Natalia Lukas - Agile Champions, a critical part of Agile transformation
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Agile Champions are key to an organization's Agile transformation. They help guide teams through regular ceremonies and increments using principles like visualization. Their coaching spreads Agile practices and helps transform individual teams, improving communication and collaboration. Lessons learned include timing the size of champion teams better and clarifying their goals during onboarding. Today there are over 60 Agile Champions across 7 offices who continue growing in experience.
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Natalia Lukas - Agile Champions, a critical part of Agile transformation
- 1. Agile Champions Key element of your Agile transformation Natalia Lukas September 2018
- 2. Nice to meet you! www.linkedin.com/in/natalialukas “In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or step back into safety.” - Abraham H. Maslow
- 5. The beginning of the story
- 6. Who are Agile Champions? Definition Expectations Experience Mindset
- 7. & “WHY” and “WHAT” “HOW” and “WHO” STRATEGY INCREMENTS & MEASURABLE GOALS GUARDRAILS & PRINCIPLES NORMS & GUIDING PRINCIPLES STRATEGIC COACHING TACTICAL COACHING
- 8. How they work • Guiding principles • Regular ceremonies • Increments • Visualization
- 10. The impact Examples and results of Agile Champions network
- 11. Introduction trainings • Broad over deep • Exposure to everyone
- 12. Transforming their own teams Creative Tank • Global summit • Global standups and regular retrospectives • One singular Kanban board • Improved communication and collaboration • Closer to customer Pricing & Portfolio teamGlobal Email team
- 13. Pull signals
- 14. Learnings What we would & wouldn’t do differently
- 15. Continue doing Coaches act as PO Champions self-organized Size of teamDiversity Motivation
- 16. Would do differently Timing & size of teamChampions retention Unclear goalsOnboarding and education
- 17. Today we have around 60 Agile Champions operating in 7 different offices around the world. The group keeps growing (in size and in experience).
- 19. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL 19 WWW WWW ? Puzzles ? (leave your email)
- 21. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL 21 Contact details: nlukasova@vistaprint.com www.linkedin.com/in/natalialukas
Editor's Notes
- Try to keep your questions for the end. There will be time.
- I am going to introduce myself in X photos… I am fresh mom I am passionate agile coach – I am most passionate about people – growing talent, helping people to improve the way they work and shift their mindset I love travelling I am passionate volunteer and board member
- Today I am going to tell you story about this amazing group of people who have been shifting and helping Vistaprint to become agile.
- Why we decided to build champions network? When it started How we looked for people Who we looked for What was the response / reaction Who were the people who signed up Chris was leading by example. Chris – high level in org. He said “we saw value of self-org… we need help” It wasn’t pushed on people. It was optional people. To discuss how to bring value to the org. Chris asked for help. It was experiment on the beginning. Champions needed to define what and how to do. It was driven by the passion to change their teams. From all in: We believe Champions to be one of the biggest levers we have for spreading the Lean and Agile mindset and successful practices throughout the org. Through their broad reach and personal conviction, they increase the rate of exposure and adoption of these concepts and practices. We have abundant evidence that change introduced by a local Champion lasts longer and delivers more value, both early on and long term, than changes introduced by any other influencers. Why? Coaches wouldn’t be fast enough to bring the change. Stickies on wall Every team should do Retros Trainings… How we chose to work together: Pull versus push Breadth vs. depth
- How do we define them Time commitment Experience How the definition has shifted over time -> we don’t need so much experience but mindset matters Expectation of Agile coaches and org Agile coaches as PO Self-organized team Helping coaches to educate the org Bringing agile principles to their teams Eyes and ears in the org Very diverse group of people – different departments, different levels. Mindset is the only link. Company commitment -> there needs to be support system for them in case they don’t have support from their managers
- Let me tell you about the differences of the roles of us, coaches and champions… First of all, it’s important to say that the connection between these two groups is a very close relationship. We need each other to succeed. There is no hierarchy. It’s very close and strong relationship based on trust. We’ve spent lot of time to build psychological safety within the team. Whenever there have been any tension, we’ve revised it, reflected to improve. It is partnership – we complement each others work, and there is lot of collaboration. These principles have been key for both groups to succeed, to be strong and to move forward with the transformation. However what are some key differences in our roles? Coaches as PO defining the why and what, while champions define the how and who (they are fully self organized around the work)
- Tactical Regular ceremonies Retrospectives Trello board – prioritization Work was extracted from the strategy of agile coaches. Agile all in was guidance for their increments of work.
- Why? To show we mean it seriously To introduce the guild To attract more talent To communicate their activities How? The breakfast of champions Articles Posters to invite to trainings All hands meetings
- Through the next several examples I want to show you how critical and impactful the existence and work of Agile champions (or any champions) is.
- Broad over deep First we did deep (before 2016) – we needed success stories and we needed to know that it’s going to work Then we started to see gaps between teams with agile mindset and working and teams who haven’t been exposed to agile, it was creating tension Then we decided to go broad to make sure that the entire organization understands agile - Reasons to go broad over deep: Give Exposure about agile to everyone Everyone speaking same language To start breaking silos and start becoming partners at work (x-functional teams) towards one outcome Opportunity for pull signals
- Most of the initiatives run by champions start as EXPERIMENTS. People are more opened and willing to try for limited time, than to implement complete change. Creative tank Cross functional collaboration – we are talking about creative, marketing and go to market folks How we can cut down on cycle time but also how we can collaborate better First one was experiment, now it’s our good practice Idea of tank created and lead by one of our agile champions Great results! Pricing and portfolio Team with 2 agile champions + after leader of the team went through ALP they wanted to change the way they worked Great results since their global summit! Team implemented some key agile practices – stand ups, regular retros, one singular Kanban They are willing to experiment, they improved collaboration and removed some barriers from their value stream Global email team We are talking about x-functional team again – creative + email marketing team + pricing They’ve been struggling with delivering emails w/o errors and on time Thanks to 2 agile champions they’ve been constantly improving – removing barriers, identifying and minimalizing the reasons why the emails were delivered late or with errors They have been tracking their improvements, cycle and lead time
- Reacting on pull signals: Team formations Special workshops Co-facilitation with agile coaches ALP Summits – pricing team, market team, London team Small coaching engagements
- We learnt through trial and error. We didn’t have idea how to build successful network so we have been learning along the way. And we still are learning…
- 1. Close relationships with coaches + Informal group of people – trust 2. Coaches as PO + champions self-organized 3. Size of the team 4. Diversity – different functions, levels and experiences 5. Motivation – what motivates them? Growth and Continuous learnings Conferences 6. Fun!
- 1st Launch in Boston – timing and amount of people invited -> try to grow slow even in big office, look for quality, not for quantity 1st agile champions in bos – too managed by coaches w/o any clear vision and goals 2nd agile champions in bos (after BCN group has been up and running) – wrong timing (very close to re-org) and too many people; also too much of a structure / prescription by coaches – people didn’t feel autonomy and they were focused internally on how to structure themselves, instead of what they want to achieve 3rd agile champions in bos – recent! People with upfront commitment to be part of the group – much smaller group!; clarity on their role and expectations from coaches; not prescriptive- much more autonomy to define how they want to work and what they want to do (they only have strategy from coaches) 2. Retention – commitment of the people vs. support of org (try to make the role official so people don’t need to worry to commit) 3. Slow delivery because of unclear direction – sometimes the guild felt stuck 4. Better onboarding + educational pathway for (new) champions
- This story started in 2016 with a small group of champions in BCN and with no clear idea on how to implement this concept of champions network and whether it will be successful. Today it’s 2 years later and we have around 60 Agile Champions operating in 7 different offices around the globe and across different functions including marketing, creative, development, analytics and customer care. We made this concept work and we will continue investing in it because we have seen tremendous impact on Vistaprint’s agile and cultural transformation. Our next big increment is going to be to help bringing these groups together, help them to connect..
- Now after hearing our story, I would like to ask you… And we are going to use stand up again Look around because you might want to talk to your colleagues after. Who already have active agile champions network? Who thinks that this is an interesting idea to implement? Who is curious to know more?
- Retro Whitepaper