1.
Facilitating Agility:
Obligations of
Organizational
Leaders
Twin Cities Agile Days
St. Paul, Minnesota November 2019
Michael Levine

2.
• We value people and interactions over
processes and tools.
• Business people and developers must work
together daily throughout the project.
• Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they
need, and trust them to get the job done.
• Working software is the primary measure of
progress.
• The best architectures, requirements, and
designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
Is our
obligation to
provide space
and money
and then
stand back
and see what
happens?

3.
Kick-off Principle: Light Governance
• Empowered teams.
• Streamlined and fast decision-making.
Team makes decisions unless they
decide to escalate.
• No status reports. If management
want to know what’s up, come to
demo.
• No management grilling of their
assigned team members. Team
members ask when they need
something.
Retrospective: Journey Owner
• “Most valuable element was my
meeting every morning at 7:30 with
the president of the business unit.”
• “In past we didn’t have such close
participation of senior executives in
our projects.”
• “This enabled us to get fast decisions
made, helped us get other groups to
pay attention and act, and got us the
resources we needed quickly.”

4.
Not Just Management: Leadership for Agility
A new kind of endeavor………Requires a new kind of leadership
Building something complicated
Leadership for Agility
• Participating in & leading large
teams of talented and diverse
people to deliver highly
abstract, intellectually
challenging, complex and
valuable solutions, and
• Enabling many such teams
within larger organizations to
succeed.
Coordinating large number
of people to common goal
Now add: Integrating thousands of
ideas in new ways using new tools
that work invisibly for thousands of
people– over and over!

5.
Leadership for Agility

6.
Rigor
Ensuring
Good
Decisions
Hire & develop right talent,
experience, skills, and roles
Ensure teams have the right
composition
Expect & inspect rigorous decision-
making

7.
Alignment
Everyone’s
Head in
Game,
Moving
Together
Get right involvement from each partner
Ensure communication flow to & from teams
Value consensus
When needed, make a decision

8.
Efficiency
Respect
for people:
don’t
waste
their
valuable
time
Balance Agile & Planful Management
Establish a Few Common Frameworks
Make Meetings Work
Provide Tools

9.
The A3
Originated at Toyota, part
of lean problem solving
Can be used to frame an
effort / project, solve a
problem, etc.
One page, diagrams and
charts
Nemawashi
Rigor, Alignment, &
Efficiency!

10.
The Architecture Simulation
• Prepare business scenarios starting with customer
• Lay out systems architecture
• Run scenarios
Audience participation
Make it physical
Make it human
Have fun!
Rigor, Alignment, Efficiency

11.
More Information
TheTalesOfAgility.Com
Love to have feedback!