For Agility's Sake: Recent Episodes
Kyle Spitzley
Amway is on an agile journey, working to improve how it delivers value to YOU. Hear from the practitioners, leaders and everyone involved in making the transformation a reality.
In this episode Arlo Belshee, Aaron Coville and Marc Denman discuss how small changes in our coding behaviors can lead to incredible results. Arlo believes we can achieve a bug-free world, Aaron agrees with him on some points of that... Listen to hear the debate and more:
- Imagining a bug free world
- Why we waste so much time making and dealing with bugs
- The average developer creates 3 bugs a day (even Senior Devs)
- What is “The insight loop” (16:36)
- Teaches you how to see code differently and
- How to refactor legacy code safely
- Your engineering culture will create habits, some good some bad.
- Naming as a process (27:11): using nonsensical names for methods, like Applesauce, forces a habit of refactoring and naming with intentionality, but does it come at a cost?
In this episode, Sameera Moinpour, Sr. Director of Strategy Solutions at Workboard, explains how OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) can help drive better results for your team. OKRs are a key component of Amway's Agile Workflow Model, ensuring teams are clear on what outcomes they want and how they will measure progress against them. Listen to learn:
- What are OKRs?
- How to keep teams aligned to common goals
- Where to integrate OKRs into your current operations cycles
- Showing up to review cycles "already informed" instead of "to be informed"
- How to get started with OKRs on your team
- 2 pronged approach to starting
- 2 OKR Levers: Alignment and Transparency
Rituparna Ghosh, General Manager and head of DevSecOps at Wipro shares her view on Agile Leadership. Ritu will be the first to tell you, she is still on the journey of becoming an Agile and Servant Leader.
In this episode we discuss:
- How leadership styles have changed over the past 15 years - what used to be "nice to have" leader skills are now a "must-have."
- What it feels like to transition from "command and control" to "servant leadership."
- The importance of psychological safety in creating the space for team members to dissent.
- Respecting the hierarchy of competence OVER the hierarchy of authority - being the most senior person in the room does not make you the most competent. Today's leaders need to recognize the value of competence and ensure it is given equal, if not greater, importance to seniority.
- The importance of spending time developing new skills (too often it is deprioritized to "get something else done."
- i-shaped, T-shaped and Comb shaped skillsets.
- Attributing success to the team, but failure to yourself.
- Conducting blameless post-mortems or retros
- Be a just and fair leader: balancing compassion, discipline and accountability. Set high expectations with your team and hold them accountable to it.
- Shifting between being the leader and being a member of the team.
In this episode Hannes Färberböck shares his rich, 20+ year history of agile and its various methodologies with us. Hannes is the Managing Director of Nagarro's Austrian operations and the had of their Testing Business Unit. He first started his journey by learning and applying Extreme Programming (XP), and then conducting trainings for other teams on XP.
Hannes recalls hearing about the first ever XP conference, where many of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto were in attendance (before it actually existed).
Looking back over time and seeing how agile has evolved, here are some of the changes that Hannes reflects on:
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- There is more than one process you can use to be agile
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- Companies can (and should) adapt those processes to meet their needs
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- DevOps significantly helps reduce silos between dev teams and operations (he sees the next best version as DevTestOps).
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- Continuous Delivery: while it has the right goals, it can unintentionally turn "burndown charts" into "burnout charts" where teams never get a moment to take a breath.
To that last point, we discussed the importance of NOT ignoring or delaying your continuous improvement focus. Whether it be a technical area like refactoring code, or a more interpersonal area like building trust on the team, these things cannot be delayed because we have too many things to deliver. Instead, we need to make them a routine that becomes part of the fabric of the organization.
Hear from Chris Mastnak, "Global Practice Lead - Agile Testing" at Nagarro, on what it means for QA/Testing team members to work in an agile environment.
According to Chris, life in QA gets easier with agile. He tells a story of major User Acceptance Test events at the end of a large 9-12 month build carrying a significant amount of risk. It's simply too wide of an area to cover with testing after nearly a year of development. Thanks to agile, QA can be much more confident with testing because they're covering smaller batches of functionality.
Unfortunately, just like in a traditional, waterfall project, the greatest risks are pushed to the end of the timeline. This same cycle shows up sprint by sprint, with QA getting 1 day to test all of the stories of the sprint. The good news? On agile teams, this kind of an issue resolves itself after a couple of retrospectives.
As your team gets better at delivering features more frequently, you're going to need to get better at regression testing (making sure everything that worked before is not broken by new features/code). Before you were doing this a few times a year, but now you're doing it every 2 weeks. Agile teams remedy this issue by automating everything they possibly can. According to Chris, manual testing is still very important, but automation has to become a priority across teams. Chris suggests starting with automation for regression testing and sticking to manual for exploratory testing to make sure the new features are behaving as expected.
What about teams that "don’t have time" to automate? Chris suggests looking for automation tools and frameworks that fit your team's situation. Aim to automate one story in each sprint, this will slowly build your automation repo.
According to Chris, an interesting side effect of agile is that it creates a cross-over between Developers and Testers. On the one hand, Testers get more involved with the development and start to understand why a feature was developed the way it was, giving them a better understanding of the behavior they should expect from it. On the other hand, Developers get more involved in the testing and start to become better at spotting gaps in test scenarios or plans. Ultimately, the team's ability to build and test a quality solution significantly improves as they work together more and more.
What does this mean for a QA Manager?
There's nothing in the Agile Manifesto about the role, nor is there anything in the Scrum Framework for QA Manager, so what do you do now?
Aside from becoming a QA Coach and working to make your team of Testers the best they can possibly be, Chris suggests elevating your perspective.
- Start looking across development teams and consider how to elevate transparency of testing beyond one team (it's easy for one team, but how is it done across multiple dev teams?)
- Start advocating for automation beyond one single team to drive quality on a larger scale.
- Start anticipating what this years' big programs mean for QA.
- Start thinking about and advocating for what Continuous Integration or Continuous Deployment will require across development teams.
- Things you may have already been doing, but will help clear the path for your teams:
- Make sure your QA environments are well cared for
- Make sure your team is continuously honing its skills
- Make sure your team has the necessary tools to do a stellar job
Still not satisfied? Chris points out that anyone at your company with a few years of Testing experience has likely accumulated a vast amount of knowledge about how your product works; which makes them a potential Product Owner.
Daniel Eder, Enterprise Agile Coach from Nagarro, talks about the role of a leader in an agile organization (and more).
- When he realized that traditional development was broken
- His first organic agile transformation
- Role of a Leader
- People oriented: aka making people awesome
- Coach and mentor people to make wise decisions
- Relieving the daily pains the team deals with
- Provide context and broader perspectives to implications of team decisions
- Embrace your technical expertise (but leave your title at the door)
- The greatest barrier to agile transformation, "uncertainty," and what you can do about it
- What to do when you don't have enough time for a coordinated transformation effort.
Agile Portfolio Manager Lisa Gordon explains the importance of blatant honesty, difficult tradeoff decisions and maintaining relationships across teams. Lisa has been instrumental in establishing Agile at Amway, particularly in our Agile Portfolios. Here are some of the highlights from this episode:
- What is a Portfolio Manager
- Making difficult tradeoff decisions while maintaining relationships
- What a Portfolio Manager needs from a Product Owner
- Doubling down with a radical focus on what matters most
Questions? Reach out:
Kyle.Spitzley@Amway.com
Lisa.Gordon@Amway.com
Coach Lee tells us "why agile fails" at scale and what needs to be addressed to reduce the chances of it happening to you and your organization. Most of us know that Agile is easy and effective on a single team, but those of us in the business of Agile Transformation are not working with single teams - we're working with large corporations, multiple departments, external service providers and dozens upon dozens of teams.
So how do you avoid failure with agile at scale?
3 key elements of agile at scale
- Teams
- Backlogs
- Working Tested "Stuff" (software, product, etc.)
3 areas that need to change
- Structure (of the teams and their relationships to one another)
- Governance (who makes decisions, how they are made, when they are made)
- Metrics (what we measure and how we respond to what those measures are telling us)
Questions? Email me or Lee at
Kyle.Spitzley@Amway.com
Lee.Wiesehuegel@LeadingAgile.com
The world is in a state of significant flux. If there was ever a time when individuals, corporations and society as a whole needed agility, it's now. In this episode Tom Fox, Manager of the Agile Transformation Office at Amway, speaks on the impacts of COVID-19. His words are his own and do not represent the position of Amway as a company, but as you'll hear, they speak admirably of the culture at Amway.
- How does "Work from home" affect the Agile Transformation?
- How do you coach teams when you're completely distributed?
- What are we learning from this?
If you have specific questions, contact Tom Fox.
Tina Abdoo, VP at Amway shares how agile is a way to thrive in an ever-changing marketplace.
Why it matters to a leader
- Your team is happier!
- Your team is more stable, predictable and autonomous, so you can have higher confidence in the things you commit to.
Challenges you can expect during transformation
- You will experience ups, downs, forward momentum, back sliding and forward progress again. Persevere.
- The myth that we don't need KPI's and metrics anymore - we do, they're just different.
- Fear of measurement (aka metrics) leading to judgment
Common mistakes leaders make
- Leaders and managers trying to fix things for the team - getting in to the details and providing the answers of "do it this way" instead of contributing their idea as an option - not the only way.
- We forget that this is a cultural movement. Closely tied to a growth mindset, we must cange the way people think about and see their work.
Sys. Analyst Gaye Garvelink recounts her experience with agile and how it hasn't been easy, but more than worth it. My favorite quote from this show was "We were working really hard, but we loved every minute of it."
In this episode we discuss:
- How agile creates an environment that allows teams to flourish while bringing out the best in each individual.
- Agile before Agile was "cool"
- Lean / Continuous improvement / Toyota Production System
- Agile makes learning new things feel safer
- Work gets better for everyone w/agile
- Brings the team together
- Keeps everyone informed
- Makes work visible
- It doesn't matter what your role or title is on an agile team - you swarm problems together to solve them as fast as possible.
Gayle Evans, Digital Experience Delivery Mgr at Amway, explains how an agile transformation is really a transformation of individuals. It does not require us to know everything up front, but it does require that we continue to make progress.
- Individual Transformation
- Servant Leadership
- Agility is the only way to thrive today
- Managing an agile team
- Remove hurdles and support your team
- Get out of your team's way - trust them and let them do the work
- Swooping in to save the team means they miss the opportunity to learn
- Cast the vision
- Making progress is more important than making perfect
- Culture is at the center of making this a success
- Recognize that you will be learning FOREVER
- Next problem to solve: how do we accelerate the transformation across functions
Luke Nieuwenhuis, VP of ABO Incentives at Amway explains how Agile is a way of getting work done. We often overcomplicate it, but it's really about how we get things done as an organization.
WHY IT MATTERS
Our ability to move more quickly from one thing to another (markets, projects, strategies, etc.) is paramount to our ability to keep serving our customers.
On the ground floor, our teams can be very flexible. They often know that what we're working on might not be the most important thing - the struggle is to get the rest of the organization to keep up.
EXPLAINING AGILE IN SIMPLE TERMS
Don't get caught up in the terminology (epics, features, sprints, etc.) The more we can talk about agile in terms of the intent behind the things we're doing, the better people will understand it.
Our intent: focus first on the customer. What are their needs? How do we know those are their needs? How do we go about executing in solving those problems? How do we know our solution has solved it? These are the questions that agile is helping us answer.
CHANGING MINDS IS HARD
We tried to explain that we don't need to force "everything" into one big launch, but until we showed people how it could work differently, it didn't stick. The proof was in showing them it's viable, and only after that did we really start to shift thinking.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR THE CUSTOMER
Their feedback has a greater influence on how we make decisions and build solutions that help them run their business. The faster and more often we incorporate their feedback, the more trust we build with them.
The caution is to not over do it. At some point, too much change makes it impossible to keep up with. If a tool you use to run your business changes every month, it's going to be difficult to be efficient and effective.
THE CHALLENGES
The relationship between the process of how we work and the corresponding organizational structure. Today we are organized by functions and departments, and when we have work to do we spin up a project team and assign people to it. Getting to a place where we have stable teams is critical. Most teams should be persistent - and the work flows to the team.
The transition from a project-based approach to a flow-based approach has a messy middle. It requires us to think differently about how teams work, and at the same time, identify ways we can do it in an organizational system that isn't completely designed for it yet. The risk is that we think "agile isn't working" because we haven't given the organization time to catch up with this new way of thinking - and at that point the tendency is to go back to what we've always done.
HOW A LEADER CAN HELP
- When you get a new "project" or objective to accomplish, pause before you spin up a project team. Consider what stable teams exist (or should exist) in order to help you accomplish the work.
- Be more aware of how agile is seeking to accomplish the goals / work.
Product Management Coach Scott Sehlhorst goes deep into how an Agile Workflow Model and Product Management can enable a company to thrive in an increasingly complex world.
Our Agile Workflow Model is a robust decision making system; providing clarity and alignment at each decision point. This is the only way we can manage the complexity AND stay aligned as we execute.
Scott explains the difference between a "regular workflow" and an "Agile workflow" and much more:
- Cross-functional collaboration over multiple Product teams and how they should work together.
- Product Teams should be focused on the prolems they are solving. It's not about building the thing. It's about solving the problem set before us and achieving the outcomes that result from solving the problem.
- Scaling and coordination across product teams is a challenge, but it's a requirement for large companies.
- The tiers of our workflow model are not hierarchical, they are a separation of concerns, they are looking at different time horizons, they are making decisions on different levels of the problem. They MUST work together.
- 3 Amigos: Product Owner, Tech Lead and QA Lead. Each person has their own vantage point and their own blind spots - but together, you minimize the likelihood of shared blindspots. Add the Scrum Master to those 3 roles and now the team can improve their own execution and effectiveness. As the team gets better at self-improvement, the Scrum Master role becomes more and more about cross-team coordination.
- What do you do if you have too much work for a Product Owner? Don't add a second product owner - then you have two cooks in the kitchen. Instead, add a Business Analyst - someone who can think like a PO, but doesn't hold the same role.
- T-shaped teams: some roles look broader at the situation and context, other roles are very narrow and specific to a topic/discipline. It's rare to find a single person who has both. On our teams with 3 amigos, we improve our odds of seeing things broadly and deeply (as in the T-shape).
Link to Count Basie song Scott mentioned and incorrectly named: Count Basie - Straight Ahead
He's back! Tech Craftsmanship Coach Llewellyn Falco shares stories of his second visit to Amway. Some of the topics he touches on in this episode are:
- Anti-fragile: a systemic way of implementing things so that when they break, you get stronger. More resilient. If your system is dependent on discipline, it’s broken.
- Safeguarding: after an issue was resolved, the team reflected on these 3 questions to help them build more resiliency for the future:
- What allowed us to create this situation?
- What made it hard for us to discover what it was?
- What made it hard to fix?
- PS: Don't start safeguarding in the middle of a crisis; wait until it's over (but not too long).
- Learning through documenting: As you document something, it prompts new ideas for how the thing could work.
- Shared, isolated, mutable and non-mutable states: the only combination to avoid is the one that everybody chooses = shared + mutable.
- What the team did when multi-threading threw a wrench in their testing…
- Continuous improvement: stop worrying about how to improve faster, worry about starting. Make improvement an everyday habit, and speed will come later.
Experience Owner Kate Kronemeyer shares her thoughts on agile, empathy and a hyper-focus on the user. "Design is more disciplined than you think."
Other topics we touch on:
- Building empathy.
- Design is more disciplined than you think.
- With agile, everyone can help make things better.
- Satisfying the customer is EXCITING!
- Agile isn't just a process change. It's a personal transformation.
- Stay focused on the user - Literally walk a mile in their shoes.
- Learn more about your user than you think you need to know.
- Sometimes your user doesn't know what they need, and sometimes they don't know you have what they need.
- An exceptional user experience example - AirBnB
Marty Bradley, Sr VP at LeadingAgile, says Agile Transformation is NOT about Agile; it's a way of achieving your companies goals. Here are some of the other topics we discussed.
- It's not about Agile. It's a way of achieving your goals.
- Companies have to get better de-risking their investments.
- Example: Increasing Sky Atmosphere sales with fast feedback loops.
- 3 elements of agility: teams, backlog, working tested software
- Teams: a stable cross-functional team has all of the members it needs to ship a product.
- Backlog: a healthy backlog of clearly defined work increases predictability.
- Working tested software: deliver something that a user can try - it's ok if it's rudimentary, but it has to "work")
- Face to face collaboration is ALWAYS faster.
- Deciding what to work on based on data
- Managing an Agile Team
- Step out of the Project Management elements.
- Identify ways to make your team more effective / efficient - be a coach.
- Lead your people: develop them, not the product/tech.
- Stop solutioning - support the delivery system by trusting your team
Learn about the System of Transformation we use to improve the organization (currently only available to Amway Employees).
Send questions/comments to the Agile Transformation Office.
Brian Hart, VP of ABO & Customer Solutions shares his thoughts on why agility matters, how leader behaviors MUST change, and a first step you can take toward agility - rapid experimentation.
Other topics we touch on:
- Agile isn't the goal. It's a way to achieve your business goals.
- You can apply agile principles to the development of ANYTHING. An idea, a strategy, a physical product, a digital product, a service, etc.
- Leadership behaviors must change: your team can't change without you.
- As a leader, assess what your interactions with your team look like. Are you empowering them, letting them fail, helping them learn, encouraging them to validate assumptions? We hire great people, trust them.
- A first step to becoming more agile - rapid experimentation. Accelerate the learning in your development process and pull forward every bit of it that you can as you move forward.
Questions for the Agile Transformation Office? Email us.
Questions for Brian Hart? Email him
Product Owner for Training & Development, Francisco Calderon explains how Agile can tear down the mentality of "us and them". He highlights the importance of cross-team collaboration and a constant focus on improving what we build and how we build it.
Scrum Master Alyssa Rawsky shares her agile experience and how her first reaction was "I don't want this." Now, she encourages others with "don't be afraid of change!" Alyssa describes how she and her team are using agile practices to improve adaptability and team morale. A number of other topics are also covered:
- Misconceptions of the Scrum Master role
- Fail, adjust and adapt
- Shout out to the Amway Social team
- Visual Management is a game changer
- Planning a year ahead with agile (continuous planning / it's okay to change your plan)
- Ideaboardz for retros
- Spending time with your team to build trust
- The value of face-to-face interactions
DevOps Coach Llewellyn Falco talks about improving code you don't understand, among other technical topics. Llewellyn is known for his unique coaching style, working with teams for 2 weeks at a time and getting into the technical details with them, creating a sense of safety that allows the team to practice new techniques with low risk. Given Llewellyn's area of expertise, this episode is more technical than others.
This episode briefly touches on:
- MOB Programming
- Testing code w/a compiler
- Code reviews / confidence
- Refactoring a monolith legacy system
- Java
Nichole Vanderlaan shares her experience as a Scrum Master, her love-hate relationship with Retrospectives and the mindset of responding to change over following a plan.
Delivery coach Kaylee Betzinger shares her recent experience in the world of agile and how it can create a positive culture of psychological safety on teams.
Product Management Coach Erin talks about her experience with agile as a developer, a Scrum Master and an Agile Coach over the last decade.
Hear from Amway's Agile Transformation Office Program Manager, Kris Zoerman, on agile and the 7th day effect. The 7th day effect is a concept for what it feels like to finish a job and feel immediately satisfied because the results are immediately apparent (like mowing the lawn or cleaning a room). It's based on the book of Genesis in the Christian Bible, where God created the world in 6 days and rested on the 7th, admiring the work he completed.
Product Owner Alissa Dornbos talks about her experience as a Product Owner and the importance of having empathy for your customers.
Hear from Marc Denman, the Amway Agile Transformation Office DevOps coach about the practice of DevOps and how it's being applied at Amway.
- What is "DevOps"
- How we define and apply it at Amway
- Why it matters
Hear from Tom Fox, Manager of the Agile Transformation Office at Amway on why agile is so important to the company, its distributors and employees.
Learn about the Agile Workflow Model being used at Amway and how it can improve your work! In this episode of AgileNEXT podcasts we give an overview of the Agile Workflow Model at Amway. Here are the key points we cover:
- Why have a model at all
- What is "the model"
- How it works