This is a webinar presented by Ahmed Avais at the Agile Dialogue Mississauga. Here is a link to the recording- https://youtu.be/tT5PIB9ePU4
Framework or no framework? Focus on delivery or focus on learning? Go fast or go further? These and many more trade-offs are dependent on the team needs at a given moment. How do you know where to shift our focus? We know every team is unique, so how do you appreciate that uniqueness and find practices that are fit for purpose?
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• Where does the organization need your
specific team to be?
• Why? What business needs drive this need?
What Capability Does Your Organization Need?
Thinking in terms of the Agile Fluency Model
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The Agile Fluency Improvement Cycle
Capability
Goal
Next
Performance
Target
Now
Practice
Steps
1
2 34
Improvement Kata pattern courtesy of Mike Rother
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• Framework-less, Inclusive, and Positive
• Road-test and codified progression
• Zone benefits and challenges in adoption
• Discovery versus living up to standardization
• Better leadership conversations when you focus on needs and benefits
The Agile Fluency Model
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The Agile Fluency Model
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvvMl1F_Tow
Watch the 10-minute video
Diana Larsen partners with clients to
design work systems, improve team
performance, and support more
effective leader behaviors. Diana co-
authored Agile Retrospectives:
Making Good Teams Great, Liftoff
(2nd ed): Start and Sustain
Successful Agile Teams, and Five
Rules for Accelerated Learning.
James Shore teaches, writes, and
consults on Agile development
processes. He is a recipient of the
Agile Alliance's Gordon Pask Award
for Contributions to Agile Practice
and co-author of The Art of Agile
Development.
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Zone Benefit Investment Learn From Time to Fluency
Focusing
Greater visibility into teams’
work; ability to redirect.
Team development and work
process design.
Scrum, Kanban, non-
technical XP
2-6 months
Delivering
Low defects and high
productivity.
Lowered productivity during
technical skill development.
Extreme Programming,
DevOps movement
+3-24 months
Optimizing
Higher-value deliveries and
better product decisions.
Social capital expended on
moving business decisions
and expertise into team.
Lean Software Development,
Lean Startup, Beyond
Budgeting
+1-5 years
Strengthening
Cross-team learning and
better organizational
decisions.
Time and risk in developing
new approaches to managing
the organization.
Organization design and
complexity theories
unknown
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• Does your company make software as its central business?
• If Yes, all zones applicable
• If No, Focusing or Delivering zone may be good enough
• Which Agile Fluency Zone do you aspire to?
• Focusing: Individual contributors work in collaborative teams.
• Delivering: Your technical teams consistently deliver business value on the market cadence.
• Optimizing: Cross-functional teams contain all the skillsets and domain knowledge needed.
• Strengthening: Your teams contribute to the greater good of the organization beyond team product focus.
• How much time are you willing to invest in an agile transformation?
• Four to eight months
• Six months to two years
• One to five years
Why custom tailor?
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• Routine, smooth, skillful ease
• What you do automatically without thinking
• Example: Riding a bicycle (goals/needs determine practices)
• Riding to commute?
• Riding for leisure?
• BMX / Extreme Sports?
• Tour de France?
What is Fluency?
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Dangers of going on auto-pilot
20 years of experience
“acceptable performance”
5 years of
experience
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• Develops skills for which effective training
techniques exist
• Builds on previously acquired skills
• Depends on clear, immediate feedback
• Stretches the learner’s comfort zone (so
not always fun)
Deliberate Practice
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“A team is a small number of people with
complementary skills who are committed
to a common purpose, impact goals, and
approach for which they hold themselves
mutually accountable.”
What is a Team?
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Teams are Complex Adaptive Systems
THE MACRO IS IN
THE MICRO
TEAMS ARE
MIRRORS OF THE
ORGANIZATION
“Fluency is how a team develops software when it’s under pressure”
– Martin Fowler
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Expected Benefits
Transparency
Core Metric:
At least once per month, the team shows
what it’s working on and how it’s progressing
from a business value perspective.
Reduce Risk:
Management knows when the team is building
the wrong thing, or isn’t making progress, and
has the ability to positively intervene.
Achievement
Increase Productivity:
The team regularly reflects upon, tunes, and
adjusts its work habits to provide more value.
Increase ROI:
The team focuses their work on the priority
that they are told is most important to the
business.
Increase ROI:
The team makes incremental progress on
business priorities every month.
Alignment
Increase Productivity:
Collaborative communication reduces
misunderstandings and hand-off delays
among team members.
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Ideas to help identify specific capabilities
Focusing Delivering Optimizing
Iteration Demos
Iteration Retrospectives
Backlog Refinement
(Virtual) Team Room
Generalizing Specialist
WIP Limits
Definition of Done
Continuous Integration
Continuous Deployment
Pair Programming
Incremental Design
Test-Driven Development
Exploratory Testing
Sustainable Pace
Design Thinking
A/B Testing
Build-Measure-Learn
Customer Visits
Paper Prototypes
Feature Flags
Collective Ownership
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Case Studies
Team-Health Assessment for Engineering Organizations
Brent Miller – New Relic Software
https://blog.newrelic.com/technology/team-health-assessment/
Real Agile transformation case study, with Agile Fluency Model
Asad Safari – Omid, a wealth management company
https://medium.com/@asad.safari/real-agile-transformation-
case-study-with-agile-fluency-model-4aa0e73a1088
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•Watch the ten-minute overview of the Agile Fluency Model.
•Read the Whitepaper:
https://martinfowler.com/articles/agileFluency.html
•Join the Community:
http://www.agilefluency.org/
•Connect with the Facilitators:
https://www.agilefluency.org/diagnostic.php#facilitator-list
•Play the Game:
https://www.agilefluency.org/game.php
Further Resources
