Sensis was a very early corporate in Australia that adopted Agile from beginning to end, moved teams out of the building so they could work uninhibited in an Agile way
The technology teams almost always aren’t the problem with product delivery – it is the product team taking an idea from the top to the bottom of the organisation and getting it in a form that is fit for customers
Not happy Jan! – Sensis had their focus on print and was not willing to disrupt
You need sponsorship and objectives right from the top if you want to make change – otherwise there are reasons why you do what you do and you won’t change
Do the things that are the hardest to do because then that gives you the freedom to do the things you want to do
Need to stop thinking about Agile as an institutional process
You can’t focus on the practices, you have to become Agile and then adopt practices that are the right thing to do
In relation to feedback, you need to value people’s effort and return something of greater value than what they put in
A real Agile digital transformation is about the shift to provide something that people want to use and then we can monetise it, which means you need to build something people need not what you think they want
Need to put teams together for a customer journey as opposed to divisional handoffs – that is an Agile digital transformation
The theory is that the twelve principles were written to be too strict to apply and too heavy to consume at the time – the manifesto was written to be flexible around those principles – now the manifesto gives people too much slack
We need to stop trading off doing the right thing because the shortcuts drag down the productivity and it becomes an anchor – do the right thing right now, pay the cost, take the ownership and don’t give in on the principles
The success of the REA technology teams today was the move into multidisciplinary teams where the influence comes from product – it was a difficult decision and chaos at the time
Love Spotify for their humility, honesty and contribution to the industry, their high impact video series, “if you had a music streaming startup that was well funded based in New York and Stockholm with 700 people, then the Spotify model is perfect… If you don’t, you need to think about that for yourself.”
Data debt is going to be a huge issue in the future
REA solved scaled prioritisation across lines of business works via a product council that meets monthly, they prioritise the work and re-allocate teams
Guilds are an internal meetup, taking a senior level interest by turning up and sponsoring a small budget ($2,000) for pizza or to bring in speakers is essential for success
Building architecture is a hot topic – open plan versus the Fog Creek “office for every engineer” – have found that you need overhear the conversations as everything moves so rapidly, had to sacrifice flexible work spaces as the number of employees grew
It’s interesting to see how some of the early Agile success stories have declined – have a change in leadership and the organisation changes
“Change the habits and change the work process and you get culture change for free” – Deming
The REA culture is likely to survive a change in leadership because the ownership of the way of working has been spread to all areas of the business and people get tech
Transformation doesn’t happen overnight – REA is 5 years in and probably 20% of the way
Reflected on why it was so hard to get meetups happening in the new REA Melbourne building and realised that no other professions have meetups, it’s a differentiator of working in tech, a healthy community of free sharing
Cruise Control started as an idea to write a cron job to check out code, compile and run tests
Without good processes and tools the individuals and interactions become much harder
Agile India conference – running since 2005, one of the earliest Agile conferences
Agile is a given way to do things, but we are still not seeing the benefits – need to build capability in user first / product thinking, need autonomy to deliver end-to-end customer value (startups within a startup), need to build a learning culture and expert people / craftsmanship and need to focus on continuous delivery
Indian Agile community – a lot of interesting work happening in the FinTech space and startup in spaces such as health and messaging, a move towards innovation centres from cost centres
Code is a liability, need to focus on the problem we are trying to solve rather than perfect code or an over-complicated safety net, allows you to throw away code more easily, frequently and willingly
Testing through dogfooding – want to be able to fix things faster rather than safeguard and guess what might break
As thought leaders it is our responsibility to challenge our own beliefs, otherwise we stagnate
Agility is how you think about the situation around you and be opportunistic about it
What is the least I can do to make some progress today – Indian word Jugaad (get away with it)
UK government had some large IT failures in the last like the NHS National Program for IT (12 billion pound failure), but now lots of successes like Spine 2
Agile techniques have been successful in the UK government not just because other approaches have failed so badly but the cost of an IT project is only a fraction of the overall cost of a system
The Government Design Principles – start with user needs – successful projects start with clearly articulated principles, did not realise how much they would resonate
Worked around a number of government process early on, support from the Minister and investing time to find allies was essential
Were never dogmatic about flavours of Agile, this presented challenges with vendors – can you make changes quickly, can you ship software faster, have you thought about quality?
The problem is not scaling frameworks, it’s that you tried to start big – need to start with a small team and seed the trust
Tackled the financials with the spending control process and an Agile business case (based around progressive funding) and align spending around Discovery, Alpha, Beta and Live stages and approval for later stages comes from what you have learnt from the previous stage
Genuine leadership requires openness – be self reflective, clearly articulate values and principles, the biggest risks you are concerned about and the outcomes you wish to achieve – then build trust with the team to achieve this
The strategy is delivery
Don’t start until somebody can express an outcome – once they do, turn something around quickly
Craig and Tony are at LAST Brisbane 2018 in their home town of Brisbane and wander the lunch hall speaking with members from the local Agile community:
Craig is at YOW! West in Perth and sits down with Dr. Anita Sengupta, a rocket scientist and aerospace engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (and since this interview was recorded now a Senior Vice President at Hyperloop One). They geek out talking about space exploration as well as the important topic of diversity:
When you are doing something for the first time, you have to come up with out of the box solutions – first you need to make it work, and then you need to make it last
The biggest issue is to get enough people into the pipeline from under-represented groups, one thing we can do is more public outreach at the school level
You come up with more interesting solutions when you work with diverse teams, and, when you intersect with other universes you learn so much
Craig is at YOW! Singapore and catches up with Stanly Lau, organiser of the Agile Singapore conference and the Agile Singapore meetup:
