Note: This makes for an excellent read. If you like the
podcast, listen to it or if you are like me, read the transcript of the podcast
here.
The following points stand out.
1. It is very difficult when a part of the organization
is agile and rest of the organization continues in the normal way of
functioning. This introduces a dissonance or an impedance mis-match ( to be
more
technical).
2. Waterfall is not bad and it was very useful in a
particular context “It’s not that waterfall is bad. Actually, waterfall is a
perfectly fine way of doing things. There were good reasons why it emerged when
the computer and mainframes and the cost of doing things were such that it
required a lot of advanced planning, a lot of coordination, and a lot of
rigidity to make sure that things were done in a way that dependencies were
addressed properly up front.”
3. The need for Agile now, “The reality is, in today’s
context, with technology being more flexible and cheaper, you have the ability
to think very differently about how you bring technology to market.”
4. On organizations adopting agile principles “I do think
one of the beautiful things about these principles is you need to think of them
in a holistic way. You can’t just cherry pick a few of them”
5.On the first principle of Agile Adoption, “At the core,
you need to be putting the customer first. You need to be clear on who the
customer is, what problem you’re trying to solve, what matters to the customer,
and prioritize. Always come back to who the customer is. In some cases, the
customer can be the internal customer. But often, you need to make sure that it’s
the external customer.In typical organizations, the distance between the
customer and the people doing the coding is eight layers of translation. That
can only lead to wrong prioritization, compromise, and, in the end, your
likelihood of delighting the customer and doing something that’s “aha” is
reduced. That’s principle number one and incredibly important.”
6. On the second principle of Agile Adoption, "The
second principle that I would add is around how to focus on people interactions
versus process. it’s about bringing the customer to the table. It’s part of the
interaction of processes that takes away so much of the focus on just checking
a box—to more of a focus on how to serve our customers and get to the right
solutions for them."
7. On the third principle of Agile Adoption, “I think a
third principle that is very important is welcoming change—so removing the
barriers that if you change, [the idea that] if there’s failure, that something
was wrong. Rather to turn it around and say, we’ve learned something. We’re
going to integrate that learning into the next iteration.”
8. On team empowerment, “The fourth principle, I’d say,
is to empower the team. The team knows more about the customers, it knows more
about what it can do. If you make it autonomous, within some boundaries, you
can have something special. We’re going
to let the people who are closest to the problem, closest to the customer, make
the trade-off within the scope that we’ve agreed is the scope that they can
operate in. That’s what makes it agile. That’s what makes it speedy. That’s
what makes it flexible.”
9. On the whole business running in an agile manner,
“Unless the whole business is operating in an agile manner, you’ve always got
this layer of interaction between agile teams and, let’s say—I don’t want to
pick on finance but—the finance function or control functions that may not be
used to this way of operating. Is that something that organizations need to
look out for?”
10. On bringing the rest of the organization along in the
Agile Journey, “ bringing the rest of the organization along, because it’s not
a one-time effort, it’s not a one-time transformation, it’s a journey. You have
to bring every part of the organization along so that you’re speaking a common
language and so that you’re shifting the way that you operate as a whole.”
11. The concept of Sunk Cost “I also see many
organizations, where they’ll get the input that what they’re building is not
right, and they continue to invest in it just because they’ve already invested x
amount of dollars.”
12. The typical problem that we see in many
organizations, cherry picking on agile principles to implement “... if you
assign a product owner that’s not an empowered product owner—he or she still
has to go to 50 different people to be able to make a decision on what
experience to deliver to your customer. These are the things that, if you
experiment with agile and start to cherry pick—and then on top of that you try
to scale that approach, which is not truly agile—it’s worse than not doing
agile at all, because you’re confusing the organization with “I think I’m
agile,” but I’m still following the traditional way of working, and now we’re
scaling this.”
13. On the three dimensions of a product owner
“A product owner is a critical role, and there is a
debate in the industry around who plays the role, what is it. For me, I see it
as a linchpin role, because it’s the core for these agile teams. There’s a
couple of things to highlight.
One, product owners represent the customers. They understand
their customers. They set the vision for their customers. They dream about
their customers’ experience and the functionality that they want to deliver to
them. They help to drive the team toward the vision that it has and encourage
it as it goes on.
Second, product owners have what I call organizational
capital. They’re able to influence the organization and bring it along on their
vision of where they want to go. As they’re thinking about what they need to
deliver in terms of functionality, they start to pull in the marketing team:
How do you start to share the vision? The compliance team: How do we start to
build the vision together? So, they start to rally the troops on the vision
that they have for their customers.
The third one is, it is a leadership role. They help to
guide the team and they are the leaders for how to make sure that we’re
exciting our team members and that they’re rallying around the vision that they
have. Because if you don’t put in the efforts that you need in terms of getting
the right person for the role, it ends up being a waterfall team, because the
person that you assign will just continue in the traditional way of thinking
and guide the team in that direction."
* Image Source : https://twitter.com/lhamerlinck/status/676715855334400001
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