Agile Principles in Action: Passport Handling

Last April, I had the privilege of travelling to Bangalore, India. My company sponsored me to get trained as a Certified SAFe? Program Consultant (SPC). So I packed my bags, I got ready to start studying for my training by getting acquainted with the relevant material beforehand, and then started to get my travel documents in order. I was almost ready to go, waiting for the day of my flight, excited to visit a vibrant and interesting foreign country. Except, I had to renew my passport as its validity was less than 6 months. The timing to get prepared was a bit too tight for my liking, but I enjoyed having an adventure. Besides allowing me to journey towards a country I’ve never been to before, the trip would also allow me to have physical face time with the rest of the team I’ll be working with. Likewise, it's at least moderately in-line with one of the Agile Manifesto core value: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. It would allow me to build better rapport with the team I work with through the offsite work interaction I am scheduled to do over there. But first things first... I have to renew my passport.

No problem, I thought. I had enough time given the DFA’s published turn-around time to issue passport renewals. Being a bit paranoid (mantra: only the paranoid survive ?? ), my wife and I decided to also have my 1 year old daughter get her own passport. Why, you might ask? As courtesy procedure, a 1 year old kid doesn’t need to book an appointment to get their passport as long as all requirements are intact. A parent could piggy back on the courtesy extended. That allowed me to shave off a few days early in acquiring my renewal. Or so I thought. So, we went to the DFA, got through the renewal process, paid the rush fee (just to be on the safe side – yes, overkill if you think about it) and waited for our passports to be issued. Yey! Off to my next adventure in the next few days!

A package arrived as expected within a few days. It was my daughter’s passport. But only my daughter’s passport. Mine was nowhere to be found.

Not to worry, I still have a few days to get this sorted out. So I went to DFA’s website to look for the phone numbers I needed to call. I managed to get a few listed which I started to call ONE-BY-ONE. Interestingly, nobody was answering the hotline, the trunk line, department contact number. The phone numbers were either busy or nobody was answering. Hmm, why do they even bother to list them down if nobody is going to pick up?

Agile observation #1: If you are going to use Information Radiators, make sure your information is up to date.

To be fair, those *contact* numbers they provided might have been updated. But not being able to contact them through the same made it irrelevant in a way. It might as well be outdated. Needless to say, I was already starting to get frustrated with the experience. So, I proceeded to quit calling and explored other options to reach them. I next tried email.

Again, no immediate response. I’m tempted to get worried now. Literally seeing the number of preparation *buffer days* leading to my flight getting eaten away was gnawing at me. My preparation tasks were all getting accomplished one by one, except this one bottleneck which could prove to be the deal breaker.

I was getting desperate. I’m not getting through to them through the phone lines nor are they responding to my emails. How about if I tweet the Secretary of Foreign Affairs? Seemed like a good idea. He’s quite an active tweeter. Here goes nothing…

He didn’t respond. Let me re-phrase that, he didn’t *personally* respond. But one of his lieutenants (social media officers) noticed my public tweet to him and within minutes they proceeded to assist me with my issue. Interesting, they’re exploring different venues and channels to bridge the digital divide. This is aligned with the previous core value I mentioned earlier.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

After getting the details of my complaint, the dutiful staff who remained anonymous coordinated behind the scenes and reached out to the errant teams and departments. They updated me of the status and that they are working on fixing the issue.

I was immediately reminded of Scrum of Scrums. I’m not sure if they’re consciously implementing something similar or anything based upon it on their end, but I’m sure they and other enterprises can benefit from learning about this simple principle.

In the end, we’re they able to pull it off? Barely. Was it a nice experience for me? Far from it. But I doubt I’d have a better one if they didn’t explore other channels to reach out to their customers. Could they have done better? Obviously. But I sincerely believe that a few years ago (or months ago for that matter), my case would have been a statistic – part of the ball drops that possibly didn’t get resolved IN TIME. Instead, I am now writing this. I saw some improvements. I also see a lot of room for improvement. But I’m glad there are some people in there actually working to improving how government agencies work for the people it serves.

As a result, I was able to make my flight, take my training, take the certification exam 30 days after and am now a proud Certified SPC. Hooray! I will be writing soon about some of the things I learned in India (especially during the training experience and outside the training venue as well) that is a direct application of Agile and Lean principles.

As I retrospect, I realized that teams and businesses can learn from this recent experience. Why don’t you try exploring some of the principles I mentioned. Better yet, apply those principles in your place of work. I hope the DFA is also retrospecting and “Regularly Reflecting on Work”. ??

About the author: Chris is a movie fan who happens to be a new dad. Now that his daughter has turned one, he hopes to get more movie time, enjoy the story and glean insights about Agile and life in general. When he's not busy watching a movie, he's working as an Agile Coach. He has been Coaching since 2013 -- mentoring & training teams, fellow Scrum Masters and companies become more Lean and Agile. On top of his regular work duties on project teams that span the United States, Australia, UK, India and Bangladesh, he has on shore Scrum and Agile coaching experience in the following countries: Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.

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