Agile-impics
This week we ran our second Agile-impics event out of our More London office. Like last time, teams were given a case study which they then had to apply elements of product visioning, story slicing, planning and estimation to before presenting back to myself and others who act as judges (in this case we were board members). This time we had six teams (compared to nine previously) who were battling it out for the coveted PwC Agile Olympics trophy.
Overall, teams did well in understanding the case study and having something engaging to present back to myself and the other two judges. Storytelling is a really important part of what we do, and it’s clear some teams were very strong in that area. Some fell into the trap of throwing too many terms into their presentations. Senior leaders don’t really want to hear about epics / features / fibonacci numbers. Another point was around planning, and in particular planning based on velocity. Now this approach is fine (or maybe try without…CTRL+F the Scrum guide for story points 🙃) however it presents a lot of risk when using ‘average velocity’. Plans based on average fail 50% of the time — should we really be encouraging that as practitioners?
A recommended video would be Dan Vacanti’s talk on forecasting:
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jI4cvQbWQA[/embed]
Overall though it was a fantastic event. Less teams worked better in terms of the organisation and judging, teams focused on outcomes > outputs and it was great to have partners attend to stress how important Agile is, in particular with our clients. Looking forward to the next event!
The power of the network
This week I’ve been amazed at the power of our network in terms of both creativity and bringing people together.
On Tuesday we had a visit to our office from Paula who works in our Advisory team in Colombia (Paula was here on holiday — she didn’t fly all that way for just a meeting!). It was great to share ideas and chat to someone else trying to drive change in both our internal ways of working and what we offer our clients. The appetite and enthusiasm we have globally for Agile & DevOps is one that keeps me inspired in my role.
Talking of inspiration, on Wednesday I had the pleasure of recording a short podcast with Mike and Lisa in our IT Employee Engagement team on ‘bringing goals to life’ — and how people can help us achieve our goal this year of taking an Agile by default approach. It was lots of fun and flowed really nicely (one take!), as well as the fact that Mike brought some real concrete examples of where he had applied Agile thinking (small batches FTW) despite being on a traditional waterfall delivery.
Defining a “product”
Now that the main element training is done for close to 90% of our IT staff, the hard work begins on the transition from project to product. A current working definition I quite like around defining what we offer being centered on products is:
A product is a tangible (good) or intangible (service) information offering to meet the needs, wants, and demands of the firm.
As part of the change we need to think about the roles in our IT organisation and how we best align them around products. This presents a good challenge and one where I’m looking forward to a continued learning process, as we incrementally transition.
Next week
Next week I’m helping the Digital Audit team build out their Agile ways of working for their Advanced Analytics programme, doing more work on performance goals and spending time putting together what the future operating model looks like from a roles perspective.