In Action with Wendy: Recent Episodes
Wendy Closson
Erick and David are West Coast CTOs and Advisors with an extensive background in negotiating. From Options to Lawyers, they have a well rounded strategy to ensure everyone wins in the deal.
Episode Breakdown:
0 — introductions
5:00 — leadership and teams
8:15 — importance of negotiation beyond salary
9:15 — how to think about negotiation (“win win or no deal”)
12:30 — focus on goals
13:30 — Are these options valuable?
17:15 — Adjusting for market
19:40 — Changing perspective on where you add value
24:00 — when to bring in an attorney
26:00 — Losing fear of hearing “no”
28:00 — What does an unreasonable ask look like?
David Subar
David has served as at Chief Technology Officer and Chief Product Officer at several companies, including at Break Media (as CTO), before its merger with Alloy to become Defy Media, and at Zest Finance, where he served as CPO.
David has served as an interim CTO/CPO at a number of companies, including Lynda.com (sold to LinkeedIn for $1.5B), PlutoTV, AirMedia and a major studio, where he has advised on product development, recruiting, architecture and security.
David has led teams of greater than 100 and has built products of over 600MM page views/month and greater than 1MM video views a day on mobile and a similar number on the web.
Erick Herring
Erick has been building internet-based systems since before the advent of the commercial Internet. He has held executive roles for the last 15+ years and led teams of 100+ in the development of systems for Privlo, Local Corporation, Feedback, WebVisible, Toyota, LRN, California Federal Bank, Ticketmaster.com, Variety.com, Dell Computer, and many other Fortune 1000 and startup companies.
In addition to his mainstay role as CTO (usually including responsibility for Product), Erick has served as Chief Technology & Marketing Officer (Privlo), Chief Security Officer (Digital Evolution/SOA.com, Zenith Insurance), General Manager (Adapt Technologies - sold to WebVisible - and Feedback.com), and Founder (Townloop, Adapt, Feedback.com).
What started as a discussion between some folks about the VW scandal, became inspiration for this episode about ethics.
Related Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath
http://www.agilemanifesto.org/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dark_side_of_the_Force
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_law
Uncle Bob is a software developer, speaker and author. He has been writing code for 50 years and has written several books about software craftsmanship.
Uncle Bob is a software developer, speaker and author. He has been writing code for 50 years and has written several books about software craftsmanship.
This is a great episode if:
You want to be a better developer
You want to better support your development team
You need a push to write better code and say "no"
What you will hear about:
Common mistakes developers make
The ethics of being a software developer
Impact of the fast growth of the software industry
Related Links:
Clean Coders
Randy Rayess is the co-founder of VenturePact, a service that helps companies build remote software teams and execute on software projects. He is passionate about remote work, outsourcing and software development. He previously worked in private equity at SilverLake Partners, in machine learning and in payments.
This is a great episode if:
You are researching your offsite/offshore options
You want to understand how to ensure a good ROI from offsite teams
You want to understand how to mitigate the risks of offsite teams
What you will hear about:
The impact of cultural differences
The value of investing in the team
Ways to ensure alignment
Chad is a developer, founder, and the CEO of thoughtbot. He has coauthored the books Rails AntiPatterns and Pro Active Record, and presented at conferences around the world. Thoughtbot works with companies of all sizes to build successful products that people love to use. This is a great episode if:
You are a leader who wants to create a strong culture in your company
You want to perform user testing in a sustainable and valuable way
You are looking to outsource a project
What you will hear about:
Thoughtbot culture, history and process
User Testing
What happens when you invest in your people
Related Interviews:
Robert Richman
Debbie Madden
Jean Barmash is currently VP of Engineering at Merchantry, an eCommerce Technology startup. He has over 15 years of experience in software industry, and has been part of 4 startups over the last seven years, 3 as CTO / VPE and one of which he co-founded. Prior to his entrepreneurial adventures, Jean held a variety of progressively senior roles in development, integration consulting, training, and team leadership. He worked for such companies as Trilogy, Symantec, Infusion and Alfresco, where he consulted to Fortune 100 companies like Ford, Toyota, Microsoft, Adobe, IHG, Citi, BofA, NBC, and Booz Allen Hamilton. Jean is passionate about raising the level of technical leadership, and for the last five years has been organizing CTO School meetup, an organization he co-founded and grew to over 1,600 members. Jean speaks frequently at conferences, meetups, mentors at startup accelerators (ERA, Techstars), blogs (infrequently) at http://hellofoobar.com, and tweets almost just as infrequently at @jbarmash. Jean lives in NY with his awesome and supportive wife and two hilariously-funny kids.
This is a great episode if:
You are a technical leader who works with offshore teams
You want to ensure your team(s) are aligned with business priorities
You are looking for new ways to measure success
What you will hear about:
Off-shore teams
Tactics to align with business goals with team processes
Batman
Links:
Cynefin
Related Interviews:
Ken Judy
Jessica Barnett
Esther Derby is an expert in organizational dynamics and a leading thinker in bringing agility to organizations, management, and teams. She has spent the last twenty-five years helping companies design their environment, culture, and human dynamics for optimum success. In addition to this work, she’s written over 100 articles, and co-authored two books–Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great and Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management.
Relevant audience:
You are a technical leader who cannot get the resources, people or buy in you need.
You want your teams to learn and make decisions independently
Your team(s) are having trouble collaborating
What you will hear about:
Tactics to gain influence
Retrospectives
Experiential Workshops
Training and Learning with Esther:
Problem Solving Leadership (http://estherderby.com/workshops/problem-solving-leadership-psl)
Monthly teleconferences (http://www.estherderby.com/qa-teleconferences)
Agile Retrospectives (http://amzn.com/0977616649)
Related Podcasts:
Dan Mezick - http://bit.ly/1q3lZ5W
Robert Richman - http://bit.ly/1u6eIUJ
Joseph Benson is a brand strategist with over thirty years of experience. He defines and expresses the brand strategies for financial services, educational institutions, non-profits, healthcare, high technology, entertainment, and retail clients.
Joseph also trained as a filmmaker. His films have appeared in over a dozen festivals and have been licensed to HBO. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 1982.
You can find out more by visiting:
www.bensonbrandstrategy.com
www.linkedin.com/in/josephbensonbrandstrategy
Notes From Interview
Becoming the “Clear Choice”
Differentiate clients/customers in minds of customers
Understand occasions of choosing company
Center message around a single word
Client Profile
Statistics and demographics
Look at the “stories they tell themselves about themselves”
Understand how they make decisions and why they chose competitors
The Best Stories
Tells the consumer their need will be fulfilled
Come in many forms — pictures, colors, fonts, sounds, words
You have to define the story, not the customer
The Discipline of Market Leaders
The narrower the focus, the stronger the brand
Overcoming a Bad Story
Standup and admit the mistakes
Hold leadership accountable
Create new clear policies and live up to them
Americans believe strongly in second chances
Robert Richman is a culture architect and was the co-creator of Zappos Insights, an innovative program focused on educating companies on the secrets behind Zappos’ amazing employee culture.
Robert built Zappos Insights from a small website to a thriving multi-million dollar business teaching over 25,000 students per year. Through his work, Robert has been responsible for improving the employee culture at hundreds of companies like Procter & Gamble, Whole Foods and Amazon.
Previously a Zappos spokesperson and authority on employee culture, Robert is a sought after keynote speaker at conferences around the world and has been hired to teach culture in person at companies like Google, Toyota, and Eli Lilly. He has pioneered a number of innovative techniques to build culture, such as bringing improv comedy to the workplace.
His new book, The Culture Blueprint, is a systematic guide to how a workplace can help people grow, inspire amazing service, and ultimately drive revenue through amazing culture.
More information is available at his website, www.RobertRichman.com.
Culture
Culture exists when there are more than 2 people in the room.
Culture is about beliefs.
Impact beliefs by experience.
Strong vs Weak Culture
Not good or bad cultures — strong versus weak cultures
Weak culture is one in which there is not alignment between actions and values folds
Strong culture you can walk in and see the values in action without anyone telling them the story
Improv
Not improv for performance, but applying principles to a group
Agree and take to the next level
Start with the smallest of acts
Practice failing
Costs of Weak Culture
Unfulfilled promises to employees and customers
Lack of trust to bring best self to table
Subtle discomfort and insecurity
Results of Cultural Experience
Emotional Honesty — gives way to open communication
when someone is real with you, that’s when you can trust them
The Book
Improv and open space work best when culture already strong
Book is about getting tight into vision and values
Basic elements of culture — on boarding, creating leaders, teaching customer service
Successful Onboarding
Extend time for on boarding
Have several people start at same time
Create two-way conversations around expectations and what’s needed for success
Why Open Space?
Culture ownership needs to be on the leaders and the people
Open space is team building and strategy session at same time
Unlocking creating potential of company
If a place like Zappos who usually gets 10-20k calls a day can take a day and turn off phones to work on themselves, other companies can as well.
The Power of Stories
Story telling is “cultural currency”
getstory.com — power of somebody seeing themselves in the story
Related episodes: Ken J, Dan M
Debbie Madden has built five companies from the ground up, is a lead generation istructor at General Assembly, and a sought after public speaker and writer, appearing in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fox Business TV, the HuffingtonPost, Inc. Magazine, and more. Prior to Stride, Debbie was the CEO of Cyrus Innovation, an Agile software development consulting firm, which she grew Cyrus into a 60-person, multimillion-dollar, five-time Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies winner, and Crain’s NY Best Place to Work.
How does a team realize their best?
Improve in small steps, not trying to change the world overnight
Expand on strengths
Identify risks, past success, factors in control
Make the process of software development more reliable
Honesty
What are your goals, are they realistic?
Adding value is making product better
People’s opinions are based on past life experiences
Risk
Decisive — set tripwires
“Liftoff” meeting — Diana Larson, Liftoff
Create working agreements, risk assessment
Proactively monitor risks
Tools to help stay aligned with principles and priorities
Have deadlines for action items and follow up
3 things you will stop doing in next 30 days to make room to do this?
Categorize how you spend your time
Other episodes mentioned: Ken J
Jessica Barnett is a Product Manager at a startup called Medivo. At Medivo, they’ve adopted Trello to organize just about everything, including their retrospectives. After seeing the positive impact of retros, there was company-wide adoption, starting with the c-suite. Not only has the company embraced some agile practices, the team has been able to influence business to reduce overwhelm, staying aligned with their top priorities.
Trello Retrospectives
See Jess’ post detailing their process
Its the one time the whole team is focused on improving our lives
Influencing Business
Retros pulled across company, starting with c-suite
Creating visibility on overwhelm
Many different ways to tell the same story
How can we ensure if this is the most important thing it is what we are focused on?
What worked
Demonstrated velocity improvements with focused efforts
Pushed back on requests
Gained clarity on top priorities
If you want us to do great work, this is the way we’re going to do it
Needed support to say “no”
VP of Technology saying “you present the facts, you drive home principles and I’ll make sure it goes okay” (and following through by defending the team)
Contract between business and technology agreeing to use Agile to manage development
Performance connected to celebration and investment in your people
If you believe in your principles, find ways, experiment with ways that you can communicate those principles and make it happen.
John Shiple — Freelance CTO, technology advisor — triages businesses, help business scale, launches new businesses. John's been in technology over 20 years and loves building websites.
In Part 2 of this interview, John and I continue our discussion about founders and startups needing (or not needing) CTOs. Red flags to watch out for (both the founder and the CTO) as well as some stories and philosophies based on John's experiences and expertise.
Part 1 can be found here.
John Shiple — Freelance CTO, technology advisor — triages businesses, help businesses scale, and launches new businesses. He's been in technology over 20 years and loves building internet sites.
In Part 1 of this interview, John and I discuss important topics for non-technical Founders to consider including recruiting challenges, expressing ideas, and the importance of a technical leader. This is a great episode for both founders and technical leaders to get an understanding of common challenges and misalignments.
Notes from Interview
Collection of Videos about CTOs, recuriting and startups by John (created by DocStoc)
Common weaknesses (business side)
miscommunication on product needs
lack of background in technology
fragile relationships between business and technology
technology is the least important - you need to have the right people building the right things
Recruiting Help
more challenging than other domains
if you have a good friend from college that knows CS, get them onboard
every techie is working and if they aren’t its because they are choosing not to
John will be teaching a class at GA on How to be a CTO (this November in LA)
Joanna Clay is a reporter for The Orange County Register. Previously she was working with the Los Angeles Register and covered the West Side with a focus on tech and the Silicon Beach phenomena. In this episode we discuss her takeaways and observations in creating the article on Why there aren’t more women in the tech industry (pdf version).
Interview highlights
Article Summary
-
Companies need to advertise opportunities in a way that is appealing to women
-
Girls need messaging from a young age that encourages exploration into engineering
-
Engineering needs to be discussed more in the media and schools
Projects Creating Shifts
Hopscotch — Getting girls excited about tech at young ages
Changing the Conversation -- Initiative to change the way we speak about engineering
Girls Explore Engineering
Santa Monica Youth Tech Program
VC needs more women too!
oasis summit -- vow to be chic
Jesse Draper and Valley Girl Ventures
Have a good story about tech on the west side? Contact Joanna
Past interviews mentioned on the show:
Josh Bigelow
Luke Melia
Ryan Janssen has been creating and leading companies for the last 20 years. His latest venture, Collectively, aims to improve the way people work.
Ryan and Wendy discuss the lonely entrepreneuer, the challenges around working by yourself as well as how his company, Collectively, is evolving. It is a fun conversation for anyone who has worked by themselves, started a company or likes the Borg.
Notes from the Interview
lonely entrepreneur
corporate culture sucks…talk in a way, dress in a way, interact in a way with people that just isn’t you
companies provide colleagues
socially isolated environment
bipolar role — company cheerleader and risk mitigator
challenges
we’re all afraid to get our stuff in front of people
rabbit hole w/o outside opinions
fear inhibits success
evolve based on experiments
Ken Judy has twenty years experience in development and over a decade of experience leading and creating agile teams. Currently he is VP of Technology at Simon & Schuster, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.
This is a great episode for technical leaders and team members to understand how to create value on their technical team beyond pushing tickets. We also discuss how the day to day actions and behaviors of leadership impact the decisions and values of the team.
Notes from Interview
Improv Theater Takeaways
in theater people have a good sense of the lifecycle
adjusting expectations based on constraints and timeframe
constraints support creativity
you can’t get performance from an actor without interacting with the actor
Typical Environments
developers are creating the product and often don’t have say in what they are crafting
kill yourself to get to date, not make the date and then its arbitrary, so they just set another date
only way to have accountability is to have a date
Team Dynamics
different personalities combine
having right environment that attracts the right talent takes a long time
i wanted a way of working that allowed us as a small team to take advantage our our individual strengths and not be victim of individual weaknesses
Leadership
developers are achieving what their company wants them to achieve
they will do what your values/actions tell them you want
people say they value quality, but their day to day actions and priority do not
if you cannot have collaboration around features, you will automatically sacrifice quality
Valuing Quality
model through collaboration
humility from the stakeholders
listen to risk
what you want to achieve -- not how
creative ways of measuring value
Antipatterns
developers are there to code and efficiency is about passing off tickets
master/slave paradigm
by the time it gets into debs hands, the business has already made too many decisions that limit impact devs can have on limiting work and creativity
its all about how many people are on something and not who they are
Where to start
a conversation with business, product and developer is most efficient conversation
once you have that practice internal, build relationships with outsiders
often time people asking for work are not in technology and developers are not domain experts
coding is meaningless without understanding the problem at hand
The value is in the team
companies that think they are agile and constantly reform team
team reforms every time it changes
small group who know/trust each other, needs to be reestablished if even one person changes
core talent of development team is problem solving
Fallacies
there is value in variety, can lead to a new spark of creativity and excitement
people will roll on/off team, that is life
never have to worry - oh no team has been together too long, i need to shake things up
Agile
agile is not about delivering more stuff, its about delivering more value
accomplishment comes from focus on what really matters
achieve outcome with least amount of waste.
you need to understand success on small scale to know what success looks like on large scale
You get what you ask for
devs close stories when it meets the letter of what you ask for
schedule pressure makes it too easy to not get it "done done"
if you criticize velocity, your team will increase velocity, but most likely deliver less value
Read more of Ken's thoughts and experiences on his blog.
How does your team stack up? Ask the right questions.
Luke Melia is a software developer, co-founder/CTO of Yapp who loves building great teams and communities. Luke helped create the first GORUCO and the Ember.js community in NYC.
In this podcast, Luke discusses Yapp’s early adoption of Ember.js, and its impact on revenue, community and recruiting. We dive into building community, unique takeaways about Ruby, and the many benefits of community. This is a great talk for people interested in speaking, teams who need to grow, and leaders who want to infuse a vision into their culture.
Ember History
Adopted Ember from Sproutcore
Ember consulting funds Yapp
Ember.js meeting up NYC has over 1100 people
Ruby is Unique Community
No big corp behind community, the driving force was individual
Motivation, style, stems from roots
Community takes responsibility to fix problems
Lessons from Ruby Community
Matz is nice and so we are nice
People talking about it made it true
Took into Ember — together we help folks climb the learning curve
After a while you are saying the same words and instead of vision it becomes true
Impact of Community on Hiring
First crack at folks as they come onto the market
Apprenticeship programs
Find talent, be attractive to talent
Talented devs don’t come onto the market… they reach out to a few friends and have a new job
Other Ramblings
Lightening talk great introduction to public speaking
Differences between Silicon Beach and Silicon Alley
Historian Role
Community Builder? Ping @lukemelia on twitter
Tweet @embernyc to find out where they are going for drinks the evening of a meetup
Dan Mezick is a management consultant, author & keynote speaker. His work includes The Culture Game, a book based on five years of experience coaching 119 Agile teams across 25 different organizations. He is also the cultivator of Open Space Agile Adoption.
This interview is a continuation of Part I
Notes from Interview
After Open Space
Proceedings are the beginning
Adoption is learning through experimentation, inspected at next open space
Stuart Kauffman, Santa Fe Institute — The Adjacent Possible (http://edge.org/conversation/the-adjacent-possible)
Coaching Change
Coaching + experimentation => learning can take place
Experiments make a space for learning
Cannot inflict help
Power of Invitation
Pull out of comfort zone rather than push through invitation
Frame it like a party
Let the teams pull changes instead of pushing on them
Play
A lot of work is really serious play
The opposite of work is not play
Solving problems doesn’t have to be heavy process
Open to Failure
Games dissolve tension, make room for love
We like to fail fast, but are uncomfortable with vulnerability
Mandated collaboration is ultimate oxymoron
Unwilling Participants
Reduce commitment by 1/2 until they willing to try
Create opportunities to try, not mandated
Disengagement Epidemic — Pushing Mindset
We pull work in Agile, but routinely push agile without teams consent
Most people unhappy/disengaged with work
Engagement is associated with a sense of control and belonging
Improving Velocity
Great work possible for any team
Make the team the genius instead of hiring geniuses
Genius Teams — McCarthy Project (http://www.mccarthyshow.com/aboutus/)
Interpersonal Equity
Substantial asset to team productivity
Energy is created in group from history of the group
Creates lasting friendships, strong networks
Dependency, Autonomy and Mastery
Consulting versus Coaching
Explicit boundaries needed
Steven ‘Doc’ List
35 years in software development, business owner, facilitator, agile coach
Team and People
technical practices take you so far
Teams that work well together more productive
Learn how a team collaborates by observing
choice of words indicate culture and mindset
Red Flags
Difference between facilitated and run
meetings should be multidirectional, conversation — purpose, learning
we’re all in this together, how do we all contribute
Facilitation Antipatterns
Gladiator, Benevolent Dictator, Superhero
champion - great deal of responsibility for success or failure
nice people in bad positions
culture of blame, a culture of fault, a culture of heroism
Role of Coaches
coaches role is teaching
rather than wrong/bad, asking questions
telling is not a good way for influence
balance guidance, question and strong suggestion
take it to the team
Help the Disenfranchised
stickies on the wall
give people tools/ways to democratize the process
Agile Retrospectives (http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Retrospectives-Making-Pragmatic-Programmers-ebook/dp/B00B03SRJW/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406827093&sr=1-1&keywords=Agile+Retrospectives)
I don’t know why it works, but it does so I’m going to do it again!
Language Matters
interpretation of behaviors cause problems
communication is a dance
Non-Violent Communication
Crucial Conversations (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0071446524?ie=UTF8&tag=athought-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0071446524)
Ask yourself, why would a rational, reasonable, decent human being do that?
Dangerous Words
“can’t” “made” “feel” “should”
Superteams (http://www.amazon.com/Superteams-How-Take-Your-Team/dp/0670921483)
Practice
think about your words
judgements are not feelings
make an effort to make a change
Contact
Doc List https://twitter.com/athought
His Recommending Reading http://www.doclist.me/reading/
Check out his blog (http://www.doclist.me/) for more about patterns and anti patterns
Josh Bigelow is the founder, CSO and janitor at Synchromatics. Engineer by training, entrepreneur by heart. Started Synchromatics in his garage and its now has 15 employees, 34 clients across the country and healthy revenue.
Josh shares how he brought Synchromatics clarity, unity and purpose by analyzing competitors, creating campaigns and dropping distractions. A great show to get an understanding of what a viable strategy looks like, how to create one and the benefits that come with its execution.
Notes from Interview Symptoms that something needed to change: lack of progress on core initiatives people frustrated that they weren’t heard vision wasn’t clear lack of unity and mission in company where were the efforts lost people didn’t understand the why behind initiatives people just finishing the task at hand without connection to the why working really hard and getting nowhere "if you are facing the wrong direction every step, how could you possibly get to destination?" Formula look at enemies, determine weak point figure out strengths where is industry headed and how can we be part of it. secure position in market while delivering value. Investigate competition linkedin to research leadership resumes of employees press releases, interviews Sweet Spot area where no competitors were strong important to customers strength of team can be exploited quickly "if its not simple, people won’t remember." Benefits easy to drop the dead weight - "the nos give power to the yes" ended fragmentation people working hard on the right thing unified, collective leadership management became natural less meetings, more free flowing communication redesigned bonus plan 50% of bonus aligned with goals delivered to employees with clarity around execution of mission people are happy staff has a sense of commitment and real buy in to a mission Josh’s Influences Art of War — when everything is on the line, ego’s go out the door and people unite Michael Porter The Lean Startup The Innovators Dilemma David and Goliath — it isn’t size that determines strength of a team, but unity and how well they can think Paul Graham — take the best of what others have mastered and digest it so you don’t have to learn the hard way Steve Jobs Contact: http://synchromatics.com @BigelowJosh
Dan Mezick is a management consultant, author & keynote speaker. His work includes The Culture Game, a book based on five years of experience coaching 119 Agile teams across 25 different organizations. He is also the cultivator of Open Space Agile Adoption.
Notes From Show
Coaching — help organizations learn
They need to be willing to receive.
Litmus test for willing customers — used a variety over the years, these days openness to use open space to kick off agile adoption
Open Space — authorize people to be great
What does that look like?
- Theme around agile — what are we solving — needs to be in service to something
“In Service” — businesses are slow to respond to change — service is about solving a problem or improving performance — specific — not just “we want to be better”
- Invitational event — willing people show up
Harrison Owen (founder of open space) — bring all the people who are passionate about topic to get movement — developed in the 80s because the best part of conferences is usually the coffee break
Most important part of litmus test is that leadership needs to be on board. Leadership promises to act on feedback created in open space immediately.
“sponsor” — highest authorized person at the meeting — needs to announce intention and openness to act at kick off of open space
How do we keep the best/most passionate/responsible people and prosper in a world of change?
Open Space meeting is “signal event” — things are “shifting” — people open up/change minds
What comes up that can be actioned right away — impediments come up — leadership works on those problems with the people who were involved with the open space. This leads to policy changes, move people around, meetings eliminated, etc
Ilio is the Executive Director of Agile at Kaplan Test Prep. with about 10 years agile experience.
Five years ago, Kaplan was almost entirely waterfall. Over the course of two years, he introduced agile in some pilot projects with good outcomes. These proved the case for an organization wide roll out. To date, all 12 development teams work in agile. Several non-development teams do as well - 8 total including marketing, publishing, and content.
Wendy's Notes From Interview
- After first year of rollouts across development teams, non-tech teams started agile adoption.
- Introduction of agile to complete autonomy varies depending on size and culture of team. Average 3 months non-software teams. “Processes are meant to serve you and not control you.”
- Identify problems and baseline to improve before adoption and measure improvements as a result.
- Use of surveys to measure more subtle points such as trust and happiness. Working with team gives the best sense — watching communication, collaboration, etc.
- Most important questions: is throughput increasing? is team delivering more value?
- Coaches focused on agile roll out and now focused on how can our practices work better to build better products for our customers.
- Culture shift — upfront planning -> hypothesis and goals with experiments in the marketplace and exercises. How can we deliver most stuff to how can we deliver right stuff
- Less lines of code, value higher.
- Technical debt gets reduced incrementally so value is continually added.
Shifting Culture From Waterfall to Agile
- Provide lightweight formal support mechanism while adopting.
- Weekly meetings with c-suite, 80% of time needed, solves problems team couldn’t solve on own. 3 months, 25% of time, 6 months meeting eliminated. Teams solving all problems on their own. Once in last 2 years, they thought they needed it for a problem, but ended up figuring it out.
- Lots of meetings — wean off naturally because teams were able to resolve issues themselves. “supporting teams until they don’t need support… goal is for teams to be able to solve problems themselves.”
- Opt-in approach — figure out challenges, give it a 3 month try, see how it works and then decide if they want to continue. 20 teams stayed with agile 2 teams opted out. “The ultimate goal is for teams to work well together and deliver most value you can.”
Thoughts on Dogmatic Agile
- Openness to try working differently in different context. Schools of thought that say what works best. “I don’t really care if its ‘agile’ I care if they are able to make good decisions, able to work in an iterative and incremental manner. If there are some things like portfolio management that helps the teams, thats ok. Pick whats right for your org and the context there."
- Balance is key — too much rigidity is bad, no framework or support is bad.
- Cynefin Framework — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin — being a “chef” with ingredients