Elevate Your Inspect and Adapt Event: Best Practices and Tips for Success

By Gerben Kollaard

Introduction

The Inspect and Adapt (I&A) is one of the most important events from the Scaled Agile Framework. It connects with the SAFe Core Values and will help your organization to learn. But it is not easy. Energized from the RTE Summit 2023 in Haarlem, a group of RTEs brings you the best practices and tips of the I&A.

One of the biggest problems of the I&A is low participation and low engagement. Destroying the relentless improvement cycle of your ART. Making the I&A better on all the three parts will help you get a higher participation, giving your attendees autonomy and responsibility during and after the Inspect and Adapt will help you get a better engagement. How you say? We are going to tell you for each part of the I&A:

·?????? System Demo

·?????? Quantitative Qualitative measurement

·?????? Retro & Problem Solving Workshop

Best practices and tips for the System Demo

Low engagement during the system demo, a very technical system demo or no system demo at all. We’ve all seen it. Here are some best practices and tips that will help you:

1.?Let the business owners/users run the System Demo: letting the users run the system demo will make the demo more understanding for the rest of the audience which will also help on giving feedback and will improve the involvement of the user-group. Letting the business owners run the system demo will not only help with all of the above, but also will give the signal that the System Demo is really important.

2.?Do something with the design of how you do your System Demo: Looking at demo’s is intensive, so variate the way of doing the demo. For example: let the Product Owner Pitch his Demo and let the audience choose or organize the demo’s in market style.

?3. Demo value instead of technology: as a best practice, you should focus on showing the added value and things users can actually provide feedback on. Which often is very hard and teams love to share all the technical cool stuff they did to create the business value. If it’s hard for a team to provide a demo ‘because all the things we did were technical’ use a persona to tell with they did, why it was so hard and show the end-state users recognize

Best practices and for the Quantitative and Qualitative measurement

Objectively looking at facts of your process sounds easy. But the quantitative and qualitative measurement part of the Inspect and adapt is hard to do right. Here are 2 tips:

1.?Give business value during the System Demo: by letting business owners add value to the objectives during the system demo, you will not only motivate teams for a good demo, but you will make the process of adding business value to objectives more transparent. Using automating business owners can rate the objectives and after a small break you can share the given value with the teams. Creating a shared vision on potential issues.

2.?Prepare and share: gathering the information, analysing it to potential issues and share it beforehand with the ART and it’s stakeholders will help you in the process of finding and choosing issues to solve.

Best practices for Retro & Problem Solving Workshop

Doing the retrospective and problem solving workshop will help your ART improve, but one of the most seen mistakes of the Inspect and Adapt is not following up on improvement items. Improving this part of the Inspect and Adapt will help you build and speed up your relentless improvement cycle.

1.?Variate in the retrospective: often you already see that teams use different ways of doing their retrospective, doing so in the Inspect & Adapt will help engagement. For example an Open Space set up will help teams in a different way as a traditional retrospective.

2. Bring focus in improvement items: as a best practice, just start with 1 improvement item, as it is better to successfully do one item then fail in doing 10. It will inspire the ART if they see the one item has effect. If you see that the ART can take on more improvement items it can still be helpful to use a WIP-limit.

3.?Give improvement items high priority: turn the improvement items of the problem solving workshop into a PI-objective for next PI, it will tell the whole ART the importance of the item and will make it easier to spend time on it. You can also demo the improvement item in the System Demo, of course if the item is suitable for it.

4.?Get back on improvement items in the next Inspect and Adapt: also a best practice, ensure follow up at the following Inspect & Adapt to show respect for the work that teams and ART have put into I&A items.

5.?Use tooling to track and embed improvement items in your regular process: log improvement items in tooling/backlog to ensure follow up. Tooling can also be helpful to flag items during the PI. Also during the PI, find a way to embed the improvement items in for example an event.

6.?The problem solving workshop should be fun: creating a higher participation, a higher engagement, you should try to make the problem solving workshop fun by using different techniques, for example use business drawing, value stream mapping or 15% Solutions (libration structure).

Conclusion

Optimizing the three parts of your Inspect and adapt by using these best practices and tips will hopefully help you to improve your Inspect and Adapt and ultimately improve your relentless improvement cycle.

Do you think the Inspect and Adapt can use some relentless improvements? Do you have other great tips or best practices? Make sure you get in touch.