Brewing Agile

Change isn't simple. This talk is my story about the tools that I was part of providing for 6 teams and how we enabled them to build the foundations for safe continuous learning themselves.

Most people in agile and lean are involved in change somehow. Whether it is a big transition or an evolvement of an exiting organisation, it is still a matter of change.

We explain the change, sometimes we even explain the vision and the why behind the change. And then it is supposed to happen.

But change is not simple.

If the goal is to get teams to perform and to work better together, we need to provide the teams with the tools to do so. We have people who are educated in engineering, programming, computer science, etc. – how are they supposed to have the tools to build good relations and to collaborate if we do not provide them?

Once upon a time there was IT, and IT departments had projects. Projects were always a bad fit for software development but somehow we made them work. As IT became Agile the damage caused by the project model became obvious and #NoProjects emerged to help teams go beyond projects.

Today growth businesses are digital. Technology is the business and the business is technology. Projects end but do you want your business to end? Or do you want it to grow? Growing a digital business means growing software technology.

In this presentation Allan Kelly will look at how #NoProjects came about, how it evolved into Continuous Digital and why it is the future of management.

Measurement, and Governance for Agile Leaders

To achieve true business agility, leaders must not only grow and support self-reliant, cross-functional, self-organizing teams, they must also change the way their organizations fund and oversee their agile initiatives. They must believe in feedback and allow that feedback to work. However, old measures like “on time” and “within budget” are not useful when markets and customers are constantly changing, potentially resulting in delivering great solutions to problems that no longer exist.

This session introduced a framework called Evidence-Based Management that helps organization to define measures that are meaningful to them, in four dimensions: Unrealized Value, Current Value, Time to Market, and Ability to Innovate. The framework helps agile leaders gauge the health of teams and the products they deliver, providing an alternative to schedule and budget-based governance models that fall short of meeting the needs of agile organizations.

Velocity. Sprints. More points, more speed.

An obsession with speed often overtakes the core values of agile software development. It's not just development of software; it's development of working software. Sprints are not about sprinting; they're about sustainable pace. Time to market is less important than time in market. Full-stack development is normally a statement about technology, but it also applies to individuals and interactions. The full stack touches both the code and the world outside the code, and with that view comes responsibility and pause for thought. Doing the wrong thing smarter is not smart. The point of a team is its group intelligence not its numbers. Is scaling up the challenge, or is scaling down the real challenge?

The distraction and misuse of speed, velocity, point-based systems, time, team size, scale, etc. is not the accelerant of agile development. Agilty lies in experimentation, responsiveness and team intelligence.