, even when you don't have solutions. But, as a piglet you must resist the urge to consider yourself as separate and distinct from the team; they are depending on you to be an active participant, not a part time critic.
I keep wondering who was (initially) behind the idea of the chicken and pigs in Scrum. Any thoughts?
Torfi,
You can thank Teresa Tierney for the "pulling off the feathers" analogy.
In respect to your comment, I agree there is no room for chigs on a successful project, and in fact, it may be safe to say that few projects that have chigs are successful.
In respect to the question from PMHut about who initially had the idea for the chicken and pig story, to the best of my knowledge it was Ken Schwaber who either created the story, or at least popularized it.
Chigs are freaks of nature and should be destroyed before they infect the rest of the animals. Piglets are young pigs, so the only thing needed is to feed them a balanced diet of stories to grow on.
Linda,
I love your creative comment, especially the part about the Piglets needed to be fed a balanced diet of stories to grow on.
In respect to the Chigs being freaks of nature, and being destroyed before they infect the rest of the animals, in many organizations the Chigs are so common that it is hard to consider them freaks of nature.
Since there are so many of them, you can’t destroy them, you must convert them.
Fortunately, per my post, I think it is often as easy as making the Chig in question aware that they need to be part of the solution.
As an example, we can extend the dialog included in the post with an appropriate response to Chuck the Chig:
"Well Chuck, if you limit yourself to an audit role, the organization suffers. Perhaps we can apply your experience in a more productive fashion and have you help us solve the security problems you have found.
If you don’t have the bandwidth available to do this, we can work with your manager to either allocate enough time for you, or get appropriate time from someone else in your group.
What do you think? "
On that same note Linda, what do you think?
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