Category: Teams

We are doing all the Agile CEREMONIES; However, our output has not changed, what is going wrong?

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Steve Walton – taking our Adaptovate team through some drills.

3 IMMEDIATE WAYS TO GET THE TEAM BACK ON TRACK

Each ceremony should serve a specific purpose and when done correctly, helps the team to be more collaborative and effective.

First up! – This short article is designed to: – Help you understand what may be going wrong with your Agile Ceremonies.

What this article is not about.  –  Understanding what Agile Ceremonies are.

By that we mean, if you are reading this you – we are kind of assuming you are giving Agile or new ways of working a genuine go.  You have initiated all the ceremonies you believe are required as part of the Agile process.   You’re having Sprint Planning meetings.  And You’re having Daily Scrums, (or ‘stand-up’s’).  You’re conducting Sprint Reviews.  You’re holding Sprint Retros.

So, if you are confused by any of that – you need to understand them first. Or more importantly, you need to do some genuine research into what an Agile way of working is.

(A quick handy tool– The team at The Digital Project Manager – produced a great comparison chart – to guide you through those ceremonies quickly.  You can download that here. )

Our company Adaptovate is also happy to answer any questions, and help you get started.  That’s what we do.    However, this is not a sales pitch.  In this article, we want to help you understand what you may be doing wrong in your ceremonies if they aren’t working.

OK -So on to our 3 simple tricks to get back on track.

Be Agile and Not Just Do Agile Click To Tweet

  1. BE AGILE AND NOT JUST DO AGILE

“Agile ceremonies exist to create discipline around certain practices, such as time boxing, continuous improvement and customer feedback.” says Mark Barber our project lead in Melbourne.  “However,”, he continues, “conducting ceremonies without considering why we do them leads to what we call cargo culting – following a process or instructions without understanding them.”

Mark says, “Be clear on why you have ceremonies in place and continuously inspect and adapt them to make them more effective.”

“It is also important to know that practices alone do not make you agile. You need to understand and embrace the mindset, values and principles so that you can BE agile and not just DO agile.”

 

  1. OUTCOMES VS OUTPUTS

Outcomes instead of outputs should be ultimately what we are measuring.  Tiong Yeow Tan, one of our team in Singapore, says “Outputs are a means to achieving the outcomes. For example,  delivering a user-friendly online application submission functionality is a means to reduce application drop-out rate. Hence what’s critical is that we achieved the planned outcomes.”

“So, if our outcomes have not improved with all the Agile ceremonies, we need to reassess the way that we are doing the ceremonies.

Steve Walton agrees.  “Agile ceremonies are not people’s work, they are a vehicle to align and synchronise.” He says, “It is about ensuring they are doing the right work effectively.”

“This means that it is possible to create less output, however had more of the right output – the output which is relevant and valuable” Steve says.

  1. THE RIGHT PEOPLE IN THE ROOM

Often, one of the common reasons for Agile ceremonies being not helpful is that the right people are not attending the relevant ceremonies (e.g. how can we expect to confirm the sprint backlog without inputs from the Product Owner?).   So, we would suggest you ensure the right people are in the room.

“Agile ceremonies are not people’s work; they are a vehicle to align and synchronise.” Steve Walton says.  “It is about ensuring they are doing the right work effectively.”

He continues “Participation in Agile ceremonies however does not guarantee improvements, however. The ceremonies provide an opportunity for people to engage though targeted interpersonal exchanges.”

To be useful, these ceremonies need to learn how to extract value from them – this happens with practice. They also need to have the right people. Ceremonies where people turn up and ‘go through the motions’ may be uninformative and inconclusive. This may result in people not being clear on what they are doing and producing little useful output” he concludes.

How can leaders support the agile journey?

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7 WAYS LEADERS CAN SUPPORT THE AGILE JOURNEY
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According to Jerome Parisse-Brassens in a recent article from InsideHr,  “The number one challenge facing a leader in an agile culture is letting go of fears related to losing control and not being needed”.

So, before we get to the list,  let’s set the scene.

This letting go of control and fully embracing the mindset of trust,  is where leaders can go from hindrance to hero very quickly in an Agile organisation.

At Adaptovate, one of our co-founders – Doug Ross believes leaders can support the agile journey “By communicating clear goals for the organisation, and publicly rewarding teams and people that deliver testable outcomes that illustrate progress towards that goal.”

WE SEE IT, DAY IN DAY OUT.  What works, and what doesn’t.

Steve Walton – a consultant in our New York office,  says that “When leaders adopt a mindset which focuses on concepts like responding to change rather than enduring it and empowering over directing, they create a culture where people are more able to confidently talk about what is important rather than what has always been done. Their actions create the context in which people operate.”

We asked some of the Adaptovate’s consultants on their thoughts about how leaders can support the agile journey.   Our global consultants, see every day the world over,  how teams in organisations, big and small, cope on their own agile journey’s.

So we’ve developed a list for leaders, to assist their teams on their organisation’s agile journey.

7 WAYS LEADERS CAN SUPPORT THE AGILE JOURNEY

  1. EMPOWERING THE TEAM

Laura Scott , a senior consultant in our Sydney office , unequivocally believes, it’s this simple

“By empowering their team!!! If the leaders buy into the journey and empower their team to make decisions agile will be successful!”.

However as Slawek Koziol from our Poland office says “Leaders and the way they shape company culture are the most significant enablers of agile journey. They should discipline themselves to adopt new creative and collaborative mindsets in order to support their teams along the journey.”   He continues “Only then will they be able to empower and coach diverse teams and allow people who have a clear view of the customers to make their own day-to-day decisions.”

“By giving the team the latitude to determine the “How””, believes our Principle and Managing Director of our Singapore office, Charles Tan .

 

  1. CLEAR VISION

Steve says that leaders should “set a clear vision of what the organization is trying to achieve, and ensuring that teams have a prioritized backlog of work to move focus on. “

Charles  agrees “Leaders need to ensure the team understands the vision, then give them the space to work out how to deliver the vision”

 

  1. BEING TRANSPARENT AND OPEN

“Leaders can support the agile journey by being open, transparent and showing vulnerability at times.” Says Chelsea Bates, our principle in the Melbourne office of Adaptovate.  “Showing the team they don’t always have all the answers and being able to make decisions on what information is available”.

 

  1. BEING WILLING TO CHANGE DIRECTION

Chelsea also states that it’s also important being able to acknowledge when new information shows a change in direction is needed and deciding to change direction instead of waiting another month or two.

Charles agrees.  He says “By being open to review sacred institutional processes, I.e. strategy develop occurs only once every three years, corporate budgeting and project funding review only occurs annually etc.”

 

  1. DISCIPLINED PLANNING AND PRIORITISATION

Slawek believes that some of the key leadership behaviors supporting the agile journey should include a disciplined planning and prioritization approach.  Although he explains “This must be supported with informal rapport as well as prioritizing steady cadence of work over perfection.

Allowing for failures might seem like something utterly unnatural for a leader to do but is critical to building strong agile teams.”

 

  1. SHOWING INTEREST.

Charles Tan believes that leaders can support the agile journey by showing interest in what their Agile teams are doing. He says “Being Agile involves not just teams behaving in an Agile manner, but management engaging with the team in an Agile manner as well”

“Leaders can support the agile journey by cascading down the benefits of agile to their teams.” Believes Rachna Verma – a consultant in our Sydney office.  She continues “If the message does not come from top down then staff are not empowered to deliver and there is a misalignment between expectations.”

Shilen Modi, as associate in our Sydney office, says enthusiastically “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey and if a company/team wants to achieve agile, they need a leader to drive them there.

He continues  “The best thing a leader can be is show their thirst for transitioning into agile. If it is something they really want then they need to be able to convey this back to the team by being enthusiastic about Agile.”

 

  1. ENSURE THE ORGANISATIONAL HYGIENE FACTORS ARE DONE

Steve says “From an Agile perspective, leaders should ensure organizational hygiene factors.  Such as stable funding, appropriate workplace/tools to do get the job done.  And mechanisms to enable the team to work with other parts of the organization.

So try these steps if you are a leader, working with an organisation setting out on their Agile journey. Or perhaps your organisation is struggling with the agile journey.  By following these 7 points  will ensure  you’ll be pleasantly surprised how quickly things will fall in to place.

 

How will smart spaces impact your workspace?

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We live in a world of multi-offices, multi-city teams and flexible work scenarios.  For example, Adaptovate has offices all over the world, and consultants travelling to far corners of the globe at a moment’s notice.

When recently looking for new offices in our Sydney and Melbourne cities, what became apparent was how smart spaces are impacting not just our hospitals, our connected homes and shopping centres, but also our workspaces.

The best designed co-working space should be a smart space.

Importantly, a smart workspace will include, interactivity and connectiveness to each other and allow us to be efficient in how we conduct the basics like videoconferences and workshops.  For example, The IoT should be almost invisible to the worker.   That is, The space needs to be smart and feel human.

4 strategies for companies to run like a greyhound

In an article he wrote earlier this year,  Paul McNamara (Adaptovate’s co-founder) said, “Large organizations are geographically distributed, which makes co-location extremely difficult. The economics of having teams 100% dedicated to a single project can be unrealistic.”    In the piece he shares four strategies that enable large companies to strive in this environment.

  1. Redesign the work
  2. Build Personal Connections
  3. Use Video
  4. Support a Remote-first culture

So, in our quest to find the perfect shared co-working smart space we wanted to ensure that our own company was set up to enable the above strategies to thrive.     Having the right smart space, with fast wi-fi, the right connectivity and room to shut yourself away when required, will lead to our better wellbeing and happy consultants.

Employee wellbeing

As Bob Fox says in his article 2019 Workplace Trend Predictions  “Employee wellbeing is becoming one of the important considerations in workplace planning and design. Companies are widening the tent for planning and design teams to include HR and wellness program stakeholders, and research is proving that a well workplace is a healthy workplace.”

Importantly, the ‘Curated Communities’ that companies like WeWork are establishing around the world, provides the right environment for our downtime, as well as our work time.   Several companies are now including bars and cafes as part of the space.

Recently WeWork published an article on the science behind smart office design stating

“Humans have always used spaces for the same instinctive tasks, like safety, sleep, and community.”  In fact, they continue “Combining subjective and objective data is the only way to design spaces in which all kinds of people can feel comfortable.”

The Must Haves

Closer to home one of Australian consultant’s Rachna Verma says “Smart spaces will force us to think really hard about what we value and what we “must have” in our lives.  How many things do you really need to have in your backpack?  What purpose do ornamental objects provide? How can you repurpose your carry-on and luggage to still meet your requirements and be lighter and less cumbersome?”

In the US one of our team Steve Walton, says “ Smart spaces provide the potential to customize our environments to be better in tune to our needs and moods. There are possibilities to unlock our thinking by tuning them to stimulate our creativity, help us slow down by being more relaxing and having increased functionality to be more productive.”

There are concerns though.   As Steve points out “They also have the potential to be problematic if they fail to live up to the hype through lack of integration, poorly designed interfaces or inadequate hardware.”

Screenless worlds

Finally, we’ll leave you with this seed.  One of the interesting themes that may be emerging for smart spaces is the recurring concept of screenless.    The now ubiquitous ‘Voice tech’ is the biggest out of this broad trend.  But there will be more.  As Jenna Van Schoor reminded us “Google Design strategist Golden Krishna wrote a book called The Best Interface is No Interface”      – This could be the future of our smart spaces.   No screens, no interfaces.  Just human interaction and invisible technology.

What does your smart work space look like?   Do you have one, want one – of in fact need one?