Agile Question Time

On Tuesday 14th November Joe MacDonald and I attended the “Agile Question Time” being ran by the Project Management Institute (PMI) at HSBC’s premises in Birmingham. PMI’s very own David Dimbleby, Joe Ellis, was on hand to host and chair the panel.

The panel consisted of leadership individuals from a range of different organisations.

·        Rob Moores – Agile Programme Manager, Google

·        Linda Lloyd – Senior Project Manager, Thales UK Limited

·        Gez Smith – Global Head of Agile, HSBC

·        Manjit Mann – Regulatory Compliance Manager, HSBC

·        Matt Winterbottom - Head of Transformation Frameworks, HSBC

As the name suggests, the format for the evening was based on the BBC’s current affairs show ‘Question Time’. Prior to the event the audience members had been invited to submit questions for the panel to discuss.

From my point of view, I felt that many topics seemed to cross over, and similar challenges seemed to pop up no matter what organisation you work in. The audience, which represented a diverse number of companies, all seemed to have similar experiences when it came to working with agile.

Some of the questions that came up were:

• Is the point of Agile to deliver things faster?
• When should compliance and governance be brought into the build process?
• What methods are best within the framework that allows for post integration feedback and improvement?
• What metrics should we use in an agile world.

These questions, like the others, elicited a lively debate among the panel. Personally, I felt that this form had its positives and negatives. It depended largely on the situation whether the question could be answered. But it was great to hear the different viewpoints from respected members of the agile community.

My colleague Joe, recently wrote an article about Agile Leadership, after attending a Geoff Watts meet up. I think a lot of what Joe wrote about was represented at the Question Time event. For me, one of the take home points is this: Agile is a “mindset”. It isn’t a ‘magic bullet’ that solves everything. You must get it to work for you, use the right framework (tool) for the job. Agile must be part of the culture, not something that delivery teams use, but an ethos that the company lives and breathes.

If I think about our culture here at Xpertise, we operate in an agile way (Kanban boards and all the trimmings..!) As a management and leadership team this is how we all work and think. We get close to our customers, we are the product owners for our clients as we speak to the community who are looking for new opportunities.

We feel we have gotten agile to work for us, because the whole company has embraced it as a working practice. It is something that has been articulated throughout the company. As if to justify we have recently won an award as the Best recruitment firm in the UK to work for, beating of competition from over 100 recruitment firms.

Buy in from the top down and from the bottom up enhances our culture, is this how your organisation works?