Weeknotes #26 - Manchester & Time for reflection

Manchester Travels

This week I spent a couple days on the newly designed fourth floor of our Manchester office. Despite the rain (seemingly every time I go to Manchester) it was great to see a new, modern work environment with lots of space for visualisation and collaboration amongst teams.

Source: PwC_NorthWest Twitter

One of the main reasons for my visit was to present our proposed new ways of working model to get an agreement around this being where we *think* (as it’s emergent) we want to go, as well as formulating a working group and how to approach the change (incremental rather than big bang). It was one of the most positive meetings I’ve been to in recent months, both in the sense of getting feedback/providing clarity to others, and from a personal standpoint being able to passionately showcase the work our team have spent the last few months on.

Another reason for my visit was to meet our new Agile Delivery Manager — Stefano Ciarambino who has moved across from Consulting to do a six month secondment with our team. Me and Stefano have chatted on and off about all things Agile for the past 6/7 months, after he attended one of the Hands On With Azure DevOps course I ran. I was impressed with his experience and understanding as a practitioner, and with us starting to gain momentum with our new ways of working model, we needed a new face in the team to help *do* and help others do. Having learnt through some past mistakes, I’m quite particular now around who we have in our core team and them bringing something unique to the table. I’m hoping it proves to be an enjoyable six months for him and for us, so that we can make his stay a permanent one — welcome aboard Stefano!

Reflection

This week is a bit of one for anniversaries! This post will mark 26 weeks/6 months of writing weeknotes. In reflecting on the writing of them, I’ve found it to be a great vehicle for checking that the work I’m doing actually has purpose. For example if I’m getting to the end of the week and struggling to come up with things to write about, then maybe I’ve not been working on the right things! I hope sharing the things I’m learning through our own internal Agile adoption should help others who are experiencing it in a big organisation, and show to those who I do work with that I’m learning all the time, just as they may be.

This week also marks the four year anniversary since I joined PwC. When I think about that first team I joined to work with, who were split by developer per application, estimating tasks in story points but stories in hours, not delivering anything working at the end of sprints and working without PO’s, it’s fair to say I’ve come a long way since then! There’s been some memorable high points for me, a highlight being over the last twelve months in building a team of people who I look forward to working with every day. Also it contains some low points, for example being maybe too dogmatic at the beginning around Agile or having to walk away from teams as the negative behaviours from a management perspective inflicted on them were not going to change.

Hoping for both to continue for the foreseeable future and to writing the same again in twelve months time!

Next Week

Next week is our sprint review, looking forward to getting feedback on work we’ve done and what we should focus on next. I’ve also got some conversations with people who could help us in our transition towards new ways of working — looking forward to hearing their thoughts and seeing what adjustments we could make.

Weeknotes #25 - Team Identity & Agile Portfolio Management

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, DORA and DevOps

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 - TACO Scrum

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.

Buy it 

here

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.

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

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 #21 - Personal Kanban & Continuous Everything

Personal Kanban

I started this week by running a little bit of an experiment, using Kanbanchi as a personal kanban tool for the week. We’re current trialling the product with different teams, mainly as it nicely integrates with G Suite. It’s easy to get started, and once I’d created a board I mapped out my workflow (of course using WIP limits as well) of:

To Do This Week | To Do Today | Doing | Done (Awaiting Feedback) | Done

After that, I set myself a 15 minute daily standup at 7:30 each morning, to review my board and make a plan for the day. Much like when you work with new teams, you don’t quite realise how many things you’re doing (or things that are half done!) till you start to make it visible.

They’ve also recently added some metrics to the product as well which, for those that know me will be aware of, are something I’m very passionate about. Here is a look at my CFD for the week as of this morning:

Overall, I found it pretty useful and something I’ll look to stick with in the future. Nothing like eating your own dog food!

Continuous Everything

This week we ran a workshop to start to define how support would work in our new ‘Product’ world. With the traditional hand-off from Dev to Ops (throwing over the fence?), the conversation was all around how we bring these two groups together, in particular looking at some of our pilot product teams we’re working with at the minute and how we can incrementally introduce that in. It was good to have a number of the roles in teams already prepared to explain to a wider group, as it helped provide context around what outcomes we’re trying to achieve, plus the chance for us to get feedback around if they actually make sense. Whilst there’s no doubting there will be teething problems/learning, the good thing was that everyone came away positive and with a shared understanding on how we want things to work. Simon from the Operations side did a great job in facilitating, in particular by involving not only those of us on the Agile side, but also our supplier (for the pilot team) and procurement in the conversation. With this adoption of new ways of working, it is clear that everything now moves to being continuous. Not just continuous integration and delivery, but also continuous compliance, continuous support and ultimately, continuous transformation. There is no ‘end state’ and teams should now be constantly looking to experiment, learn and evolve their own ways of working.

Agile Outside IT

The Assurance Digital Audit team had a bit of a soft launch this week in their Agile adoption, which I attended along with their core team based in London. The team are taking a pragmatic approach to Agile adoption, using kanban boards at Project > Deliverable > Product Backlog Item (PBI) > Task level depending on your role in the team, combined with daily scrums to start with. What’s been great so far is the recognition that full blown Scrum is probably not right for their context currently, but they have expressed a desire to incrementally get there. The team have taken to it really well so far, with myself just needing to sow the seeds every now and then around what the principles of Agile are, gently steering them if they start to go off track. It will be interesting to see how the next few weeks/month play out, with a plan for a UK wide adoption based on the outcomes of piloting it in London.

Next Week

I’ll be starting next week off with a discussion around Machine Learning in an Agile world, with a team interested in learning more and applying the practices relevant to their context with the work they do in Assurance. We’ve also got a long overdue team night out planned for Wednesday at Swingers Mini Golf — looking forward to a few drinks, great company and hopefully not too many sore heads (and bruised egos after the mini golf?) the next day.