Our Agile Guild Journey

I first learned about Guilds when I formed Monotype’s Engineering PMO in 2014. It was the most significant step to date towards an Agile Enterprise and I had done a great deal of research around different Agile models and had given a lot of thought to what elements we had wanted to use in our framework as a part of getting that started.??

My introduction to Guilds came from the “Spotify Model” which Henrik Kniberg had made famous in Agile circles with his super entertaining videos on YouTube. (Note: If you haven’t watched Henrik’s videos and are an Agile fan, you really need to, they are so much fun and very informative – here are links to Part 1 and Part 2 enjoy!)?

So, you might ask: What is a Guild??

Anthony Praveen Thilak describes it this way in his LinkedIn post:?

A Guild is a community of people with shared interests, such as web technology, test automation, or Agile coaching. Guilds promote knowledge sharing, tool sharing, and best practices across the organisation.??

I like to think of it as a “professional interest group”.?

I thought we should give it a try. When we first started having our Guild meetings, I started with the Agile group since I thought that I could best lead by example. Our Guilds events started based primarily on skills, so we had Agile, Architecture, Quality and things like that - Engineering focused topics. After a year or so, as my role expanded and as I started to get groups outside of Engineering more excited about Agile ideas, I started inviting the entire company to these meetings. I think sometimes people would join and wonder what they were doing there but generally people enjoyed it and the meetings got larger as more people started attending.?

As we gained experience with hosting the events, we split the Agile Guild into three types of events:??

1. Bootcamps. Targeted to folks who had just joined the company, the idea was to introduce folks to how we do Agile things at our company (and how to undo all the bad learnings they brought with them from previous jobs).?
2. Clinics. These were topic-based and depended on what our PMO felt was the most pressing problem at the time. Sometimes it was about “Estimation” or “How to Maintain a Healthy Backlog” or maybe even “Transparency” or “Scrum Values”. Something we felt would benefit as many people as possible.??
3. Agile Talks. This one was the most ambitious. The intent for this type was to involve the Agile community. To invite folks from outside the company to come to speak and to have our folks present as well to people from outside the company. It gave our newer people a chance to present topics to an external audience as well as learn from some more experienced outside people and get some fresh perspectives. It also gave us a chance to network and have some new faces visit our offices. Usually these were two hours long and we served drinks and snacks.??

Over the next few years as we expanded to an Agile Enterprise PMO, I believed that Guilds would be a great way to connect and engage people across the entire organization to other areas of the business. I put together a survey and asked people what they wanted to learn more about. I found people who were knowledgeable on the suggested topics, I sent out the invitations, I promoted the talks, I recorded everything, I posted the recordings. I spent a good amount of effort lifting to get this idea up and running.??

Topics like “Security”, “Design”, “Data”, “Blockchain & NFTs”, “Innovation” and “Finance” in addition to Agile were all ones that happened in that year. My personal favorite was “Women in Leadership” which was very highly attended and informative, presented by some of the Women in Executive and other Leadership roles. We did 13 Guild meetings in our first year trying them as an Enterprise activity. I was trying to do one per month and was able to accomplish the target. However, I also did a lot of work to make that happen.??

In the second year I decided I’d step back a little and see if I could let some other people step up and guess what – they did! It took off in a very big way! I would make suggestions to people like “Hey that seems like it would be a really interesting Guild topic” or “Have you ever considered trying to create a Guild around that?” And people jumped right in. Some months we had one every week! Most of my effort that year was spent making sure they didn’t schedule on top of one another and then collecting and posting the recordings. We did 22 Guild meetings that year. I couldn’t have been prouder. Topics like “Artificial Intelligence”, “Patents”, “DE&I”, “Legal”, “Coaching & Feedback”, “SEO”, “Remote Working” and of course Agile were some of the most popular.??

This year as I author this post, I have seen us further evolving this concept. Our Agile Guild has now started sending short form videos like “Reels”, Newsletters and recording Podcasts in addition to the presentation events. Our Artificial Intelligence Guild just made a five-minute update video animation and sent it to the entire organization as a quick update of what the Guild has been up to.??

As I have seen this idea flourish from a concept we wanted to try 10 years ago to embed into our global culture to today, I feel so proud and excited about what we have done as an organization. The thirst of the population for more knowledge about other areas of the company that they work only makes us all understand the business we are in and the people within it so we can all make better decisions, have more empathy and ultimately be more engaged. Maybe I should start a Guild about Guilds??