Why you need to “Go and See”?

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One of the advantages of having a company that spans three continents is that you get a diverse array of opinions and approaches. Unfortunately, the disadvantage of having a company that large is that you get a diverse array of opinions and approaches. Sometimes it can feel like you have no idea what other people in the same organization are doing.

This is a problem that many of our clients face and we are no different.  After a few conversations with our European coaches about how they operate that left me more confused than when I started, I decided to do exactly what we tell our clients to do: Go and See.

When we tell our clients to do this, we are used to hearing these normal excuses: That is too hard;  It is too far away; I am too busy; I don’t speak the language. Well I can tell you, these are all real challenges, but they are far less insurmountable than you may think.

So how did we make it happen?

Well, it started with a simple, important (and often overlooked) step: we decided to. Specifically, I said, “I would like to work in Europe to see how you do things.” and Marion, our CEO, said “Sure.” Of course, we both understood that we were far from making it happen, but from there, the ball was rolling. We both made a commitment and we were going to see it through.

This was followed by a conversation with others in the company that would have to support this trip – the people who would cover for me in North America and those who would partner with me in Germany. Our sales team started looking for clients who were comfortable working with an English-speaking coach (we were lucky enough to find two!).

Finally, I made the necessary family arrangements. It is often easy to forget that everyone has his or her own schedule, and it takes time to coordinate. I was going for 4 months, and that meant I had to make plans with my family and my home. This wasn’t just my problem though. Both the North American and German offices helped line up the trip close to my children’s summer break from school so that my family could move with me.

All-in-all, the effort wasn’t herculean, but it was far from trivial. However, it was worth the effort.

So, what did I learn from all this effort?

1. Tools and Techniques

First, I learned how a lot of the tools and practices that originated from Germany were meant to be leveraged in coaching. Sure, I had read the instructions and talked to people at meetings, but seeing them in action was completely different.  Additionally, I was able to share how we had been adapting these tools to our circumstance, which opened up possibilities they had not considered themselves.

2. Culture and Temperament

I expected to learn about the difference in tools that were applied, but what I did not expect was to learn about the difference in problems. The circumstances, culture, and temperament of the clients we worked with meant that while they faced many of the same problems and struggles as our clients in the US and Canada, the right approach to solving the problem was completely different. This led to a better understanding of the problem thanks to seeing it from different angles. I also got to learn some things about pace and company cultures that challenged many norms I once thought were immutable. Ultimately, this changed my views on how we approach our coaching back in the US.

3. Company Connectivity

agile42 invests a lot in keeping employees connected. We visit other countries regularly, we collaborate remotely, and we all get together annually in one location. However, working together for an extended period of time adds a personal connection that you cannot get in short stints.You become part of the team, and not just a visitor.

4. Personal Growth

We grow when we are challenged, and nothing is quite as challenging as being thrown into a new context with a new team (in a language you don’t speak) and being expected to deliver excellence from day one. This trip tested my skills and forced me to adapt. The most notable challenge was when one of the clients decided that they didn’t want to speak English but wanted to converse in German instead. It was their prerogative – we were in Germany after all – and I was the outsider. But how could I help and contribute? It turns out that you can get a lot from tone, body language, and pulling just enough from the conversation to follow the thread. Matching this with the understanding of conversations between other coaches, I was surprisingly able to add value.

5. Employee Loyalty

When you make your employees an instrumental part in how you bring your company together like this, it goes a long way. Not only did I learn and grow from this experience, but my family did as well. What could have been a difficult long trip became a shared, meaningful experience. Many companies talk about investing in their employees, but they only consider tangible benefits such as continuing education and compensation packages. However, what makes people stick around are investments that develop the person as a whole.

So the next time you feel disconnected from another part of your organization and you’re not quite sure what’s happening at the office in Beijing or London, don’t set up another conference call. Don’t ask for better documentation. Instead, plan a trip. Go and See!

Sponsoring the Italian DevOps community

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In its sixth edition, Incontro DevOps Italia 2018 is the leading conference in Italy devoted to DevOps and all the infrastructure topics that create a modern IT environment, with the presence of national and international speakers.

Agile has a special part in this community and in fact, three-fourths of the companies surveyed in the 2017 State of Agile Report are either engaged in or planning a DevOps initiative.

We are very happy to be a sponsor of the event, which will take place in Bologna on March 9th, with a set of workshops offered on the previous day. At the conference, we will discuss our point of view about the relationship between Agile and the most modern IT topics, and present our offering for technical coaching including a brand new edition of the Certified Scrum Developer training later this year.

Tickets are still available, see you in Bologna.

Scrum Anti Patterns

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The term anti pattern as used in the software world is an expression of what are initially attractive, easy to implement solutions. But actually, far from solving the problem, they end up causing bigger ones.

Scrum as stated in the Scrum Guide “is a framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value. Scrum is

  • lightweight,
  • simple to understand,
  • difficult to master.”

In less than an hour, you can explain all the elements of Scrum to someone.

Since it is easy to understand beginners can take it easy and misuse the framework. They may use some of the practices out of the whole and repeat them in a mechanistic way without understanding the principles underlying them.  Without changing anything and challenging yourself can you expect an increase in your productivity?

Let us keep in mind that Scrum will not turn everything into a miracle overnight. When people are accustomed to new forms of work that time is needed, especially for cultural transformation. Be patient, do not hurry to show up too early, just start by applying it as it is coached by an Agile Coach, challenge yourself, change your way of working and understand the principles. 

I will now talk about the most common “anti patterns” to give you an idea.  This may help you to inspect yourself and your team.  I have observed some of these during agile team assessments to companies who were struggling to find out why they were not improving although they started to apply Scrum.

  • The team waits for a task to be assigned to it or asks for the Product Owner to assign the tasks, thus destroying its development of self-organizing and decision-making capabilities.
  • The “Master” part of the ScrumMaster’s name is perceived as technical or domain expertise, and as such, this person is identified as being the most experienced software developer on the team. This negatively affects the team’s development capacity.
  • The Product Owner and team meet only at sprint planning and review. This usually means that the Product Owner is not spending time with the team and the customer during a sprint, so the decision-making and learning process is slow.
  • At the sprint planning meeting, all tasks are assigned from person to person, and everyone is solely responsible for their own task, so they are not functioning as a team by, working individually, without collaborating with each other throughout the sprint.
  • If they work in the manner which is described in the upper item it is not surprising to hear that the Daily Scrum, which allows collaboration and the ability to make daily decisions as a team give up doing Daily Stand up.
  • The team and the Product Owner are focusing on completing tasks rather than delivering value.
  • They don’t do retrospectives and they don’t actually challenge themselves to change for better.
  • There is no sprint review, or when there is the team shows what was completed in the sprint rather than inspecting on the value that was delivered and reflecting on the sprint goal.
  • Meetings do not respect the ‘timeboxes’.
  • As the sprint continues, the sprint backlog changes a great deal.
  • The team carries the user stories from Sprint to sprint and works on the same story for several Sprints showing the indication that there is a problem with splitting them or they don’t understand the iterative and incremental way of working.
  • In the sprint planning the team only discusses the ‘what’ part and forgets to discuss how the pulled items are going to be developed.
  • The sprint planning meetings are long (i.e. they exceed the timebox) because of lack of backlog refinement meetings.
  • Team performance is compared on ‘velocity’.

If you see your team as having these anti-patterns, all is not lost. There are ways of recovering from them such as helping the structured coaching approach and ask help from an experienced Agile Coach.

As we indicated earlier, Scrum is difficult to master. If you are interested in learning how to address these anti-patterns, consider taking the Advanced Certified ScrumMaster course. Some of the topics that will be covered include resistance to change, lack of engagement, low motivation, and unavailability of key personnel.

Leadership Alignment with ORGANIC Agility Principles at OOP 2018

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We are happy to be once again sponsors of OOP 2018, the conference for software architecture that will take place in Munich, Germany, from February 5th to 9th. On the first day of the event, Monday, February 5th, we will facilitate a full-day workshop for managers and decision makers that have to deal with strategic decision making within Agile environments. 

In becoming more Agile, it is difficult for organizations to continue using traditional tools to steer their business. Traditional yearly or quarterly planning, as well as long-term strategies, are not sufficient to address rapidly changing market conditions. Many organizations realize the need to commit to decisions as late as possible and to explore multiple options before committing to one particular option, is of fundamental importance in order to reduce risk. 

The workshop will introduce and follow the ORGANIC Agility Principles. ORGANIC is both an acronym and a metaphor that suggest a natural and biological context. The idea behind is to shift the paradigm of organizational design thinking and change management towards something which isn’t engineered, nor manufactured, but that rather grows and evolve like a natural thing. Organizations are more similar to networks of organisms as they are to machines. Using an organic metaphor allows considering properties, such as resilience, which aren’t present in our engineered world, but are in nature.

We will also work together experimenting the Agile Strategy Map™, a tool agile42 coaches have developed to provide a structure for decision making and, thereby, helping companies to achieve more confidence and direction during an Agile Transition. The Agile Strategy Map enables the leadership team to align and coordinate their efforts both on a strategic and tactical level. This will be an interactive workshop where the participants will experience how to create an aligned strategy, visualize it and follow up the strategic and tactical decision making throughout an organization’s agile journey.

Read more on the OOP 2018 conference website.

Three Actionable Components of Success

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From entrepreneurs building their first start-ups to well-established organizations with years of experience, success has always been the driving factor – whether it is in the form of high profit or good reputation. However, underlying these achievements, we rarely take the time to consider our definition of “success”.

So my question to you is “How do you define success?”. Do you define success as a list of outcomes? Or have you ever considered an alternative definition of success?

Success can be viewed as a journey with three components.

1. Ask Questions: Building the vision for success

As stated by the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, change is the only constant in life. As a result of rapidly changing market conditions, it is becoming more difficult to stay up-to-date with the latest changes and make decisions based on the latest available information. Fixed and repeatable processes prevent an organization from responding to these changes.

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, highlights the fundamental questions we need to ask ourselves in order to succeed:

  • Which elements of our strategy are working to realize our vision?
  • What do customers really want? (This is neither what they say they want nor what we think they want.)
  • Are we on a path that will lead to growing a sustainable business?

2. Adopt the Right Mindset: Small rapid failure is good for success

If we want to answer these fundamental questions, we need to formulate hypotheses about which Possible Success Factors (PSFs) would contribute to long-term success and validate or invalidate these hypotheses through rapid experiments.

What happens when your experiment results in failure? 

Using the example above, let’s say you created an additional free service that yielded zero increase in the number of subscriptions. Yes, this is a failure, but the takeaway is that you invalidated this hypothesis. Opposed to spending more time and money on creating additional free services, you can allocate your resources to hypotheses that were validated (i.e. Critical Success Factors (CSFs) that have been verified in having an impact on the achievement of your goal.)

3. Act on Progress: Learning is not an excuse to explain why you failed

However, learning does not serve as an excuse for a failure of execution. Validated learning is not intended to cover up why you had failed to achieve the promised results. Instead, it demonstrates progress empirically – truths that enable you to refine and improve on the strategy that is driving the business’ success.

If success involves learning through failures, then consider all the learnings you have gained from last year. Share your learnings and upcoming challenges, so that we can address them with you. https://goo.gl/w5gaah. 

Source: Eric Ries, The Lean Startup

For our Canadian audience, we have recently created a new LinkedIn page. Follow us for tips, tools, and insights on making an Agile transition. https://www.linkedin.com/company/agile42-canada/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/agile42-canada/?utm_source=Medium&utm_medium=BlogPost&utm_campaign=Enterprise_Fitness_2018&utm_content=HowDoYouDefineSuccess

Tickets on sale for Agile Days Istanbul

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We are happy to be a sponsor of Agile Days Istanbul which will be held on 12 April 2018 at the Radisson Blu Hotel.

It will be the first of the series for this 1-day conference featuring 17 sessions within 3 parallel tracks with 20 spectacular speakers. Agile Days Istanbul is organized by a group of volunteers working under the name of Open Agile Turkey, a nonprofit organization which is willing to spread agile knowledge and experience in Turkey and around.

The main theme of Agile Days Istanbul is Agile Leadership, and sub-themes will be “Agile for Non-IT teams” and “IT Agility”.

While Jurgen Appelo and Tom Gilb will be the keynote speakers, agile42 coach Joanne Perold will present a talk on Agile, Entropy, and Human Systems.


The tickets are on sale now, if you don’t want to miss this spectacular event visit Agile Days İstanbul website and book your trip to İstanbul on 12 April 2018 for this conference in your calendar.

This conference is also sponsored and supported by Scrum Alliance and you can earn SEU units when you attend this event!

State of Scrum report for 2017-2018

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The Scrum Alliance has just released the State of Scrum 2017-2018 report focused on Scaling and Agile Transformation. The report is based on the survey of more than 2,000 Agile professionals to uncover trends in Scrum adoption, use and scaling.

The membership survey shows that Agile transformation is firmly on the horizon for organizations around the world. As digital transformation has steadily increased demand for faster turnarounds, user-friendly platforms and flexible goals, modern business demands ever more Agile workflows.

The full report can be downloaded from the Scrum Alliance website.

Sponsoring Let’s Test South Africa

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We are happy to be sponsors of Let’s Test South Africa 2017, starting Today in Johannesburg. Let’s Test are a series of conferences all over the world all about context-driven testing. We meet, talk, listen and learn from each other in order to build a stronger community of testers and to improve our testing skills.

Let’s Test South Africa takes place at the beautiful Valley Lodge & Spa in Magaliesburg and runs for 2.5 days between 26 – 28 November 2017. It will have an intentional focus on the craft and community of Context-Driven Testing. We will showcase not only South African talent, but also host new and familiar faces and minds from the global community.

Together with Barry Tandy I will present Visualising your way to better problem solving: We will surely post slides and feedback after the event!

Niels Verdonk, new Certified Scrum Trainer in the Netherlands

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We are happy to announce that Niels Verdonk has been accredited as a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) from the Scrum Alliance during the latest round of expansion. agile42 currently employs 8 CSTs in Europe, North America, and South Africa, in addition to 7 Certified Enterprise Coaches (CEC). This allows us to tailor training and coaching solutions to the specific needs of our clients worldwide.

Niels started working as a Software Engineer in 1995, and after working for leading brand names as Nintendo, Nike and Novell as Software Architect before he started managing a team of developers at a startup. Inspired by XP since 1999, Niels started working with the small team using these practices and principles until the team grew too big and needed more structure. In 2006 they started using Scrum and scaled up to 9 teams, mostly scrum feature teams, some distributed, some component teams, some using kanban. Since 2011 Niels started working as an agile trainer and coach. In 2013 he founded the Dutch subsidiary of agile42 and has been working for large and small customers in the Netherlands, both for software as well as non-IT companies.

Joanne Perold keynote at Regional Scrum Gathering 2017

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“Agile, Entropy and Human Systems” is the title of the keynote that will be presented by Joanne Perold for the Regional Scrum Gathering South Africa 2017 organised by SUGSA, taking place on November 8-9 in Cape Town.

Joanne has been thinking a great deal about human systems, what makes them tick, what helps them be better and what gets in their way. In this talk, she will dig into human systems, entropy and agile. She will explore the things that she believes can help human systems to be better and share the things that she has seen yield results during her experience coaching.

We will soon report on this exciting event in Cape Town!