Hear how to support your team’s success when transitioning to Agile. The adaptation of the Aikido principle of Shu Ha Ri, as well as more info on Disciplined Agile.

Table of

Contents

00:58 … Meet Alan

02:07 … Defining Agile

04:20 … Shu Ha Ri

08:26 … Non Traditional and Non Profit uses of Agile.

14:43 … Challenges with Transitioning to Agile

17:41 … Disciplined Agile Train the Trainer Seminar

21:48 … Choosing your WoW

23:14 … D.A. and Lean

26:01 … Value Stream Mapping

27:33 … Fundamentals of Agile InSite Course

29:51 … Closing

Alan Zucker: ...as long as you are stepping in and making those decisions, the team won’t.  So you really need to focus on stepping back and giving the team that space to make those decisions and allowing them to stub their toes and skin their elbows. So that they will become successful over time.

NICK WALKER:  Welcome

to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  We’re back with another episode, bringing the

kind of information you’ve been asking for. 

We hope you’ll keep the requests and comments coming in.  You can always comment right there on your

listening app, or on Velociteach.com,

or on social media.  We love hearing from

you.

I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are the two guys who

guide our discussion, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And this time

around we’re featuring a member of the Velociteach family.  And like most of the folks around here, Andy,

he has credentials a mile long.

Meet Alan

ANDY CROWE:  He does

indeed, Nick.  And we have Alan Zucker on

the show today.  And Alan and I go back a

good ways.  He and I interacted back

before he worked for Velociteach.  We had

a relationship.  Somebody I have deep

respect for, and I’m really looking forward to today’s podcast.

NICK WALKER:  Before

we hear from Alan, I want to tell you a little bit more about him.  He’s a certified project management

professional, an ITIL Foundation certificate holder, a Scrum master, a scale

Agilist, and an Agile certified practitioner. 

Alan Zucker is a keynote speaker, and he has more than 25 years of

experience as a leader in Fortune 100 companies.  In 2016 he founded Project Management Essentials to provide

training and advisory services.  He

recently completed a new course for Velociteach titled “Fundamentals

of Agile.”

Alan, welcome to Manage This.  We want to talk Agile today. And before we really get into it, can you tell me a little bit about what Agile is, particularly for my benefit and for the benefit of those who maybe are coming from a predictive or waterfall background.

Defining Agile

ALAN ZUCKER:  Sure, Nick.  Well, first of all, Andy, thanks so much, it’s great to be on the podcast again. So Agile is a way of managing projects and it goes back formally about 20 years. And it started out as a way of developing software using incremental and iterative development techniques. So what we try to do with Agile is try to develop our projects and deliver our projects in smaller pieces. And then learn from what we’ve delivered in order to make things better with each of the successive increments.

BILL YATES:  Those are

some of the keys; right?  Small batches,

quick iterations, quick turnaround, get it in the hands of the customer,

deliver value quickly.  Those are some of

the keys.

ANDY CROWE:  Value,

value, value.

BILL YATES:  Yeah,

value, value.

ALAN ZUCKER:  And so I think one of the other really big pieces of Agile is that it changes the way we work, and it really focuses on having empowered teams and people really engaged, both from a customer’s perspective, as well as from the technology team perspective. In our traditional projects, particularly our waterfall projects, there’s a big separation between the customers, the business, the development team, the testing team, and on an Agile project we try to get everybody to collaborate together more effectively.

So, it’s really interesting, Jeff Sutherland wrote one of the really great books on Agile, and he actually wrote it with his son J.J, and J.J Sutherland, as you may know, was a producer for NPR.  And in the book he talked about how, when J.J. was covering the Arab Spring in Egypt, they really were having a hard time getting the material back to the states for broadcast.  And they thought about how do we deliver the broadcast, and how do we cover the topics more quickly so we can get smaller pieces back to the states in order to meet their broadcast delivery schedule.  So even though Agile was built for software development, it has a lot of applications outside the software development realm.

Shu Ha Ri

NICK WALKER:  Alan, there’s a Japanese martial art called Aikido, and so within that there’s the principle of steps to mastery of Aikido that’s the Shu Ha Ri, and a lot of Agile leaders have borrowed this principle.  Tell me about how Shu Ha Ri fits into the Agile concept.

ALAN ZUCKER:  So a number of the Agile thought leaders use the Aikido principles of Shu Ha Ri as a way of talking about progressing and maturing our Agile. The idea behind Shu is where we’re following the rules, and if you’re doing a martial art, this is where you follow the master, and you really are copying the master step by step. So the idea behind Ha is where we’ve learned the principles, and Ha stands for bend the rules.  So we’ve learned the principles, we’re beginning to adapt the style a little bit for ourselves.  And then the idea of Ri is break the rules, and that’s where you’ve gained your own mastery, and you can see patterns, and you can pool different practices and almost create your own style with this.

So one of the things that’s been really interesting for me is I’ve been doing Agile now for actually well over, I hate to say it, 30 years.  And now that I’m teaching, and I’m consulting and coaching organizations, I’ve really gotten to the point where I’ve got that rate, where I can pick different things off the shelf, and I can work with non-software development organizations and other organizations to help them apply the Agile principles to improve whatever they are doing.

ANDY CROWE:  You know, Alan, when you were talking about this, something came to mind, I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy lately and Cormac McCarthy is a famous fiction author.  He will do some things that are so unconventional as a writer. For instance, he doesn’t do a lot of punctuation marks, he doesn’t do quotes, he just goes back and forth with narrative and dialogue, and it’s very fluid.

Now, my middle child tried to do this back in high school, and decided he was going to just eliminate certain pesky rules of grammar, but he had not mastered the Shu first, so he didn’t know the rules and you’re not allowed to exactly bend the rules or break the rules yet. So as a writer, this actually resonates very loudly with me, I understand, you know, there are certain rules as a writer that I will intentionally break. The rule in my house is you can use incorrect grammar if you know the rule, and you know what you’re doing, so there’s a little bit of a parallel there, as well.

ALAN ZUCKER:  So it’s really interesting, about two years ago I started working with this team. I was part of a small eLearning company, and when I started working with them, they were like, we want to learn Scrum.  So I went, and I did a workshop for them, got them running on Scrum. But I also taught them how to do Kanban, or flow-based Agile, and I’ve maintained contact with the director of the group over the years. And in the last six months they’ve actually moved onto the next version, where they’re doing what they’re calling “hyper sprinting.”

So instead of following the two-week Scrum process, or the flow process, they are doing demos two times a week. They’re delivering work as soon as it’s available, they are not doing story point estimates. They’re still doing daily stand-ups and some of those things, but they’ve bent the rules in order to make it work for their organization. And so it’s really interesting, and they’ve been very, very successful with it, that’s in software development.

Non Traditional and

Non Profit Uses of Agile

I’ve also started to do some work with nonprofits. I’m working with the board of a nonprofit near me, and so I’m using Agile principles with them to help them run their board meetings much more successfully.

BILL YATES:  What are some of the challenges that you see a group like that – so you know, you’re mixing things up for them and introducing these new concepts. Do you start out with, “Hey, guys, I’m going to teach you Agile,”  or do you just go into specifics and say, “Hey, here’s another practice that I think may benefit our group?”

ALAN ZUCKER:  So I don’t start trying to teach Agile theory to a nonprofit board.  What I do is I start in with the practices.  So the new board started its term in July.  So at the first board meeting, I did what I normally do when I’m starting up an Agile team, which is setting the rules of normative behavior. And so I go through a structured brainstorming process, everybody puts their ideas, how should we behave as a board, what are our expectations of each other and of ourselves.  We put the ideas on the wall.  We go through our brainstorming process, and we sort of codify that into the rules of normative behavior, and then we set that as how we’re going to work.

So it was really interesting, I was standing there, and we came up with the rules. It was like, we want to be respectful, we want to be efficient in terms of the use of our time. We want to have respectful debate, all these things.  And then I turn around – I’m going through this, and I’m facilitating this process, I see a couple people on their cell phones scrolling through, a couple people sort of having side conversations. And so like a good Scrum master, like a good Agile coach, I said, “Look,