Introduction
Agile has become a core approach in today’s corporate world. This webinar covers what makes an Agile transformation successful. Barbara Roberts, with her decades of industry experience, shares key insights. She discusses what defines successful Agile change and the common challenges organisations face. Learn how to adapt Agile values to deliver sustainable change.
Video
Access the presentation here presentation-link, tune in to the audio version audio-link, or read the full transcript transcript-link.
About the speaker
Barbara Roberts has 50 years of IT experience. She has been a part of the Agile journey since 1994. Her pragmatic approach has helped organisations across all sectors adapt to Agile methods. Known for her common-sense style, Barbara focuses on helping complex organisations embrace 21st-century challenges.
Transcript
Here’s the full transcript of the webinar.
00:00:00 Barbara Roberts: Thanks very much, Jay, and thank you for asking me to do this for anybody that doesn’t know me. I love talking about agile. In fact, I’ve been doing it for so long, probably explains some of the grey hair as well, and quite a lot of the grey hair. So, what I want to talk about today is “Agile Transformation – What should ‘good’ look like? And also, if you’re caveats of things to be aware of, whether you’re a recipient or a deliverer of agile transformation.
00:00:26 Barbara Roberts: So yes, I am your Agile transformation coach because I’ve got a lot of experience in agile. I do most of my work in the complex corporate world, so I don’t get the simple, you know. Could you just help us do X and get the complicated ones or could you come in and sort out something because it’s in a mess. So basically, I’ve been around quite a long time, I think that. So, what I want to talk about today is just a little bit about what is in Agile Transformation. Is it a silver bullet? Will it solve the impossible? And then I’m just going to talk through my typical steps for successful transformations. But just to say that the views expressed here on my own, based on my own experience of delivering and rescuing agile transformation. So, I’m not saying this is the only way I’m just talking about what I’ve seen that works and what doesn’t work and what to be careful of.
00:01:20 Barbara Roberts: So, I’m not dissing any other way. So, one of the things I’m seeing more and more which in a way is really good compared to 20 – 30 years ago is there’s a lot more talking about agile. There’s also a sort of bragging about agile, so you often go to conferences, and somebody will stand up and or there’s a large corporate announcement said. “We are now agile”, we have now transformed to agile, we just do agile. The reality is often slightly different, so when people say they’ve transformed to agile. Ohh know who it is that the company that’s talking about this. And I love this cartoon in this sort of complex structure and at the bottom there’s this little red thing is our agile project and quite often people talk about we’ve transformed. In reality, they’ve got one very small piece of agile in large organisation, that isn’t agile transformation.
00:02:20 Barbara Roberts: So, agile isn’t just getting a small pocket working and agile transformation means change at the higher levels. And what you see is if people say we’ve transformed to agile, if you don’t make any changes at the higher level, it’s a bit like running an engine at full breadth for too long. You get mashing of teeth and smoking and then things blow up. So, for example, if you do scrum at the lowest level, it might be worth working really well. But as soon as it hits the upper levels within the organisation you get problems.
00:02:52 Barbara Roberts: So agile transformation, it’s not a quick fix, it’s not an instant binary cut over. Yesterday we were traditional, and they were agile. It just isn’t like that, there’s also a still a perception out there that agile transformation is an “IT thing”. And people so ohh yes, we’re introducing agile, we’re using Scrum and JIRA, so that’s job done. That is really, really far too simple. The Scrum is an approach, Jira is a tool and they’re great and they’re good at what they do. But if we don’t address the people thing, then again it it’s not a successful transformation. So natural transformation is basically a major change programme and like any change, it’s got to be done properly. You’ve got the sort of curve of change where people go from being worried to being extremely frightened, and there’s lots of change going on and then they come out to the other side.
00:03:47 Barbara Roberts: But if you introduce agile properly then it does involve significant behavioural change and also importantly, it’s not just about IT, a lot of the work that I do is talking to business people about how it’s going to impact them. And the reality is it eventually can affect everything from procurement to recruitment. As well as accounting so we start small and eventually we take over the world, but it takes a while. No, seriously it is a major change programme. So, the thing for me is that it’s really important to get the early steps right if you want success later on. If you start on the wrong footing, then quite often it goes horribly wrong.
00:04:32 Barbara Roberts: So, the first step for me is about making the right choices. So, I talk about the fact you need to understand never ever assume you know exactly what should be done. So, every transformation is different, and it depends on the number of things. So, for example organisation maturity. If you’re dealing with a start-up company, it’s a very, very different set of issues to deal with a long-standing company with significant legacy. If you’re a start-up and it goes wrong, you can fold down, start up again under a new name with new funding. If you’re a long-standing organisation with a significant legacy, you’ve gotta work out how you deal with the legacy. You’ve got a different grouping of people, and you can’t just afford to get it wrong and then shut down and start again, you’ve got shareholders as well.
00:05:25 Barbara Roberts: I also want to understand what’s driving the change. If everything was perfect, nobody would be asking to do this, so usually there’s something behind this request, you know. We need to go agile that is driving the need for change. I’m also very interested in who owns the change . Ideally it needs to be somebody that’s senior enough to make the change happen to help embed it. If you start to low down in the organisation, people don’t have the clout sometimes to deal with the senior management that might need to make some changes. And then are there any specific constraints that need to be thought about like is this organisation formally regulated. So, we did an agile change with a company that was so formally regulated because they did safety critical work, so you have to be doubly careful there. Also, things like what is the workforce, skill level about and what is the level of skill within the workforce. Some are highly skilled, some are have skills but they perhaps haven’t changed recently and making a change is a big step.
00:06:32 Barbara Roberts: Certainly, it’s never going to be “one- size- fits- all”. I’m never going to an organisation and what the answer is because until I talk to people I don’t know. So, the first thing I start to do is I go in and I ask questions. I need to understand this organisation and its current issues, what is going on here? Why am I here? What are you interested in? Because I’m not gonna just come in and click switch and make everything fine. So, what I normally do is I try and talk to people at different levels, so the senior management will give me their view. But to get the proper picture I need to talk to levels within the organisation from the middle layers, the bottom layers, the staff view, the management view. And often the management view, the senior management view and the staff view is very different both views are important.
00:07:22 Barbara Roberts: So, I did a transformation a while ago and when I went in to talk to them because they told me what the problems were, I said no. I need to talk to your people, and we set up a series of about 15-minute interviews. So just to talk to people sort of honestly and I said I won’t report back on this. This is between me and them; this is not going to go back to you as a report. And this will tell me what’s going on, both your view and the people at the staff as well, so that to me is really important. The other thing about understands and never assume couple of caveats here. First of all, if you are an organisation or customer, be very wary of the organisation, the consultant who arrives in with the solution for you. Here, let me tell you what your agile solution is going to be.
00:08:15 Barbara Roberts: How can they possibly know what you need? What’s the right solution for you? So, I’ll just share the worst example I ever came across. I will anonymise this to protect the guilty, I was working with a very large global, very successful company, very rich shareholders and a lot of business. And they’d invited an Agile guru apparently to come in and just chat to them and I was already in there doing agile, so they said, would you like to just sit in and listen. So, I did, and this guy came in and he was to me the worst sort of consultant, huge ego, very, very little empathy. And he came and he said, well this went too long, so I’ve got a short presentation for you it’s just two slides. So, he put the first slide up and the first slide said well ohh I won’t say exactly what he said, but he said what you do is rubbish. Can’t tell you what the second slide said because he was thrown out of the first slide, that is not the way to take on an agile transformation.
00:09:21 Barbara Roberts: Caveat for consultants and beware the customer who invites you in and then tells you exactly what you need to be doing. So how do you know this is the right solution for this customer? So again, I can’t push through an agile approach that is not the right fit for this customer, so being told we want you to implement Scrum. In my experience, is often based on somebody with a very limited understanding of agile. And also, I found quite often that when I go and talk to people, they quickly look up agile on Wikipedia so that they can tell me, show me that they understand agile as well as I do, which is not true. Second asking is asking “Why” – What are the drivers? So, what is driving this particular change for you? And in my experience, it’s to address a specific business issue. For example, we need to respond faster to market change, we’re getting left behind.
00:10:19 Barbara Roberts: We need to deliver better quality solutions because we’re building things that when they go live, they don’t work or sometimes they don’t go live. We need to be more flexible; we’re looking to expand into new areas. We need to be more flexible in the way we work or the way we deliver solutions. So, these help me understand what the change needs to deliver. What are the areas that they need to focus on? Also help me understand what is working well because we need to protect that. So, with an agile transformation I do not expect to be coming in and changing everything. All companies are successful in certain areas and within reason will protect the good within reason. Once I know what’s working well, then I can start to see the boundaries and what I find is that most transformations require compromise on both sides. Both myself as the consultant and the customer, so there’s give and take on both sides. So, if I understand the boundaries, I can see where I may need to compromise, but also where my customers may need to compromise. So, the way forward is typically somewhere in the middle. In other words, if you’re doing an agile transformation, it needs to be agile. It needs to be done in an agile way, and what we’re doing is evolution rather than revolution. So, we don’t chuck away everything you do now, we will build on what you’ve got. We’ll build on the good stuff and then add on some extra facilities, some extra skill sets and extra options.
00:11:50 Barbara Roberts: Then you start asking why about the process. So again, be wary of being told this is the way we do it, because typically I end up politely challenging the process the way it’s working. Why do you do this way? Because in my experience, quite often the logic behind the process is what’s important. And also, often the processes of being quoted to me and often being built around historical problems. And are still in place long after the problem went away. So just because we’ve always done it this way, or we’ve done it this way in living memory doesn’t mean it’s the right way moving forward. So sometimes I hear what we need is another one but just like that one. The reality is you wouldn’t have another one just like that one, if that one was working perfectly. So, the logic behind the process is important and also understanding the logic behind the process is equally important for using agile. So, I don’t want people just to say I’ve got the book, I’ll follow the book letter by the letter, because that’s not gonna work. Agile itself has to be agile, so even if you had a standard way of doing agile, you’re going to have pieces of work that won’t follow the book exactly for good reasons. So, part of being good with agile is knowing what you can bend when you can bend it and when actually to leave it alone. So certainly, when I’m coaching, when I’m training, I also talk a lot about why this thing that I’m explaining to you is important. What this thing achieves so, understanding the logic helps.
00:13:27 Barbara Roberts: So, the next thing, once I’ve had a look, I need to agree the strategy and I need to start communicating so that’s my second step. So, the way that works is I assess, so I take the feedback I’ve been given, and I start putting it together and I start thinking about which agile approach or combination of agile approaches will be best here and I’ve signed up to the agnostic agile approach. Agnostic agile approach is like, but I don’t have one. I push above all others, so if it’s Scrum that the organisation needs. I talk about Scrum, if it’s Scrum plus AgilePM, I talk about that. If it’s safe, I’ll talk about that. So, I don’t go in with a preconceived solution I work out what this particular customer needs. Having assessed then I will position what I think with the senior stakeholders.
00:14:22 Barbara Roberts: And the focus for my talking to them, my presentations to them is what are the benefits for you? What’s in this for you? Because they need to understand that it’s not ohh just agile sort everything. So, I take their problems, and I feedback to them what agile can do for you in this problem area, this and this. So, the way we can help you deliver better quality solutions is by taking early feedback with the people that are gonna be working with it instead of working in a black hole, for example. But I make sure I’m always honest, I won’t promise impossible if something is going to be difficult. If there’s going to be impact to the customer, I’ll explain what the impact is, but why it’s important, why we need to do this. And again, relate it back to what’s in it for you, if we can resolve this issue. Been provided that the customer is happy, I’ve installed the communication properly. And I do lots of short informal sessions, they may be general ones open to everybody, or they might have a specific focus, so I might do a group of senior leadership team. I might do a specific role, so I’ve done training for groups of BA’s (business analysts) or groups of project managers. I might focus on an area of the business. What does this mean to procurement? I might focus on a single topic. So, all of the above are use different little sets and I set up a set of webinars or little bites that people can go back and look at if they can’t attend the session itself as well. So, I build up the collateral support. What I’m doing, what I want to do is build a consistent correct message of what this is and what it means.
00:16:08 Barbara Roberts: And my objective, apart from building a base of accurate agile information, is doing these sessions lets people see that I’m unapproachable. And then I’m on the side of the organisation and the individuals, I’m not here as a consultant just selling you something and walking away. It seems to work because I’ve had a lot of very long-standing relationships with customers. In fact, I’ve just gone back to a customer, I did about five years’ work in a large organisation in the management team have recently moved on to a new organisation and they dug me out of my attempts to retire and said will you come and do work with us again? And I’m now doing that well, I’ve said I’m not gonna do it for the next five years, I must retire at some point. So, what we need to do with the transformation is to bring people on side as early as possible and what you find with an agile transformation is there are three categories of people that you need to deal with. People who were sort of depressed about this, their anti-agile or they’re extremely cynical. And you hear the Oh no not another fad, fad agiles just another thing, you’ll be gone tomorrow. You’re promising everything here today gone tomorrow. These are people who say they’re also people who some sometimes believe that agile is anti equality, anti governments and only sports “quick and dirty”. So, they’re concerned about this being introduced. You get the wildly enthusiastic people these are typically people who believe or hope they’re agile is anti equality, anti governments and supports “quick and dirty”. So similar worry to the people of above but they see it as a positive rather than a negative.
00:17:49 Barbara Roberts: And then the third group are the people who want to wait and see. But “let’s see how this pans out before I make any commitments to it”, which is absolutely fine. The interesting thing for me as a consultant is I’m fine with number 3, but one and two both need very careful handling. So, one of the problems I have in a recent transformation is people that think they know agile but actually are doing it wrong. So, there’s a where I am at the moment, there’s a bed of scrum people. They’ve been doing scrum for a while, but they’re not actually doing it right. And they’re saying ohh, we know how to do this and somehow, I’ve got to help them understand that what they’re doing is actually quick and dirty, and it needs to be a little bit more structured than that. What’s should need to address fears and misconceptions for people, we need to get these misconceptions and fears out into the open.
00:18:49 Barbara Roberts: So, one of examples I see are the real worry ohh agile coming in. It’s going to be the only solution here in the future and underlying that is my experience for me will no longer have any value. So, I have to reassure these people that this is not a throw everything out you’ve done and take on something new, it’s about saying all your previous skill is still value. What we’re doing here with agile is we’re adding an extra stream to what’s on offer. And for a lot of you this will be useful for some of you, you will be perfectly happy just staying outside agile and that’s absolutely fine.
00:19:26 Barbara Roberts: One of the things I do see a lot, and this is the fault of agile people. Unfortunately, agile fanatics, I’ve seen presentations at the at conferences where it’s particularly Scrum people, So there’s no role for PM in agile. So, people are concerned project managers, experienced, project managers think they’re going to be out of the job. Will be asked to retrain as a Scrum Master. This highlights a flooring Scrum, Scrum doesn’t have the concept of a project, it just delivers in little, small sprints. It doesn’t have the overarching picture of exactly what we’re going to deliver or how we’re going to deliver it. It doesn’t have the beginning, middle, and end of this project, so therefore it doesn’t see a role for a project manager. But for me the Scrum Master role is more like a team leader role and the project manager sits above that. If you’re working in a project environment, if you’re not, that’s fine then the project manager doesn’t have a role.
00:20:24 Barbara Roberts: But for organisations, complex corporate organisations, the majority of them deliver projects. The fanatics, agile is great, you can do whatever you want. The one that’s particularly popular is ohh it’s agile, you don’t do any documentation. And many, many years ago when we were doing rapid application development, I used rapid application development to avoid doing documentation as a developer. The reality is you have to document, but you’ve got to document in a different way. So, in agile, the documentation is focused on supporting the solution in production, not writing things down. So, you can hand it over to somebody else and walk away. “Agile can defy the laws of physics” have been told that we need this failing project delivered next month, so let’s see what your agile can do with it. That’s not very helpful if it’s a big piece of work and it’s been failing, I can’t suddenly compress time and deliver it in an impossible time frame. And the last one, which I still love particularly at my age, “Agile is only relevant for young tecchie people”. So, like Kevin here, agile is fine for anyone of any set of thinking of any age, wherever your background is, whether your business technical. It’s an effective for everybody, everybody uses agile in their day-to-day life.
00:21:51 Barbara Roberts: Most people are flexible in what they do outside work. Some people are never going to be flexible, but most people have the ability to be flexible, which is why the human race has survived for so long. So, if I can expose these worries in one way or another, whether it’s in coaching or training sessions, then I can help explain to people. That this is not something you need to worry about. Trust me, you know, Agile will not ruin your career. You can have extra value here and not be lost. So, having started the agreed, the way we’re going to work, having started the communication, the next thing is find a pilot. I always joke about being a consultant that quite often consultants start a discussion with. Trust me, I’m a consultant, although give you an advice, some advice and say trust me, I’m a consultant. I don’t think that’s right, I don’t think it’s the right way to work. So, what I want to do is take an agile approach to the transformation, so start to understand the status quo and then look at what we change. But “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water”. So, protect what is working well and keep the focus on where we need to make the changes.
00:23:07 Barbara Roberts: So, I always, I strongly recommend not always recommend starting with the pilot. For a number of reasons, one its limits the risk to the customer. So rather than going out all guns blazing, saying right, we’re going to start changing everything. So let me prove what I think is gonna work for you. Let’s start small, let’s find an opportunity for you to see what I’m about, what this means to see you for your people to see how this works. And then once we’ve done the pilot, you can decide for yourself. Do you want to continue with this? Do you want to get rid of me and get somebody else in? Do you want to just abandon it and go back to your old way of working, which has never happened yet for me. But for me, that’s a much better approach than “Trust me, I’m consultant” just do what I tell you and it pays dividends.
00:23:55 Barbara Roberts: Because what it demonstrates is the empirical and iterative and incremental approach that is agile itself. So, I’m using agile to demonstrate agile in action. Also from the pilot, we get early learnings. So, for example, a current piece of work I’ve just been completed was a very, very difficult. It wasn’t a pilot, but it was so problematic that I said right, we’ll give it a go, but we’re gonna have to bend agile so much it will be barely recognisable to anything in the book. But what we did was we used that to learn how what we were doing could fit in the gating process. So, we still got through formal gates even though we were bending agile to being extremely agile. So, the feedback gives us the learnings to make sure that we tailor the process and the way we’re working with this organisation to fit within this organisation itself. Because one organisation does gating in one way or another, organisation is a bit more relaxed or a bit more formal, so it’s never that simple.
00:24:59 Barbara Roberts: So, I want to choose an agile pilot, but I want a pilot that is a challenge, but I don’t want him in Mission Impossible. So, some of you may be too young to remember the Monty Python Dead Parrot Sketch, but I had a dead parrot, and I was brought in and said right, you know, it’s all going horribly wrong Barbara. We need you to sort things out and start, we want you to fix this particular one. It’s an 18-month project, it’s 12 months behind and we need it delivered in three months. So, if you go with that one, you know show me what your agile can do. And I had a discussion about, you know I’m sorry, but this this project basically died ages ago, it should have been stopped about 9 months ago. This is a failed project, and it was getting more and more like Monty Python saying this is a dead parrot. It is no more I’m saying, you know this project has died. It really, you know, is not savable.
00:25:56 Barbara Roberts: And I walked away from that one because I said you were asking me to solve something that isn’t possible and that agile is not the answer to this. You need to go back and start again with this one. So sometimes you need a polite refusal, so there will be the occasional dead parrot offered for agile pilots. So, what we do is I assist potential pilots, I look for certain things. First of all, I look for business commitment, I want is actively engaged sponsor. I don’t want the name of the CEO as a token name at the top of the tree. I want a good sponsor to come in and support and champion this project or this piece of work. And a good sponsor makes the difference for me between success and failure. And the description of a good sponsor is often a cross between a rock fire and ferret. A rock fire because they’re very aggressive and they will push and a ferret because when they get their teeth into a problem, they won’t let go. And I was doing a presentation to a large group of people, and I described my perfect sponsor. Like everybody in the room, looked at one person. Fortunately for me, he had a sense of humour and smiles, and he said yeah, that probably sums me up and I thought, well, this is gonna work well because I’ve got somebody that A has a sense of humour and B cares. And look for potential pilots that agile can actually deliver particular benefits. So, I love pilot that can prove a challenge for a traditional linear approach where agile will do a good job.
00:27:30 Barbara Roberts: And when we start with, we created a while ago a very simple agile o-meter and I used this as a very simple early starting check, and it looks as six key areas which would support successful agile. So, what we’ve got here is 6 statements and you rate them one to five. And five is the perfect agile environment which you would hope to get to over a period of time. You won’t be there on day one and one means it’s a long way from being agile and there’d be risks here. So just to talk through these, the first 3 flexibility on one’s what’s being delivered, what level of collaboration do we have and how easy is it to communicate. So, in the perfect world in terms of flexibility, level 5 would be stakeholders are comfortable that changes inevitable needs to happen to converge on an accurate solution. So, using feedback as you go to gradually get to where you need to be rather than expecting to know it upfront. They’re comfortable with their role prioritising the work fixed time, fixed cost, fixed quality, negotiate features is typical agile approach. Understand the scope of the work is being flexed to protect the quality and the deadline of what’s being delivered. So, we negotiate on features, so that’s the perfect world and obviously, you know I get people to rate this honestly between 1 and 5.
00:29:00 Barbara Roberts: What level of collaboration? So, in a perfect world, very high level of collaboration amongst all parties and one team culture, excellent working relationships both internally and externally, whether that’s internally or externally working with suppliers or whatever. High levels of trust exist and desire to be helpful is prevalent, perfect for agile. Ease of communication, so in a perfect world, communication is very easy amongst all parties. So, it’s a communication mix environment, people talk rather than share documents. Lots and lots of face-to-face interaction, whether that’s physical or virtual. These days a lot more virtual, is it easy to do, you know, due to the time zones make that possible. I did quite a lot of virtual communication a while ago where I agreed inadvertently to do some work with an organisation that I talked based in Scotland and it turned out most of them were based in Australia. So, my virtual conversations interactions were being done at midnight till about 4 clocks in the morning. But you know it was worth it because it was fair because it was just me and they were all on a different side zone.
00:30:11 Barbara Roberts: We want visual information to be readily available, so we expect to be able to do things like prototyping, proof of concepts, modelling. And retrieval of information is easy, we can get at knowledge, information or data, so those are the first three. The second three sliders are the ability to work iteratively, iteratively and develop incrementally advantageous environmental conditions and acceptance of agile. So, a perfect world, very easy to deliver benefit to the customer or business by regular deliveries of the overall solution, not a Big Bang. You know one delivery at the end, very easy to work iteratively, solutions and understanding is refined interactively by delivery and feedback both formally and informally. A desire to learn an experiment, a fail fast being seen as a positive, not a negative. As well as this overarching feeling of “think big, start small” that’s the perfect agile world.
00:31:15 Barbara Roberts: The right environmental conditions, so the working environment is very supportive of working in an agile way. Whether that’s sitting people together or getting them the ability to communicate, the ability to share things, having personnel assigned, ideally full time to their work rather than, you know, I’ve got somebody’s leg on a Tuesday morning. But the rest of the time they belong to somebody else. In an ideal world, people are dedicated, full to an agile piece of work, we don’t always get that, but that would be perfect. People are skilled, they’ve got the right skills, they’ve got the right platforms to work on. So yes, the tooling and the software, the communication is nice, but very importantly, I’m looking for people that have got the communication skills as well because that is one of the hardest things to teach. Anybody that’s worked with or recently lives with teenagers know how difficult it is to communicate with a teenager if they don’t want to talk to you. So, the last thing you need is people in an agile team who don’t communicate unless you push them hard. So, tell me what you’re doing, come on, show me what you’ve got, explain to me what’s happening here.
00:32:22 Barbara Roberts: And finally, the acceptance of agile. So perfect is all stakeholders closely involved fully aware of the behaviours and practises of working in an agile way. They have been trained and they’ve got experience. Not only are they happy to work this way but they prefer it and understand the advantages it brings. And also bringing in the peripheral stakeholders who understand that they need to carry out their roles in “agile friendly” way as well. So that’s my starting point and the main thing when we do this in the early days, do not expect 100% perfect response, 100% positive what the agile o-meter does is it gives you an impartial and realistic assessment of the potential risks to agile success. And it gives you also further information where we can potentially mitigate the risk by doing training on one-to-one coaching. But all these contra-indicators go on a standard risk log because there are risks to the agile process for also interestingly, some of the traditional risks go away. So, the risk in agile of delivering the wrong solution is very, very low, because if you’re doing the feedback, you can’t deliver the wrong thing.
00:33:38 Barbara Roberts: So, if we get lots of low indicators that suggests this one is possibly a “Mission Impossible”. Being an old cynic, I’m very suspicious if I get all responses of high, I was asked to assess with an organisation. They’ve got five candidate projects to be the pilot. So, I read up with them the night before and then I spent the day with the customer and the project managers all came and presented their project. And one guy came, and he presented this project, and we went down all of these and the answer to all of them was five. And when he finished this, well that doesn’t sound like the project that I read up about last night, you know, can you tell me why? Why you’ve got five? He said, well I love agile. He said I’m so keen to be the pilot. I thought, you know, if I say they’re five, you’ll let me do mine as the pilot and I had to explain to him that is not how risk management works. You pretend it’s nice because you want to do it this way.
00:34:35 Barbara Roberts: The reality is certain projects are not suitable for on agile, they’re just not agile doesn’t bring any benefit. If you need another one that you’ve something you’ve delivered previously and it’s just a repeatable process, there isn’t enough uncertainty volatility in there to give you the value from agile. We also look out for particular areas that often cause internal friction, so quality is a particular one. I need to understand how formally this is access. You know, in the range of one to five, you know, is it do whatever you like qualities you know, we’re not worried about that or is it very, very formal. Are we highly regulated? It’s not a stopper but I want to know how quality is assessed so I don’t want people coming with a standard tick list. I want to be able to discuss what you’re trying to prove. So being told I want this as a signed off Word document. My challenge would be why do you want to stand off Word document? What are you trying to prove? Well, I’m trying to prove you understand the requirements. Yeah, but we do it differently, so I’ll have a signed off final list at the end. But in the middle of the project, we still agreeing the low-level detail. But the good news is that agile has proved to work very, very well in highly regulated environment. So pharmaceutical, aerospace, technology, so I’ve done agile at CMMI level 5.
00:36:03 Barbara Roberts: The only complaint I had was they had to redo some of the documentation. I’ve done it introducing ISO 9000 and something, and somewhere in the kitchen I’ve got the mug. I was given the proof that we passed, so there’s no blocker I just need to understand. What about gating? Is there formal gating? The nice thing with agile, particularly something like AgilePM is it has very natural gating points, but the gating points are different to for example PRINCE2 stage gates. So, you’re not signing off in at the end of foundations that you know everything, now you’re just going to develop from there on in. In foundations in AgilePM, you’re proving that at this point, you know, enough to predict an end date but you’ve got flexibility in the requirements. So again, we need to have early discussion around the gating to make sure that both sides understand what we’re doing before we get problems coming to the surface. So, prepare the way forward, so what I do is I organise training for the pilot team and the stakeholders and it’s a mix of formal training and 1-2-1 it depends helping people understand what to expect and also what’s expected of them really importantly. So, I don’t want them thinking just one phone call a month, it’s going to be a number of interactive sessions you need to make the time for this. It’s not just IT way of doing this stuff, I need time from the business, but it starts to reassure people that agile isn’t unstructured chaos.
00:37:35 Barbara Roberts: And I work out what level of support I need. So how, when and where, although one workshops bite size sessions but also 1-2-1 coaching schedules for key roles or groups. So, I’ve recently been doing some 1-2-1 coaching for my business sponsor or my technical coordinator, technical architect roles. And also, things I have to consider are things like locations and time zones. they can make it difficult? how mature? What’s the level of experience within the team? If you’ve got a mixed level of experience maturity within the team, you have to handle them slightly differently. And also, my background is languages, and I have a thing about the use of words and I’m very, very hot on things like how we use the language. So, in agile feedback is feedback, it’s not a bug. So, I won’t let people register feedback as bug. And I talk a lot about we accept rather than sign off and it has a very different feeling. So, I start changing the language and people know me for that, you know I pick them up on words. So, we’ve identified our pilot, we run the pilot, so the team stakeholders have got all the information they need, we’re ready to go.
00:38:49 Barbara Roberts: What I do is I make sure that I am available and accessible as much as is needed, and these days it’s not necessarily about me sitting on site with the team because most of my teams now work from home. Work in the office, split site, split time zones or sorts. But I’ll make sure that I’m available and if someone needs to be urgently, if possible, I can usually talk to them within half an hour or so. But I’m certainly make sure I’m available at things like gate points or day-to-day as they’re taking on new practices so the first time, we’ve done group estimating the first time we’ve done sprint planning, I will be at those sessions. And the support was provided needs to be done formally, organised and informally, so there needs to be room in there for a help me I’m having a really bad day. OK well, you know, you’ve got some time at lunch bring your sandwich and we’ll talk it over for lunch.
00:39:44 Barbara Roberts: Also, making sure that we run regular retrospectives to inspect and adapt and then taking that feedback and feeding it back into the process so the process, even in the pilot seem starts to mature for this particular customer. But the main thing is expect the unexpected things never ever go to plan, so be prepared to adapt and be prepared to compromise. In other words, be agile about being agile. So, a recent thing that I worked on, it was going incredibly smoothly until we started the testing for the cloud. And it went very pear shaped for things that were completely out of control and it caused problems for us. It wasn’t a showstopper, and it wasn’t something in agile could have predicted either. It was just a problem, and we had to adapt, and we had to compromise. And then from there in, retrospect to build out the change. So, there are a number of ways you can build on this and being a consultant, my answer is always it depends. So, we could run a second project with the same team. Benefit the team know what they’re doing, they know what to expect, but it does limit the spread of what we’re doing.
00:40:57 Barbara Roberts: Alternatively, you could do take the amoeba approach, split the team and create two teams with the mixed experience and you in each team. That spreads the experience wider, but it does disrupt the performing team so, is that a good idea at this point or not. Pilot in the new area of the business, so take what you’ve learned, take it to a new team and a new pilot project in a completely different area of the business, building on the lessons we’ve learned. Which is a great opportunity to test what we’ve done so far with a new group. So that’s always a good one and then as you get more experience and knowledge start to tackle the different areas and the difficult people, but not everybody is going to want to, or will transfer to agile way of thinking and that is perfectly OK. So, we are not doing a binary switch, so you know the goal is not going to be that everything’s 100% agile. I haven’t got a single organisation that I work with, complex corporate organisation is 100% agile. There is all stuff that is more traditional. Yes, I’ll plug lots of agile techniques into their traditional ways of working, but they still have traditional style projects.
00:42:10 Barbara Roberts: But the reality is overtime the traditional pool will diminish and the agile pool will increase significantly. So, it will be a decreasing pool for people with the limited skill set. And finally, the end goal for agile is something like this, this rather nice picture. Agile is a mindset and it’s based around common sense, so things like face-to-face working is the most efficient. Focus on specifying the customers, make sure the solution works is just common sense, it’s not rocket science. Agile gets results and it gets it through teamwork and collaboration driven by people. So, we have self organised teams working together daily. Agile delivers quality solutions, so it still delivers sustainable deployment, technical excellence, good design, harnessing change so, we deliver a solution that actually works. Agile being successful is about being agile, not doing agile. So that means agile thinking sits at the heart of everything you do. So, we’re building projects based around motivated individuals.
00:43:22 Barbara Roberts: And finally, just key takeaways from the session hopefully make sure the customer supplier relationship suits both sides. Find somebody to help you, who fits with your way of working, your mindset, your style. If you want huge formality, then sometimes you want a supplier you want a consultant that is more formal. If you want a more relaxed approach, then make sure there’s a good fit with you know as a customer you want the customer choose what you want. Make sure the agile transformation is delivered using agile thinking. It sounds absolutely obvious, but it’s so often forgotten, and it’s rolled out like a sort of an army initiative that you just drive out according to the rule book, that’s not the way it works. Start the comments early and deliver honest and consistent messages at all levels. Always tell the truth but build this consistent understanding of what this means and what it doesn’t mean. Remember this is an evolution, not a revolution, so don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Protect the good stuff and finally, remember that compromise is normal, it’s not a sign of failure. OK, so I think that’s my full set and that’s just nearly 50 minutes, sorry Jay, so questions
00:44:50 Jay Gao: No worries, great. Thanks, Barbara great presentation. Thank you very much and we wait for people to submit their questions and at the same time I’ll just put out the survey before I forget it and if you could complete that would be great, there you go. OK thanks Matthew.
00:45:14 Jay Gao: If you have any questions, please feel free to type in the chat message and we’ll go through them. If there are any questions in the end of that we didn’t go through, we will actually send those questions off to Barbara and we will provide the answers in the emails that we sent her, everybody.
00:45:30 Barbara Roberts: I’ll do my best. Thanks.
00:45:38 Jay Gao: A lot of positive comments but no questions yet we’ll just wait.
00:45:44 Barbara Roberts: Sometimes it takes a while for the questions to surface.
00:45:48 Jay Gao: It’s a lot of information taking, I’m sure very interesting.
00:45:55 Jay Gao: Here’s the first question, very interesting. Is there an overview of agile and plug in steps that can be used for formal processes?
00:46:05 Barbara Roberts: No, not really because there’s lots of guys on agile, but they usually talk about each particular agile approach. Agile transformation is almost separate from the agile approaches, so I often put presentations together on things that there isn’t guidance on and probably a starting point. You’ll get copies of the slides and use these steps whether you’re a customer or a consultant. These would give you the sort of steps to start with, but I haven’t. The other thing to look at is good guides on how to handle change, and there’s a very good book that somebody recommended which I read which was called the Change Master, and it talked about the whole impact of change, agile transformations to change like any other.
00:46:52 Barbara Roberts: I’ve just seen one on group estimating and sprint planning, and that’s a whole different discussion. I’ll answer that one separately quickly, which is that when I was bored in COVID, I put together a self an online teacher self-guide to estimating because I’m actually a trained estimator and I put this together so people could learn about that’s how you estimate in agile the different techniques it talks about things like estimating group estimating, sprint planning. So, if you’re interested, ask Jay or agileKRC and they can send you the information about that one but that wasn’t intended as a sales pitch.
00:47:36 Jay Gao: Absolutely, thanks, Barbara. Yes, we Barbara actually offered a course called estimating for Agile Foundation course, we actually have that, feel free to get in touch. Another question is Barbara, do you have any favourite books on Agile and/or transformation?
00:47:54 Barbara Roberts: No, I don’t read lots of books and somebody came up to me recently and they got the book the AgilePM book which I sort of was my idea. They were chasing me around the conference saying what I what I sign it because they wanted to sign a copy and then they said they’d read it to cover from cover and I said oh I’m surprised really because we didn’t design it that. We designed it to go in and read, I read agile books, but I usually dip into them and look up something out of interest, but I don’t read them rigorously. From me agile is about common sense, and you’ll learn more about agile by looking at the way you work in the real world and thinking, actually that’s very agile. I’m driving to a concert next week, I allow extra time and if I get stuck in a traffic jam, I adapt. So, in the outside world you do agile, we just need to bring that thinking into work because it is the most natural thing in the world. My contact details are on the slide Ebru, so you’ll be able to see that.
00:48:54 Jay Gao: Yeah, we’ll be sharing the slides as well as the video recording. Thanks, Barbara, the next question, do you have any experience of whether agile is commonly used or works well in scientific areas?
00:49:06 Barbara Roberts: Yeah, it can do. I mean, I did some coaching recently with the startup company and they or I can’t tell you what they were creating, but they’re creating something to make a medical piece of equipment reusable. I think that’s you know, it’s secret squirrel. So, I can’t tell you what else. So, it’s all about scientific research, and it was really interesting working with the startup company because they have to do enough to prove that they have a viable concept to go for the next round of funding. So, it does work I also have a colleague, and he worked for a pharma company and obviously a lot of pharmaceutical stuff is very scientific research and proof and evidence, there’s nothing agile can’t do. Although some things are a bit harder than others, and if it some things occasionally, I say no, that’s just not particularly suitable for agile. You’re better following a more traditional approach, but hey let me help you with the communication and collaboration part of your traditional style working.
00:50:07 Jay Gao: Great thanks, Barbara. The next question, do you have a standard way of presenting results of the pilot and phase delivery to management and teams?
00:50:17 Barbara Roberts: I have a fairly standard way, but it depends on the maturity of the people I’m presenting to. When I present, I’m always me, unfortunately I can’t do sort of serious and scary. You know, I just come along like some old back that knows a load of stuff and talks about it enthusiastically. It seems to work, but there’s no standard way. It just tell people what they need to know. Communicating bullet points, normally you know this is a bit wordy this presentation so that you’ve got the details to take away. But I tell people communicate briefly, effectively and to the point don’t waffle, be honest and you know that’s the best way I think.
00:51:02 Jay Gao: Great, next question any suggestions for how to help an organisation to develop a culture of being agile?
00:51:12 Barbara Roberts: I can’t remember, I can’t see the name of whoever that was from. Again, if you get these slides, whoever that is, it’s got my e-mail on the bottom. I think on one of the slides, if you want send me an e-mail. I can point you in the direction of a guy that did a lot of work on agile culture. And he’s got a set cultural assessments is really useful set of materials and it might be working well following up on that one, I think there’s a free version that gives you a sort of superficial view and then you can take it further. So, if you come back and ask me, I will send you that information.
00:51:49 Jay Gao: Great thank you, Barbara and just wait for more questions to come up.
00:51:58 Jay Gao: Lots of thanks.
00:52:03 Barbara Roberts: It looks like I don’t have any homework to answer then Jay.
00:52:08 Jay Gao: We probably can go through them all now.
00:52:30 Jay Gao: Great thanks guys for completing the survey, it’s very high completion rate on that. Thank you very much for that, I’ll just end the call now.
00:52:42 Barbara Roberts: And hopefully it’s given people a bit to think about either whether you’ve got experience, or you haven’t had any experience, you know agile isn’t scary, and whoever’s doing this with you shouldn’t be scary. They should be seeing on your side rather than in it for themselves so. And I’m getting some thumbs up I love these little floating graphics. It’s nice, isn’t it?
00:53:06 Jay Gao: Yeah absolutely.
00:53:08 Jay Gao: Very good kind of communication tool.
00:53:12 Barbara Roberts: It’s nice to hear it. Yeah, for a complete novice. it’s interesting, it’s not rocket science, it just isn’t. You know, once you understand what agile is, you think, and we’re sort of doing this already. It’s just the next step, taking it more formally at work. I’m not sure what a floating farm means. That’s what I went up there and I saw it go through but I’m not quite sure.
00:53:38 Jay Gao: Probably means is hot and what.
00:53:41 Barbara Roberts: Not burning bridges, then?
00:53:45 Jay Gao: Didn’t think of that but I’m sure not.
00:53:48 Jay Gao: It’s pretty nice.
00:53:53 Barbara Roberts: Yeah, it is taking people along with you, Jay. It you know, one of the problems I have with the transformation is people suddenly want to join my gang. And you get people saying they’re doing it or starting to do it on their own. That and I have to try and stop them and say no, we need to do it under control. Until we get this good base, we don’t want people doing it off their own back, doing it wrong and then using the reputation.
00:54:19 Barbara Roberts: Bourgeois Gentilhomme.
00:54:22 Barbara Roberts: Possibly and you my friends at the university, would come in useful.
00:54:31 Jay Gao: I didn’t dare to actually read that question because I can’t.
00:54:35 Barbara Roberts: That’s fine.
00:54:40 Jay Gao: Great, I think we’re nearly the time if there’s no more questions, we’ll wrap up and close the session once again, thank you so much for joining the webinar. Hope you find it useful; we will be sharing the video recording and the slides after a within a week from today.
00:55:00 Barbara Roberts: Can we share the slide straight away Jay and then people can actually see them.
00:55:03 Jay Gao: Ohh, absolutely yeah, of course. Great I will send that out today and to everybody who registered.
00:55:14 Jay Gao: Great stuff, thank you very much, enjoy your evening.
00:55:17 Barbara Roberts: And thank you all for coming because I enjoyed it. So, it was good fun.
00:55:19 Jay Gao: Thanks Barbara, thank you, bye.
00:55:24 Barbara Roberts: Bye.
00:55:47 Barbara Roberts: Still got a few left.
00:55:49 Jay Gao: Yeah, I think so I’m not quite sure how. So, I think there’s you and me and four others.
00:56:00 Jay Gao: Yeah, I think we’ll just end the session now, Barbara. Yeah, thanks very much for this speak soon. Yeah, have a good evening, thank you.
00:56:09 Jay Gao: Bye.
00:56:09 Barbara Roberts: Bye.
