Craig and Tony are once again roaming the halls at Agile Australia in Sydney and once again chat to some old friends from the Australian Agile community:
Sharon Robson from enterprising agility – enjoying the recognition that Agile adoption starts from the top down, agile at scale is about the thinking and thought processes being applied throughout the entire organisation, looking forward to Sandra Davey on “Upon retrospective: the board went Agile“
Steve Lawrence – a member of the “11 club”, agile should be a mechanism to create greater value not reduce headcount, every small step you take is a step forward
Renee, Craig and Tony are together to chat with Serge Beaumont, Principal Agile Coach at Xebia, live from his man cave and despite showing their lack of mathematical skills in relation to dice they chat about:
In relation to culture, if the human connections are there you can handle just about anything
A foundational cultural aspect at Xebia is that they implemented Xebia Knowledge Exchange (XKE) – every second Tuesday the team has dinner and then has a mini-conference of about 20 streams
Xebia were at the foundation of the ING Agile transformation
You need leadership that truly believes in culture as a powerful thing
Renee does story maps like trees and Serge prefers to ensure that he finds his epic on the horizontal slice rather than using the activities on the vertical backbone, building towards an MVP
All backlogs should be tree structures
An epic is a user story that is too big
Deltas go in the backlog and constraints go in the definition of done
two rules for scaling – autonomy over coordination and Scrum is a fractal
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
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
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:
Craig, Renee and Tony catch up with old friend and “irregular” guest Adam Weisbart about Agile Virtual Summit, Recess retrospectives, Build Your Own Scrum and making your own pizza.
Renee realised Washington state is nowhere near Washington, DC
Agile Virtual Summit 1-5 June 2020 – a collection of great speakers and registration is free!
Distributed retrospectives – important that people give a voice-over to the items that they add
Tips for Remote Agile ceremonies – recreate being in the same room with technology as much as possible, avoid the asynchronous Slack bots, actually standup,
At Slack, you are not allowed to hold a meeting via Slack!
Making virtual retrospectives fun – change them up, craft retrospectives into a story (Recess does this), remember the future (where would you be if you had the most awesome sprint ever)
The next thing in Agile just sounds like Agility!
No apologies meeting rule for children, dogs or ringing the bell…
Build Your Own Scrum in a virtual world works well on Miro and Mural (and the exercise started as an accidental panic!)
One of the strengths of the agile approach to delivery is flexibility in responding to changing circumstances, and there is no better example of this than the current lockdown. I’m sure you have heard the political adage: “Don’t waste a good crisis.” which allows us to reflect on how ways of working are currently being impacted. The Agile Brisbane community joined Tony, Craig and Renee for this online fireside chat to explore concepts around the state of agile now, and what we can carry over to the post-COVID world.
A lot of organisations are shifting their strategy and looking to digital in a stronger way than they did before
Remote amplifies everything you do when you interact with people
Once upon it was agile teams, now all teams are agile – they just struggle to operate in an agile mode
Conversations are more asynchronous now and single disruptions amplify a level of discomfort – we are not seeing the right level of tools
Need to think about the social styles of the people you are dealing with
You can work efficiently but not effectively
Working from home now is not the same as it was before – you are working AT home
“We need to be able to do the same with less”
This is the opportunity to look at the waste and focus on the value
This has allowed us to get access to people and places we had not been able to do this before
People put pressure on themselves to work harder as we lack the ability to sense the need that our teammates need help, but we have solved the amount of distractions we get during the day
The heart of agile is people, and if we can’t help people what are we doing?
This crisis is sending us a message to slow down and focus on what matters – as businesses and human beings
Reinventing Organizations and the fact some organisations have been forced to move up a level out of necessity
Are organisations responsible for providing a good workspace that meets workplace health and safety when we work from home?
With disruption comes opportunity – look for the collaboration, lean, tooling and continuous improvement opportunities
Craig and Tony are once again roaming the halls at Agile Australia in Sydney and once again chat to some old friends from the Australian Agile community:
The Agile Revolution Podcast 