Agile West Midlands: Transformation, Product Ownership and Hand Sanitiser!

The Meet Up

In what has been a dark few days across the world, there was a ray of light on Wednesday 11th March when the Agile West Midlands community came together once again – despite Covid-19 hanging over the nation! However, hands washed and sanitised, happy birthday sang twice over, we were ready to go!

We had two fantastic talks from Carl Garton  from Severn Trent, and Seb Bonicel from BJSS.

Carl took to the stage to take us through Severn Trent’s Transformation, their journey and challenges! All of which echoed the passion for Technology shown by the CIO. Taking roughly 2 years to transform, focusing on delivery and satisfaction. On this journey to delivering digital change and outstanding technology it was key to embrace and adopt a learning culture and an environment safe for continuous development. A key part of this development was training and self-learning! Be that an extensive reading list or specific training for Project Managers turning Scrum Masters and Product Owners to name a few.

How did they do this?

To take on this mammoth task there was an enormous amount of planning, 9 months to be exact. All to plan moving from Waterfall to Agile.

A key part of this plan was release trains. Trains made up of Scrum Master’s, Delivery personnel, Portfolio personnel. Trains for: SAP, Support Services, Asset Health, Cloud, Work Management, Customer Experience

The program team was specifically set up to serve the train. One of the biggest challenges was over commitment – people want to say yes! Their use of sprints was able to stop people from over commitment. One of the other major challenges was the culture shift. There were challenges with trying to avoid a culture of seeking permission, which was not the kind of empowerment they were trying to achieve.

Where SAFe worked really well was taking on cross train dependencies. Where certain trains might not have the capacity to deliver – other trains with the ability to do so would often help and assist with successful delivery.

Currently in Severn Trent, Technology is somewhat of an Agile island, every other area of the business are still using waterfall methodology.

Having said all this, it’s not perfect! Just an insight to where they have won and lost!

Before moving onto the next fantastic insights by Seb, we all washed our hands and sanitised again, before digging into pizza!

After the break Seb then took to the stage with his experience and flair, to talk to us all about The Relational Product Owner - the person who understands the value of relationships in delivering good and valuable business outcomes.

It seems there is a real debate around where a Product Owner should sit, the involvement of a Product Owner and the key relationships needed to survive. Thus one thing was certainly apparent - without good product owners, there is no successful agile delivery!

It is a critical role in any delivery and one that requires awareness of stakeholders and a maturity in assessing and working to maintain quality relationships to do the right thing.

A real stand out from Seb’s talk was the 3T model:

1.   Trust – your team and yourself

2.   Transparency – Are you hiding things? Is your team hiding things? Make everything visible and honest.

3.   Time – Spend time together, be productive in that time, build value!

Sit down with your team (in person or online!) and make ‘we will’ statements! Liberate structures and remember to always inspect and adapt!

The 3T model really resonated with me and made me think about how we do this in our daily lives. This is especially true with the core values of Xpertise, where we build our relationships with our colleagues, candidates and clients based on trust, honesty and respect. We spend time getting to know our candidate and client’s goals and drives, and treat people how we ourselves would wish to be treated.

All in all, two very important and interesting topics, and some excellent takeaways (not just the pizza!) A big thank you to all those involved, especially the speakers and Severn Trent for kindly hosting.