Agile Coaching and Transformation Digest - W10

An Agile Story - Article W10

Agile has been part of my life for the past 4 years. I have worked with large enterprises on their transformation through training and coaching across different departments and across industries. The one obvious standout protocol that increased my interest and belief in the mind-set and various methods was the fact that teams realized value in their day to day activity and decisions were made quicker and more tests were conducted for a single product. By testimony of the people, we tested the product in the past 4 weeks more than we have tested it in the past 3 years.

 Agile development provides many advantages over the waterfall alternative. We never eliminate any way of working we just enhance the way we are working, doing things in a different way.

The base approach to which I use with clients is to first engage Business and technology teams co-located in a joint workshop with clarity on customer-vision using specific agile tools and techniques. secondly, always building the product/ service on the test scenarios created, reversing the way of commencing the plan. This approach gives a great insight of what you are able and unable to offer and probably enhancement to the product or service early on and on the go.

Upon completion of those two initial steps, the iterative approach fulling the Agile equation of Agile = Iterative + Incremental + adaptive. A duration of 2 to 4 weeks, with a test sprint with specific ground rules to test the approach and method to follow customized to the culture of the organization and hybrid to their internal processes. "you don't want to change everything at once, change is about consistency"

Surly, many challenges disturb the agile PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) iterative approach. The main challenge is having your people co-located, so the question is always will agile work for them?. It can, but it requires investment in technology and travel as necessary. There are many tools out there that brings continents closer and co-locate the work being done through centralized communication tools, but it's not always that simple.

I had one of the teams I worked with come to me with feedback, that they have tried agile and it didn’t work. They had their daily meetings on the phone as they were not physically located in the same place. They used e-mails and spreadsheets to communicate and follow up on tasks. All sounded pretty familiar, and people's feedback was: we increased the number of calls, documents, and emails going back and forth; How exactly does Agile present more value?

Here is where everyone falls into the agile adoption trap. Agile is certainly about further collaboration and engagement, but not overwhelming activities that kill the spirit of the team without proper set-up to promote the scene. In the late 90s and early 2000s when Agile went beyond software development the idea of Video calls was not that popular and therefore was not the go to option at all times and costs were incurred for extensive travelling and for organizations that was costly (will tackle the solution at the time in another article), but as technology matured, now things are different and that is why Agile' uprising nowadays across industries because Agile utilizes the use of technology in line with the digital market giving not just employees full control over their services and products delivered but customers as well.

Technology that helped people visually communicate being miles away, tools that give the Pull privilege and live interaction over the use of multiple tools to get the job done and dependent on the Project Manager or Project Lead to push the information to the team or update the "Progress Report". A more simplified environment to build more complex solutions was born as I like to refer to it.

In one of the major companies I have worked with, they had a fixed budget that they asked me, this is yours, use it to transform our organization. This started in one location before they decided to transform the rest of their locations. For this head office, I used less than a quarter of the budget to purchase two large screens for two team with cameras and connectivity. These monitors were always on.

 People who want to meet can walk to the respective monitors and talk, just as if they were in the same room. The Value of the Monitors always showing the other location provided much more interaction than if the teams needed to continuously call one another. This simple act brought teams together and saved lots of time looking for meeting rooms and living with doubts on how the corresponding team acts and behaves in the absence of the other.

I was challenged by top management that this will cause people at the same location not meet face to face and rely on the screens and this makes more sense at remote locations. A response definitely of value and may have been the case, and I asked them let's try and learn and see how it goes going live with just these two teams and we will have a retrospective to reflect on the experience as we observe the daily activity; Let me tell you, the results were SHOCKING:

Every morning the team will say good morning to the people on screen on the separate floor, the managers of both teams started observing the other and started replicating in a way that they started getting together to discuss actions and teams dynamics just glimpsing one another on a daily basis. Team members got to know each other more talking to the screen here and there and asking straight away through the screen (who is up for lunch, we're ordering) they get the food and meet at the cafeteria and have lunch together. The time saved moving between floors and having private chat conversations on PCs decreased by around 50 to 70% which made more time for working on tasks and enhanced collaboration and engagement among those teams. Two teams with separate roles and responsibilities, KPIs and management structures mirroring as one team.

When progressing through the idea, we created a strategy to smooth in the idea to roll out across the whole location but with rotational and adaptive rules to make it a smarter solution becoming a value on it's own.

With the success of the idea we were able to launch it in 3 more locations globally building stronger relationships among teams globally and increasing productivity by 40% in the first 15 months. It was the approach not the idea that made it a success, and most importantly the buy in of people and leadership to embark on the journey being part of it's evolution.

The key benefits using a simple Agile approach with core values and coaching:

1. Collaboration is the heart of achieving greatness
2. Transparency is Agile and Agile is Transparency, and through Transparency comes physiological safety
3. Change is recognized as inevitable and is embraced across all levels
4. Value is presented to customers customized and continuously
5. Incorrect approaches are identified early on and quickly taken care
6. Decisions are made faster and more efficiently
7. Business development becomes part of the daily work
8. The Run and change organizations become a joint force ringing build and operations together eliminating silos from Sales to operations.

Kr~

This article is published as part of The Agile Transformer and Business development LogIQ articles.