This Hands-on Agile webinar addresses the agile maturity and a possible agility assessment of organizations before the start of an agile transition.
Moreover, learn about the survey results what indicates an agile organization, whether agile maturity is a fad, and what the open source project of the ‘Agility Assessment Framework’ is about.
BLOG: https://age-of-product.com/webinar-agile-maturity/
YOUTUBE: Tba.
5. Let’s Start at the Beginning:
Why Do Organizations Want to
Become ‘Agile’?
stefan@age-of-product.com
6. The ‘Why’ Question (1): C-Level Motivation
Typically named reasons for doing “Agile”:
• Become more efficient
• Deliver more & faster
• Improve predictability
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7. The ‘Why’ Question (2): C-Level Motivation
Actual benefits of becoming “Agile”:
• Create learning organizations
• Autonomy, mastery and purpose
• Minimizing risk, improving ROI
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8. The ‘Why’ Question (3): Command & Control
21st Century Taylorism:
• Functional silos prevail
• Projects, budgets & initiatives rule
Source: Scientific management (Wikipedia) stefan@age-of-product.com
11. The Agile Path (2): Business Agility
Source: Domains of Business Agility stefan@age-of-product.com
12. The Agile Path (3): Packaged ‘Agile’
Source: SAFe® stefan@age-of-product.com
13. The Agile Path (4): Agile Onion
Source: What Is Agile?
Processes &
Tools
Practices
Principles
Values
Mindset
This can be adopted
C&C style
This requires
cultural &
organizational
change
Move to a learning
organization
Less powerful,
more visible
More powerful,
less visible
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14. The Agile Path (5): Kniberg’s Scrum Test
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16. Nagging Questions:
Is becoming ‘agile’ a destination or a journey?
Are we on the right route?
How do we know we’re making progress?
What will the ROI be?
The Agile Path (7)
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18. The Survey (2): Fundamentals
Four Questions:
1. What factors contribute to a team’s growing maturity in agile
practices?
2. What maturity levels do you see at a team level?
3. What factors contribute to becoming an ‘agile’ or a learning
organization?
4. What maturity levels do you see at an organizational level?
Responses: 86
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19. The Survey (3): Preliminary Taxonomy
Agile Maturity Indicators:
1. People & Communication
2. Organizational Excellence
3. Technical Excellence
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20. The Survey (4): Autonomy
Self-organization:
1. Empower teams (Decisions, accountability)
2. Focus on outcome
3. Respect Scrum values (Commitment, focus, openness, respect,
courage.)
4. Safety to raise & discuss issues
5. The team handles its own problems (No scrum mom.)
6. Supporting each other as team members (Bonding.)
7. Holding each other accountable (Agile is a team sport.)
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22. The Survey (6): Mastery
Learning:
• Short feedback loops (User tests, customer development)
• Use of retrospectives
• Continuous team coaching (Guilds, code mentors etc.)
• Stakeholders live up to their responsibilities
• Hands-on experience over credentialism
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23. The Survey (7): Mastery
Competence:
• T-shaped people
• Active knowledge sharing
• Continuous learning,
• No withholding of knowledge
• Knowledge sharing beyond the product and tech realm
• Budget to attend conferences
• Center of Excellence for Agile
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24. The Survey (8): Mastery
Team building:
• Cross-functional teams:
• No dependencies w/ other teams,
• End-to-end delivery capability
• Stable, long-living teams
• Support by an experienced scrum master
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26. The Survey (10): Communication & Collaboration
Trust & respect:
• Benefit of the doubt for colleagues
• Safety to disagree
• Honesty
• Candid peer feedback
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27. The Survey (11): Communication & Collaboration
Conflict resolution:
• Constructive disagreement:
• ‘Disgree but commit’ approach
• No tyranny of compromise
• Non-violent communication
28. The Survey (12): Communication & Collaboration
Collaboration:
• Zero tolerance for political games
• No scripted collaboration
• No incentives to withhold knowledge (Or information.)
• No finger-pointing, no blame-game
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29. The Survey (13): Organizational Excellence
Culture:
• Embrace and celebrate failure (Validate hypotheses by running
experiments)
• Curiosity as a norm
• Undogmatic attitude, live Shu-Ha-Ri
• Transparency:
• Share information and data at all levels,
• No more gated information or information brokers
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30. The Survey (14): Organizational Excellence
Leadership:
• Focus on innovation, quality and business value (No more HIPPOism.)
• Supports of ‘agile’s way of working’ fully
• Enforces ‘agile’ as the core of the company culture
• Respect for roles, principles, and processes (The ‘real’ PO.)
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31. The Survey (15): Organizational Excellence
Management:
• Managers to servant leaders
• Trust in people and teams
• Provides tools and facilities necessary to become agile
• Gemba and Kaizen become standard practices
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32. The Survey (16): Organizational Excellence
Organizational design:
• Abandon functional silos for cross-functional teams
• Remove redundant middle management layers (Flatten the hierarchy)
• No more command & control, compliance driven management
• HR aligns with requirements of self-organizing teams
• The organizations morphs into a team of teams
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33. The Survey (17): Organizational Excellence
Clear objectives:
• Shared vision among all actors
• Clear strategy
• Clear priorities
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34. The Survey (18): Organizational Excellence
Business value focus:
• Customer centricity mindset
• Delivering business results
• Shifting the IT focus business needs
• From project budgets to product teams
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35. The Survey (19): Technical Excellence
Engineering level:
• Built-in quality:
• Code reviews,
• TDD:
• Test automation,
• Test coverage
• Pair and mob programming
• Practicing Scrum, Kanban, XP
stefan@age-of-product.com
36. The Survey (20): Technical Excellence
Process level:
• DevOps: CI, CD (Deployment at will)
• Regular cadence of releases
• Identifying suitable metrics:
• Lead time, cycle time,
• Number of experiments,
• Team health
• Open sourcing code
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41. Can an organization make an informed decision on
becoming agile in advance:
Is the organization able & willing to change?
Where can the organization probably go?
Where does the organization need to change?
AAF’s Application (3): Answering…
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44. The Status Quo
The Why & Who:
• Ask the C-Level: What are the reasons to become agile?
• Wrong answers:
• Become more efficient
• Deliver more & faster
• Improve predictability
• Better answers:
• Outperforming competitors by creating learning organizations
• Creating a great culture by providing room for autonomy, mastery and purpose
• Minimizing risk, improving ROI
• Who is the sponsor of the decision to become an agile organization?
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45. The Status Quo (2)
Organizational background:
• Size
• History
• Culture
• Non-profit & philantrophic
• Engineering-focused
• Sales-driven?
• Market:
• Legacy products
• Innovator’s dilemma
• Product life-cycle state of the cash-cows
• Customer-base
• Is the business regulated by law?
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46. The Status Quo (3)
Budgeting:
• How is product development currently funded:
• Projects/initiatives
• Product teams?
• What process is applied to funding:
• Stage-gate model?
• Who will control the budget for a transition? (CEO, CTO or COO/CFO?)
• How large is the budget for the planned transition?
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47. The Status Quo (4)
Collaboration with product teams—How does it work now?
• W/ business stakeholders
• W/ customers
• W/ the management
• W/ the leadership
• How are product teams working among each other?
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48. The Status Quo (5)
Nature of teams:
• What is the outsourcing level; are there internal teams?
• Team longevity:
• Are teams funded or projects/initiatives?
• Are team members assigned to teams randomly?
• Are people simultaneously working on several project?
• Are teams functional silos or cross-functional team?
• Are teams co-located?
• If not: are team members meeting regularly in person?
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49. The Status Quo (6)
Team building & hiring (1):
• Hiring:
• Are teams diverse? (Gender, age, religion, race etc.)
• Peer recruiting of team members?
• Are the teams selecting themselves?
• Is HR is pursuing old-school career development?
• Titles, certificates etc.
• What about ‘autonomy, mastery, purpose?’
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50. The Status Quo (6)
Team building & hiring (2):
• What is the fluctuation rate:
• Among teams?
• Within the organization?
• Freelancer vs. Employees relationship:
• Are freelancers regarded as equals?
• What is the ratio of freelancers to employees?
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51. The Status Quo (7)
Team management:
• People management/team management:
• Are people or teams micromanaged?
• Detailed instruction what and how to do?
• No trust in the capability of a team?
• Management of teams by OKRs?
• Do people have conflicting incentives with their teams’ objective?
• How is failure handled?
• Is a change of the incentive schemes planned?
• WIIFM syndrome?
• Is pursuing personal agendas or local optima lucrative?
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52. The Status Quo (8)
Workspace:
• Can all work spaces be provided?
• Large, flexible space(s) for training, public ceremonies
• Defined team spaces to create a sense of togetherness
• Ad hoc collaboration space for 2-5 people
• Silent workspace to for deep, focused work
• Are exclusive spaces available?
• Whiteboards in abundance?
• Offsite work spaces to leave the comfort zone of the office?
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53. The Status Quo (9)
Tools and technology:
• On-premise vs cloud—what is the status?
• Bring your own tech?
• Choose your own tools/software?
• Is open source acceptable?
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54. The Status Quo (10)
Current agile practices:
• Product discovery:
• Lean Startup
• Lean UX
• Design Thinking
• Design Sprints
• Product delivery:
• Scrum
• Kanban
• XP
• Lean software development
• TDD, BDD
• DevOps
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55. Open Questions
How to deliver the Agility Assessment framework
to the community?
How to include remote contributors in the creation process?
Got a suggestion? 👉 Stefan@age-of-product.com
stefan@age-of-product.com
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening
Welcome to the hands-on agile webinar on the question whether agile maturity and the agility assessment frmaework
I am your host, Stefan Wolpers
Some housekeeping:
The webinar will take about 25 to 30 minutes which will leave enough room for Q&A at the end
Some background on myself:
I have spent 12-plus years in agile
Mostly as a product owner in fast growing, vc-funded startups in Berlin (including a later Google subsidiary)
At the moment, I am working as an agile coach/scrum master for a large european electricity and gas provider
“One size fits all” does not work
Packed Agile — think SAFe
Agile industrial complex is making good money
What is in for me? CST = $ 500,000 annually
Probably, they need it, too, for the next financial report — because the analysts keep asking them…
Probably, they need it, too, for the next financial report — because the analysts keep asking them…
Just a few agile organizations around — think of Semco, Patagonia, Zappos, and partly Spotify.
But wait: we are no longer assembling Model T
No shortage of tests at the team level
Peter Drucker: “With strategy, one always makes compromises on implementation,” he wrote. “But one does not compromise on goals, does not pussy-foot around them, does not try to serve two masters.”
No vanity metrics for reports, but honest expectation management
No data for stack ranking of teams or departments
Gathering data to accompany retrospectives at organizational level during a transition
How are we progressing?
So, I hoped you considered this webinar of product discovery anti-patterns useful.
The next webinar will in two weeks time from now. It will be about product backlog anti-patterns — from out-dated and oversized tickets to the part-time proxy product owner and his or her idea repository. Learn more about the numerous product backlog anti-patterns that can manifest themselves when you try to create value for your customers and your organization.