Flow, value, culture, delivery — measuring agility at ASOS (part 2)

The second in a two-part series where we share how at ASOS we are measuring agility across our teams and the wider tech organisation…

Recap on part one

For those who didn’t get a chance to read part one, previously I introduced our holistic measurement to agility, covering four themes of:

• Flow — the movement of work through a teams workflow/board.

• Value — the outcomes/impact in what we do and alignment with the goals and priorities of the organisation.

• Culture — the mindset/behaviours we expect around teamwork, learning and continuous improvement.

• Delivery — the practices we expect that account for the delivery of Epics/Features, considering both uncertainty and complexity.

Now let’s get to explaining how the results are submitted/visualized, what the rollout/adoption has been like along with our learnings and future direction.

Submitting the results

We advise teams to submit a new assessment every six to eight weeks, as experience tells us this gives enough time to see the change in a particular theme. When teams are ready to submit, they go to an online Excel form and add a new row, then add the rating and rationale for each theme:

Excel online file for capturing ratings and rationale for each theme

Visualizing the results

Team view

By default, all teams and their current rating/trend, along with the date when the last assessment was run are visible upon opening the report:

Note: all Team/Platform/Domain names anonymised for the purposes of this blog!

Viewers can then filter to view their team — hovering on the current rating provides the rationale as well as the previous rating and rationale. There is also a history of all the submitted ratings for the chosen theme over time:

Note: all Team/Platform/Domain names anonymised for the purposes of this blog!

Filters persist across pages, so after filtering you can also then click through to the Notes/Actions page to remind yourself of what your team has identified as the thing to focus on improving:

Note: all Team/Platform/Domain names anonymised for the purposes of this blog!

Platform/Domain view

Normally, we facilitate a regular discussion at ‘team of teams’ level which, depending on the size of an area, may be a number of teams in a platform or all the teams and platforms in a Domain:

Note: all Team/Platform/Domain names anonymised for the purposes of this blog!

This helps leaders in an area understand where the collective is at, as well as being able to focus on a particular team. It also can highlight where teams in an area learn from each other, rather than just relying on an Agile Coach to advise. Again filtering persists to allow for Leaders to have a holistic view of improvements across teams:

Note: all Team/Platform/Domain names anonymised for the purposes of this blog!

This is key for leaders as it informs them in understanding how they can support an environment towards continuous improvement and agility. For example if a team was experimenting with WIP limits to improve their rating for Flow, if a leader is pushing more work to them then this probably isn’t going to result in the theme improving!

Tech Wide View

The Tech Wide View provides an overview of the most recent submissions for all teams across the organisation. We feel this gives us the clearest ‘measurement’ and holistic view of agility in our tech organisation, with the ability to hover on a specific theme to see if ratings are improving:

As coaches, this also helps inform us as to what practices/coaching areas we should be focusing on at scale, rather than trying to go after everything and/or focusing on just a specific team.

In turn we can use this data to help inform things like our own Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). We use this data to guide us on what we should be focusing on and, more importantly, if we are having impact:

Rollout, adoption and impact

In rolling this out, we were keen to stick to our principles and invite teams to complete this, rather than mandating (i.e. inflicting) it across all of our technology organisation. We used various channels (sharing directly with teams, presenting in Engineering All Hands, etc.) to advertise and market it, as well as having clear documentation around the assessment and the time commitment needed. After launching in Jan, this is the rate at which teams have submitted their first assessment:

In addition to this, we use our internal Team Designer app (more on this here) to cross-reference our coverage across domains and platforms. This allows us to see in which areas adoption is good and in which areas we need to remind/encourage folks around trialling it:

Note: numbers may not match due to date screenshots were taken!

With any ‘product’, it’s important to consider what are appropriate product metrics to consider, particularly as we know measurable changes in behaviour from users are typically what correlate with value. One of the ways to validate if the self-assessment is adding value for teams is if they continue to use it. One-off usage may give them some insight but if it doesn’t add value, particularly with something they are ‘invited’ to use, then it will gradually die and we won’t see teams continue to complete it. Thankfully, this wasn’t the case here, as we can see that 89% of teams (70 out of 79) have submitted more than one self-assessment:

The main thing though that we are concerned with in demonstrating the impact/value of this approach is if teams are actually improving. You could still have plenty of teams adopt the self-assessment yet stay the same for every rating and never actually improve. Here we visualise each time a team has seen an improvement between assessments (note: teams are only counted the first time they improve, not counted again if they improve further):

Overall we can see the underlying story is that the vast majority of teams are improving, specifically that 83% of teams (58 out of 70) who have submitted >1 assessment have improved in one (or more) theme.

Learnings along the way

Invitation over infliction

In order to change anything around ways of working in an organisation, teams have to want to change or “opt-in”. Producing an approach without the acceptance going in that you may be completely wrong and being prepared to ditch it leads to sunk cost fallacy. It is therefore important with something like this that teams can “opt-out” at any time.

Keep it lightweight yet clear

There are many agility assessments that we have seen in different organisations/the industry over the years and almost always these fall foul of not being lightweight. You do not need to ask a team 20 questions to “find out” about their agility. Having said this, lightweight is not an excuse for lack of clarity, therefore supporting documentation on how people can find out where they are or what the themes mean is a necessity. We used a Confluence page with some fast-click links to specific content to allow people to quickly get to what they needed to get to:

Shared sessions and cadence

Another way to increase adoption is to have teams review the results together, rather than just getting them to submit and then that’s it. In many areas we, as coaches, would facilitate a regular self-assessment review for a platform or domain. In this each team would talk through their rationale for a rating whilst the others can listen in and ask questions/give ideas on how to improve. There have been times for example when ratings have been upgraded due to teams feeling they were being too harsh (which surprisingly I also agreed with!) but the majority of time there are suggestions they can make to each other. In terms of continuous improvement and learning this is way more impactful than hearing it from just an Agile Coach.

Set a high bar

One of the observations we made when rolling this out was how little ‘green’ there was in particular themes. This does not automatically equate to teams being ‘bad’, more just they are where we think good is from an agility perspective, relevant to our experience and industry trends.

One of the hard parts with this is not compromising in your view of what good looks like, even though it may not be a message that people particular like. We leaned heavily on the experience of Scott Frampton and his work at ASOS to stay true to this, even if it at times it made for uncomfortable viewing.

Make improvements visible

Initially, the spreadsheet did not contain the column about what teams are going to do differently as a result of this, it was only after a brief chat with Scott and with his learnings we implemented this. Whilst it does rely on teams to add in the detail about what they are going to do differently, it helps see that teams are identifying clear action to take, based on the results of the assessment.

Culture trumps all when it comes to improvement

This is one of the most important things when it comes to this type of approach. One idea I discussed with Dan Dickinson from our team was around a ‘most improved’ team, where a team had improved the most from their initial assessment to what they are now. In doing this one team was a clear standout, yet they remained at a value of ‘red’ for culture. This isn’t the type of team we should be celebrating, even if all the other factors have improved. Speedy delivery of valuable work with good rigour around delivery practices is ultimately pointless if people hate being in that team. All factors to the assessment are important but ultimately, you should never neglect culture.

Measure it’s impact

Finally, focus on impact. You can have lots of teams regularly assessing but ultimately, if it isn’t improving the way they work it is wasted effort. Always consider how you will validate that something like an assessment can demonstrate tangible improvements to the organisation.

What does the future hold?

As a coaching team we have a quarterly cadence of reviewing and tweaking the themes and their levels, sharing this with teams when any changes are made:

Currently, we feel that we have the right balance in the number of themes vs. the light-weightiness of the self-assessment. We have metrics/tools that could bring in other factors, such as predictability and/or quality:

Left — a process behaviour chart highlighting where WIP has become unpredictable | Right — a chart showing the % of Throughput which are Bugs which could be a proxy for ‘quality’

Right now we’ll continue the small tweaks each quarter with an aim to improve as many teams, platforms and domains as we can over the next 12 months…watch this space!

Weeknotes #40

Product Management Training

This week we had a run through from Rachel of our new Product Management training course that she has put together for our budding Product Managers. I really enjoyed going through it as a team (especially using our co-working space in More London) and viewing the actual content itself.

Credits: Jon Greatbatch for photo “This can be for your weeknotes”

What I really liked about the course was the fact the attendees are going to be very ‘hands-on’ during the training, and will get to go apply various techniques that PdM’s use with a case study of Delete My Data (DMD) throughout. It’s something that I’ve struggled with when putting together material in the past of having an ‘incremental’ case study that builds through the day, so glad that Rachel has put something like this together. We’ve earmarked the 28th Jan to be the first session we run, with it being a combination of our own team and those moving into Product Management being the ‘guinea pigs’ for the first session.

2019 Reflections

This week has been a particularly challenging week, with lots of roadblocks in the way of moving forward. A lack of alignment in new teams with future direction, and lack of communication to the wider function around our move to new ways of working means that it feels like we aren’t seeing the progress we should be, or creating a sense of urgency. Whilst it’s certainly true around achieving big through small, it does feel that with change initiatives it can feel like you are moving too slow, which is the current lull we’re in. After a few days feeling quite down I took some time out to reflect on 2019, and what we have achieved, such as:

• Delivering a combined 49 training courses on Agile, Lean and Azure DevOps

• Trained a total of 789 PwC staff across three continents

• Becoming authorised trainers to offer an industry recognised course

• Actually building our first, proper CI/CD web apps as PoC’s

• Introducing automated security tools and (nearly) setting up ServiceNow change management integration to #TakeAwayTheExcuses for not adopting Agile

• Hiring our first ever Product Manager (Shout out Rachel)

• Getting our first ever Agile Delivery Manager seconded over from Consulting (Shout out Stefano)

• Our team winning a UK IT Award for Making A Difference

• Agreement from leadership on moving from Project to Product, as part of our adoption of new ways of working

All in all, it’s fair to say we’ve made big strides forward this year, I just hope the momentum continues into 2020. A big thank you from me goes to Jon, Marie, James, Dan, Andy, Rachel and Stefano for not just their hard work, but for being constant sources of inspiration throughout the year.

Xmas Break

Finally, I’ll be taking a break from writing these #Weeknotes till the new year. Even though I’ll be working over the Christmas period, I don’t think there’ll be too much activity to write about! For anyone still reading this far in(!), have a great Christmas and New Year.

Weeknotes 36

Refreshing Mindsets

This week was the second week of our first sprint working with our graduate intake on our team health check web app. It was great to see in the past week or so that the team, despite not having much of a technical background, had gone away and been able to create a very small app created using a mix of Python and an Azure SQL database for the responses. It just goes to show how taking the work to a team and allowing them to work in an environment where they can be creative (rather than prescribing the ‘how’) can lead to a great outcome. Whilst the app is still not quite yet in a ‘releasable’ state, in just a short time it really isn’t too far away from something a larger group of Agile Delivery Managers and Coaches can use. It’s refreshing to not have to take on the battle of convincing hearts and minds, working with a group of people who recognise this is the right way to work and are just happy to get on and deliver. Thanks to all of them for their efforts so far!

Cargo Culting

“Cargo Culting” is a term used when people believe they can achieve benefits by adopting/copying certain behaviours, actions or techniques. They don’t consider why the benefits and/or causes occur, instead just blindly copy the behaviours to try get similar results.

In the agile world, this is becoming increasingly commonplace, with the Spotify model being the latest fad for cargo culting in organisations. Organisations are hearing about how Spotify or companies like ING are scaling Agile ways of working which, in practice, sounds great, but it is incredibly hard and nowhere near as simple as just redesigning organisations into squads, tribes, chapters and guilds.

In a training session with some of our client facing teams this week, I used the above as an example of what cargo culting is like. Experienced practitioners need to be aware that the Spotify model is one tool in the toolbox, with there being lots of possible paths to organisational agility. Spotify themselves never referred to it as a model, nor use it themselves anymore, as well as ING moving towards experimenting with using LeSS in addition to the Spotify model. Dogma is one of the worst traps you can fall into when it comes to moving to new ways of working, particularly when you don’t stop and reassess whether this actually is the right way for this context. Alignment on language is important, but should not be at the compromise of finding first of all what works in the environment.

Next Week

Next week I’ll be running an Agile Foundations training session, and we (finally!) have Rachel joining our team as a Product Manager. I’m super excited to have her as part of the team, whilst hopeful we can control the flow of requests her way so she does not feel swamped, looking forward to having her join PwC!

Weeknotes #34

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!

Weeknotes #32

Little Bets

A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a colleague in our Robotic Process Automation (RPA) team who was telling me about how the team had moved to working in two-week sprints. They mentioned how they were finding it hard to keep momentum and energy up, in particular towards the end of the sprint when it came to getting input to the retro. I asked what day of the week they were starting the sprint to which they replied “Monday”, of course meaning the sprint finished on a Friday. A suggestion I had was actually to move the start of the sprint (keeping the two-week cadence) to be on a Wednesday, as no one really wants to be reviewing or thinking about how to get better (introspection being a notoriously tougher ask anyway) on a Friday. They said they were going to take it away and run it as an experiment and let me know how it went. This week the team had their respective review and retrospective, with the feedback being that the team much preferred this approach, as well as the inputs to the retro being much more meaningful and collaborative.

It reminded me that sometimes as coaches we need to recognise that we can actually achieve big through small, and that a tiny little tweak can actually make the world of difference to a team. For myself I’ve recently found that I’ve been getting very frustrated with bigger changes we want to make, and concepts not landing with people, despite repeated attempts at engagement and involvement. Actually, sometimes it’s better to focus on those tiny tweaks/experiments that can make a big difference.

This concept is explained really well in Peter Sims “Little Bets”, a great book on innovation in organisations through making series of little bets, learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins.

Here’s to more little bets with teams, rather than big changes!

Digital Accelerators

This week we also ran the first of two sessions introducing Agile to individuals taking part in our Digital Accelerator programme at PwC. The programme is one of the largest investments by the firm, centered on upskilling our people on all things digital, covering everything from cleansing data and blockchain to 3D Printing and drones.

Our slot was 90 minutes long, where we introduced the manifesto and “Agile Mindset” to individuals, including a couple of exercises such as the Ball Point Game and Bad Breath MVP. With 160 people there we had to run 4 concurrent sessions with 40 people in each, which was the smallest group size we were allowed!

I thoroughly enjoyed my session, as it had been a while since I’d done a short, taster session on Agile — good to brush off the cobwebs! The energy in the room was great, with some maybe getting a little too competitive with plastic balls!

Seems like the rest of our team also enjoyed it, as well as the attendee feedback being very positive. We also had some additional help from colleagues co-facilitating the exercises which I’m very thankful for as it would have been chaotic without their help! Looking forward to hearing how the Digital Accelerators take this back to their day to day, and hopefully generate some future work for us with new teams to work with.

Next week

Next week is another busy one. I’m helping support a proposal around Enterprise Agility for a client, as well as having our first sprint review for our ways of working programme. On top of that we have another Digital Accelerator session to run, so a busy period for our team!

Weeknotes #31

OKRs

We started the week off getting together and formally reviewing our Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for the last quarter, as well as setting them for this quarter.

Generally, this quarter has gone quite well when you check against our key results, with the only slight blip being around the 1-click deployment and the cycle time at portfolio level. 

A hypothesis I have is due to the misunderstanding around people feeling that they had to hold a retrospective before moving something to “done”, we have inadvertently caused cycle times to elongate. With us correcting this and again re-emphasizing the need to focus on the small batch, the goal for this quarter really will be to focus on getting that as close to our 90-day Service Level Expectation (SLE) at portfolio level. As well as this will be putting some tangible measurements around spinning up new, dedicated product teams and building out our lean offering.

Prioritisation

Prioritisation is something that is essential to success. Whether it be at strategic, portfolio, program or team level, priorities need to be set so that people have a clear sense of purpose, have a goal to work towards, have focus and that ultimately we’re working on the right things. Prioritisation is also a very difficult job, too often we rely on HiPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion), First In, First Out (FIFO) or just sheer gut feel. In previous years, I provided teams with this rough, fibonacci-esque approach to formulating a ‘business value’ score, then dividing this by effort to get an ‘ROI’ number:

Business Value Score

10 — Make current users happier

20 — Delight existing users/customers

30 — Upsell opportunity to existing users/customers

50 — Attract new business (users, customers, etc.)

80 — Fulfill a promise to a key user/customer

130 — Aligns with PwC corporate/strategic initiative(s)

210 — Regulatory/Compliance (we will go to jail if we don’t do it)

It’s fairly “meh” I feel, but was a proposed stop gap between getting them doing nothing and something that used numbers. Rather bizarrely, the Delight existing users/customers aspect was then changed by people to be User has agreed deliverable date — which always irked me, mainly as I cannot see how this has anything to do with value. Sure people may have a date in mind, but this to do with urgency, not value. Unfortunately a date-driven (not data-driven) culture is still very prevalent. Just this week for example we had someone explain how an option was ‘high priority’ as it was to going to be delivered in the next three months(!).

Increasingly, I’m finding a simple, lightweight approach to prioritisation I’m gravitating towards, and one that is likely to get easier buy in, is Qualitative Cost of Delay.

Source: Black Swan Farming — Qualitative Cost of Delay

Cost of Delay allows us to combine value AND urgency, which is something we’re all not very good at. Ideally, this would be quantified so we would all be talking a common language (i.e. not some weird dark voodoo such as T-Shirt sizing, story points or fibonacci), however you tend to find people fear numbers. My hope is that this way we can get some of the benefits of cost of delay, whilst planting the seed of gradually moving to more of a quantified approach.

Next Week

Next week is a big week for our team. We’re running the first of two Agile Introduction sessions as part of the firms Digital Accelerator program. With four sessions running in parallel with roughly 40 attendees in each, we’ll be training 160 people in a 90-minute session. Looking forward to it but also nervous!

Weeknotes #30

CI/CD

We started the week with Jon running a demo for the rest of UKIT on CI/CD, with a basic website he built using Azure DevOps for the board, pipeline, code and automated testing. I really enjoyed the way it was pitched, as it went into just enough detail for people who like the technical side, but also was played out in a ‘real’ way of a team pulling an item from the backlog, deploying a fix and being able to quickly validate that the fix worked whilst not compromising on quality and/or security. This was a key item for our backlog this quarter, as it ties in nicely to one of our objectives around embedding Agile delivery in our portfolio, specifically around the technical excellence needed. We’re hoping this should start to spark curiosity and encourage others to start exploring this with their own teams — even if not fully going down the CI/CD route, the pursuit of technical excellence is something all teams should be aspiring to achieve.

Aligned Autonomy

This week we’ve been having multiple discussions around the different initiatives that are going on in our function around new ways of working. Along with moving to an Agile/Product Delivery Model, there are lots of other conversations taking place around things such as changing our funding model, assessing suppliers, future roles, future of operations and the next generation cloud, to name a few. With so many things going on in parallel, it’s little surprise that overlap happens, blockers quickly emerge, and/or a lack of shared understanding ceases to exist. Henrik Kniberg has a great talk where he talks about the importance of aligned autonomy, precisely the thing that we’re missing currently.

Thankfully, those of us involved in these various initiatives have come together to highlight the lack of alignment, with the aim of something a bit more cohesive to manage overlap and dependencies. A one day workshop is planned to build some of this out and agree priorities (note: 15 different ‘priorities’ is not prioritisation!) — which should provide a lot more clarity. 

An important learning though has to be around aligned autonomy, making sure any sort of large ways of working initiative has this.

Next Week

Next week has a break midweek for me, as I have a day off for my birthday 😀 We’ll have a new DevOps Engineer — Dave starting on Monday, looking forward to having him join our organisation and drive some of those changes around the technical aspects. Dan is running a lunch and learn for the team on LeSS, which will be good to hear about his learnings from the course. We’ve also got an OKR review on Monday which will be good to assess how we’ve done against our desired outcomes and what we need to focus on for next quarter.

Weeknotes #29

Back to training

It was back to training this week, as myself and Stefano ran another of our Agile Foundations sessions for people across the firm. It was also Stefano’s first time delivering the course, so a good experience for him. We had an interesting attendee who gave us “a fact for you all, agile is actually a framework” in the introduction which did make me chuckle and also made things a little awkward 10 minutes later for our Agile is a mindset slide:

Source

We also had a number of our new graduates attend, which was good to meet them all and not have to deal with quite so many “but in waterfall” or “how would you do this (insert random project) in an Agile way” type questions. They also got pretty close to building everything in our Lego4Scrum simulation which would have been a first, had it not been for a harsh business stakeholder attending their sprint reviews! There were a couple times they got lost when doing the retro and misunderstanding its purpose, which was hard to not interject and correct it. Feedback was they would have preferred being steered the right way (as we let it play out), so good learning if that happens again.

BXT Jam

On Wednesday night myself and Andy ran a session in the evening as part of a BXT Jam.

BXT (Business, eXperience, Technology) is all about modern ways of working and helping our clients start and sustain on that journey. It has four guiding principles of:

1. Include diverse perspectives

2. Take a human centred approach

3. Work iteratively and collaboratively

4. Be bold

Our session was mainly centered on understanding Agile at its core, really focusing on mindset, values and principles as opposed to any particular practices. We looked at the manifesto, some empirical research supporting Agile (using DORA) and played the Ball Point Game with attendees. We took a little bit of a risk as it was the first time we’d run the game, but given it’s a pretty easy one to facilitate there thankfully weren’t any issues.

Andy handled some particularly interesting questions well (“how are we supposed to collaborate with the customer without signing a contract?”) and I think the attendees left with a better understanding of what Agile at its core is all about. We’ve already been approached to hold a similar session for our Sales and Marketing team in October, so hoping this can lead to lots more opportunities to collaborate with the BXT team and wider firm. Special thank you has to go to Gurdeep Kang for setting up the opportunity and connecting us with the BXT team.

Next Week

Next week I’m heading to Birmingham to run a couple workshops with Senior Managers in our Tax teams, helping them understand Agile and start to apply it to a large, uncertain programme of change they are undertaking. We’ll also be holding a sprint review with one of our vendors centered on new ways of working, looking at how some of our pilot teams are getting on and learning from their feedback.

Weeknotes #28

Incremental Changes

This week I observed a great example of approaching work with an Agile mindset. Within our office we have a number of electronic displays which show desk availability on each floor, as well as room names/locations. John Cowx, one of our Experience Design team, showed to me an incremental change they had made this week, introducing a single touch screen for one display on one floor which would allow staff to interact, type in a room name and then have a route plotted to the room to show them the way. This is a great example of an Agile mindset to work, as rather than roll this out through every single screen across every single office across the country, here we’re piloting it (small batch) and observe the interactions/obtaining feedback, before making changes and/or deciding whether or not to scale it across all locations (inspecting and adapting). It was great to not only see someone so passionate about the product, but to see an example of the Agile mindset being evidenced in the work we do.

Retrospectives

This week we were having a conversation around the Continuous Improvement initiative being run in IT and encouraging people in our ‘Project’ model to conduct retrospectives, regardless of delivery approach (then taking any wider improvements identified in the retrospectives into the initiative to implement). It’s something that has been running for a while with limited success as, generally, the observations are people aren’t conducting Retrospectives or the improvements being implemented are low hanging fruit rather than anything meaningful of impact. The former doesn’t really surprise me, even with using our team to provide lots of guidance, templates and lunch & learns. For me it’s clear that people don’t want to use retros (which is fine), therefore we need to learn from that feedback and change direction, rather than continuing to push the retrospectives agenda, as otherwise we can end up falling into the trap below:

Imposition of Agile

It’s perfectly reasonable to see that people can continuously improve without doing retrospectives but more importantly, it’s to recognise that doing retrospectives != continuously improving. I’ve suggested the group conduct some end user interviews/field research to understand why people are struggling with retros and also around what they see the purpose of the initiative as. Possibly there could be an unearthing from that around what the real improvements are that are needed, rather than relying on the retrospectives as the mechanism to capture them.

TLDR; individuals and interactions over tools and processes

Training

It was back to the training rhythm this week, running a half day session on Wednesday as part of our Hands On With Azure DevOps course. Given it had been so long since running any type of training, I found myself a little bit rusty in parts, but generally thought it went well. Dan from our team was shadowing, so we can reduce the single point dependency in the team of only myself running the session. This was really good from my perspective as there are certain nuances that can be missed, which he was there to either point out to attendees or to ask me about. Having started doing the session months ago it finally feels like now the content flows nicely and that we give a sufficient learning experience without teaching too much unnecessary detail. My favourite point is the challenge on configuring the kanban board, as normally there are a lot of alarmed faces when it’s first presented! However they all end up doing it well and meeting the criteria, which is of course a good indicator that attendees are learning through doing. There is only one slot available across all sessions in the next four months, so please that demand is so high!

Next Week

Next week it’s back to running Agile Foundations courses — with myself and Stefano running a session on Tuesday. I’ll also be working with Andy from our team on presenting at a BXT Jam on Wednesday night, with a 30–45 minute slot introducing people to Agile. A few slides plus the ball point game is our planned approach, hoping it can scale to 40 people!

Weeknotes #27

New Ways of Working

This week we’ve had some really positive discussions around our new delivery model and how we start the transition. We’ve tentatively formulated a ways of working group, bringing expertise across operations, software engineering, programme & portfolio management and Agile — so it should provide a nice blend in managing the change. The more conversations we’re having with people the consistent feedback is that it “makes sense” with no real holes in the way of working, however a recognition that we are some way away in terms of the skills needed with the current workforce. I’m hopeful we’ll be able to spin up our next pilot product teams and service in the next month.

Brand Building

Now that the holiday season is over with, we’re back into full flow on the training front. This week Dan ran another Agile Foundations session on Monday, which was followed up with some fantastic feedback. Speaking to someone who went in a separate conversation on Wednesday she said it was “the best training I have ever attended”, which is a fantastic endorsement to Dan and the material that we have. Currently it’s forecast for us to have delivered 41 training sessions in 2019, which will be a great achievement.

The good thing about these sessions going well is that word of mouth spreads, and this week I was approached about us getting involved in other initiatives across the firm. BXT is one of our Digital Services we offer to clients, and we’ve been requested to present at a BXT Jam later this month for roughly 40–50 people, to help familiarise attendees with what Agile at its core is really about, plus showcasing what we’re doing to grow and embed that thinking in our culture. We’ve also been asked to help run sessions on Agile as part of the firms Digital Accelerator initiative, which is helping over 250 people (open to anyone from Senior Associate to Director, across all LoS and IFS) upskill in all things digital, in order for them to become advocates and help the firms next phase of our transformation, helping us to build our digital future faster. With over 2000 applicants across the UK it’s something recognised by the whole firm and highly visible, so hoping it’s more positive press for the Agile Collaboratory — maybe we can get an exec board member playing with Lego!

Change is hard

This week in general I’ve found things to be really tough from a work perspective. I’m finding it increasingly difficult when involved in calls/meetings to not get frustrated at some of the things that are being discussed. This is mainly due to it being things like bad knowledge, deliberately obstructive behaviour, misinterpretation or statements being made about things people really just don’t know anything about. Despite trying to help guide people you can often be shouted down or simply not consulted in conversations. It must have been noticeable in particular this week as within our own team people asked if my weeknotes were going to be as bad as my mood!

A day in the life…

I think when you’re involved in change like we are, there are going to be setbacks and off days/weeks — you are going to get frustrated. Like all things it’s important to recognise what caused that, and what preventive/proactive measures you’re going to take in order to not feel that way again. For myself, I’m going to temporarily taking myself out of certain meetings, in order to free up time to focus on individual discussions and share/build understanding that way.

Next Week

Next week it’s back to training, with another of our Hands On With Azure DevOps sessions in London. The week concludes with a trip to Manchester to look at identifying our next pilot product teams and areas of focus, a meeting I sense may provide more challenges!

Weeknotes #25

Team Identity

One of the experiments we’re running is for our newly formed teams to come up with a team name as well as some form of team identity. Typically we’ll suggest teams complete something like a team canvas, coming back to revisit it as the team evolves and matures, to better reflect ways of working.

We’re struggling at the moment around this becoming a ‘thing’ that teams do, and it’s often greeted with derision, a blank stare or a roll of the eyes. As well as that teams aren’t always the most creative with either team names (we’ve suggested a theme of ‘major places — fictional or non-fictional’) or filling out the canvas (i.e. completing them with Agile buzzwords so as to ‘convince’ management). This week in particular I’ve mentioned it a number of times to people, the majority of the time getting one or all of the reactions above. I’m struggling with why this is, in particular when I think about some of the great teams we know of. A great (albeit begrudgingly) example for me is Manchester United. When I think about the Ferguson era, the class of 92 and the values and principles he instilled at that club, everyone there knew what it meant to be ‘Manchester United’ — in terms of what was expected both on the pitch and off it. You hear ex players now talk with great passion about what it means to be at that club, to wear that shirt and how certainly in recent teams they’ve lost their way, with those values seemingly going out the window. When coming up with a team identity, this is what we want teams to strive for. I’m not sure if it’s because work has become so transactional for people they can’t possibly fathom something that isn’t solution focused (i.e. naming yourself after the application you’ve worked on) or that the psychological safety is lacking in the context they are in (i.e. teams don’t feel safe enough that they can be viewed as having fun or show vulnerability). One to watch in the coming months but a topic I’m certainly finding difficult at the moment.

Agile Portfolio Management

This week I’ve also been helping on some client work where we’re looking at helping their PMO transition/adopt Agile ways of working, and what it means for their area. For a lot of organisations this is probably one of the hardest areas to change — with a PMO that is focused on milestones, RAG statuses and being on time and on budget, getting them to shift mindset is one of the biggest challenges. We’ve been trying to do some of this internally, with a real shift towards a focus on flow from a metrics perspective, but also agreeing some principles around what the PMO is there for. Even just adopting the metrics more relevant to Agile teams is not enough, it requires a whole shift in thinking around the PMO being an enabler for business agility. Things like focusing on the small batch, focusing on outcomes, as well as the scaling of team work through to portfolio and strategy at the relevant flight levels is really how a PMO “transforms”.

We’ll be playing back to them some example next week, which should hopefully lead to some good conversations and follow on opportunities for how we can enable their Agile adoption.

Next Week

Next week it’s back to Manchester, as we look to setup a ways of working group to take our adoption to the next level. We’re looking to blend experienced Agilists with PwC’ers, which should give us that balance. As well as that we have our first Agile Delivery Manager starting, looking forward to welcoming Stefano to the team!

Weeknotes #24

Psychological Safety

A trip to Manchester this week involved interviewing for a new Product Manager role, making a point of focusing on questions centered around outcomes people had experienced (both good and bad). I was really impressed in particular during one of the interviews where a candidate mentioned around the importance of psychological safety for the team. This individual even went on to reference Amy Edmondson when I queried further, which was even more impressive! It’s clear now that more and more practitioners are aware of the importance of psychological safety in their environment with it often being the focus of talks at conferences, meetups etc.

For those unfamiliar, psychological safety refers to:

An individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk or a belief that a team is safe for risk taking in the face of being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.

As part of Project Aristotle, Google found it to be the top key dynamic that set successful teams apart from other teams at Google. It also is referenced in this years State of DevOps report as positively impact software delivery performance.

The 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps

In our ways of working (WoW) programme, tracking this will be really important. Measuring it is no doubt hard, however there are some useful articles already that may help us in this aspect of our journey.

Dev+Ops != DevOps

This week we’ve taken a look at some of pilot teams in our WoW programme and planning the next steps in bringing them closer together in the value stream. With a traditional horizontal slicing of roles, we now need to rebuild that relationship between Dev and Ops into the same team, however that means for the time being we’re still going to have a bit of a split, something which we need to address in the coming months. Putting ‘DevOps’ teams together is not as simple as just chucking them together, it’s largely cultural based, with the right tooling to support them to work together.

Looking at where I would rank our organisation using DORA’s quick check, I’d suggest we’re at the following:

Which shows how much work we have to do/some of the challenges we’re facing. On the operational side we’re pretty strong in time to restore service, however we need to do a lot more in building that trust around deployments. The hope in the coming months is to pair up 1 x Dev and 1 x Ops together, in order to grow that capability around DevOps.

Next Week

Next week I’m helping put together some material on Lean-Agile Portfolio management for one of our clients, hoping to weave in some of the metrics we’re using currently, as well as that we’re looking at agreeing our next pilot team(s) and starting them on their Agile journey.

Weeknotes #23

Incremental Approach to Change

This week we’ve been having numerous discussion around roles in our proposed delivery model, with some differing views as to how to approach it. My view, much like how Agile delivery is, would be to incrementally roll-out new ways of working, once confidence builds and constraints are addressed. Taking the expectations/skills we desire in new roles and mapping the current skill set, it’s clear we have a shortfall in what is needed. That’s not to say we don’t have the right people, in particular lots of people can bring contextual knowledge to the table that will help us as change leaders learn. However there should be a recognition that a period of upskilling is needed, one which can only be done through continuous coaching with these individuals, something that you can’t do in one big ‘batch’. Similarly, the technical excellence needed to aid business agility is few and far between currently, which therefore presents a dangerous flirtation of something akin to a TACOS implementation.

[embed]https://twitter.com/tottinge/status/943518694436679681[/embed]

A learning this week therefore has been witnessing first hand the reasons why so many change programmes fail. Taking a SAFe rollout as an example, to suddenly train everyone, then set them up in a release train with a bunch of new roles/titles without any sort of consideration for the individuals impacted is very naive. To expect people to be ‘transformed’ overnight (or over 2/3/4/5 days — depending on your preferred training course) to Agile people in an Agile organisation is simply not how change works. 

Change is hard, change takes time and those involved in change need to be prepared for this. Shortcuts only guarantee one thing, change won’t stick.

Metrics for Business Decisions

I’ve been continuing to read Mattia Battiston and Chris Young’s book — Team Guide To Metrics for Business Decisions. Despite only being 70% complete it’s been a great read so far, and should provide a lot of inspiration for practitioners, both those that are experienced and those that are just starting their Agile journey. A favourite section of mine is the one on forecasting, and the pitfalls of using story points. I conveyed similar thoughts to our internal and client facing teams around why we feel the need to do this with teams, yet it still feels like as an industry we’re finding it hard to let go of some of those things we hold dear. Buy it here.

Ron Jeffries said it best:

[embed]https://twitter.com/ronjeffries/status/943790497981706242?lang=en[/embed]

Team Health Checks

I’ve started introducing the concept of us running Team Health Checks with our Agile teams, to make visible if teams are in an environment they can succeed and if our culture fits their needs. Whilst retrospectives are great, sometimes a high level view of certain areas and identification of trends is needed, particularly if you’re a leader and sometimes need a TL;DR.

This is an example of the outputs from the health check we ran within our own Agile coaching team at the beginning of our retro on Tuesday. We take the mode (most frequent) value in the responses, settling on the lower of the two if there is a tie. I slightly tweaked the well known version famed by Spotify, as not all of our teams are doing software development (however a separate template exists for those that do) as well as adding a question on psychological safety which, given Google’s findings, is one of the most important things to consider. Looking forward to seeing more teams give it a try and spot some underlying trends that may not immediately be apparent.

Next week

Next week involves a trip to Manchester, where we’re interviewing for a new Product Manager and DevOps Engineer. It’s a good indicator around the backing we have in the change that we’re able to make these hires, aligning with roles that are recognised across the industry, rather than creating roles specific to our IT department. Looking forward to meeting some interesting candidates!

Weeknotes #22

Invitation over infliction

This week we’ve been looking at mapping our existing applications into specified products and services, to have an initial idea around where we may want to go next from a product side in incrementally moving to new ways of working. Unfortunately as part of that some had misunderstood, and taken it as a need to also map people into new roles, based on what they do now, without much/any conversation with those impacted individuals. 

After again being inspired by watching Jonathan Smart latest talk on Better Value Sooner Safer Happier, I had to explain around the need to invite rather than inflict change.

RIP Grumpy Cat

Trying to drag and drop humans into new roles just like how we move files on our devices is the classic example of inflicted, capital A/D, capital T, agile/digital transformation. This kind of approach lacks empathy, and is more than likely to result in limited success in adopting new ways of working. Inviting people to the change, be it through asking for their feedback, sowing the seed for maybe where we want to go but showing our own fallibility in admitting of not being sure ourselves is more likely to lead to success in the long run, as people feel a sense of involvement and ownership in the journey. The message seemed to land in the conversations we had, with us agreeing to slow down to focus on the product/service side, and taking a slower, incremental approach on the people side.

Product Management

Increasingly we’re having more and more discussions around Product Management and the importance that role is going to play in achieving positive outcomes for new ways of working. One of the first things that comes up is the difference between a Product Owner and Product Manager. 

As I’ve mentioned before, Melissa Perri’s view of a Product Owner being a role on a Scrum team Vs. a Product Manager being a career is what we’re explaining to people. In addition to that, she gives a great overview here. Scrum has lots of stuff on the process/rules of Scrum and what a PO should do, but leaves a lot of stuff unanswered around knowing if you’re actually building the right thing or not. It’s precisely why we’re focusing on Product Manager as a role, as we want them to be able to prioritise work in particular from an outcome oriented perspective. I recall my days at Royal Mail when I worked with a Product Manager called Anne, who was one the best PM’s I worked with. She showed me what Product Management really was all about, not just prioritising work but also pouring over customer data and obsessing over outcomes rather than individual features. This lead to developing some of the most used products on the platform, as well as creating new revenue streams for the organisation. This mindset is what makes a great Product Manager.

FlowViz

This week I finally managed to get FlowViz into the Azure DevOps Marketplace through a collaboration with Agile Extensions.

Whilst the listing only redirects people to my GitHub page, it’s nice to have something out there and see if it’s going to help people in the teams they work with. I purposely made it free due to me wishing I had something like this early on in my Agile journey-hopefully it will help others avoiding making the same mistakes I made/measure things a bit more useful!

Next Week

Next week we have our team sprint review and retro — a good time for us to reflect on how our adoption of new ways of working are going and a check in on our OKRs to see how we’re performing so far this quarter, changing direction if we need to.

Weeknotes #20

Project to Product

This week we’ve been spending a number of sessions building out what our future IT delivery model looks like, with the focus on shifting from project thinking to aligning products teams around services we offer to the organisation. Building on last weeks notes, the current working definition we’ve gone with on the Product front is the following:

Product — a product is a tangible item that closely meets the demands of a particular market and yields enough value to justify its continued existence. 

It is characterised by its benefits, features, functions and uses that satisfy needs of the consumer.

With this, we feel some taxonomy is also needed around what types of products we offer, with the below being what we currently define as offerings:

Now, we’re still learning through incrementally moving towards the model but kudos must be given to Government Digital Service (GDS) material available online. The role descriptions and skills needed with positions such as a Delivery Manager, Product Manager, Business Analyst and Service Owner are all roles we envisage to feature prominently in our new teams and services, so it’s great to have some material out there to build appropriate roles and (more importantly) career paths for our people. 

The biggest area of challenge I foresee at the moment is around Product Management, with this being a skill that across the whole organisation we’re not great at. A blend of hiring experienced PM’s and upskilling the majority is likely the route we’ll take to address this. Look out for future posts on the rest of the delivery model as we learn and iterate in the coming months/years…

Goal Setting

With it being summer holiday season, it’s the annual “goal setting” period for everyone in the organisation. I’ve found it hard to formulate my goals this year, not so much with what I want our focus to be on as a team, but more the measurement aspect that comes with goals. My goals are currently a blend of launching new ways of working (through product teams), reducing batch size/managing portfolio WIP around ‘old ways of working’ (projects), moving towards certified trainers within our team and finally a personal goal around being a career coach for a couple of our newly promoted managers in IT. 

The notion of setting annual goals is a problematic one I find as a practitioner, drawing parallels with big up front planning akin to a waterfall world. Thankfully I work with a career coach who is pragmatic around my goals and allows me to tweak them where appropriate. 

It was great to see a member of our leadership team share their goals around committing to have N teams (exact number still TBC) having implement continuous delivery within the performance year, especially as that really is the ‘hard stuff’.

Reflection

This week, myself and Andy had a call with a member of our Assurance team who wanted a demonstration around some of the things we had implemented as part of formulating the Lean PfMO within our IT organisation. The call went really well with them being impressed with some of the things we’d done around prioritisation of work using our rough RoI calculator, the visualisation of work using a portfolio kanban board and the empirical nature of monitoring progress using flow metrics. It made me reflect on when myself and Andy first started working together a couple of years ago, and how our own working relationship has developed, as well as the improvement of his own understanding and knowledge around Agile ways of working and portfolio management. With my primary focus being on where I feel we need to be and how far away we are from that, it’s easy to forget just how far we’ve come from where we once were. Some of the things we have implemented so far have gone really well and are a far cry from a large majority of people in our organisation who still rely on techniques such as spreadsheets to manage their work. Much like these posts, reflecting on how far you’ve come can help motivate, in particular during times of frustration.

Next Week

Next week I’m looking forward to meeting one of our new Consulting directors, who is focused in particular on Agile ways of working using SAP and cloud in the FS sector. I’ve already helped him this week get a Kanban board setup for his current team (rare to get someone proactively wanting one!), so hopefully it can be a mutually beneficial chat :) 

With a few gaps in the week I’m hopeful I can finally make a start on our 2-day ICAgile Certified Agile Fundamentals course, which we plan to start offering from October this year.

Weeknotes #19

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.

Weeknotes #18

Scaling OKRs

After a year of experimenting with OKRs, we’re getting a lot better as a team in setting achievable and ambitious objectives and key results for the quarter. The approach appears to be working, as this week our help was requested by a member of our IT leadership in helping set OKRs for five other teams across our IT department. This presents a new challenge for us, in that we’ll get to learn about scaling OKRs and how we can use them across multiple teams to create departmental (and scaling to organisational) alignment. With the fact that the key results are SMART in their nature, it should also mean personal objective setting is a lot easier for people. I know this is something a number of people (including myself) find difficult, so if we can introduce something that makes this easier then it’s another potential win for our team.

Agile Assurance

I had some good conversations this week with multiple people in our Assurance team who wanted to learn about applying Agile either to their own work internally or developing further offerings to assist clients. 

It makes sense why an offering around an empirical, data-driven approach would appeal to clients, as well as the fact it’s focused on the roots of Agile around empiricism and transparency. An interesting learning for me in our conversations was just around how many misconceptions there are when it comes to metrics/measurements for teams to use. The language used such as ‘Items committed Vs. Items delivered’ or ‘Estimate Accuracy’ are almost all set out with a bias of ‘it must be the teams fault’ — rather than looking at underlying system symptoms, as well as focusing on outcomes. 

A good few hours coaching however managed to reset some of these misconceptions, so I’m looking forward to the next steps in us developing something that will ultimately aid organisational agility.

One of the partners in one of our business lines for Assurance seems dedicated to adopting Agile within his team(s), which was great to hear. So often it feels like our role is around convincing people why Agile is the right fit for them, whereas this was very much one centered on the how, rather than the why. We pickup again first thing Monday morning (I love a sense of urgency!) and already I’ve got lots of ideas in how we can help them adopt a pragmatic, flow based way of working based on Agile principles.

The Dip

This week I started reading The Dip, a short book by Seth Godin. The book explains how you might be in a dip, which may get better if you persevere, or that you may get stuck, and it will never get better no matter what you do.

According to the book, Winners quit fast, quit often and quit without guilt — until they commit to beating the right dip for the right reasons. It’s a good short read, and useful for anyone going through wider change programmes, who may need some supporting reading around the dip they may be in.

Next Week

Next week I’ll be recording a podcast with a couple of my colleagues on ‘bringing goals to life’. Given one of our three goals for this performance year is around taking an ‘agile by default’ approach, we want to give people some assistance and (hopefully!) inspiration around what that means and how everyone can help contribute towards us achieving our goals.

Weeknotes #17

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:

Every project does not have to be Agile. However, each project you work on should encourage and support agility.

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!

Weeknotes #16

Reward and recognition

This week, I was really pleased to see that our team have been shortlisted for the Make a difference award for our IT awards on 17th June:

Reward and recognition are tough subjects when playing the role of coaches and/or change agents. We all want to be rewarded/recognised for driving a wider change but we can often end up failing to get recognised with the ‘old’ behaviours still rewarded, this then tests your own ability to continue driving the wider change, as well as not be perceived as bias by those rewarding the wrong behaviours. Individual reward conversations are happening in the next few weeks so it will be interesting to see what has been recognised as leading by example, in particular with our strategic shift at the end of November to move towards more Agile ways of working. Hopefully the right behaviours have been recognised, otherwise my fear is that the sense of urgency will not be created if we still reward business-as-usual, big batch projects, year-long delivery cycles.

Training Day

On Wednesday I ran a one-day Foundations session for fellow IT staff in our Manchester office. This was the first one we’d run for IT people in the UK where we have switched up the format, replacing Featureban with lego4Scrum to get more of a feel for simulated delivery in an Agile world.

Feedback was positive across the board, which is good to know given the changes made. I’m a big fan of lego4Scrum, mainly due to its potential variability in outcomes (plus the fact it’s lego!). I’d like to give Featureban 3.0 a go, but

FlowViz

With some time to myself after flaky wifi (Virgin Trains 👀) on the train to/from Manchester and then up to Newcastle on Thursday, I set about refactoring FlowViz, given the API is now up to v3.0 (I built it using v1.0). 

It’s good to see the Azure DevOps team making more data such as builds, pipelines and test items available…although when looking through the data I was struggling to see what additions I could make with the new information. Ideally I’d like to bring in the 4 Software Delivery Performance metrics from DORA, alas this currently looks to be unavailable.

In any case, I made a number of tweaks, updating the endpoint to use both the new URL format (dev.azure.com) and the v3.0-preview of the API, as well as creating a few new charts for teams to use. With Power BI * still * (to my disbelief and frustration) unable to handle date on the x-axis without aggregating I’ve moved to using average cycle time per week with a trend line to see if we’re on the right path.

Wrong direction team!

I actually did this for existing teams a couple of months ago, so was quite pleased to see Troy’s new team dashboard having the same chart added a few weeks ago. Made me smile that my own thinking was in-line with someone far more experienced than myself.

Other charts added/updates include:

- Layout changes/new modern visual header

- In-Progress Item Age (Calendar Days)

- Stale Work (Days since item updated)

- Cumulative Flow by Day

I also made an attempt at the Tasktop flow metrics that get a frequent mention in Project to Product:

Nowhere near as good however feedback from others has been that they really like the ‘clean’ design — hopefully it’s a simpler way to present information that teams can start to leverage.

Check the link here for the free download.

Next week (or next few weeks)

Next week I’ll only be in the office on Monday morning, then taking an extended break till 3rd July. On Monday night myself and my fiancée will be flying out to Bali (not Hotel K — but thanks Jon for the book suggestion) for two weeks of relaxing and travelling. Of course, this means I’ll be taking a hiatus from Weeknotes till I’m back, so look out for Weeknotes #17 on 5th July.

Weeknotes #15

Metrics and Curiosity

This week I spent a few days (along with some big help from my colleague Tim) reworking one of troy.magennis amazing team dashboards from Excel into Google Sheets.

I view Troy’s work as really important to what we do in our industry, and the fact he gives it all away for free in a format that is easily consumable with clear instructions is even better. He has been one of my biggest inspirations in the last few years, always available to chat, give feedback and share ideas with. If you are going to Agile 2019 this year, be sure to check out the Data & Metrics track he has put together (I’m biased as I helped review the submissions!).

On the topic of metrics, it’s great how beneficial they are in unearthing information that isn’t immediately visible to a Coach/Scrum Master/Delivery Manager. A great example of that was this week with someone I’m coaching, where we looked at a scatter plot for her team:

Now, whilst this is great in showing you how long things in general take (85th percentile — 16 days — not bad as this team are doing two week sprints), it should, if it’s an effective chart, spark curiosity and questions. 

Good coaches then find a way to safely introduce this information to the team (See: Goodhart’s Law) and leverage it to have better conversations as a team.

If we go back to the original visual, these are the sort of things I would be considering:

That way we’re asking open questions centered on improvement, rather than making the team feel they are being critiqued for performance using data.

Estimation

Estimation is always an interesting topic in the Agile world, from story points, t-shirt sizes, fibonacci or fibonacci-esque, cost of delay or even #noestimates there is always passionate discussion in this area. This week task estimation came up, specifically the topic of needing to estimate in hours for tasks, with some of our coaches working with teams saying that they ‘needed’ the team to estimate tasks in hours to understand capacity. Now I’ll admit this was a practice I once encouraged at the beginning of my career, however having learned and experimented with other techniques I can see it’s not effective, and something I wouldn’t get teams to start with now. The days of telling (or as I witness from some other Scrum Masters — yelling 😐) a team member to change their hours remaining in the digital tool from 3 to 2 are ones I look back on and cringe at. I was trying to explain to the coaches that it’s a bad practice, hourly estimation is nigh on impossible and that we should focus on flow, small stories and limiting WIP. 

Don’t believe me? Sutherland himself says:

We want to abandon hours as a reporting tool for Scrum teams as data on over 60,000 teams in a Rally survey shows that the slowest teams use hours. 

The fastest teams use small stories, no tasking, and no hourly estimation.

So as practitioners who are all about empiricism, why push old/bad practices on teams and ignore the empiricism that shows they don’t work?

Focus on flow, manage WIP, and slicing work into small vertical slices will tackle your capacity issue in a much more effective manner than updating your hours in any respective digital tool will.

A framework for Agile collaboration

On Thursday night I went along to an executive dinner at the Connaught Hotel hosted by IDC & Slack.

It was a really interesting evening, with approx 30–40 people from different organisations big and small sharing about their own Agile journey, challenges they were facing and success stories. Common themes over the dinner around approaches that help to success were, leadership buy in is a must for success, trust, measure outcomes over outputs and the shift from project -> product. The two challenges I heard most frequently used were culture and the funding model, which I would agree with.

A member of a large bank on our table in particular stressed the importance of having HR as part of the change which, given what I mentioned earlier, helped me validate we were making the right steps forward. 

Some surprising points for me were around technical practices, in particular on our table where some people didn’t think they were key (albeit important) to organisational agility. When you consider the work from DORA and Accelerate, which both talk about how technical practices directly influence organisational performance, I found that odd. Another interesting observation was around the love digital tools (Jira, Azure DevOps, Trello etc) were getting from everyone.

One table in particular began their answer to the main topic discussion point with “tools and process”. This was confusing to me given the values in the manifesto. In summary, I don’t think there was anything massively * new * I learnt over the evening, other than big organisations have similar issues to ours. It confirmed to me certainly that our current approach is sound and, whilst it may take years to get there we are getting there incrementally.

Next Week

Next week I’ve got some conversations around release management, which should be interesting given the inroads Jon made this week in automating ticket creation/closing for deployments with SNow and Azure DevOps. 

I’ll also be heading up to our Manchester office, running another 1-day Agile Foundations session for a number of new joiners in our IT organisation.