We on award tour
As I mentioned before I went away, our team had been shortlisted for the Make a difference award for our IT awards. After an amazing two weeks away it was great to come back refreshed but also to have this:
It’s a testimony to the people in our team that we’ve been recognised with an award, and I’m incredibly thankful to all of them for a great year, hoping for a repeat in the next performance year.
Complex = Waterfall (🙄)
Another discussion this week has been around when to use Waterfall vs when to use Agile. Now this is a common discussion point for us at the moment, in particular with the current approach we are experimenting with being ‘agile by default’ with people needing to prove why Waterfall is a better fit for delivery. Our approach has been on a case-by-case basis, preferring conversation with individuals over a computer generated answer.
A document was passed our way as to some guidelines for when to use Waterfall or when to use Agile:
The major problem I have with things like this, is that they are similar to maturity models in their ‘one size fits all’ approach, and heavily favoured as revenue generators for consultants. They look to get away from conversation by getting a system generated answer, with little appreciation of context.
The most baffling aspect on this particular one is alluding to that if it’s a complex product, where users are unknown, then waterfall is the best fit.
Perhaps it’s best for the creators to take a look at page 3 of the Scrum Guide:
Purpose of the Scrum Guide
Scrum is a framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining complex products.
This is where another useful tool in the practitioner toolkit is having familiarity with Cynefin.
Cynefin offers five decision-making contexts or “domains” — obvious (known until 2014 as simple), complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder — that help managers to identify how they perceive situations and make sense of their own and other people’s behaviour.
Complex in particular is a domain that represents the “unknown unknowns”. Cause and effect can only be deduced in retrospect, and there are no right answers.
The notion of being in a complex domain and therefore waterfall being the only sensible approach is clearly flawed. Similarly the idea around ‘best practices’ for Agile also being an oxymoron.
Ultimately, regardless of approach to delivery, we should all try to remember this from Jeff Gothelf:
Reviewing OKRs
With us coming to the end of the first quarter in our performance year, today we had a review of our OKRs as a team.
Overall, I think we were all quite pleased with the outcomes. In particular the 32% reduction in cycle time at portfolio level shows the impact introducing (and sticking to) WIP limits has had. Unfortunately it looks like a few things we’ve neglected or we were maybe too ambitious in setting as key results we looked to achieve. All useful in informing the direction we need to go for the next quarter.
Next week
Next week I’ve got a few discussions planned with other coaches in the different business lines we have, so looking forward to hearing what’s going on in their areas. I also have a workshop myself and others in our team have been invited to which is tentatively titled as “Agile session for digital audit” — currently I’ve not had any briefing so prepared for an interesting session!