What we all see as a big transformation, is actually the sum total of all the little things that add up to such big events. Yet, how often, we ignore those little things, but instead keep trying to achieve the big transformation thorough large scale changes. In this talk, I explore the value of building trust, the power of little habits, and how, even the best intentions of doing the right thing and doing the thing right, can fail miserably if we don't address the issues at the system level.

1. Sandwiches, trash and doing
the little things right
Key lessons from a coaching engagement
Munish Malik. Vishal Desai
Product Lead / Coach @ Equal Experts

2. The ask

3. Coach a strategic cloud platform
team to transform behaviors, embed
new ways of working and build their
software delivery capability.

4. Here’s
what we
found
Picture by Maria - Bochnia/Polsk - on Pixabay

5. No safety net
insufficient test automation

6. Far away from the
users
struggling to deliver value

7. Moving big batches of
software
long lead times

8. Efficiency over
effectiveness
would mean making the wrong things
efficient

9. So what did we do?

10. Jon Dickinson, CCO, Equal Experts

11. Test-tube approach
● Being small and time bound, with the aim of delivering working
code into production
● Having a team that has permission to try new ways of working
● Being ‘glass tube exercise’ visible but protected from the rest of
the organisation
● Having the ambition to prove out new ways of working before
scaling out to the rest of the delivery organisation

12. Product stream - build the right thing:
● Initiatives for closer collaboration with the users
● The engineering team takes part in the discovery track
● The Three Amigos and other such efforts to improve dev-BA-product collab.
● Intensify user story, backlog refinement efforts, BDD (specification)
Engineering stream - build the thing right:
● TDD, BDD (Implementation)
● Test Automation, Pair Programming
● Lead time reduction

13. T-shaped
● Strong focus on a single test-tube team
● Wider audience during training and knowledge sharing sessions

14. How did we go about it?

15. Chris Matts, Author, Agile Transformation Lead, Coach

16. Story of
Lieutenant Commander
Conway

18. Lesson #1
The value of building
trust and relationship
(before coaching)

19. Picture by Lisa Scott - Northumberland/Great Britain - on Pixabay

20. Billion year history of
the ice-ages

22. “Lessons from one field
can often teach us
something important
about unrelated fields”
- Morgan Housel, Author, The
Psychology of Money

23. “When nothing seems to help, I go
and look at a stonecutter
hammering away at his rock,
perhaps a hundred times without as
much as a crack showing in it. Yet at
the hundred and first blow it will
split in two, and I know it was not
that last blow that did it—but all
that had gone before.”
- James Clear, Atomic Habits

24. Questions to consider
- Could we break down our goals into little things?
- Could the teams focus only on those little things? One at a time, until they
become a habit.
- Could good outcomes be a side-effect of doing the little things, repeatedly,
consistently, over a long time?

25. What were some of the
little things we tried?

26. - Intensified refinement efforts. Sliced the stories
appropriately. Small. Similarly Sized.
- Spec by Example.
- Engineers in discovery and co-authoring user stories
- Prioritised finishing work over starting new work
- Made the current state visual
- Started working much more closely with our users

27. We started to see:
- More value emerging from the
kind of work the team chose to
deliver
- Development lead time started
to reduce
- A happier team

28. Lesson #2
Focus on doing the little things
right, repeatedly, consistently,
over a period of time - the big
things get taken care of.

29. However, we saw the changes were not really
sustainable.
We were struggling to scale beyond a couple of teams.
Teams used to regress upon reaching a certain stage.
Quality was still a big challenge.

30. Photo by Ádám Urvölgyi - Salgótarján/Magyarország - on Pixabay

31. The adoption to new ways of working was
more with the product owners and the
facilitation group like the Scrum Masters,
but not so much with the engineers.

32. Why was that?

33. Started to reflect on the
engagement with the
leadership group.

34. Coaches were engaging
with the leadership
group via “sync-calls” or
“fortnightly-reviews”

35. Was there an on-going and
shared commitment between
coaches and leadership on not
just the transformation goals,
but how to achieve them?

36. Were the coaches aware
of the challenges and
pressure that the
leadership team was
facing?

37. What was the message being
hammered to the engineers
during appraisals?
The need of on-time delivery v/S
the little things - like improving a
particular engineering practice.

38. Lesson #3
Coaching is needed at all levels of
the organisation for the
transformation to be sustainable

39. To consider
- Coaching over coaches
- Player-coach model for agile transformation

40. Thank
you!
Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash