Talking about Agility in CoDir

Photo by Hunters Race on Unsplash

As part of one of my current missions, I was asked by my agent to talk about Agility during a CoDir. It was in fact one of the first times that I had to do this kind of exercise: a different audience with different expectations and yet a subject that remains indeed the same!

Knowing the importance of getting Top Management to understand their role in an Agile approach, I had to find a way to be impactful:

• What are the most relevant messages to convey?
• How?
• How to arouse interest, or at least not generate outcry?

Here is how I responded to this request, from the design to the workshop! 😉

Note: I promise, I didn't wear a costume! 😛 

Context of the request

I share with you below the raw data of the context and the request that I received:

• The request is a " Agility Awareness " of 2 hours which will take place during a working day of the CoDir
• There maturity of the CoDir on this subject must be considered 0
• The audience made up of Directors, approximately 15 people
• The need is to give bases on Agility in a way pragmatic and operational :
  • The concept of encryption
  • What Agility brings
  • What Agility is
  • What Agility is not

• Fighting the rumour: “Agile takes less time”
• Audience who consider they know what Project Management is and who find it boring
• If possible discuss topics such as:
  • The principle Iterative
  • User tests and business feedback: the importance of being as much as possible close to trades

• Spread the Motto: “Stop Starting, Start Finishing”
• Broaden the debate in order to involve people in the process
• The wish would be that the directors leave with:
  • A better understanding of What does the term “Agile” mean? as we hear it
  • A accountability of the requesting profession

A nice Christmas list, don't you think? 😛

Now, let's see what we can do from there! 😉

Design

Let's go back to the previous elements to extract the information we need:

As usual, the first information I'm looking for concerns the framework. Indeed, the definition of this framework already allows to have an idea on what one can afford to do or not and to reflect on some elements of form.

In general, I particularly like the workshops in the sense that they are participatory, that the message is less descending – which in my opinion therefore contributes less through authority – and allowsengage attendees in a reflection of their own.

Timing

In 2 hours, there is plenty to do! Now there are a number of messages to pass so I can't afford to make a workshop too long like a Lego4Scrum or one getKanban. I will therefore rather opt for one or more short or medium duration workshops (max 45 mins)

Number of persons

The number of people also influences my choice of workshops because the more people there are, the greater the risk of overflow in terms of time (especially if there are several teams and there are asynchronous debriefings). I will rather opt for one workshop to take the time for the debriefing and to keep room for a potential broadening of the debate.

Intention

We are talking about an awareness of Agility, pragmatic and operational.

Thus, to be impactful, it would be necessary to be able to see a concrete result at the end of the workshop. THE Penny Game is an activity that I like very much and which has precisely the interest of making people think about concrete results because they are directly measured from experience! It is not too long and fits well in the timing that I want and can involve all the participants at the same time!

I will also avoid spending too much time on theory Agility (Agile Manifesto, history…)

Target

The target of this session corresponds to directors with a maturity considered close to 0, with some prejudices on Agility. Nothing unusual at this point. However, their impact on the rest of the transformation is far from negligible: they are often the ones who urge teams to be Agile without understanding the true content.

To see where these directors really are, it may be interesting to bring out what they mean by the term “Agile”. One of the interests is to highlight to the collective the homogeneity or heterogeneity of perceptions on this subject.

Another interest for me is to observe who will be good allies on whom I can rely for the future.

At this level of reflection, I start with:

• a potential starter: “What does the term Agile mean to you? »
• a simulation workshop: the Penny Game

To see now if through the Penny Game, I can succeed in conveying the necessary messages described in the list below:

“Stop Starting, Start Finishing”

The Penny Game is mostly used to talk about overall stream optimization as well as batch size limitation for better productivity. Its use is therefore direct to convey this key concept of Lean Kanban!

Start to finish to have the possibility oflearn faster of a context in permanent change: the needs just like the solutions must adapt continuously, this is why we use short iterations to limit the impact of errors.

Global vs local optimization 

Global optimization introduces the fact that people are part of the same chain, the value production chain !

To align all the parts, it is necessary to have a shared vision with all the employees.

There liability is therefore global and no longer local:

• Each director therefore not only has his perimeter to manage but must see if his actions have a global coherence with the corporate vision.
• Whether I am Business, IT, Business Analyst, Tester or other, if a problem emerges, its resolution remains everyone's responsibility.

Speak Prioritization to introduce the importance of the Job

The last part of the Penny game shows us that it is necessary not to do everything if we want to keep a relevant 80/20 ratio. Not trying to do everything naturally allows us to introduce the Agile iron triangle involving the biggest paradigm shift.

Prioritization is therefore fundamental in order to be able to do the right thing at the right time and thus focus our efforts in the right places. The profession is therefore necessarily involved in the process because it is supposed to be as close as possible to user needs.

In order to be able to prioritize as well as possible over time, it is important:

• to get some feedback as close as possible to future users: here we can introduce the notion of user testing
• while keeping a long term vision on the needs expressed: we can introduce the notion of review here (based on what Scrum offers)

Bring up the subject of costing and therefore estimation in Agile

When we talk about the iron triangle, we emphasize that the adjustment variable becomes the content and no longer the deadline and the load. This implies that these last elements are fixed: we then speak investment.

As further described in my article “Estimation and Agility: a paradox? », initial costing is often used as a decision-making mechanism because it is believed that one can define the outcome one will achieve in advance (usually by spending time on analysis and planning) . This is an illusion on which many drifts of Agility are based by only taking into account a set of practices without changing the paradigm shift needed.

A working track is the measurement of our ability to produce value at a given time to give us an idea for the future.

Combined with a continuous prioritization, the initial costing requested from the teams loses its value in favor of a finer cutting and one quick and frequent availability users of concrete results enabling them to take the right decisions at the right time.

Thus, it reassures me that the workshop will give me the opportunity to discuss the subjects necessary for Agility Awareness! 🙂

Let's finish with the last items on the list:

To deal with these last elements, keeping a little closing time seems sufficient to me.

Final proposal

With all this, I think I have what I need to fill my 2 hours in a coherent and relevant way:

1. Introduction
2. “Agile” according to you
3. The Penny Game to talk about Agility
4. Summary of main concepts
5. Closing and Opening

Procedure

To get the session started, it was important to me that my proxy/applicant be part of the introduction.

Indeed, it allows to contextualize my intervention and at the same time, it justifies the interest to bring to the activities which will follow.

Agile in your opinion?

In this part, I invited participants to think about 2 things:

• What the term "Agile" means to me (on the left in the photo)
• The questions I have about this (on the right in the photo)

The main idea was to see:

• what were the prejudices thanks to the elements of the left
• if we could answer the right questions during the session

Let's experiment with the Penny Game

I will not go into the details of the animation of the workshop that you can find here.

However, here are the results obtained in this case:

It was interesting to see that encrypted data led to a lot of exchanges.

The debriefing was mainly carried out by the participants themselves, whether at the level of the questions that this may have generated but also at the level of the answers.

The diversity of profiles was of great interest and one could sense the heterogeneity of ways of thinking at the same time.

Agile: the essentials

To ensure that the main messages were perceived by all the participants, I took a moment to summarize the concepts brought to light through the workshop on a Flipchart.

We then closed the session by opening the debate on the possibility of bringing Agility to environments other than IT.

Conclusion

This 2-hour animation was rather well received by all the participants. It generated exchanges and curiosity beyond the sphere of IT, which for me is a good indicator of success. For my part, it was a great challenge to take up in the sense that the importance of the words used, the themes addressed and the way of introducing them was very great.

Of course, this is only one way of doing things among others, but I hope that this one can inspire you!

Besides, I would be curious to know how you approach this type of intervention on your side!

Feel free to share them with me 😉