NANBAN AGILE PRACTICE PART2
In this blog, I am introducing an agile (transformation) practice called as NANBAN to the organization so that they can combine all the practices like Scrum, Lean/kanban, XP, DevOps (Agile Culture for Agility) and few other agile & lean practices as complementing practice to each other gradually, instead of skipping/ignoring/comparing and leaving in a incomplete state of agile practices. I wrote about Complete Agile Transformation (CAT) couple of years ago, and have good feedback from the community, now the NANBAN addresses two problems, 1) that we don't usually need a new agile practice (we don't need to reinvent the wheel) rather we need to improve our fundamental understanding of agile-lean topics, and as a agile transformation (NANBAN) practice helps us to recognize the building blocks of agility and how Scrum and other practices helps to bring that focus. For example: Teams that adopt Scrum effectively as a framework usually combines other agile practices and make gradual agile adoption overcoming the organization challenges, sometimes this type of Scrum adoption is not seen and teams are moving to another practice, ignoring Scrum, without understanding or practicing Scrum fully for a specific duration. 2nd problem NANBAN addresses about the two important parts of agile transformation 1) Foundations 2) Implementation i.e., We need to give a good agile lean consulting, training, coaching to the agile topics, and let the team adopt in a gradual approach, and also guide the implementation with coaching, training, consulting again for specific advanced topics that are required at specific stages.
The purpose of NANBAN is to create an awareness & foundations, and also help the adoption of the agile practice as-is described for a specific duration to get the actual agility for the organization (Business Agility, Enterprise Agility, Organization Agility & Customer Agility). If foundations are not given properly, we see that teams need to get introduced again to the agile topics every now and then, requesting more coaching efforts, budgets and more coaches are involved instead of switching to AgileMaster or ScrumMaster for Teams.
A well coached, trained team can help other teams and build custom practice approach to adopt gradually what is required to start (e.g., starting with Scrum first)
In the Part1 the Manager and Developer had discussed about the NANBAN practice, and this discussion continues in the cafeteria... and this is the Part2 of their discussion
"Manager:" Let's talk about the Agile practices adoption problem for your team or in general? Shall we discuss that first before going into your NANBAN agile practice?
What you think the biggest challenge in adopting agile practices?
"Developer:" Yes! In my observation,, We as an organization or organization unit, don't have good agile-lean or agile practices related foundations!
"Manager:" Ok, I think I can agree to that topic, but is that the first problem, can the teams and their managers have their own introduction to agile practices foundations themselves?
Is that the first problem in the agile adoption challenges?
"Developer:" Yes, the main problem is that if we don't have good foundations on the agile topics, we will have adoption problems. Teams are always busy with their managers, that includes my team! You know this, we are unable to dedicate good amount of time for the practice
"Manager:" You are referring me! Ok, Can you please elaborate more on what you mean "good foundations" on agile topics?
"Developer:" Ok, You know Scrum is good choice for complex product development, XP is good for building high-performance engineering team, while Lean/kanban helps us to identify the flow outside and the inside of the team! so, we need to know what is agile & lean, why agile & lean, mindset and thinking practices, systems thinking, continuous improvement, and implementation of agile lean practices gradually as a transformation for the organization and team, we can't adopt all practices or immediately adopt Scrum without a good change agent like an AgileMaster or ScrumMaster to explain / train us first and then guide us along the adoption gradually considering the implementation challenges (especially the organization level impediments like organization structure, management culture, skills and focus related issues). You know that it takes a good amount of practices to change our teams from Test After Development to Test First Development mindset / paradigm, some of the members are ahead while others or not ready (we could utilize pair-programming to coach technically on the programming approaches like clean code). We need some good training on all these topics and not one topic alone.
"Manager:" So, I know you have listed lot of things for me in sequence and I heard gradual transformation. But, I am really confused, why can't the teams learn on their own, If say, the Manager like me gives them the choice to adopt agile practices on their own!
"Developer:" No, these practices have to be trained by an experienced and expert who can explain the what and why and also the Team is more focused when a "learning environment" or "team environment" is setup, this is another thing I wanted to talk about! Sometimes coaching and training are not the same, and few of the coaches I have seen, suggest only one practice and strongly recommend not to adopt certain other practices. This way, we miss the overall understanding of different practices and their power to create high-performance teams!
"Manager:" Wait, let us take one by one, first let us figure out whether your suggestion is making sense in our context, I am just making sure, that we don't duplicate or replicate the same effort within organization and then later on will talk about the "learning environment", let me note down the two important points from you in my phone first
- Foundations
- Learning Environment or Team Environment
"Developer:" Ok, I am sure you have understood my interest and gradual adoption of agile practices, as we have organization level impediments. At the same time, I would like to suggest to take some time officially, so that we could discuss this in details, I have some end-to-end map (value-stream mapping exercise done based on the current ways-of-working) and we need to adopt all of these agile practices within 6months, first 3months will go for learning the agile practices as-is by adoption, setup the learning/team environment and then fine-tuning the remaining 3months gradually adopting a expert level agile practices from end-to-end by various techniques in software development by understanding the concepts like DevOps, Lean, Systems Thinking so that we have good software development platform and expertise.
"Manager:" Sure, I think, I understand your perspective and the impact, let us get this sorted out tomorrow itself, let us give some time today to catch up with our existing issues. How about 8:30am tomorrow morning?
"Developer:" Yes, I am usually here in the Office by 7:30am, sure, we will catch up by 8:30am.
"Manager:" Ok, Me too, I am here by usually 6:45am so that I can go home around 6pm and have a lunch with my business stakeholders and other senior management, customers and discuss about the current issues and resolutions, taking their feedback.
"Developer:" Ok then, let us meet tomorrow 8:30am in the ConferenceRoom1 (I will book the room and send a calendar invite)
"Manager:" Thanks, we will meet tomorrow morning!
"Developer:" Welcome, Nice talking to You..
To be continued ...