Notes from Agile Riga Day

Henri Kivioja.md

Henri Kivioja: How to coach traditional managers to lean and agile

Why change?

• Create most value
• Improve responsiveness
• Build quality in
• Empower people

Change in almost everything!

• Big projects -> Decoupled projects, flexible releases
• Functional silos -> Teams in e2e flow
• Indivdual offices -> Team spaces
• Narrow competence -> Broader competences and continuous learning
• Individual accomplishment -> Team success
• Detailed processes -> Lean-Agile Thinking
• Top-down control -> Self-organization

What is traditional management?

For Ericsson, different than Finnish companies. Discussion-based culture.

Coaching in context

• Lean-Agile practicioner
• Coaching
• Mentoring
• Teaching
• Facilitating

==> You must be both a coach and a leader. Those moments when you have influence, you must be able to leave your mark.

Minimal requirements:

• Technical mastery
• Business mastery
• Transformation mastery

Coaching at Ericsson Finland

Early stage:

• Scrum-masters
• Team-level learning
• Only few managers involved
• Initial communities
• Identification of organization-level coaches

Second stage:

• Coaching for all teams ==> demands a lot from coaches, some wrong choices
• Organizational learnings
• All managers were affected ==> needed to reapply for jobs ==> everyone realizerd that this is real
• Community of practice culture
• Organizational coaches

Third stage:

• Coaching for the whole Ericsson ==> requests from around the organization to come and coach
• Enterprise-level learnings ==> really difficult
• Resistance in middle management ==> don't do that in purpose, but it is very hard to get off from the surroundings
• Networked organization

Empowerement, a buzzword?

Happens when people and teams take full responsibility of improving their process.

It's all about people! ==> What does this mean for the managers?

Areas that need to be touched

Decision-making: how to relearn how to do decisions?

• Do you allow people to fail to do it better next time?
• As a coach, you show to managers how to leave decision-making to people.

Art of management?

• Management is dead, long live leadership?
• Someone needs to support the teams - management still needed, but can the managers do that?

Team constellation and dynamics

• Cooperation with coaches and management ==> Took really long time to learn how to do it.

Feedback and rewarding

Where is HR?

• HR processses are years behind.
• Try to help, but don't know how.

Competence management

One of the most important roles of managers to help.

Environment changes => Competitive edge from top individuals => World class teams => Organizational capability to respond to change => repeat

Henri's leadership team

Old role:

• Reporting and planning based approch

New role:

• Community enabler
• Big picture responsibility
• Culture fostering

From first line to middle managers

• Seniour management support is curucial (sponsor)

• Middle managers have worked hard -> challenging does not work

• Coach needs to be accepted

  • Experience
  • Progessionalism
  • Personality

• Get one one your side and the rest will follow ==> Go to sauna

• Pressure coming from top and the sides all the time ==> prepare for pressure

Main learnings so far

• First hand evidence and experience through feedback cycles is the real source of learning.
• Whole organization needs to accept it. If not, there will be the comical middle-management resistance for ever.
• This is a profound change of culture that goes beyond processes and tools.

Johannes Brodwall.md

Johannes Brodwall: Agile contracts?

Software developer, but feels he needs to care about stuff like contracts to do his work well.

Why does this matter?

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. ==> Contracts suck? No. ==> How can we get a contract that allows us to collaborate?

Why should we care about contracts?

Two kinds of contracts:

• Fixed scope
• Time and materials

Time and materials allows for easier change ==> creates the most happiness within contractors. Although customer may feel differently.

If time and materials is so good, why care about fixed-scope contracts?

How should your government spend your money? ==> Sometimes we need to care about fixed-scope.

Can agile help in big projects? Yes.

So we need to care about agile contracts.

Example projects:

• Framework contract: PS2000+Agile
• Typical Norwegian public sector project: We need to replace huge system, and we would like to use scrum

Mechanism 1: Target pricing

• Instead of setting target price: split the difference between cost and budget

Mechanism 2: Specify client and contractor responsibilities of scrum

• Colocation
• Sprints
• Sprint review
• Customer presence
• Product backlog

Mechanism 3: ... but also:

• Negotiation phase
• Requirement phase
• Acceptance test phase

Project 1: LARM

• 12 million euros

• 2 scrum teams plus support

• 3 years, halfway through

• Target pricing for whole scope

• Reliable product backlog using trial sprint

  • But decreasing velocity after that, because of gold-plating of user stories to keep customer happy

• Big win: first release in use 1 year after contract, containing the most important use scenarios

Project 2: PERFORM

• 100 million euros
• 12-14 scrum teams plus support
• 3 years
• First release: time & materials.
• After that: target pricing per release, using previous release as benchmark (smart thing)
• "Competing" suppliers working on different areas

Big success. Delivered what was needed. Government happy. Users happy.

Problems:

• Full-time requirement specification
• Hostile architecture team on the customer side

Did we have customer collaboration? To some extent

How are the suppliers chosen?

First round: Request for information regarding companies. Select about 5 companies.

Second round: Requirements document. Quote. 40-50 page document in PERFORM. Commit price to that document.

• Estimation
  • Split to user stories
  • Estimate them independently
• Requirements
  • Pretty good.
  • Some major omissions.

Third round: Presentation by all suppliers.

Fourth round: Negotiation phase.

• 1,5 months
• Workshops
• Develop more extensive prototype

Customer IT competence?

These contracts require the customer to know pretty well how the project is run. Product owner skills, for example.

Some public sector areas hire consultants to fill these roles. This does not work as well as having someone from the customer organization.

Johannes estimates there are 200 certified scrum product owners working within public sector in Norway.

How do you avoid vendor lock-in and higher prices?

• Any changes in the next release are based on empirical evidence.
• In practice the price is per story point, but varies based on historical data.

Acceptance testing

• At the end of each release
• Releases 3-6 months apart

Questions:

• Would you recommend using PS2000+Agile contract outside Norway?
• How was the requirements document?
• Sprint commitment

Jurgen Appelo.md

Jurgen Appelo: Change Management 3.0

Top barrier for agile adoption: Ability to change organizational culture (52%)

• How can I make the rest of the organization more agile?
• How can I motivate my employees to develop themselves?
• How can I be successful in influencig other people?
• How to change a social complex system?

The mojito method for change management:

1. Consider the system.
2. Consider the individuals.
3. Consider the interactions.
4. Consider the environment.

Dance with the system

PDCA cycle

• P: Start with the vision
• D: Define simple steps, choose the right moment to start
• C: Feedback.
• A: How to accelerate results?

Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: "We can't control systems or figure them out. But we dance with them."

Mind the people

ADKAR model

• Awareness: Choose ways to communicate
• Desire: Address people's intrinsic desires. CHAMPFROGS.
• Knowledge: Use experts to help people undersand exactly what to do.
• Ability: Start with something easy, like scrum.
• Reinforcement: Short-term wins to make it sustainable.

Stimulate the network

Rogers adoption curve model

• Initiators
  • Are you committed?
  • Make sure you are not on your own. Ask other people for help
• Innovators
• Early adopters
  • How will the leaders help?
• Early majority
  • How can you make it viral?
• Late majority
  • Listen to the skeptics and understand what is holding them back
• Laggards
  • How will you prevent relapse?
  • Dont's stop too soon!

Change the environment

Self-organization cannot even exists if there is no boundary to stere it.

Five I's:

• Information
  • Keep goals visible and make people aware of their actual behavior
• Indentity
  • Appeal to higher identity that people want to associate themselves with
  • Them versus us
• Incentives
  • Incentivize good behavior with small rewards
• Infrastructure
  • Remove obstacles and add guidance to make things easier
• Institutions
  • Define and enforce rules of good conduct

John P. Kotter, Leading Change: "Culture changes only after you have succesfully altered people's actions, after the new behavior produces some group benefit for a period of time."