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:
Reminiscing about Barry’s resume that includes CitySearch (and its competitor Zip2 owned by Elon Musk), Snake, Wireless Pets on Nokia and Lilo & Stitch using J2ME and eventually onto ThoughtWorks
Lean Enterprise was written after “The Lean Startup” was released but to explain how it works if you are not a startup and increase experimentation in organisations
When people can design good disciplined experiments, you have system to break down problems and grow your system and people
Fortune 15 executives and successful startup leaders don’t sit around and ask “if we are doing the framework correctly”- they have their own system, in the same way as Toyota created their own system
If you choose an off-the-shelf framework it is just a starting point – you need to evolve your system of work to your context to have a competitive advantage
ExecCamp – take execs out of their business for up to 8 weeks with the aim to disrupt themselves in a safe environment
Unlearn – we are in an industry where we need to learn but that is not the limiting behaviour, it is our inability to unlearn our existing behaviours that holds us back from getting breakthroughs of higher performance
Mean time to discovery – how quickly can you see that an assumption is invalid so that you can then make better decisions
How often are you spending time with customers, how are you getting customer feedback and how are you feeding that information back into your system of work to improve it
Think big but start small and learn fast – safe to fail experiments
Retrospectives are great for any sort of change, not just software
There is no way of becoming Agile as a company without the CFO on board and moving from yearly budgeting – beyond budgeting assists from both the money side and the strategic side
Sociocracy looks at the organisation from the structure side – we need to build structures that allow us to make decisions more quickly through double linking and built in feedback loops
Open Space techniques are essential for facilitation and product liftoff and about using the passion of the people for innovation of your products
If you trust people maybe its cheaper than checking procedures
Need some background, come up with a hypothesis, design some experiments and measure
Experiments need to be safe to fail – either if the hypothesis is not true or the outcome is not valuable
Not “safe to fail” but “failing safely” or “safe to learn”
Publish your experiments so people can learn from each other (even if only internally)
Extreme Programming (XP) was born at Chrysler by letting go of conventional wisdom and pushing practices to eleven
Software development is a social process, not a sum of individuals process
Nobody cares about certificates, we care about competence
It’s time for a renaissance and reboot of XP – this time it needs to be inclusive and no barriers to entry
We know how to make a difference – it starts with execution and continues to empathy
Big tent agility can become an excuse not to tackle hard problems
“Not thinking about all the legs on the stool leaves you sitting on the ground” – some of the legs of agility require a fundamental change in belief
As a programmer am I responsible for my code running – once you have that belief, unit testing falls out of that
TDD is a set of feedback loops and an incentive system to encourage confidence and certainty
Test, Commit, Revert takes TDD further – run the tests, if they pass you commit and if they fail you revert the changes – incentive to take small steps
“Silence is the sound of risk” – you need feedback (unless you are perfect)
XP was a better product, but it lost (round one)
Electric or blade?
If XP starts with the premise that we want a process that anyone with talent and skill can contribute and grow at maximum velocity, the rest will take care of itself
Agile as a name is so attractive, nobody doesn’t want to be agile – the brand of Extreme Programming means if you are not extreme you are not going to say that you are
The fundamental question to ask first is “what do we have to lose” – if you have nothing to lose you need to try short and crazy experiments to find things nobody else is doing
3X model (explore, expand, extract) – YOW! keynote “3x Explore, Expand, Extract” – depends which part of the curve you are on as to which tools in your bag you should use, rules of the game change depend on whether you are looking for a new source of value (explore), growing fast and trying to keep up (expand) or continue growing to pay for new explorations (extract)
Brendan Cleary and Pete Manion from Tabcorp – got value from Jessica Kerr’s keynote and talk, Brendan’s Gregg’s keynote and the aspirational bar that has been set
Michele Playfair – 2 step journey in Agile (those playing catchup and those that are faster moving looking into newer things like sociocracy and holocracy), enjoyed Jessica’s keynote and Avdi Grimm’s “#nocode” talk suggesting that you are still a developer if you are gluing things together
“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
If you are a consulting company and don’t have your hands dirty building a product, you are missing out – try it out on yourselves before you try it out on your customers
Modern Agile recognises that there are other people who are not building software who also want to be agile and want to leverage the agile and lean concepts
Modern Agile principles – Make People Awesome, Make Safety a Prerequisite, Experiment and Learn Rapidly and Deliver Value Continuously
Lightweight methods movement came out of minimalism, but now we are in the Agile Industrial Complex – Agile has lost its simplicity and lightweight qualities
People need recipes to get started but we often get stuck on these
Forrest Gumping – stupid is as stupid does!
A lot of methodologists don’t pay attend to economics – be too idealistic and you won’t make money
We are in the business of helping individuals be agile, not organisations
Make people awesome is about being obsessed with our customers and making each other awesome in our organisations
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
Craig is at YOW! West in Perth and sits down with Ian Randall, Engineering Lead at Pushpay and co-organiser of the Codemania conference in New Zealand and they chat about:
The size of the New Zealand banking system and small number of banks makes it very easy to innovate in the payments space
The more times you the do the things that are hard and hurt, opens up the opportunities for automation
Blameless Retrospective (John Allspaw, Etsy, 2012) – promise that there will be no retribution or consequence for decisions that anybody made during an incident, they made the best decisions that they knew at the time, they were operating in a system that allowed you to make that system in the moment – therefore means that people are not afraid to make decisions because they know they are not held to blame for making a mistake
5 Whys – don’t ask why until you reach the root cause analysis, because there are often moire contributing factors and also when you ask why you end up with who (which is blame)
WOMing – ensure it works on my machine before it leaves your laptop
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:
The Agile Revolution Podcast 