Tag Archives: Business Agility

Episode 177: The Human Side of Agile for Non-Software Teams with Gil Broza

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Renee and Craig are at Agile 2019 in Washington, DC and talk to Gil Broza, Agile Mindset and Leadership Coach / Trainer at 3P Vantage and author of “The Agile Mind-Set“, “The Human Side of Agile” and “Agile for Non-Software Teams” and they talk about:

  • Agile 2019 talk – “How to Help your Non-Software Colleagues Adopt Agile“
  • Outside of software, they notice Agile and want what they have – a different team experience and doing things better
  • Focus on a principle based transformation rather than practices – have conversations early and often on how we want to be and how we want to operate
  • The Agile Manifesto principles are partial and software heavy, the values and beliefs are the root and leadership should keep these alive
  • 26 principles in “The Agile Mind-Set” book and includes transparency (which is harder in areas like HR and Finance)
  • Craig’s Agile 2010 talk “I’m The Business & Agile Was My Idea” (and we were before our time!)
  • The practices really don’t matter and there aren’t really equivalents outside of software
  • We are obsessed with the how in Agile (the implementation), Lean has always been about principles
  • We have crossed the chasm of Agile at team level but not at scale – or have we? Nail it before you scale it!
  • Ceremonies mean people turn up and go through the motions (The Scrum Guide says events), use workflow instead of process (which means I do work and send it in for approval), work item or task instead of user story (Scrum calls them backlog items)
  • The common denominator between software and the rest of the organisation is the principles
  • If you don’t think differently, doing differently won’t matter
  • Renee recommends “The Human Side of Agile” as well as “Coaching Agile Teams” for new Scrum Masters
  • Heart of Agile (Gil is not familiar with it so Renee and Craig channel their inner Tony to explain it!)
  • Oath of Non Allegiance
  • Are you coaching around values, principles and mindset or practices?

TheAgileRevolution-177 (57 minutes)

Episode 140: Spinning the AgilityHealth Radar with Sally Elatta

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Craig sits down with Sally Elatta, Founder and President of Agile Transformation and AgilityHealth at the Agile 2016 Conference in Atlanta and they talk about:

  • First things first, the AgilityHealth discs are not a frisbee!
  • The AgilityHealth vision is to help Agile teams have a consistent way to measure their health and performance and see the results in a visual way and secondly for leadership to understand the cause and effect – the radar opens up a conversation
  • AgilityHealth radars
  • The team radar has five dimensions – leadership, performance, clarify, foundation and culture – a healthy team should have these
  • It is not a survey tool, it is a facilitated retrospective to promote healthy conversation and create an action plan
  • We should be doing tactical retrospectives every sprint, but the missing component is strategic retrospectives once every quarter
  • Business agility relies on having healthy teams
  • Many other radars including Lean Product Health, Technical Health, Scaled Agile Release Train Health and Portfolio Health and Business Agility as well as individual radars for Agile Coach Health, Scrum Master Health and Product Owner Health
  • Larry Maccherone and the SDPI
  • “If you ever use data to punish a team, you will never see the truth again”
  • Craig’s Quality video on the AgilityHealth growth portal
  • AgilityHealth certifications

TheAgileRevolution-140 (19 minutes)

Episode 139: Talking Agile Craft with Steve Elliott

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Craig chats with Steve Elliott, the founder and CEO of Agile Craft and they discuss:

  • Dependencies are the number one thing that kills agility
  • Scaling agility across a large organisation is a 5 – 10 year journey
  • Scrum is often disconnected from the portfolio planning layer, the scaling methods are making the program level agile and predictable
  • If you want business agility you have to hinge the technology into the business
  • Sometimes it takes a few attempts for agile transformations, like tipping over a Coke machine (and unlike tipping a cow), you need to lead with results and then work on cultural change to be successful
  • If the leader of an Agile transformation left the organisation, would they go back to the old way or is Agile part of their DNA – if they would go back they have not been transformed
  • The scaling Agile frameworks are relatively new and evolving with major changes, without these though there is a lot of chaos and you need them to do Agile at Scale in a large company
  • The companies that win are the ones where the technology and the business are in sync, you need some process to do that
  • If we do more experimentation with the scaling methods and some of the lesser frameworks get traction, the community will be better for it
  • SAFe is the leader in the scaling space, but LeSS is very popular in Europe
  • Startups are all about business agility, because long feedback cycles are deadly, we need to be able to make decisions and react quickly
  • Amazon is a good technology company that through business agility threatens everyone
  • The technology curve is only going to accelerate; physical, digital and biological is going to come together and the application is going to disrupt many businesses very quickly
  • We still need more data to improve the software process using machine learning to do simulations to get better quality, predictability and value
  • Agile Craft brings together the product strategy, the team ALM tooling and the business strategy together from the top down, and is multi-modal (it works with all levels of Agile maturity) to nudge teams across to Agile practices faste. The tool has automated coaching built in (no, they have not built a robot coach, yet…!)

TheAgileRevolution-139 (45 minutes)