Agile: Release, Pivot, Fail Fast!
As I sat down on my first Agile workshop I was sceptical if this was going to be another waste of time to try to engage us; as opposed to real value delivered.
When I hear we were doing a Paper Scissors tournament I knew I was right.
The brilliant Frank Amankwah who was leading the workshop asked for any people with project management and asked two of them to organize the contest as they saw it fit to have a final in 10 minutes.
It was easy and natural to them, they started by splitting the room in two and organizing the best against the best (most logical) in an almost orderly manner we came 4 minutes outside the time between a little over 30 people.
Next, we had no Product Managers, we would organize ourselves and the goal was the same.
The result? We finished in 7 minutes and the level of noise and energy was totally different, we were pumped!!
First lessons, people will work quicker and happier when they are left to figure it out by themselves and love autonomy and games, welcome to Agile thinking.
What stroke me as surprising was Agile isn’t about doing, it’s about being (like in meditation??) let me avoid the pitfall of sounding too mystical, it means you focus on people not on processes and products first, and in the word of one of the founders of the Agile Manifesto “And we really mean it”
People over process and tools
The Agile Manifesto was created in 2001 by developers for developers and organizations with the main focus of making customers and developers happier with the process and outcomes of product creation.
“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:”
The idea was to guide through 12 principles that would allow for better outcomes, but, it didn’t manage expectations; assumed everyone would understand what the required work was; didn’t validate the decision with the group; didn’t get a feedback loop, these are the most common but not only.
Methodologies appear to fill in the gaps such as Cleanroom; TSP; PSP; RAD; DSDM; MSF; SCRUM; Kanban; UP; XP; TDD; ATDD; BDD; FDD; DDD; MDD to which we have sawn three emerge, SCRUM, Kanban and XP as the most commonly adopted.
So what is Agile? Agile is a mindset, it’s a mindset not just of the developers but of the organization where these people are inserted. Decisions come from above and are influenced from below.
Organizations want to adopt Agile because of the intrinsic advantages of lower budget, less time, lower cost (maybe, depends on the nr of changes) and how well it responds to change as opposed to other methodologies such as Waterfall.
So in practical terms, how can we achieve this?
Individual and Interactions, smaller teams (split the pizza) of cross-functional; semiautonomous; self-organising teams with the main focus of transforming ideas to value.
Teams have the skills to complete the work and are autonomous and empowered to decide the “how” and decide who does what.
This is where the serving leader comes in, he’s focused on removing blocks and helping his teams to deliver value.
Agile promotes leadership, serving leadership, it promotes leaders to grow teams in a supportive trusting and humane environment.
Collaborative, shared ownership, everyone stays informed (maximum bandwidth), and the individual's success comes last to the team's success.
Communication, decisions preferred method is consensus, gain everyone's support to the implementation of the ideas even if not everyone is wild about the idea or drop it and start again, this can be a challenge especially if time presses on.
Start with the End in Mind, start with the “why” before the “what” and then you can decide how you are together going to achieve it. You can imagine how this can be a challenge for some organisations, be obsessed with the outcome and flexible with the journey to get to your outcome.
Defer Decisions to the Last Moment, don't make commitments earlier than you have to so you can make them better informed.
If your manager is someone that needs certainty and is used to micromanaging this will be really challenging, this is why applying tools and processes are the solutions and it just fails or drags its feet.
Strive for Simplicity for decisions and doing work, this will allow you to move faster change faster and understand each other in the teams and customers better.
When Certainty is unjustified then strive for experimentation, fail fast and opt for learning.
Cadence, deliver value as frequently as desirable & possible from a technical and business point of view.
Don’t fall into the trap of quick and dirty get-it-out implementations — tomorrow's objectives might not be the same so keep yourself focused on agility and flexibility to change and obsessed with your outcome flexible on the method.
Keep the work in a Shippable and deployable state, keep teams close to delivering value, the entire team, the team's results are more important than individual achievement and delight the customer first to avoid the pitfall of keeping everyone maximally busy but not advancing on the right direction.
Quality is crucial if you reduce the value you hamper everyone's work, and strive for excellence and quality of the team's work.
Feedback loops into everything, short but actionable, focus on continual learning about what shifts (customer, business, team, work, etc), strive for continuous improvement, and ask yourselves “what can we do and be better”.
Back to the workshop, in one of the last games, we were on a team and we had to come up with a project and create a story, I “volunteered” to become the leader and, failed terribly.
I let one of the team members select the project and tell his story as opposed to checking and involving the entire team, trust and teamwork were ZERO and a close to a mediocre outcome, a great personal lesson.
There are many reasons Agile should be applied and many reasons not, always always always put people first.
Make sure your organization is really behind you from the top level and don’t scramble in a panic to old habits at the sign of trouble, there will be trouble because humans are resistant to change, make it sustainable and long-term as opposed to short-term.
Select the principles and values that make sense to you and your team, make new ones, change them, experimentation pivot doubles down to -learn, and experiments are to be applied everywhere.
There will be organizations where this will be close to impossible, one of my colleagues still has meetings when something goes wrong and the meeting starts “Who Am I firing today?” and looks at him (he’s still there) in such organizations where fear reigns, Agile will fail.
Also check; https://boldlink.io/agile-go-fast/
#agile #awscloud #devops #digitaltransformation #leadership
