What Does Good Agile Look Like? (Agile By Example 2018)
We attend Agile By Example because we believe in Agile and we want to develop our skills and improve how our teams work. We work Agile because we have had great experiences and success working this way. Our experience is not common! Most "Agile Transformations" fail. Many (if not most) Agile teams have poor Agile practices. People new to Agile struggle through these failed transformations or poor practices and get a wrong impression of Agile, because they have never seen it done well! Poor experience with Agile leads to the many myths and fallacies that developers repeat to each other or post on social media. What can a dedicated Agilist do to inspire their teams to embrace Agile or work on improving their Agile processes? Two years ago, I came to ABE to talk about the culture of continuous improvement that we were building at Avvo. It turns out that one of the biggest challenges we faced was explaining what our vision was, where we were going. I will return for this years' ABE to talk about what a high-performing Agile company looks like, how to create and explain a vision for your teams and I will share the painful lessons we learned at Avvo as we worked on our evolution. I will also share the model I use to help with an Agile cultural transformation.
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What Does Good Agile Look Like? (Agile By Example 2018)
- 1. WHAT DOES GOOD AGILE LOOK LIKE? KEVIN GOLDSMITH
- 9. @KevinGoldsmith HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE BRIEF: AGILE IS THE NEW NORMAL
- 10. @KevinGoldsmith
- 11. @KevinGoldsmith
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- 14. @KevinGoldsmith
- 19. @KevinGoldsmith IT’S A MINDSET, NOT A RULEBOOK
- 20. @KevinGoldsmith FOR MANY NOW, AGILE ISN’T SOMETHING YOU CHOOSE TO DO, IT IS SOMETHING YOU ARE FORCED TO DO
- 21. @KevinGoldsmith 2017 VERSIONONE STATE OF AGILE REPORT
- 22. @KevinGoldsmith AGILE TRANSFORMATION WITHOUT CULTURE TRANSFORMATION BREEDS BAD AGILE AND ANGRY PEOPLE
- 24. @KevinGoldsmith HOW DO WE OVERCOME THIS?
- 25. @KevinGoldsmith WE NEED TO BE BETTER STORYTELLERS!
- 27. @KevinGoldsmith WE NEED TO TRANSFORM ORGANIZATIONS
- 29. @KevinGoldsmith
- 30. @KevinGoldsmith TESTING IS NOT AGILE! Avvo Developer
- 31. @KevinGoldsmith DOCUMENTATION IS NOT AGILE! Same Avvo Developer
- 32. @KevinGoldsmith CODE COMMENTS ARE NOT AGILE! Different Avvo Developer
- 33. @KevinGoldsmith ANYTHING I DON’T WANT TO DO IS NOT AGILE!
- 34. @KevinGoldsmith WE WERE DOING AGILE, BUT WE WEREN’T AGILE
- 35. @KevinGoldsmith 2017 VERSIONONE STATE OF AGILE REPORT
- 36. @KevinGoldsmith
- 40. HIRED AN AGILE COACH STEP 1
- 41. @KevinGoldsmith STEP 1 YOU NEED A “PARTNER IN CRIME” ▸ This effort is too hard to do alone ▸ Need multiple eyes into different levels of the organization in different teams ▸ Need a second opinion on your crazy ideas
- 43. @KevinGoldsmith STEP 2 SNEAK IN AGILE THINKING ▸ Introduced Agile Facilitation methods to company meetings ▸ Lean Coffee ▸ UnConferences ▸ Introduced Agile Concepts to Senior Leadership ▸ WIP limits ▸ Strict prioritization and backlog
- 44. @KevinGoldsmith STEP 2 SNEAK IN AGILE THINKING ▸ Introduced the concept of retrospectives outside of development and product ▸ Used to “celebrate” projects and teams ▸ Guided process ▸ Dedicated goals around learning ▸ Coaching to keep them blameless
- 46. @KevinGoldsmith
- 47. @KevinGoldsmith STEP 3 RETHINKING ACCOUNTABILITY ▸ Move from date-based thinking to bigger picture thinking around company priorities and metrics supporting those priorities so that you can let teams be agile instead of waterfall
- 48. EDUCATE THE COMPANY ON AGILE STEP 4
- 49. @KevinGoldsmith STEP 4 AGILE NEEDS FULL ORGANIZATIONAL SUPPORT ▸ Created an Agile 101 Class ▸ Create a common vocabulary ▸ Introduce Agile Concepts in a general way ▸ Four hours ▸ Fun exercises ▸ Required for technology and product, but open to the whole company ▸ About 2/3 of the company attended including Sales, HR, Finance, Marketing
- 50. TOOLS SUPPORT AGILE STEP 5
- 51. @KevinGoldsmith IF YOU WANT TO ITERATE, YOU HAVE TO SHIP.
- 52. @KevinGoldsmith STEP 5 REMOVING IMPEDIMENTS TO SHIPPING ▸ Cut time to deploy from 5-8 hours to 5-15 minutes ▸ cleaned up tests ▸ improved tooling so it failed less ▸ Made it drastically easier to create new services instead of adding to the old monoliths ▸ Added more tools so devs could ship themselves ▸ Added more testers so things weren’t stuck in test
- 53. MAKE AGILE WHO YOU ARE STEP 6
- 54. @KevinGoldsmith STEP 6 HIRE FOR AGILE ▸ Make Agile mindset part of hiring criteria ▸ brings more experience into teams ▸ creates more Agile voices in team discussions
- 55. OPEN THE PROCESS TO ALL STEP 7
- 56. @KevinGoldsmith STEP 7 DON’T HIDE THE AGILE ▸ Opened end of sprint demos to the larger organization ▸ Made them fun! ▸ Made visible the artifacts from Sprint Planning, non-team retrospectives ▸ Started visits with other companies to knowledge share and expose my team to other ideas
- 57. @KevinGoldsmith HOW DID IT WORK?
- 60. @KevinGoldsmith TEAMS TOOK CONTROL OF THEIR PROCESSES
- 61. @KevinGoldsmith TEAMS REQUESTED MORE TRAINING AND COACHING
- 68. @KevinGoldsmith WE WEREN’T DOING AGILE. WE WERE AGILE.
- 69. @KevinGoldsmith AND THAT IS WHAT GOOD AGILE LOOKS LIKE