For Agility's Sake

Sys. Analyst Gaye Garvelink recounts her experience with agile and how it hasn't been easy, but more than worth it. My favorite quote from this show was "We were working really hard, but we loved every minute of it."

In this episode we discuss:

• How agile creates an environment that allows teams to flourish while bringing out the best in each individual. 
• Agile before Agile was "cool"
• Lean / Continuous improvement / Toyota Production System
• Agile makes learning new things feel safer
• Work gets better for everyone w/agile
  • Brings the team together
  • Keeps everyone informed
  • Makes work visible 
• It doesn't matter what your role or title is on an agile team - you swarm problems together to solve them as fast as possible.

Gayle Evans, Digital Experience Delivery Mgr at Amway, explains how an agile transformation is really a transformation of individuals. It does not require us to know everything up front, but it does require that we continue to make progress.

• Individual Transformation
• Servant Leadership
• Agility is the only way to thrive today
• Managing an agile team
  • Remove hurdles and support your team
  • Get out of your team's way - trust them and let them do the work
  • Swooping in to save the team means they miss the opportunity to learn
  • Cast the vision
• Making progress is more important than making perfect
• Culture is at the center of making this a success
• Recognize that you will be learning FOREVER
• Next problem to solve: how do we accelerate the transformation across functions

Luke Nieuwenhuis, VP of ABO Incentives at Amway explains how Agile is a way of getting work done. We often overcomplicate it, but it's really about how we get things done as an organization.

WHY IT MATTERS
Our ability to move more quickly from one thing to another (markets, projects, strategies, etc.) is paramount to our ability to keep serving our customers.

On the ground floor, our teams can be very flexible. They often know that what we're working on might not be the most important thing - the struggle is to get the rest of the organization to keep up.

EXPLAINING AGILE IN SIMPLE TERMS
Don't get caught up in the terminology (epics, features, sprints, etc.) The more we can talk about agile in terms of the intent behind the things we're doing, the better people will understand it.

Our intent: focus first on the customer. What are their needs? How do we know those are their needs? How do we go about executing in solving those problems? How do we know our solution has solved it? These are the questions that agile is helping us answer.

CHANGING MINDS IS HARD
We tried to explain that we don't need to force "everything" into one big launch, but until we showed people how it could work differently, it didn't stick. The proof was in showing them it's viable, and only after that did we really start to shift thinking.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR THE CUSTOMER
Their feedback has a greater influence on how we make decisions and build solutions that help them run their business. The faster and more often we incorporate their feedback, the more trust we build with them.

The caution is to not over do it. At some point, too much change makes it impossible to keep up with. If a tool you use to run your business changes every month, it's going to be difficult to be efficient and effective.

THE CHALLENGES
The relationship between the process of how we work and the corresponding organizational structure. Today we are organized by functions and departments, and when we have work to do we spin up a project team and assign people to it. Getting to a place where we have stable teams is critical. Most teams should be persistent - and the work flows to the team.

The transition from a project-based approach to a flow-based approach has a messy middle. It requires us to think differently about how teams work, and at the same time, identify ways we can do it in an organizational system that isn't completely designed for it yet. The risk is that we think "agile isn't working" because we haven't given the organization time to catch up with this new way of thinking - and at that point the tendency is to go back to what we've always done.

HOW A LEADER CAN HELP

1. When you get a new "project" or objective to accomplish, pause before you spin up a project team. Consider what stable teams exist (or should exist) in order to help you accomplish the work. 
2. Be more aware of how agile is seeking to accomplish the goals / work. 

Product Management Coach Scott Sehlhorst goes deep into how an Agile Workflow Model and Product Management can enable a company to thrive in an increasingly complex world.

Our Agile Workflow Model is a robust decision making system; providing clarity and alignment at each decision point. This is the only way we can manage the complexity AND stay aligned as we execute. 

Scott explains the difference between a "regular workflow" and an "Agile workflow" and much more: 

• Cross-functional collaboration over multiple Product teams and how they should work together. 
• Product Teams should be focused on the prolems they are solving. It's not about building the thing. It's about solving the problem set before us and achieving the outcomes that result from solving the problem.
• Scaling and coordination across product teams is a challenge, but it's a requirement for large companies. 
• The tiers of our workflow model are not hierarchical, they are a separation of concerns, they are looking at different time horizons, they are making decisions on different levels of the problem. They MUST work together. 
• 3 Amigos: Product Owner, Tech Lead and QA Lead. Each person has their own vantage point and their own blind spots - but together, you minimize the likelihood of shared blindspots. Add the Scrum Master to those 3 roles and now the team can improve their own execution and effectiveness. As the team gets better at self-improvement, the Scrum Master role becomes more and more about cross-team coordination. 
• What do you do if you have too much work for a Product Owner? Don't add a second product owner - then you have two cooks in the kitchen. Instead, add a Business Analyst - someone who can think like a PO, but doesn't hold the same role. 
• T-shaped teams: some roles look broader at the situation and context, other roles are very narrow and specific to a topic/discipline. It's rare to find a single person who has both. On our teams with 3 amigos, we improve our odds of seeing things broadly and deeply (as in the T-shape). 

Link to Count Basie song Scott mentioned and incorrectly named: Count Basie - Straight Ahead

He's back! Tech Craftsmanship Coach Llewellyn Falco shares stories of his second visit to Amway. Some of the topics he touches on in this episode are:

• Anti-fragile: a systemic way of implementing things so that when they break, you get stronger. More resilient. If your system is dependent on discipline, it’s broken.
• Safeguarding: after an issue was resolved, the team reflected on these 3 questions to help them build more resiliency for the future: 
  1. What allowed us to create this situation?
  2. What made it hard for us to discover what it was?
  3. What made it hard to fix?
  4. PS: Don't start safeguarding in the middle of a crisis; wait until it's over (but not too long). 
• Learning through documenting: As you document something, it prompts new ideas for how the thing could work. 
• Shared, isolated, mutable and non-mutable states: the only combination to avoid is the one that everybody chooses = shared + mutable. 
• What the team did when multi-threading threw a wrench in their testing…
• Continuous improvement: stop worrying about how to improve faster, worry about starting. Make improvement an everyday habit, and speed will come later. 

Experience Owner Kate Kronemeyer shares her thoughts on agile, empathy and a hyper-focus on the user. "Design is more disciplined than you think."

Other topics we touch on:

• Building empathy.
• Design is more disciplined than you think.
• With agile, everyone can help make things better.
• Satisfying the customer is EXCITING!
• Agile isn't just a process change. It's a personal transformation. 
• Stay focused on the user - Literally walk a mile in their shoes.
• Learn more about your user than you think you need to know. 
• Sometimes your user doesn't know what they need, and sometimes they don't know you have what they need.
• An exceptional user experience example - AirBnB

Marty Bradley, Sr VP at LeadingAgile, says Agile Transformation is NOT about Agile; it's a way of achieving your companies goals. Here are some of the other topics we discussed. 

• It's not about Agile. It's a way of achieving your goals.
• Companies have to get better de-risking their investments.
• Example: Increasing Sky Atmosphere sales with fast feedback loops.
• 3 elements of agility: teams, backlog, working tested software
• Teams: a stable cross-functional team has all of the members it needs to ship a product.
• Backlog: a healthy backlog of clearly defined work increases predictability.
• Working tested software: deliver something that a user can try - it's ok if it's rudimentary, but it has to "work")
• Face to face collaboration is ALWAYS faster.
• Deciding what to work on based on data
• Managing an Agile Team
  1. Step out of the Project Management elements.
  2. Identify ways to make your team more effective / efficient - be a coach.
  3. Lead your people: develop them, not the product/tech.
  4. Stop solutioning - support the delivery system by trusting your team

Learn about the System of Transformation we use to improve the organization (currently only available to Amway Employees).

Send questions/comments to the Agile Transformation Office.

Brian Hart, VP of ABO & Customer Solutions shares his thoughts on why agility matters, how leader behaviors MUST change, and a first step you can take toward agility - rapid experimentation.

Other topics we touch on: 

• Agile isn't the goal. It's a way to achieve your business goals.
• You can apply agile principles to the development of ANYTHING. An idea, a strategy, a physical product, a digital product, a service, etc.
• Leadership behaviors must change: your team can't change without you.
• As a leader, assess what your interactions with your team look like. Are you empowering them, letting them fail, helping them learn, encouraging them to validate assumptions? We hire great people, trust them.
• A first step to becoming more agile - rapid experimentation. Accelerate the learning in your development process and pull forward every bit of it that you can as you move forward. 

Questions for the Agile Transformation Office?  Email us.
Questions for Brian Hart? Email him

Product Owner for Training & Development, Francisco Calderon explains how Agile can tear down the mentality of "us and them". He highlights the importance of cross-team collaboration and a constant focus on improving what we build and how we build it.

Scrum Master Alyssa Rawsky shares her agile experience and how her first reaction was "I don't want this." Now, she encourages others with "don't be afraid of change!" Alyssa describes how she and her team are using agile practices to improve adaptability and team morale. A number of other topics are also covered:

• Misconceptions of the Scrum Master role
• Fail, adjust and adapt
• Shout out to the Amway Social team
• Visual Management is a game changer
• Planning a year ahead with agile (continuous planning / it's okay to change your plan)
• Ideaboardz for retros
• Spending time with your team to build trust
• The value of face-to-face interactions