Leadership Success Recipes for Agile in the 21st Century
Agile was originally based on a simple recipe for success: a small team, co-located, self-organizing applying engineering practices. As a leader of such an adoption, you might think of your role as similar to a restauranteur/owner/head chef of a small restaurant: small staff, some simple recipes, able to quickly address the problems/challenges that might arise.
But now we are in the 21st Century and moving into more complex and demanding recipes for Agile. We still need success but we have moved the Agile recipe into a much bigger menu and venue. And, despite these complexities in our restaurant and recipes, we still need to be able to address the problems/challenges that might (will?) arise in this much more complex environment. Now, in your role as Executive Chef of this high-end operation, what will your recipe for success be?
Christophe Louvion of Gorilla Nation and Jean Tabaka of Rally Software present you with their cookbook of Agile for the 21st century Executive Chef. In this upbeat real-life experiences presentation, we offer the recipes that succeed; how they succeeded; and, what the amazing results were. Additionally, we intend to arm you with warning signs that your recipes for agile adoption may produce very unsatisfactory results and even flop. Think of it this way: do you want your large, resort-level operation to succeed with greater and greater complexity of Agile recipes and more demanding clientele? And, will you be prepared to face the challenges that could sabotage your efforts even before you get started? Or are you going to stay stuck in your little cafe and small staff as the only way to succeed?
Process/Mechanics
A. Welcome — Introductions and format of the presentation
B. What was the original set of recipes and venues for Agile success?—overview and level-setting for Agile of the early 21st Century.
C. As leaders in more complex organizations of the 21st Century, what are the challenges we face with applying the orignial recipe?—Q&A about current challenges
D. What were the challenges and audacious results of one 21st Century Agile adoption?—Christophe Louvion presenting his use of Agile to bring about 400% improvement in productivity.
E. What were the challenges and adoption failures of another 21st Century Agile adoption?—Jean Tabaka presenting her 12 Agile Adoption Failure modes.
F. Given these results of success and failure what tools must you be prepared to bring into your organization?—development infrastructure, testing infrastructure, reporting and tracking infrastructure
G. Additionally, what organizational changes must you be prepared to make?—scaling agile throughout your organization, outside of IT and around IT? New roles for scaling, Scrum of Scrums, Meta Scrum, Organizational Implementation Backlog
H. Given these successes and failures, what recipes for success are you prepared to embrace?—Q&A with the group about what they have experienced and how we can make successful recipes going forward.
Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber spoke at Agile2006 on code quality as a corporate asset. InfoQ presents video of his talk, The Canary in the Coalmine. Schwaber discussed how a degrading core codebase paralyses a team and negates any Agility gained through process improvement. He proposed strategies for management to identify, track and stop this downward spiral.
Managers new to scrum often ask what their role is leading self-organized teams.
The scrum model doesn’t ask for managers. 1 product owner, 1 scrum master, a cross functional delivery team. That’s it.
On the other side of the spectrum, lean thinking praises for strong functional manager (rather than process leaders). A lot has been written on the subject; I won’t go into it here. Check out Mary Poppendieck’s books for more on the subject.
Here’s a radical new idea about why new scrum teams need managers: to limit their self-organization.
In his book “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less“ Barry Schwartz provides a stunning vision that increasing choices flood our brains, increase stress and ultimately restrict our ability to make decisions.
Inexperienced scrum teams are often overwhelmed by the new “freedom” provided to them the self-organizing aspect of agility. I am formulating the idea from Schwartz research that managers could enable such teams succeed faster by actively reducing the huge number of things to do to a small number of good ones. Any choice would be successful and rewarding. In such an environment, it would be easier for the manager to teaching the team how to make more difficult decisions (introducing less desirable choices).
Is letting a newbie scrum team totally self-organize itself really the best way to show respect and creating the best environment for its success? Or is reducing choices a strong coaching technique with the fastest path to high performance? Worth trying, isn’t it?
Scrum is an agile process to manage and control software development. Scrum embraces change, empowers the team and provides transparency to stakeholders. The Product Owner engages in ongoing dialogs with the team to build the most valuable features. The Team demonstrates these running, tested features to stakeholders in regular, short increments. Scrum follows a simple set of rules and places responsibility on the whole team to deliver. The Facilitator coaches the team to self-organize and optimize their output. The Facilitator shields the team from external distractions by working with the Product Owner to insure that stakeholders understand the value of a prioritized and emergent product backlog of features.Scrum ruthlessly exposes problems and impediments within the Team and in the organization as a whole, and requires commitment at all levels to succeed.
Hubert Smits will give a hands-on overview of the activities that are involved in larger agile projects. Larger projects stretch out over more then a few months and have more then a single team involved. Things get more complex when the teams are not collocated. Hubert has based the talk on his paper “Multi Level Planning for Agile Projects” and presents a practical implementation of the planning levels. The experience he uses in the presentation is taken from his work as an agile coach for Rally Software Development, which brings him to projects with teams scattered across the globe: the US, Europe, Middle East and Far East.
Adwords introduced a Scrum implementation at Google in small steps with remarkable … all » success. As presented at the Agile 2006 conference this exemplifies a great way to start up Scrum teams. The inventor and Co-Creator of Scrum will use this approach in building the Google Scrum implementation to describe some of the subtle aspects of Scrum along with suggested next steps that can help in distributing and scaling Scrum in a “Googly way”.
