In this episode, Ricardo joined Shahin to talk about Practical Agile; and indulge in an in-depth conversation on Agile through time from trenches to executives, and much more.
Quotes from this session:
Coach please come on in, help us with this. That’s the dream scenario.
Never hire Agile Coaches that are gonna tell you what they are going to do to make things better.
The one thing I recommend is never to be a hero!
Hiring for Leader: I am hiring you for how you think. I can teach you what you do not know. But I can’t teach you how to think.
The following has been topics of our conversation:
Customers now expect continuous delivery of features, making them more awesome every day. Cloud computing and modern tools help, but that’s not enough. We need to improve our human interactions and day-to-day work. Learn how to help your business, management, and teams see the importance of technical improvement. Understand how your team can achieve Continuous Delivery through constant attention to technical excellence.
What do Scrum and Extreme Programming have in common? Courage is a requirement for success. Let’s explore what this means to us and our interactions with others; and how it can elevate our performance towards joy and success. Agile begins with values. Let us begin with courage.
“Agile has become overly decorated. Let’s scrape away those decorations for a minute, and get back to the center of agile.”
The Heart of Agile is a fresh look at Agile that strips away a lot of the cruft that has built up over recent years. Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect, Improve. This talk goes over the addition of kokoro onto the shu-ha-ri sequence, and it’s implications for agile. A fun, light talk with heavy implications.
Following the heart of agile talk, Alistair answered questions from the audience using the unusual form of answering with stories. They are more fun to listen to, and often more illuminating.
Agile practices are great, however as a coach and consultant it is becoming increasingly apparent that it is incredibly challenging to coach teams to use many agile practices in a correct way that is sustainable over time.
During this talk I’ll go get vet my experience s over the last two year with a large number of teams and coaches trying to improve their maturity. I have been observing the same teams going through a repetitive boom and bust agile maturity cycle as coaches come and go from teams. I’ve seen it take an incredible amount of effort to get teams to work with relatively simple agile practices with precision and skill. Once a coach leaves a team, I have witnessed back sliding in terms of adoption.
In this session Ill ask how can we help teams to increase their ability to self organize and collaborate without constant input and protection from an agile coach? How can we encourage teams to adopt amazing agile practices with enthusiasm and in a thoughtful way. How can we help team sustain their maturity and not abandon agile once the coach leaves?
Over the last six months I have been experimenting with a “Naked Kanban” approach that fully immerses the entire team, their management, and customers into a flow oriented mindset. This approach emphasizes bringing flow of work, and the lack of flow of work front and center to the entire team, and empowering the team to truly fix their flow. Coaches have been instructed not teach new practices, and in fact to resist introducing new practices even when asked, until teams can demonstrate the impact new practices will have on their flow of work.
The early results are encouraging, teams are adopting slower, but in a far more sustainable way. The collective intelligence of teams are improving. So is collaboration and respect. I’ll go through these results in detail, as well as the challenges still to come, of which many remain.
About Jeff: My mission in life is to help technology knowledge workers be awesome at what they do. Having been in the market since 1994, I have transitioned my initial passion for agile software engineering to provide advisory services to clients that want to thrive in a world of uncertainty and learning.
Over the last several years I have been running an Agile/Lean transformation service to help clients move from command and control towards feedback and self organization.
Our team has a solid track record coaching teams on foundational agile practices, guiding end to end organizational transformation to embrace a more agile mindset, and focused coaching of product and operations teams on how to embrace design thinking and validated learning.
I admit to an unbridled enthusiasm for any method or practice that bring creativity and joy to the value creation process, and get a kick out of turning leading edge thinking into contextualized, practical tools.
I also love to supercharge complex workshops through a combination of crowd awareness, passion, and above all humour. I’ll often iterate over a vast array of models/workshops in real time to adapt to the crowd’s thinking and evolving goal of the session.
My most important skill is growing the talent around me. I continue to provide passionate, motivated people with a suite of leading edge skills that take their leadership to the next level.
