Continuous Business Improvement with Agility

Peter Gfader's Adventures With Organisations.

[business-agility]

Beyond Agility Founded

In April I founded Beyond Agility GmbH where we focus on helping organizations to get better at discovering and delivering value.

What is Value? I collected some views on Value on my Tumblr Stream.

What does Discovery mean? Discovery is all about your future customer and exciting your current customer. Find ideas here. What does Delivery mean? Delivery is all about delivering products and validating the need and problem of the customer. Obviously my favorite topic Continuous Delivery (and more) needs to be in that toolbox.

   Head over to https://beyond-agility.com/ and sign up for updates on articles and more agile ideas to spice up your teams. 

[business-agility]

What Are Five Ways Enterprises Can Successfully Act Like Startups? via @dolaoseb. My thoughts at the end

Blog post moved and improved to https://beyond-agility.com/5-ways-how-enterprises-can-successfully-act-like-a-startup-my-recommendations/

[business-agility]

Book Review: Tribal Unity from Em Campbell-Pretty @prettyagile

I got this book recommended by a Spotify coach and had quite high expectations.

I would rate this book 7 out of a scale from 1...10.

Things I Enjoyed:

The Tribal Unity Checklist (some things blurred in order to not get in trouble with copyright)

5 Stages of Tribal Culture 

Stage 1: Life sucks! 

Stage 2: My life sucks! 

Stage 3: I’m great! 

Stage 4: We’re great! 

Stage 5: Life’s great! 

Source: Tribal Leadership by David Logan <-- Maybe a book to read??

“30% of a teams performance is determined by “how the initial launch of the team goes”

Source: J. Richard Hackman, Collaborative Intelligence <-- Maybe a book to read?

Unity Hour

Book Clubs

It’s a quick read, written very well and organized in good 6 parts

Things I Missed:

There was not much new in this book, at least to me. All these things I knew and used already: Delegation Levels, Team Self Selection, Social Contracts, Co-Location, Visioning, Celebrations, Rituals, ... 

Things To Improve:

The purpose of the Daily Scrum. https://twitter.com/peitor/status/995749488101871617 <-- See here why. Lots of people get this wrong... Sadly...

Some notes for my future self:

"A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea". Seth Godin

The book is 6 parts:

Part 1: Creating Great Teams

Part 2: Connecting Teams and Creating your Tribe

Part 3: Connect Tribes to Leaders

Part 4: Connecting to an idea

Part 5: Sustaining Tribal Unity

Part 6: Engaging Management in Tribal Unity

[business-agility]

How To Validate Your Startup Idea in 5 Minutes or Less

via @EntryLevelRebel

Write out the names of five people who need your product.

Can you do that in 1 minute? No? Then maybe your idea is not ready yet...

via https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/validate-your-startup-idea-in-5-minutes-or-less.html 

[business-agility]

How do you get from Checklists to Empathy?

Potential answers can be found on this Twitter Thread https://twitter.com/peitor/status/967079516261711872 

What do you focus on?

How do you enable the team?

What is your Leadership style?

[business-agility]

Are we all focusing on the right metric of success?

This is a little model that I have adapted from somewhere I don’t remember. It might be wrong but maybe helpful

Project Managers care about Software being delivered

Developers care about working Software

User Experience people care about software being engaging

Business people care about software being valuable

Imagine all those people in 1 team focusing on the same thing!

The pyramid is missing “Geil” and “Usable”

[business-agility]

How do you achieve competitive advantage?

From the Agile Manifesto: The 11th principle of the 12.

Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.

And the definition of “Agility” by Ken Schwaber

“Agility is an organization's ability to harness change for competitive advantage.”

The more I work with teams, the more I tend to think:

A well functioning, performing, value optimizing team is the competitive advantage. Peter Gfader

Question to you:

How do you create well functioning teams?

How do you know you are in one?

[business-agility]

How do you satisfy the customer with early and continuous delivery of valuable software?

Maybe “Blitz Planning” (from Crystal Clear) is an answer ...

>> the key objective of blitz planning is to find the earliest possible point at which business value (revenue or savings) can be delivered.

>> Ask each team to brainstorm and then write cards for every task which needs to be done, you should include all kinds of tasks, but not processes; for example, migrate database or order hardware, are tasks, whereas processes such as run a showcase, or run an elaboration workshop are not. Don’t worry too much about granularity at this point; you will get a chance to review that shortly.

I found this strange since #1 tasks could be a lot and #2 why should the people already focus on the tasks and less on the higher purpose and vision or even focus on the impact that the product should have?

Regarding #2 it might be just a timing issue... Maybe the “Blitz Planning” comes after the kickoff and general vision sharing...

Anyways......

A great way to come up with a shared vocabulary, dependencies between teams/tasks and a high level picture.

http://www.betterprojects.net/2015/10/a-thin-slice-of-value.html

[business-agility]

If 95% of all startups fail, why would enterprises behave like a Startup? #leanStartup

Blog Post moved and improved to https://beyond-agility.com/if-95-of-all-startups-fail-why-should-enterprises-behave-like-a-startup-leanstartup/

[business-agility]

Cycle Time vs Lead Time. What do you focus on?

Cycle Time: 

Cycle time is the total time from the beginning to the end of your process, as defined by you and your customer

from http://www.isixsigma.com/dictionary/cycle-time/ 

Lead Time: 

A lead time is the latency between the initiation and execution of a process

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_time

Although there is no common agreement what it exactly is, as described here http://guide.agilealliance.org/guide/leadtime.html. I usually see it as follows. 

In the drawing you see CycleTime as “time between start of work and done of work” and LeadTime as “initiation of the idea and done of work.

What should you measure?

What should focus on?

Don’t forget the most important state on your board

Is this product/feature used? 

Is it useful?

Another great illustration from Jurgen Appello https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurgenappelo/12048135685/in/photostream/

[business-agility]

Are the Chief Cause of Problems the Solutions?

Lots of consultants out there have a “best practice” up in their sleeve that potentially doesn’t deliver the right result.

In this article Brent Wahba describes the potential unintended new problems that can arise from those best practices aka “solutions”.

http://www.lean.org/LeanPost/Posting.cfm?LeanPostId=412

BTW: an example of the mentioned “A3 Problem Solving template” can be found on Henrik Knibergs page here http://blog.crisp.se/2009/09/23/henrikkniberg/1253687880000 

[business-agility]

What do you measure and what incentives are behind your metrics?

Great talk from Don McGreal about metrics in software development.

https://www.scrum.org/About/All-Articles/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/955/Agile-Metrics--ScrumPulse-Webcast-5

Some great bits out of the talk:

The Pizza Metric exercise http://blogs.versionone.com/agile_management/2014/04/29/pepperoni-metrics-and-software/ 

Difference between “Circumstantial Evidence” and “Direct Evidence Velocity, Defects, Code Coverage, .. VS Revenue, Satisfaction, Lead Time, Innovation Rate, Customer usage, ...

Cargo cults story from the 1st world war and the Pacific Island

The Cobra Metrics story in India

The “Score Board” with value metrics that you should care of!

Make sure to watch the whole 1hour video: https://www.scrum.org/About/All-Articles/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/955/Agile-Metrics--ScrumPulse-Webcast-5 

Figure: Software and metrics [Min 15:00]

Figure: The metrics from Evidence Based Management  http://www.ebmgt.org/

Figure: Cumulative Flow Diagram [Min 44:00]  

Figure: Metrics overlayed in a Release Burn Up diagram [Min 44:00]

Figure: A sample Project Score Board [Min 47:00]

What do you measure and what incentives are behind your metrics?

[business-agility]

What is Value?

Everything that lets us:

Make more money (increase revenue, reduce cost)

Lose less money (protect revenue, avoid cost)

Every action that lets to:

Business growth

Customer retention

With the user in mind:

Value is anything which makes people more likely to give us money or keep them as customers.

[business-agility]

the end.

This is the first post, which is to say that you've reached the end.

Get in touch via my company website: https://beyond-agility.com/