Tag Archives: Teams

Episode 188: Doing Agile Right with Steve Berez & Tony Christensen

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Tony and Craig catch up with Tony Christensen and Steve Berez, co-author of “Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos” as well as from Bain & Company and they chat about:

  • Saw a lot of companies doing agile wrong and a lot of pain suffering and probably worse off than when they started – book is to try to share learning and get agile on the right track
  • The conditions for agile to flourish need to change, particularly beyond team level
  • RBS – one of the key impediments was funding, changed to funding persistent teams
  • Most organisations have a dissatisfaction with their financial process – need to have an honest conversation around the pain points of trust and process and seeing the promise of early return
  • Bosch – were not innovating as quickly as they needed to, now using Agile for product design, manufacturing process and supply change operations – use Agile wherever a change need is required
  • Best way to manage a transformation is in an agile way – problem is unfortunately a transformation has to be funded using the existing processes and adapt the process as you go
  • Where Agile works well is where it is more organic – give the teams the tools for success and get out of the way
  • Saab Gripen Fighter Jet – built using Agile
  • Set the ambition to be a continuous internal learning organisation
  • We need good recipes – Toyota and Spotify are good examples – sharing is of benefit to each other
  • Persistent teams are recommended to get the best results. – there is a compelling economic argument for this as well
  • How Agile Is Powering Healthcare Innovation – healthcare has had to innovate at a much more rapid pace than traditionally due to the global pandemic – built around small empowered teams that are focussed on the problem

TheAgileRevolution-188 (54 minutes)

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Episode 187: Domain Driven Yak Symmathesy with Jessica Kerr

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Tony and Craig are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and chat to Jessica Kerr, software developer, consultant and symmathecist (look it up or listen to the podcast) and apart from our first live podcast sneeze they talk about:

 
  • YOW! 2018 keynote “The Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming“
  • YOW! 2018 talk “Shaving the Golden Yak“
  • Great teams make great people – if you want to become great as a developer, focus on the team
  • You can’t document what is obvious to you – whenever you say the word obviously, replace it with “I cant explain it, but…”
  • Yak shaving – all the tasks that you do that get in the way of your work
  • If you are an agile person but you wish agile had more code in it – go to the Domain Driven Design community
  • We need to embrace complexity in the business domain – the code should be a tool to learn about the business domain
  • Code doesn’t wait for design, it participates in design
  • Atomist – automation for DevOps

TheAgileRevolution-187 (30 minutes)

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 175: Self Selecting Teams & Olympic Lessons with Sandy Mamoli

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Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and chat with Sandy Mamoli, Agile Advisor and Coach at Nomad8 and co-author of “Creating Great Teams” and they chat about:

  • Nomad8 is a managerless agile coaching collective in New Zealand, based on the Crisp model
  • The lost podcast
  • Kanbanfor1 (and Jim Benson – Personal Kanban)
  • “Creating Great Teams” book with David Mole – based on the journey at Trade Me, if people can organise themselves for a Ship It day it should work for everyday work
  • You do not need to change reporting structures to make self selection work nor does the size of the organisation matter
  • Original paper on Self Selection
  • Larger companies should probably split to tribes of no larger than 150-200 people
  • Heidi Helfand – “Dynamic Reteaming” book and podcast
  • Should do self selections again every 6-9 months
  • Team structures can change during a self selection as required
  • You usually need multiple rounds of self selection, rounds are usually about 10 minutes long
  • YOW! 2017 talk “How the Olympics Can Make You a Better Person” and Agile Australia talk
  • “Be the worst player on the best team that will take you” – allows you to amplify learning
  • AgileWelly
  • State of Agile in New Zealand – along with Australia are ahead of the USA due to smaller companies, age of companies, less fear and more innovation
  • Agile Principle and Modern Agile  and Liftoff cards
  • Holocracy – pushing decisions into circles has allowed fast and good decisions, this will continue to evolve
  • #JAFAC conference

TheAgileRevolution-175 (40 minutes)

Episode 174: Dynamic Reteaming with Heidi Helfand

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Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and talk to Heidi Helfand, Director of Engineering Excellence at Procore Technologies and author of Dynamic Reteaming and they talk about:

  • YOW! 2017 talk “Dynamic Reteaming: The Art & Wisdom of Changing Teams“
  • The general belief is the best teams are the ones that are stable and don’t change, but the opposite is often reality
  • Dynamic Reteaming is inevitable, you might as well get good at it
  • Tuckman added adjourning later, as an acknowledgment that things don’t stay the same
  • Teams by percentage gives dynamic reteaming a bad name – this is an antipattern
  • Good agile practices tend to help the ability to dynamically reteam
  • Ties nicely into Modern Agile, particularly experiment and learn rapidly as well as make people awesome
  • Dr. Spok – the “single point of knowledge”, may he live long and prosper!
  • Shared experiences and fun are great ways to break down the barriers and build community
  • Drexler/Sibbet model
  • GTKY – Getting to Know You Lunch – budget to encourage people to get to know each other, especially in companies that are growing fast
  • Innovation by Isolation Pattern – GoToMyPC was created this way
  • Dan Pink – “Drive“
  • Sandy Mamoli – “Creating Great Teams” – “what would you if you weren’t afraid?”
  • Dan Mezick – “show a new idea and invite people to try it”
  • Craig Larman – “you need to own ideas and not rent them”
  • Episode 106: Turning the Agile Ship Around with David Marquet and intent based leadership
  • What is the sweet spot for freedom where the things I want to to do match with the goals of the company and freedom for learning

TheAgileRevolution-174 (38 minutes)

Episode 166: A Trip Down Agile Memory Lane with Jeff Smith

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Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and talk to their former leader Jeff Smith, EVP and COO at World Fuel Services and former CEO of Suncorp Business Services:

  • Australian Agile journey took him from Telstra, to a small startup and then to Suncorp, and later IBM and World Fuel Services
  • Scale of thought is more important than scale of people
  • The Suncorp Agile Academy was born out of the fact that learning matters, but the idea was for other companies to create content that could be shared in the Agile community which did not happen
  • Suncorp Building Quality In program
  • It all comes down to great people and working through problem
  • It’s hard for companies to build great leaders that are interested in building great teams
  • Jeff Smith keynote “Leading an Agile Company“
  • Availability is not a skillset
  • Thinking from a team point of view is important – at World Fuel for example, the MTR dropped 80% due to this approach
  • Don’t waste time on people who don’t want to follow what you want to do
  • Most companies surround themselves with the companies being disrupted, not the disruptors – need to work with people and companies who want to change the game
  • You learn a lot from being around better people
  • For ANZ, the key to their Agile journey has been that CEO Shayne Elliott was willing to spend time outside the organisation and learn
  • You need to be structured to support end to end cross functional teams formed around the work – the structure of the team matters
  • The next disruption is the physical versus virtual world, in particular what happens to things like networking appliances
  • It’s easy when something is new to find ways to shut it down, its harder to keep it going

TheAgileRevolution-166 (33 minutes)

Episode 159: What Colour Agile Would You Like Today with Nigel Dalton

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Craig is at YOW! Hong Kong and is sitting with Nigel Dalton, Chief Inventor at REA Group and the Australian “Godfather of Agile” and they reminisce about:

  • Anita Sengupta’s YOW! Hong Kong keynote “The Future of Mars Exploration“
  • Akin’s Rules of Spacecraft Design – “don’t mess it up, there are people involved”
  • Nigel Dalton’s YOW! Hong Kong talk “Agile is the Last Thing You Need“
  • The two early experiments of Agile in Australia – Lonely Planet and Suncorp
  • 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
  • John Sullivan’s YOW! Hong Kong talk “A Presentation to Myself on Organisational Agile Transformations“
  • ANZ is disrupting the power base of senior management – Shayne Elliott video about their way of working and Bluenotes podcasts, inspired by ING
  • The wish for REA is for new hires turn up and say they came to work here “because I heard the managers are awesome”
  • Google Project Aristotle brought honour back to the role of manager
  • “The Mythical Man Month” – Frederick P. Brooks
  • 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
  • Mark Hibberd’s YOW! Hong Kong talk “Lake, Swamp or Puddle: Data Quality at Scale“
  • 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
  • “The Machine That Changed The World” blew the lid on the Toyota culture – Jim Womack reflected recently that he really wanted work and workplaces to be better
  • 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
  • “Extreme Programming Explained” – many of the early adopters were inspired by this book
  • Blend of Lean systems thinking and Agile is likely to come back around again – we need to cross the streams
  • The Agilista frameworks methodologies like Kanban, Scrum, SAFe will become LeSS important #dadjokes
  • Starting to get comfortable about having conversations about productivity – immense gain to be had across the whole flow
  • John Shook – “Learning to See: Value Stream Mapping” – need the technical brains to read that book
  • Diversity and Inclusion is the solution to the shortfall of people working in tech
  • Sir John Bagot Glubb – “The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival” – it explains everything!
  • It’s time for Australia to double down on science
  • How do we make our biggest companies be more innovative?

TheAgileRevolution-159 (49 minutes)

Episode 152: Communities of Practice, Onions, Bus Stops and Shopfronts with Emily Webber

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Craig is at YOW! Conference and spends some time with Emily Webber, Agile Coach and author of “Building Successful Communities of Practice” and “The Agile Team Onion” and they chat about:

TheAgileRevolution-152 (33 minutes)

Episode 131: Program Management Envato Style with Adrian Fittolani

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Renee, Tony and Craig are at Agile Australia and sit down with Adrian Fittolani from Envato and discuss program management and monte carlo simulations. Renee also makes an estimate that is super accurate!

  • Envato – a marketplace for creative assets
  • Lisa Frazier talk at Agile Australia “Leadership in the Digital World“
  • utilise bottom up program management at Envato, they have 4 main themes as a company and use self organising themes to meet those themes
  • had to evolve from co-located teams as could not find local resources, they now have any person working in any team wherever they are and make that work, they try to keep teams in close timezones and use asynchronous communication tools, have a policy to work anywhere and additionally a policy to travel and work from anywhere in the world for 3 months
  • the teams responsibility is to radiate program status, currently using a short document with a timeline view
  • launch wall for important items kicking off in the next 2 weeks – helps eliminate surprises
  • project is where more than one team is involved, form a circle around the project (like holacracy)
  • Renee and Craig’s talk at Agile Australia “Coaching Nightmares: Insights We Can Learn from Gordon Ramsay“
  • Adrian’s talk at Agile Australia “Better Project Forecasts without Estimates – The Monte Carlo“
  • monte carlo simulation- replace subjective estimation techniques that most projects use and rather use a lean approach of takt time to model a project teams delivery
  • takt time – the drumbeat, the time it takes for a process to deliver to another process (e.g. how often a car comes off the production line or how often a story is delivered)
  • value of monte carlo is that it is non-subjective as well as allowing you to decide on the spread of risk you are prepared to take
  • Adrian’s article “Agile Project Forecasting – The Monte Carlo Method” and the associated link to the Takt Time Project Simulation spreadsheet

TheAgileRevolution-131 (28 minutes)

 

Episode 13: Stories Here, Stories There, Stories Everywhere

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StoryCraig, Tony and Renee spent quite a bit of time today looking at stories and particularly some of the odd terminology that surrounds them.:

Quotes:

“People leave organisations because of their leaders. People stay in organisations because of their teams.” – Renee

TheAgileRevolution-13 (43 minutes)