Tag: agile development

Turn your agile planning, reviews, and retrospectives into meetings that create focus and commitment. Build skills to start to get real value from Scrum, Kanban, Agile Project Management (DSDM), SAFe, and Lean Startup. Your coach will work with team leaders to build great facilitation skills. The team will take ownership for its work, leading to greater buy-in, better solutions, and high-quality work.

Posted on by

Is Agile Right for Us?

Transcript of Is Agile Right for Us?, from the Free Webinar Series to Create an Agile Organisation, on 20th August 2019. Presented by Laura Re Turner, Director, Future Focus Coaching.

Welcome

Thanks for joining us today. I think it’s a good idea to start with a definition and when I think of agility, it’s a whole collection of things for me. It’s the mind-set, behaviours, practices, iterative processes and leadership style, which is very important that allow teams to experiment, plan and deliver valuable products with minimum waste. And the reference to waste is a very over referenced to lean which is where most agile methods originate and it’s important to think about sources of waste so that we know what’s slowing us down in organisations. It’s all the non-value-added work that often leads to frustration; partially done work that doesn’t lead to value because we can’t deliver something that’s partially done. It started, sits on the shelf and maybe never gets finished; extra features, re-learning or extra processes, handoffs, delays, task switching and defects.

If we think about the hierarchical and sometimes distributed organisations working in silos kind of old-school organisations we’re thinking of them now, a lot of them have symptoms of a lot of these wastes. I think it’s important to provide a definition because the way the word agile is being used lately is as a thing or a process or a methodology. I’m hearing the word methodology more and more these days, which is interesting. I’m always reminded of Dave Thomas’s terrific blog where he says “Agile is not a noun” it never was. If you look it up in the dictionary it’s not a noun. To us when we think about how to be effective and get the most value from being agile and agility, it’s important to think of whole collection of behaviours, mind-set, leadership style and processes and tools that help us be flexible.

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

You’re probably aware of the manifesto for agile software development and this is perhaps where the word kind of caught fire agile. And I remind people that being agile is really about the left hand statements and yet when we use agile as a noun it makes us think of a single process or a software development life cycle or the one methodology that we need to adopt to be successful. So I don’t want to say too much about the manifesto because I know so many people have seen it but I think it’s important to remember that agility is a way of working and not a single process.

Should everyone use an agile approach now?

So we get questions all the time in our training courses; should everyone use an agile approach now? Should everyone be agile? Should everyone have scrum teams and scrum masters and throw away documentation? I’m just wondering what questions you have about that? I haven’t seen any questions come into the Q&A yet, but perhaps you have some burning questions about whether or not one of the iterative processes or methods or frameworks that we’ve heard of before is the best one. Is that the way to go? Is there a reason the whole world seems to want to be agile now?

The case for agility

Well things that we’ve heard from our clients are for example; new technology and new delivery platforms have allowed start-ups to get new products, niche products to market quicker and they’re actually taking away market share for some of the products that we have that we’ve enjoyed a good sales on for quite a long time. Also, we’ve heard things like small companies with flat organisation structures can organise their teams to be more nimble, to come up with ideas and to be able to organise themselves quite quickly to work on new initiatives much more quickly than we can.

We’ve also wrote things like we have a really hard time predicting how changes in legislation will affect us, especially from the government agencies that we work with. To make the company look more attractive when we look for a buyer; getting ready to sell the company and we want to make the company look a little bit more attractive – interesting.

Poll: What are your Reasons for Becoming ‘Agile’?

So, I’m wondering what are some of your reasons for becoming agile? It wouldn’t be an interactive webinar without a little poll and I thought it would be interesting to find out from you what are some of your reasons given in your organisation for becoming agile? So I’d like to invite you just to choose as many of the statements that you think apply to you and choose as many as you want and go ahead and vote and we’ll take a minute to give you a chance to read through the options and let’s find out what you think.

It looks like everyone’s voted; I’d like to show you the results. So 33% said to reduce costs and actually we’re hearing more and more that people are looking to use an agile approach to reduce costs. 50% said it’s to stay competitive while delivering innovative products and then 83%, the majority said that the reason for becoming agile in our organisations is to reduce the time that it takes to get new products and services to market. So it’s about time and speed. I thought it would be interesting to throw in a few slightly humorous reasons because the competition is doing it and sometimes there is a real reason although perhaps not stated explicitly or out loud.

The wider community: Reasons for Becoming Agile

So I thought it would be interesting also to see what were some of the reasons that other people more widely in the community said that they were becoming agile, what were some of the reasons? If you’re anything like me you tend to follow the reports and anything that’s reported on where the market’s going and where organisations are moving to and the reasons for adopting an agile approach.

Well, I thought it would be interesting just to take a snapshot from Version One’s annual State of Agile report; this came out in May and they surveyed thousands of people working in the domain every single year. Perhaps not surprisingly, most people said in response to the survey that their top reason was to accelerate software delivery very much like the reasons that we stated in the pole.

Enhancing ability to manage changing priorities which really speaks to the amount of change in the external business environment and the uncertainty that we’re experiencing now. To increase productivity is interesting. I think there’s a perception that using an agile approach will somehow make us faster; perhaps it’s the daily stand-ups that people love and to improve business of IT alignments – that’s a massive one. I would love to see more people stating that as a reason for becoming agile because it’s one of the biggest things that we can do actually to increase our ability to change is having a real business focus right the way through all the functions including the IT function. I’ll leave you to find this on the web Version One.

To find out what it really means to become agile, see my new book Becoming Agile: Coaching Behavioural Change for Business Results, published by Open University Press in 2021.

Which processes should we keep?

So when I published the topic for the webinar, I thought it might be interesting to think about the processes a little bit. Even though we say in the Agile Manifesto that we value individuals and interactions over processes and tools people are always interested in what should I keep? How much of project management methods should we keep and how do we decide? Well, I wanted to give you a few examples of the best-known agile approaches and methods that I think are in use today and being combined.

Scrum- Scrum remains extremely popular if you have a look at the Version One report. Scrum is a product development framework and helps teams to create a habit of learning how to improve. I often get questions like ”are we doing it right?” “What are we leaving out and what’s the impact of not having a sprint review or doing the daily stand-up?” To me, Scrum is a way of creating good habits to reflect and improve their processes, and improve the requirements for the products that they’re building.

DSDM- Another popular one is called DSDM, also known as Agile Project Management. It’s a project management framework and parts of it look an awful lot like Scrum. It can be in fact combined with Scrum if you are delivering projects. So I think one of the traditional mindsets is that when we move to Agile, we’re actually replacing everything that we’ve done before with a new methodology or a new process and in fact many people don’t think about combining the popular approaches. In fact, when we’re delivering projects, we need some kind of project governance so there’s no reason why we can’t combine Scrum and DSDM.

Extreme Programming- Likewise for software projects, most people are aware of test-driven development and continuous integration, but few people realise that that whole suite of practices comes from Kent Beck and all the guys that created extreme programming back in the early 1990s. And for software projects we absolutely need test-driven development and continuous testing and checking to be sure that we’re fixing the bugs that we create so soon as possible.

Lean- So that together with the lean mind-set of reducing waste together to me that’s a whole suite of practices and processes that we should be using in combination.

Critical success factors

It’s important to think about critical success factors.

  • Having a shared business vision and understanding business outcomes both among the business stakeholders and the guys who deliver the products and projects it’s really, really important, everybody has to understand why we’re delivering the project.
  • Effective teams and what we mean by effective teams is really a whole list of things. We know that small teams is really, really important for communication and even better when we can see each other because it just reduces miscommunication.
  • Stable and cross-functional. There’s nothing worse for killing productivity than asking people to work on two or three things at once. To me is kind of like trying to get your chores done on a Saturday, you know, the cat comes in and wants to be fed and the husband is in the garage playing with paint cans and needs a hand with getting a rag or an emergency clean up. The postman knocks on the door and has your Amazon parcel and at the same time you’re trying to get the hoovering and the dusting done. When you’re working on three or four things at once, it seems like everything is in progress and nothing’s getting done. So protecting the team to be able to focus on one product or one project at a time is important and really allowing them to make changes to the process and their practices in the way they get the work done so that their practices are fit for purpose.
  • Iterative development – evolving a small idea to a finished feature is really, really important and taking on very small pieces of work just like in lean where we prefer to work on small batches of work so that we can get something started and finished as quickly as possible.

I have another quote for you. This comes from the Harvard Business review article.

For me the really key word in that whole sentence is learning. The agile methods for me really come down to the ability to learn and get transparency and find out more about the processes and tools that are really working for us and the practices that are going to lead to success and what the customer really wants and the features that are really resonating with them. The requirements that we might have put on a backlog or requirements list that are no longer needed because either the markets moved on or something else come in and becomes more important to us. 

Ready to get started? Contact us. We’ll respond within one business day.
Posted on by

Get the Most from Scrum

Transcript of Get the Most from Scrum, from the Free Webinar Series to Create an Agile Organisation, on 10th September 2019. Presented by Laura Re Turner, Director, Future Focus Coaching.

Good afternoon everyone. Thank you very much for joining us. I’m the Director of Future Focus Coaching, Laura Re Turner. Welcome to our webinar series on creating an agile organisation. This webinar Get the Most from Scrum, will help you think about the value of using the Scrum Framework and what it takes to get the most value out of using Scrum.

Welcome

Today’s webinar will be for 30 minutes and the presentation part of the webinar will be 15 minutes, followed by 15 minutes of Q&A. The webinar finishes at 1:00 PM and it’s being recorded. The recording will be available on our website this afternoon at http://box5252.temp.domains/~futurhu6/webinar-series-recordings/. I also want to let you know that this webinar is part of a series. We held our first webinar ‘Is Agile Right for our Organisation?’ on the 20th of August, just a few weeks ago almost. People were on their summer holidays. It was great to have such a fantastic turnout for that. Today is the second in the series.

So if you joined us for the first webinar, you’ll know that I like to start with a definition. It’s good to level set and understand what we mean when we talk about Scrum. What better way to find out what Scrum is, than by getting a definition from the Scrum Guide.

“Scrum is not a process, technique, or definitive method. Rather it’s a framework within which you can employ various processes and techniques. Scrum makes clear the relative efficacy of your product management and work techniques so that you can continuously improve the product, the team, and the working environment.”

The Scrum Guide, scrumguides.org

So interestingly, scrum is saying that any processes, techniques, and tools and other methods that you feel you need to use in order to be effective at delivering a product or a project are ok.

Reasons organisations use Scrum

So Scrum Alliance does a survey every year. In the most recent State of Scrum survey from Scrum Alliance, respondents to the survey said that the top three reasons for adopting Scrum were to deliver value to the customer, flexibility and responsiveness, and quality.

Feedback loops of Scrum

What attributes of the Scrum framework give us these features to deliver value to the customer and flexibility and quality? These are achieved when we use the feedback loops of the Scrum framework. [Feedback loops have their origins in systems thinking and you may be interested in our Systemic Agile Coaching course.] Scrum’s meetings are used for examining feedback on what the team has just completed in the previous few weeks, and deciding what to do for the next few weeks.

For example, a planning meeting uses feedback from the previous Sprints to decide what should be delivered in the next Sprint, which is typically two to four weeks. If you say you’re using Scrum and you’re not asking for feedback and using it for forward planning, you’re not using Scrum as it was intended, and you won’t get the benefits organisations expect from Agile.

Do your Sprint Reviews

To get the most value from Scrum, you really need to do your Sprint Reviews. The team must have a Sprint Review with business stakeholders, not just a Product Owner.

This helps the team adapt the product requirements to get the work done in priority order. It helps business stakeholders understand what the team’s working on, and it builds trust and helps the team shift focus when at the end of a Sprint, which is a few weeks long, they find out that the business priorities have changed and they need to do something slightly different.

Do your Sprint Retrospectives

Also to get the most value out of Scrum, do your Sprint Retrospectives. These can be a little bit uncomfortable because in a Retrospective the team talks about which processes, techniques, and interactions among the team members are working or not. This is really where you’re starting to get the most value out of the Scrum framework and where the hard work is done. This helps the team adapt its processes, behaviours and mindset to be more effective.

I’d like to offer you a quote from a certified Scrum Master from State of Scrum Report.

“Scrum is not difficult to implement. The discipline, commitments and capabilities required to be good at delivering real value frequently, and often are hard to master. It takes a lot of work. Teams and organisations suffer from technical and cultural debt. The difficulty is not really scrum; it’s the technical and cultural debt. In these cases, scrum is doing one of the things that it’s great at- making a team’s problems transparent.”

Tiago Garcez, Scrum Coach and Trainer, CST, CSP, CSM, CSPO, REP

Q&A

So I’m interested in what some of the questions are that you have, some of the things that have been working well or not. Please use the Q&A window to submit your questions. How long you’ve been using Scrum? What are some of the challenges you’ve run into? What’s happening in your Sprint Retrospectives? Do business stakeholders attend, and what kind of feedback are you getting from them? Are you doing your Sprint Reviews with your stakeholders? Are you doing your Retrospectives with the team?

Thank you for your questions.

You’ve been using Scrum for four years and as you say, the biggest challenge is building trust with customers. The real challenge is bringing them on the journey with us so that they can start to see that the iterations and the work that we’re doing is really leading to something that’s valuable. To do that, they need to be committed too, and they need to join us for all of the Sprint Reviews.

It’s difficult in a distributed environment when the Product Owner is not the real customer. One of the challenges that we’re finding often is that the Product Owner who is meant to be a representative of the business requirements and the voice of the customer is not a real representative. That the person is perhaps appointed or reluctantly asked to be the Product Owner to the team when the person perhaps doesn’t have the experience to understand what the customer really needs and how to get the requirements or perhaps the authority to make decisions about the priority of the requirements.

Another participant on the webinar said that what he’s done is really to get feedback from people using their product, which is a mobile app, who may be difficult to reach, difficult to get involved in product development. So a Product Owner has to be creative and be a little bit innovative and think about how best to represent the actual users of the app.

Another comment from you is about working iteratively and finding out what the customers, the end users, really need. The temptation is, when planning a big project, to want to start to feel some certainty and get some plans written down and understand what we’re going to be delivering for the next 6 or 12 months. One of the biggest mindset shifts that we make when working in an Agile way is understanding how to use iterations of the product to find out from our end users what they really need next. To do that, we need to suspend the temptation to plan months of work in a project, to try to have certainty.

How Can We Help?

Thank you so much for your questions. It’s been great having you today. I wanted to let you know about some of the work that we do at Future Focus Coaching and Development. We work mainly in two areas:

Business agility
Think about how often you’re asked to do more with less, deliver faster, or create the next killer app to deliver more.
• You need to prioritise your work and deliver product versions incrementally.
• Enable the right people to work together regardless of where they physically sit in the
organisation.
• Develop strategic thinking and plan by business outcomes instead of tasks.
• Learn how to influence your colleagues, customers, suppliers, and business partners to come with you on the journey.
So for this, we work with leaders in order to develop an agile mind-set and behaviours.

Motivated teams
The sparkle of passion and team members comes from giving more responsibility to help the business achieve its strategic goals. Product development teams are most effective when they’re part of the planning process, and they can generate options and shape solutions to problems. Build knowledge sharing networks that can identify end-user’s true needs and possible solutions faster than the hub and spoke management style fostered by command and control management of single individuals.

Related posts

Posted on by — 4 Comments

Recordings of our Free Webinar Series to Create an Agile Organisation

Catch up on the ones you missed. Our free webinars answer your most important questions about becoming an agile organisation, in 30-minute sessions that you can watch now.

Create an Agile Culture on 21st October 2019

What beliefs, mindset, and behaviours are needed to be successful with agile methods? How do we change the mindset of others? How do we measure success? What can we change in our org structure now?

The Project Manager’s Changing Role on 1st October 2019

Yes we still need project managers in agile organisations that deliver projects. Find out how project managers need to adapt their leadership style to motivate the team, and focus on business outcomes instead of tasks.

Get the Most from Scrum on 10th September 2019

We’ve heard it many times: ‘Are we doing it correctly?’ Find out what really matters in Scrum. Empower your team to learn fast from mistakes, and get new products and services to market quickly.

Is Agile Right for Our Organisation? on 20th August 2019

We look at the basics, such as when to choose Agile over traditional methods, and why you should combine Scrum, DSDM, and Kanban. Which of your existing processes you should keep?

Ready to get started? Contact us. We’ll respond within one business day.