Holiday greetings from agile42!

Thanks to this photo submitted to us by our friend Joachim Elgas (the “stress balls” are a fundamental tool in each of our training classes!) Looking forward for a great and Agile 2015.

Swedbank Group IT Baltic Banking Division improves collaboration, motivation and efficiency with agile42

With the help of agile42, Swedbank Group IT Baltic Banking Division learned how to build better products faster while at the same time improving the collaboration and increasing the motivation among employees.

Swedbank is arguably the strongest bank in the Baltics, the market leader overall as well as in all segments where they are active. Of all large companies in Estonia, Swedbank has received the award for the strongest brand — for six years running and with increasing scores.

But even Swedbank is feeling some pressure. The whole banking industry is facing large changes driven by the digitalization of society. While banks were among the first to use mainframes for their information handling needs, decades of mergers, acquisitions and system integrations typically add up to cripplingly complicated legacy systems. The constantly changing laws and regulations further increase the pressure on IT departments.

SwedbankSwedbank is solving this problem by strongly expanding the Group IT Baltic Banking department and actively exploring different ways of improving efficiency, lead time and throughput. Several years ago one of the teams started using agile practices with good results, and the department wanted to spread these practices across the board. In spring 2014 they turned to agile42 for training and support.

Experienced agile42 trainers and coaches first trained all team members, managers and Product Owners in the theory and practice of Scrum, then worked with the POs to draw up good backlogs and helped the new Scrum teams and their ScrumMasters through the first sprints. After demonstrating and role-modeling the new methods, agile42 coaches helped the teams and their ScrumMasters take ownership of the process. The teams are now self-sustaining in the use and improvement of Scrum.

“The improvement has been tremendous,” says Piret Brett, Head of Division. A fresh survey inside Group IT Baltic Banking shows that 94% of the people involved in the transition are seeing positive effects in development efficiency. “Co-operation with business has improved and the feedback loop is faster.”

As little as a year ago, business and IT worked from their own assumptions, towards their own goals. Small misunderstandings caused large delays. “The weekly meetings used to be a blame game,” recalls Oleg Marofejev, Head of Digital Channels. “Now the meetings are all about what we have achieved together in the last week.”

Group IT Baltic Banking Div. Internal Survey (late 2014)

“In Scrum, the responsibilities and work artifacts are set up so that it makes sense for all stakeholders to contribute their expertise to the upcoming plans,” explains Martin von Weissenberg, one of the agile42 coaches working with Swedbank. “Besides, people are hard-wired to enjoy being part of a team, pulling in the same direction and succeeding together.”

So is there a corresponding change in work motivation? Swedbank measures morale using the Employee Net Promoter System (eNPS), by asking how likely employees are to recommend Swedbank as an employer. Group IT has traditionally measured near the Baltic average, but after the coaching, motivation increased by an amazing 33 points.

The process improvement and organizational development goals for 2014 are looking good. But the work doesn’t stop there — a continuously improving organization is always looking for issues and problems to address. “Now we have new challenges ahead,” says Piret with a smile.

Also agile42 is looking to improve, although the internal survey shows that over 96% of the respondents are satisfied with the support they received from agile42. “This is of course not satisfactory,” Martin ponders. “Clearly, we still have some way to go.”

Webinar on Agile Testing

Scrum is predicated on having working software at the end of the Sprint. Without top-tier engineering and test practices teams will struggle.

Joe Justice and I will be hosting a webinar on Agile Testing, which will be broadcasted live starting Wednesday, December 17th at 11:00am Eastern. Please refer to registration page at Scrum Inc. for all information and viewing options.

We will show how the fastest teams use Test-Driven Development to create quality product very rapidly.  The 1-hour session will cover:

  • The mindset of managing a successful agile testing practice.
  • Test Driven Development, Test First Development, DevTest, DevTestOps.
  • Unit Testing, Integration Testing, Regression Testing, User Acceptance Testing.
  • Tools to make this happen quickly.
  • Gated Check-in and Rapid Roll Back in hardware and Software.

agile42 merges with Scrum Sense

Our joint press release

Scrum Sense, the foremost agile consultancy in South Africa, will merge with agile42, a leading international agile consulting organisation. agile42 is headquartered in Berlin and already operates throughout Europe and North America.

Scrum SenseThe change is effective immediately. During 2015 the agile42 brand will be introduced to South Africa and over time the well-known Scrum Sense brand will be wound down.

Marion Eickmann, co-founder and CEO at agile42, commented: “We are excited to welcome well-known agile pioneer Peter Hundermark and his team to join our community. We have been most careful to ensure a good cultural fit between our two organisations. Now is the right time to join forces and establish agile42 as a truly global brand.”

Andrea Tomasini, co-founder and strategic coach at agile42, added: “Peter and I have known each other since 2008 and have collaborated before in our community work for the Scrum Alliance. With this addition we will have 8 Certified Scrum Trainers, 7 Certified Scrum Coaches and 2 Kanban Coaching Professionals. This is the largest collection of top-level certified professionals in a single organisation. Moreover, we have developed a powerful set of consulting products including the Team Coaching Framework™ and the Enterprise Transition Framework™ that help our clients achieve better outcomes faster than before.”

Peter Hundermark said: This is the most exciting time for us since founding Scrum Sense in 2007. In seeking a partner I was adamant to find an organisation that shared our philosophy of helping our clients to help themselves. Being part of the awesome agile42 family will bring key benefits to our local clients:”

  • The experience of agile42 with successful huge-scale agile transformations such as Ericsson and Siemens means we are equipped to better help large corporations.
  • Agile at scale requires many additional skills and consulting products. The Enterprise Transition Framework™ from agile42 provides a way for organisations to map their paths without sacrificing the emergent nature that is foundational to agility.
  • Our coaches will invest regular time cross-learning with some the best agile coaches on the planet. This is a forge for growing our skills in the fast-paced market.
  • The Team Coaching Framework™ from agile42 is another way we will foster the growth of internal coaches at our clients, enabling them to become self-sufficient faster. This is arguably the single most important success factor in sustaining an agile transition.

We are very excited to be part of this global family of talented and passionate coaches and look forward to collaborating with them and growing the agile42 brand in South Africa.

Learning by doing: CSPO class video

For my recent Certified Scrum Product Owner class, I asked participants to make a video that they can take back to their colleagues at their work places. This post captures the activities of one such team and their progression to making an awesome final video. Here is the final video after their fourth sprint. (each sprint was 20 mins duration)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKva5ttCqhA

How does this compare to their product vision statement?

Folks who made this video did not have any video editing experience and they had to learn technology (windows movie maker) and develop content during their sprint working time (20 mins each). To appreciate this teams creativity and ability at problem solving, compare the final Sprint 4 video with the one they had at the end of Sprint 1.

https://youtu.be/_JZMU4CDFE0

How did they do it?

Team work, team work and team work.

This group of people gelled in to a functioning team, that continued to retrospect throughout and implement small improvements in their inner-team processes. They acted on product feedback and most importantly cared about the quality of their work product. To put this in one word: Scrum.

During my Certified Scrum Product Owner class, I make sure that participants have space to practice concepts, tools and techniques that they are learning.

  1. Create a product vision statement and continually align actual development of the product to the vision.
  2. Participants learn and create a User Story Map, like the one for this video. (Cards in yellow were their must-have’s or minimum viable product – MVP).
  3. Learn, create and deliver a product to their definition of done.
  4. Learned about importance of Sprint goals. They created sprint goals for each sprint and realized how to value outcomes (kick-ass product) over valuing outputs (story points).
  5. Use Kano analysis to identify feature mix. That cool background music in final video was an “exciter” identified via Kano analysis.
  6. Product owners learn to temper “gimme more features” reflexes by playing team member roles and learn techniques that help them get to essence of a feature with minimal team effort.

In summary, learn about what makes a good product and practice by building a product. Learning by doing.

Many thanks to Alysia, Alistair, John and Nick from Houston for making such a great video.

ETF featured in Croatian magazine

agile42 founder and strategic coach Andrea Tomasini has been interviewed in the latest issue of Mreža, the leading Croatian monthly magazine for IT professionals.

Snippet from Mreža magazine

The article focused on the Enterprise Transition Framework™ (ETF), agile42 solution to address organizational learning and improvement through an empirical, evolutionary approach that allows you to align business goals with transition goals.

Andrea Tomasini in Croatia in 2014, photo Mreža

We are currently expanding our activities in Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia through the partnership with CROZ recently announced. Contact us to get to know more!


Trabi-Safari in Berlin!

Every year, all coaches and the complete staff of agile42 meets for a two-day International Coach Camp: this is pinnacle of our company alignment, with more frequent meetings for regional or national coach camps in the rest of year. As you can expect, bringing together all coaches leads to all sort of fun, good work and strange activities!

This year the International Coach Camp has been organised in our European HQ of Berlin to coincide with the Global Scrum Gathering that took place in the German capital a few days earlier, and had seen agile42 as a sponsor and Marion Eickmann and Dave Sharrock co-chairs of the conference program. Even if tired from the Gathering our team managed to organise, in no particular order, two full days of coaching discussions, a trip to the currywurst house, the official company party paired with the birthday of a coach (happy birthday Greg!), some great dinners and conversations, a ton of photos, new partnerships.

But above all we engaged in a full-team Trabant Safari! Organized by a company named Trabi World that stocks and operates a number of the DDR-era cars, we drove around Berlin for major sights, bordering East and West along the path of the former wall, and especially being a great amusement for the tourists. American coaches didn’t seem to have major problems in driving without an automatic gearbox (the old Trabi lacks that, in fact it lacks almost everything). Our pace in the end was so slow that at times we felt we could have been overtaken by one of the runners training for the Berlin Marathon – not impossible, since the following day Dennis Kipruto Kimetto crushed the world record at an average speed of 20.6 Km/h.

It was great fun!


Centralized Control : Trapped in Wagile (Part 4 of 4)

This is the last part in the series “Trapped in Wagile”. In the kick-off article I outlined three fundamental characteristics of waterfall organizations. In subsequent articles I explained Phase-Gates (part 2) and Large-batch handoffs (part 3). In this article I am diving deeper in to centralized control characteristics. Tendencies to centralize control of decisions stem from mis-understanding of complexity inherent in real world projects.

An expert plumber can understand how the pipes and systems in a building fit together and behave. A plumber can break a complicated plumbing system into parts and know how they will behave together. 

Behavior of a complex system is inherently NOT understandable. For someone or a group to carry a mental model of how everything and everybody in organization system fits together is impossible. So give up on attempts to understanding. Your organization is a dynamic organism and you will never be able to keep up with the complexity it exhibits. Not even if you could keep track of every atom in the universe.

Attempts at understanding lead organizations to demonstrate centralized control characteristics. 

Expected System Behavior:

Fractal Nature:

At portfolio or organization level:

– Deep dive product backlog reviews by senior management, where senior management drills down at user story level and often gets stuck in low level details.

– Strong management push for ALM tools to be used a certain way across the board.

At project implementation level:

A project manager or Wagile Master conducts laborious sprint planning meetings. Typically in front of a projector, doing roll call around the table, filling in estimates for each team-member. Often questioning estimates and making sure, every one has been assigned enough work to stay busy during the sprint. Expressing concern when (s)he perceives that a team member has not signed-up for all their available hours in the sprint.

At task level:

Contrary to definition of scrum, a development lead and testing lead is appointed for a scrum team. Often because an organization cannot fund enough lead-level people, these leads are shared between teams. Leads are held responsible for utilization and quality of work of junior members in the team.

Default Setting: Command and Control

The purpose of practical management is of controlling organization system to deliver desirable outcomes (goals) and not that of understanding the organization system. Confusing the two and assuming a causation that understanding leads to (better) control is a myth. Which drives centralization of “understanding” a.k.a reports up the chain.

Its a long con. People elevated to power roles (managers, leads etc) believe that there are “others” who either do not “get-it” or have not “paid-their-dues”. By believing that a complex system is understandable and only by a meritorious few, we are expressing that people who do the ‘work’ are fittings in a plumbing system. Parts that need to be told not only WHAT to do but also HOW to do their work. This tunes organization systems default setting at “command and control”.

Especially at the power centers of the organization, this deep rooted cultural belief persists –

“While there are many ways to do a job, the manager or team-lead is the best suited to organize people and schedule tasks for most efficient and most effective results.”

Try harder:

If the worker does not deliver on results planned by the manager, then the worker should try harder next time.

When you buy into the myth that complex endeavors are understandable by specialist roles – it is easy to see why, Managers/Leads are often held responsible for deciding what to work on and how to work on it. We’d be successful – if only workers stopped using their heads and did what I told them to do. Clearly when the worker fails at delivering results, they have a need to grow and apply themselves. “grow-up, try harder” – Something a caring mother would say! – See management is so benevolent. #sarcasm

Fungible Resources:

Management via abstraction is prevalent in centralized control environments. Managers spend more time buried into spreadsheets and reports than doing the work that they are reporting on. 

People are often reduced down to resources. With distilled attributes:

 Bob – Java dev, gets along with people, likes agile, technically moderate skills.

Just a few attributes, enough that the person tinkering within spreadsheet can handle. And if Bob is not available, then replace him with Jenna – she has similar characteristics. It will all work out. No need to talk to Bob and Jenna, they are resources. #soul-sucking

If this is not a case of institutionalized stereotyping then I do not know what is! – BTW, in public life people are people, but as soon as they walk in through the glass door, they turn into “resources” reduced to fit in the box their manager imagines.

Unintended Consequences:

Low morale & the Illusion of Knowing:

Uncertainty is not comfortable. It makes people and organizations nervous. Attempts at concentrating understanding helps promote an illusion of knowing.

When it is your “job” to know, “I don’t know” is not an acceptable answer. Admitting so could be career suicide.  When grappled with a complex problem, such as – What will be in this product release? or When can I get feature X ?, they substitute the complex question with a solve-able one. What is the plan? – And a plan they create. 

Through lists of assumptions, schedules, assignments, risk logs etc. Or in case of Wagile prepare backlogs with 100’s of items and insist on team meeting velocity commitments.

A plan is comforting, sometimes even makes sense. It describes a path from here to there. Though in reality there are disturbances. When faced with these changes in reality, workers paralyze and wait until new set of instructions get relayed. 

Remember the last time, rumor-mill served up a “tip” about likely project cancellation. or when your dev lead was on sick-leave and everyone avoided working on his story card.

Relay of change in conditions and subsequent adjustments by the central authority is by-design bound to delays. This throws future predictions and commitments out of whack from the plan. One way to maintain illusion of knowing by people who were expected to know is to start whipping reality into conformance. Command and control is inevitable in cultures that cannot maintain comfort in face of uncertainty. Other ways are to believe-in-magic (read: lying to self), rely on heroics and stress over minute decisions made by team members. 

Lack of empowerment of workers and dis-comforting lack of control by managers wears everyone down. Some just do their jobs, some complain, some blend in with furniture, hero’s get promoted and the ones with amber in their belly leave.

Low transparency: 

Success or failure is often not recognizable until the last moment. Coupled with wait states of sequential processes and local-optimization of large-batches, dependencies get created faster than they get resolved. As central decision point for her silo/team, much depends on the manager/lead to keep track of and get resolution for dependencies that her teams needs resolved. Attempts at centralized understanding lead management to push for implementation of ALM tool. Triggering the cycle of pushback and then feigned compliance by teams so as to get management off their backs. The organization still lacks any meaningful transparency, but now they can blame the tool. 

Heroics:

Project pressures and time line constraints never seem to let up. Remember the illusion of knowing that comes from attempts at central understanding. There is always that deliverable that needed to be done, yesterday! – channeling organizational energies to play catch-up. Never able to work on improvements that would help the group work smarter. In centralized control environments, last minute problem solving gets rewarded over learning and also over improvement activities that would have prevented need for heroics. It is likely that many past hero’s – who saved the day! are now in senior management roles who are likely to groom and favor people who tend to be like themselves.

Self-fulfilling prophecy: 

Managers or leads that control distribution of tasks, often give challenging tasks to trusted hero’s. Other people do not get a chance to sharpen their skills and demonstrate competence. Which leads to less and less of challenging work being directed to them. It is very important in centralized control environments for the workers to be perceived as skillful in their managers opinion, otherwise they will rarely get opportunities to improve and/or demonstrate competence. It is dangerous when managers pride in boxing their people into neat little categories. They often create the sub-optimal reality that they are trying to avoid.

Summary:

Let it go. You don’t need to be in the “know”. Project or initiative success does not depend on your knowing, in fact it more harmful than you are aware of. Trust your team. Listen, to tune into the system from their perspective and not to formulate your answer. Serve by developing a environment of trust, support and information. You’d be surprised by how much of your work stress can be relived when you admit – “I don’t know”.

While there are many challenges to overcome, I hope this series of articles provided a fresh perspective. I am eager to learn about my blind spots and whether you found this article useful. I invite you to comment below and engage in further discussion.

CROZ is agile42 partner for Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia

Yesterday during a nice meeting in their headquarters in Zagreb we confirmed the exclusive partnership for Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia with CROZ, the first under our new partner program. CROZ will provide services such as education, consulting and coaching and they have already started to negotiate with several potential clients in Croatia and the region.

We also presented agile42 solutions with a focus on the Enterprise Transition Framework™ (ETF) that leads and supports an organization through the process of becoming more Agile.

You can read more on CROZ site and in the meantime welcome aboard to our new friends!

Krešimir Musa of CROZ

In the photo Krešimir Musa, head of consulting and implementation services of CROZ.

Meet us at Manage Agile 2014

We are very happy to be part of Manage Agile 2014, event devoted to Agile project management and requirements management in practice, and sponsored again this year by agile42.

Andrea Tomasini will lead the World Cafe on Agile Project Management on the first day of the conference. The free and lively discussion will be in the style of Scrumtisch Berlin, the Berlin Scrum User Group organised by agile42 and meeting regularly in the German capital.

Ralf Kruse will faciltate instead The Marshmallow Challenge: a remarkably fun and instructive design exercise that encourages teams to experience simple but profound lessons in collaboration, innovation and creativity. You can enjoy a great experience in just one hour and see where it might help you with your management or teams.