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January 26, 2011 – Dan LeFebvre on: THREE STEPS TO SUSTAINABLE AGILITY

REGISTER:

REGISTER NOW FOR THIS MEETING

DIRECTIONS TO MICROSOFT WALTHAM.

WEDNESDAY January 26 2010, 630PM

 

DAN LEFEBVRE ON : THREE STEPS TO SUSTAINABLE AGILITY

Dan LeFebvre (pronounced La-FAVE) is the founder of DCL Agility, LLC, a provider of agile and Scrum coaching, training, and transition services. He is the first Certified Scrum Coach in New England with over twenty years in software product development as a developer, manager, director, and coach. He has been applying agile practices to successfully deliver products since 2003.

Dan spent two years as the internal agile coach for Kronos, a Boston-based Software Company, where he coordinated and implemented Scrum within the 700 person engineering organization across all sites including Massachusetts, Atlanta, Chicago, Oregon, Montreal, British Columbia, Belgium and India. This resulted in increased visibility into the development process and a reduction in defects by 60% in 18 months.

Dan holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Boston University. He is a Certified ScrumMaster, Certified Scrum Professional, and Certified Scrum Coach. He has presented at the Scrum Gathering and local user groups and has contributed articles to the Scrum Alliance and Boston SPIN.

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Presentation: DAN LEFEBVRE ON: THREE STEPS TO SUSTAINABLE AGILITY

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Transitioning to agile is hard. It involves learning new techniques, thinking in a different way, and stepping out of your comfort zone. Many organizations have been designed with traditional product development models in mind. Functional silos are put in place to handle the different aspects of the software development lifecycle with people who spent their careers becoming experts in a particular silo.

Senior managers have spent many years developing rules of thumb, instincts, crisis management models, and metrics that have made them successful in this way of working. So successful that they’ve actually become senior managers in their company. This situation creates a lot of forces that act against a successful agile transition and pulls a company back into the traditional lifecycle.

No wonder so many agile transitions revert back to previous ways over time. A change in management or a loss of the agile Champion is often a catalyst for this process. New managers unfamiliar with agile will redesign the internal systems to work the way they are comfortable. The loss of an agile Champion removes one of the largest forces pushing an organization forward; thereby, allowing entropy to set in. For an organization to sustain an agile transition, management must install several mechanisms to help counteract these forces.

This session describes the three specific mechanisms that I help organizations put into place to help sustain their agile transition. The first is an impediments escalation mechanism, the second a means for providing internal coaching, and the third is a portfolio management process.

I cover each in depth during this session. You exit with ideas and tools you can use without delay to maintain and sustain your organization’s Agile evolution.

 

You’ll learn:

— The THREE important steps for Sustainable Agility:

— How to architect and install an Impediments Escalation Mechanism

— How to develop internal coaching capability inside your organization

— Why you need a mechanism to manage your project portfolio, and how to create one

 

MEETING AGENDA:

6:30 PM: PART ONE: Intro to Scrum Fundamentals. Scrum is simple to explain and difficult to implement. Come hear the simple explanation and consider taking a shot at the often-difficult implementation. We’ll complete this session with a true story from an actual coaching engagement, complete with an Authority Map Diagram depicting the actual scenario.

7:00 PM: Food & socializing & networking time

7:25 PM: PART 02, MAIN EVENT: DAN LEFEBVRE ON 3 STEPS TO SUSTAINABLE AGILITY

8:25 PM: SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION OF MEETING

REGISTER:

REGISTER NOW FOR THIS MEETING

DIRECTIONS TO MICROSOFT WALTHAM.

NOTE: Please don’t register casually for this meeting, as you do us a big disservice to us by distorting the actual count for the seating and food. Registration is an explicit commitment to attend.

DIRECTIONS TO MICROSOFT WALTHAM.

 

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Punctuality and Scrum Values

Ken Schwaber’s book Agile Software Development Using Scrum has a section on Scrum values and explicitly lists five. They are Focus, Commitment, Courage, Openness and Respect. If you poke around on this blog you can find some writing I have done on these in the past.

Many organizations cannot do genuine and authentic Scrum. Why? Often, the reasons are the same reasons these organizations in general cannot execute on genuine punctuality. I notice that genuine and authentic punctuality instantly supports 3 of the 5 Scrum values: Focus, Commitment and Respect.

At a company where I am currently coaching, a VP-level leader implemented a voluntary opt-in Punctuality policy. You opt-in to the commitment. The policy is that if you are late, you pay $1 as a symbol of the culture valuing punctuality. Paying the $1 is an act that de-values tardiness;  it de-values “being late”.

An interesting set of dynamics immediately kicked in. There were many questions about ‘edge’ cases. First the definition of ‘late’ needed to be clarified. We discovered that the clocks throughout the building were all depicting incorrect times. These were synchronized. It was discovered that some clocks were slow and drifted to incorrect times after a few days. So a policy of using the time as depicted by the corporate network was used as the reference time.

Next the question of 1 second late came up, is this really ‘late’. 2 seconds etc. It was discussed and decided, yes, 1-2 seconds late is really, really late. being a bit early is the best policy, and encouraged.

Next the issue of ‘commuting’ from meeting to meeting came up. The operation spans several floors and each floor has like 20,000 square feet. So a policy of shortening meetings from 60 to 55 minutes was discussed.

But, since not everyone opted-in to valuing punctuality, this policy change was not simple to socialize throughout the organization and remains a problem to this day.

Next, the issue of meeting invites via Outlook scheduling was addressed. If you are invited to an Outlook meeting, the options are [Accept], [Decline] and [Tentative]. If you do not [Decline], are you obligated ?  This is an example of a fuzzy boundary and status. The issue was discussed.

A policy was defined that if you are invited, and do not explicitly decline, you are obligated to attend– on time. A policy about using [Tentative] was then defined.

As you can see, explicit examination is required for clarity in even the simplest policy definition for entire groups of people. It turns out that ‘simple’ punctuality is really not so simple after all.

Punctuality supports 3 of the 5 Scrum values: Focus, Commitment and Respect. These values associate with greatness in organizations. To be great, be great at being punctual.

It ain’t as easy as it looks. If your organization is not Punctual, you probably cannot do genuine and authentic Scrum. If on the other hand your culture strongly values Focus, Commitment and Respect, both Punctuality and Scrum are probably very simple to implement. At issue is “alignment” …..on “values”. These are very important concepts to grasp, for all organizations that intend to be great.