When the Tail doesn't Wag the Dog - Coaching for Agility
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This document discusses Antoinette Coetzee's experience coaching teams in becoming more agile. It describes some initial successes in 2019, but also challenges that emerged over time. Key lessons learned include focusing on using agile practices as tools rather than goals, letting go of predefined notions of what agility looks like, and recognizing that leadership involvement and feedback are critical for successful transformation. The experience highlighted how agility is a continuous improvement process dependent on collaboration and adapting to changing needs.
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When the Tail doesn't Wag the Dog - Coaching for Agility
- 1. When the Tail doesn't Wag the Dog Coaching for Agility BY ANTOINETTE COETZEE Agile Nigeria 2020
- 2. Z I M C O R E H U B S | D E S I G N T H I N K I N G@ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t It started off so well… March 2019
- 3. You cannot coach someone that’s not in the room @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 4. Z I M C O R E H U B S | D E S I G N T H I N K I N G Total contact time? 3 days @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 5. Z I M C O R E H U B S | D E S I G N T H I N K I N G@ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 6. Focus Areas Virtual collaboration Rework Stabilise after change Collaboration tools Work Overload @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 7. Z I M C O R E H U B S | D E S I G N T H I N K I N G@ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t 12 experiments Agile practices Collaboration Ways of working
- 8. Agile is as Agile does: model the behavior you are looking to cultivate @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 9. Z I M C O R E H U B S | D E S I G N T H I N K I N G@ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t I see a bad moon arisin’… May 2019
- 10. Z I M C O R E H U B S | D E S I G N T H I N K I N G Lugano @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t June 2019
- 11. @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 12. There is no textbook definition of what agility looks like for a team, for an organisation, or an industry. NOBODY knows, and even if somebody did, by tomorrow it will look different. @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 13. How do I add the most value to this wonderful team? I SIMPLY ASKED: @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 14. So what did we do that worked? @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 15. Let go of Agile as a goal and use it as a TOOL @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 16. The impact? Dramatically reduced rework @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t Reduced turn-around time Focus on the right things Psychological safety Continuously improving Collaboration
- 17. Major Impediments Geographical spread Matrix org Agility in strategy and execs Too many initiatives @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 18. Z I M C O R E H U B S | D E S I G N T H I N K I N G@ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t So long, Marianne! September 2019
- 19. As a leader, what will make your transformation successful? Your involvement Chemistry and relationship An appetite for coaching Clarity on priorities @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t Courage Feedback Clarifying expectations Your leadership
- 20. If your desire is to be told how to become Agile, you are not ready for it. @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
- 21. Z I M C O R E H U B S | D E S I G N T H I N K I N G@ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t March 2020
- 22. “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” ― Lilla Watson @ a n t o i n e t t e C o e t
Editor's Notes
- I have always been very fortunate in my life – being at the right place at the right time. My introduction to Agile many years ago was a stroke of luck, working for small companies that were bought by big names brought me a lot of luck, attending courses where I met people I still work with today has brought a lot of luck, so when I was suggested as the coach to support a pharma giant in Switzerland by coaching colleagues on opposite sides of the Atlantic I also thought that was very lucky. I mean, c’mon, I live at the Southern tip of Africa – who would NOT want to work in beautiful Switzerland, as part of a group of deeply experienced agile coaches, THREE of whom were actually my friends! Little did I know….
- Now let me first give you some background. The organisation is a giant. They bought an American giant pharma a few years ago, so they are well represented in both Europe and the US. They have a purpose I could certainly identify with – they only develop meds for terminal illnesses. Literally a case of life or death. We were launching 8 pilots in the clinical research area, which is called molecules to medicine. Now I didn’t know this, but it takes on average 10 years to launch a new medicine. And it takes a LOT of money. When a new molecule is invented, it is patented. And the patent only lasts for 10 years. After that the generic market can produce drugs as well. So not only is it critical to get the drug into the market as quickly as possible from a health perspective, it is also critical from a commercial perspective. Realising this, the company asked McKinsey in 2018 to help them see whether how they could use Agile to improve time to market, mostly. As a result of the work MicKinsey did, there was some changes in how the division was structured. Instead of having the traditional silos of product development, marketing, regulatory, etc cross-functional teams were formed. So we arrived to find what was known as a Lifecycle team, that comprised of a Triad made up of a Lifecycle Leader, the Product Lead, the Marketing /Commercial lead, leading a team of between 80-120 people. The Triad included a PM to form the operational team, so I dealt with the Quad. At least for a while, before Life had other plans… So we were off to a great start – cross-functional teams! Another thing that looked really great at the start, and continued to be great for me, was that the group also created a team performance coaching capability, staffing it with professional coaches. There were a number of us in the Agile coaching group that were also professional coaches, and in my experience coaches work well with other coaches. Wellllll, we’ll get to that…. I met my Triad, actually whilst at the BA conference in NYC last year, and I gave them a short overview of how this would go, which was going to be a brief review of their situation, some feedback from me, a kickoff session that would include some training, and then come up with a vision and direction for the 3 months. So in the words of one of my musical heros – it started off SO well! For about 30 mins we made a perfect pair. And then the problem that really hamstrung us first raised its head: the team was spread out over 3 main locations : Basel, Welwyn in the UK, and San Francisco. It was mirrored in the quad : 2 were based in Basel, 1 in Welwyn and 1 in San Francisco.
- I started out, like I normally, contracting or creating an alliance with each of the quad members, building a trusted relationshi[. Some of the things they thought Agile would bring were not in scope for me, like sorting out the relationship with their outside partner, most of it was. There were a lot of requests for giving them TOOLS to go faster. Then I tried to get the group together virtually so we could do a bit of alignment of what the problems were, and whether they could be solved by Agile. Weeeeeellllll, that went nowhere very slowly. The problem was that there were 2 golden hours in every day – the time SF, Basel and Welwyn were awake together – and it was already booked. Every day. The leaders wanted to help, but did not really know how to, since people are also travelling all the time, to attend conferences, FDA meetings, etc, etc. It was like herding cats! Eventually in a desperate attempt to move forward they picked a focus area – the product development in Welwyn. Most of the members of the function were based in Welwyn, so I travelled there to spend a day with the team. We did a Value Stream Mapping, and a retro, and along with individual interviews I had enough information AFTER TWO MONTHS, to give them objective feedback about the usefulness of Agile in their area.
- In 2 months I had an hour here, an hour there – what normally takes me a week or so in elapsed time had taken 2 months. This was HARD!
- Still, we had a starting point. On the plus side they were a healthy engaged team with good leadership, a good product. Remember that most of the people had PhD’s and a large number of them even had DOUBLE PhDs. So they were brilliant researchers and dedicated. And that was one of the biggest problems – they were working harder and harder and harder to get stuff done. Healthy team relations Focus on delivery – Can Do attitude Cross-functional LCT LCT leadership respected and trusted Regular communication sessions Deep technical expertise Shared awareness of issues Awareness of need and value for decision making at lower levels Good product Quarterly goal setting Focus areas Unnecessary rework: Abbvie interaction Clarity on strategic direction Shifting priorities Geographic spread Finding time to collaborate Some Us vs Them, compounded by functional silo’s Finding their feet after recent changes: Staying informed in ReImagineD world Establishing relationships after leadership changes Tools not working well Virtual tools Information sharing in general People are working too hard: A lot of work in progress No time for reflection Some people are bottlenecks Working on multiple projects and teams – context switching
- Ultimately there were 5 areas I suggested we focus on – reducing the amount of rework that had various causes, not least the relationship with their external partner, who also held the purse strings, but also because the strategic direction was not always clear. Improving the quality of virtual conversations. In a lot of cases the 2 hour virtual meetings consoisted of somebody walking through an immaculate slide to explain the latest developments of a particular study, maybe one or two of the 40 people on the call would ask a question, but everybody else’s videos and mics were off. We all know that when you are on Zoom or Skype and your video and mic is off you are so easily tempted to do something else – well, this was no exception! 80% of those precious 2 golden hours taken up by one way communication download to a bunch of people who are completely disengaged! Ouch! The organisational reshuffle had an impact on new members to the team from the US. The team needed to form properly, agree on the way they wanted to work together, their norms, values, etc in order to become a real team again. There were several tools in use by different team members – it was causing a real problem and again a lot of rework. Everyone knew that information sharing via powerpoint decks were time-consuming and inefficient. The biggest problem in terms of impact was the capacity of people. Here we wanted to pay attention to continuous context switching as a result of working on multiple initiatives, too much work in progress and on people who were bottlenecks. The approach we were going to take was Action Learning, which is basically coming up with a hypotheses about what can improve a problem with the ones experiencing the problem, defining an experiment, an action, and then learning by performing the experiment.
- There were 12 experiments that I could suggest, of which only 4 really had an agile flavour per se
- Those were my suggestions, but of course I just see a small part of the picture, especially after having only spent 3 days with them in total – mostly virtual. So we had a kickoff to discuss and build out and prioritise. I flew to the UK for a few days, full of hope and enthusiasm, since NOW we are going to really get going! And a full FIVE people showed up!!!!! The LCT leader was there, supportive and open, as always, the marketing could only attend late afternoon, since he was in SF, the And the 5 people there suggested some tweaks and prioritised the experiments, based on value to them. And we ended up selecting the top 3 only. The interaction with their external partner, visualising work and retrospectives on a bigger scale. So now we were really going to cook with gas! Well, the next day everybody had so much to do they had to work from home… So I contacted them all and they managed to make 3 hours free on the day after. Now I have NEVER had this problem , since the first thing I always do with people when I start coaching is to make an alliance with them – how we will work together, etc, etc Problem was that I could NEVER get enough of them together to create this alliance. But wait, there was light at the end of the tunnel – they were planning their quarterly offsite and they would give me a day of the agenda so we could do an alliance, I could do some education and we could make a big dent in our experiments. In the meantime we would continue with the retrospectives, since people reported real changes in their thinking, their process and their attitude. Hypotheses : Visualising work will - aid communication by localising conversations around the work - limit "in person" conversations by recording progress and issues in context of a work item - aid prioritisation - more clearly ID bottlenecks and delays Proof : people use the board and less requests for information come to the team members Disprove : people don't use the board and/or no reduction in comms Experiment length : 4 weeks Hypotheses : Weekly/biweekly retrospectives work will - start improving the way of work little by little - create the space to stop and reflect - increase shared awareness of impediments - establish the habit of small incremental improvements - keep focus on the pilot Proof : people report positive on improvements that happen as a result of the retro, people attend the retro's regularly Disprove : None of the retro improvements are followed by the team Experiment length : 6 weeks This is what we stuck with mostly, except the first one was disproved so quickly we chose another that was an extension of it – that consciously “contracting” with one another whenever we work together
- things back at home with the rest of the agile coaches were really tough – we could not figure out how to move things along. I was struggling myself, obsessing over whether there was something that I was missing? And we were butting our heads against the internal coaches, asking over and over and over again what the difference was between a professional coach and an agile coach. Since a couple of us could play either role, we tried to explain. Somehow it did not land. I was still really enjoying working with my team and we were making progress, but in the meantime it was really hard for me to make a living frankly. It was one of the points of contention – the coaching company I worked with continued to put pressure on me to embed myself at the client 2-3 days a week, which I refused. As a coach I cannot bring myself to ask people money when I am not delivering value. And although I was doing a lot of coaching and mentoring of the leadership team, there certainly was not enough work to justify parking off at the client. At the beginning of June only 3 of the pilots were still going – all the others had been cancelled prematurely. But there was going to be Lugano!!!!
- Nirvana…. Now let me tell you about Lugano. Im a pleb – I have never gone skiing or scuba diving or anything glamorous. I love travelling, and I love cities and I love nature. Lugano was something else! I stayed in the fanciest hotel ever, it was breathtakingly beautiful and I remember taking a photo of the price of a glass of wine and sending it home, where we be able to buy a CASE of wine for the same price! Anyway, I was SO prepared for this f2f session that I was overprepared. We were going to do a game first, and then the Alliance. I had 6 hours. We started 1.5 hours late. Hmmm…. I had to cut something. I really, really , really wanted to illustrate the impact of WIP to them, and I have a really great game – Klaus Leopold’s boat building game. So that’s what we did. BIG mistake! Never will I ever play paper folding games with busy PhD’s again… halfway through it felt like the air had left the room. The insights were really good though, and a good discussion followed. Seeing that we started so late I could not continue with an alliance, and they in any case had decisions to make, so I facilitated that for them. The purpose of the day was not fulfilled. I went out to dinner with them, but the Dom Perignon , yes really!, tasted bitter in my mouth. I felt utterly defeated. A few days afterwards I had a call with my performance coach, who had joined the Lugano meeting virtually. It was a tough conversation, but something she said in passing struck me…
- She asked me why agile coaches always have to be in the spotlight, why they have to run the show, etc. And whilst I knew some of the answers to that, what she said next really struck me: Why can’t you just be of service to the team? And I realised that even as a professionally trained coach I had missed the point: I was trying to land a whole bunch of things with the team because I considered my job to be increasing their agility And maybe, just maybe, that was not my real job
- And then it became really simple
- Hy mag dalk wegval