Team Areas
A tell tale sign for any Agile practitioner is normally a walk of the office floor. If an organisation claims to have Agile teams, usually a giveaway is if there are team areas with lots of visual radiators around their ways of working.
With my trip to Manchester this week, I was really please to see that one of our teams, Vulcan had taken to claiming their own area and making the work they do and the management of it highly visible.
This is great to see as even with the digital tooling we have, it’s important for teams (within a large organisation) to have a sense of purpose and identity, which I’d argue is impossible to do without something physical/a dedicated area for their work. These are the things that when going through change provide inspiration and encourage you to keep on going, knowing that certainly with some teams, the message is landing.
Product Manager Hat
With our new graduate intake in IT, one of the things various teams were asked to put together was a list of potential projects for them to work on.
A niggling issue I’ve had is our Team Health Check tool which, taking inspiration from the Spotify Squad Health Check, uses a combination of anonymous Google Form responses that are then visualized in Power BI.
This process though is highly manual, with a Google Apps Script converting the form responses into a BI tool friendly format, then copied/pasted into a Power BI table. The project therefore for the graduates is about a web version, with a database to store responses for automated reporting. I’ve therefore been volunteered as the Product Manager :D which meant this week even writing some stories and BDD acceptance criteria! Looking forward to seeing how creative they can be, and a chance for them to really apply some of the learnings from the recent training they’ve been through.
Digital Accelerator Feedback
We received feedback from both our Digital Accelerator sessions we ran recently. Overall with an average score of 4.43/5 we were one of the highest rated sessions people attended. We actually received the first batch of feedback before the second session, which was great for us as it allowed us to make a couple tweaks to exercises and delete slides that we feel maybe weren’t needed. Some highlights in terms of feedback:
Good introduction into agile concept and MVP. Extremely engaging and persuasive games to demonstrate concept! Lots of fun!
All of it was brilliant and also further reading is great to have
This was a great module and something I want to take further. This was the first time I heard of agile and Dan broke down exactly what it was in bite size pieces which was really helpful.
So much fun and energy created through very simple activities. It all made sense — easily relatable slides. Thought Marie did a great job
Really practical and useful to focus on the mindset not the methodology, which I think is more applicable to this role
I’ve heard the term agile a lot in relation to my clients so was really useful to understand this broken down in a really basic and understandable way and with exercises. This has led me to really understand the principles more than through reading I’ve done.
Very interesting topic, great presentation slides, games, engaging presenter
Very engaging and interesting session. Particularly liked the games and the story boarding.
Very engaging and impactful session. The activities really helped drive home the concepts in an accessible way
Best.Session.Ever.
Thanks to Andy, Marie, Stefano, James and Dan for running sessions, as well as Mark M, Paul, Bev, Ashley, Tim, Anna, Mark P, Gurdeep and Brian for their assistance with running the exercises.
Next Week
Next week I’ll be heading out to Dubai to our Middle East office to run a couple training sessions for teams out there. A welcome break from the cold British weather — looking forward to meeting new faces and starting their Agile journey as well as catching up with those who I trained last time!