Savitha K

Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

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Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
Identify your organization culture: <\/strong>As your next step, identify your culture. One of the recommended\nmethods is to survey to understand which category out of four types. But in\nmost cases, you will be able to guess the Culture. Usually, it will be a mix of\none or two models, with one culture being a dominant part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

Page 2 of 3 Previous 1 2 3 Next

\n
Defining our\napproach: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Identify your organization culture: <\/strong>As your next step, identify your culture. One of the recommended\nmethods is to survey to understand which category out of four types. But in\nmost cases, you will be able to guess the Culture. Usually, it will be a mix of\none or two models, with one culture being a dominant part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
Hierarchy culture where the motto is stability\nand integration (Command and control)<\/li>
Clan culture where the motto is \"we are\nin this together\" (Collaboration)<\/li>
Adhocracy culture where the motto is\ninnovation and Risk<\/li>
The market culture where the motto\nis the bottom line <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Defining our\napproach: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Identify your organization culture: <\/strong>As your next step, identify your culture. One of the recommended\nmethods is to survey to understand which category out of four types. But in\nmost cases, you will be able to guess the Culture. Usually, it will be a mix of\none or two models, with one culture being a dominant part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
Type of organization\nculture:<\/strong> Widely acknowledged, \"Quinn and Cameron\u2019s organization cultural model suggests\nthat there are four different types of organization culture. They are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hierarchy culture where the motto is stability\nand integration (Command and control)<\/li>
Clan culture where the motto is \"we are\nin this together\" (Collaboration)<\/li>
Adhocracy culture where the motto is\ninnovation and Risk<\/li>
The market culture where the motto\nis the bottom line <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Defining our\napproach: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Identify your organization culture: <\/strong>As your next step, identify your culture. One of the recommended\nmethods is to survey to understand which category out of four types. But in\nmost cases, you will be able to guess the Culture. Usually, it will be a mix of\none or two models, with one culture being a dominant part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
What<\/strong>\nis Culture:<\/strong> Organizational Culture is \"the way\nthings are done around here\" (Deal & Kennedy, 2000). Organizational Culture is\ndefined as the underlying beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways of interacting\nthat contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an\norganization. It is how the organization thinks when we are working\ntogether in delivering products. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Type of organization\nculture:<\/strong> Widely acknowledged, \"Quinn and Cameron\u2019s organization cultural model suggests\nthat there are four different types of organization culture. They are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hierarchy culture where the motto is stability\nand integration (Command and control)<\/li>
Clan culture where the motto is \"we are\nin this together\" (Collaboration)<\/li>
Adhocracy culture where the motto is\ninnovation and Risk<\/li>
The market culture where the motto\nis the bottom line <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Defining our\napproach: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Identify your organization culture: <\/strong>As your next step, identify your culture. One of the recommended\nmethods is to survey to understand which category out of four types. But in\nmost cases, you will be able to guess the Culture. Usually, it will be a mix of\none or two models, with one culture being a dominant part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
Let us start with the basic definition of\nterminologies of Culture and what are the various cultural models defined in\nthe industry. These cultural models help\nus with the approaches and frameworks that can be used for our\ntransformation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What<\/strong>\nis Culture:<\/strong> Organizational Culture is \"the way\nthings are done around here\" (Deal & Kennedy, 2000). Organizational Culture is\ndefined as the underlying beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways of interacting\nthat contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an\norganization. It is how the organization thinks when we are working\ntogether in delivering products. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Type of organization\nculture:<\/strong> Widely acknowledged, \"Quinn and Cameron\u2019s organization cultural model suggests\nthat there are four different types of organization culture. They are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hierarchy culture where the motto is stability\nand integration (Command and control)<\/li>
Clan culture where the motto is \"we are\nin this together\" (Collaboration)<\/li>
Adhocracy culture where the motto is\ninnovation and Risk<\/li>
The market culture where the motto\nis the bottom line <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Defining our\napproach: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Identify your organization culture: <\/strong>As your next step, identify your culture. One of the recommended\nmethods is to survey to understand which category out of four types. But in\nmost cases, you will be able to guess the Culture. Usually, it will be a mix of\none or two models, with one culture being a dominant part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
In our new 2020 goal of transforming to\nBeing agile, we have started with understanding the current Culture, and we\naligned the approach based on that. It has been working well, and I am sharing\nhow we started with being aware of the current Culture. I hope it helps some of\nyou going through the Organizational journey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us start with the basic definition of\nterminologies of Culture and what are the various cultural models defined in\nthe industry. These cultural models help\nus with the approaches and frameworks that can be used for our\ntransformation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What<\/strong>\nis Culture:<\/strong> Organizational Culture is \"the way\nthings are done around here\" (Deal & Kennedy, 2000). Organizational Culture is\ndefined as the underlying beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways of interacting\nthat contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an\norganization. It is how the organization thinks when we are working\ntogether in delivering products. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Type of organization\nculture:<\/strong> Widely acknowledged, \"Quinn and Cameron\u2019s organization cultural model suggests\nthat there are four different types of organization culture. They are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hierarchy culture where the motto is stability\nand integration (Command and control)<\/li>
Clan culture where the motto is \"we are\nin this together\" (Collaboration)<\/li>
Adhocracy culture where the motto is\ninnovation and Risk<\/li>
The market culture where the motto\nis the bottom line <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Defining our\napproach: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Identify your organization culture: <\/strong>As your next step, identify your culture. One of the recommended\nmethods is to survey to understand which category out of four types. But in\nmost cases, you will be able to guess the Culture. Usually, it will be a mix of\none or two models, with one culture being a dominant part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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One commonly occurring scenario is when we\npropose changing the reporting structure to a single reporting organization\ncomprising of the operation team, QA and dev teams. They are not comfortable as\nit is not aligned with the current operating model structure and they could lose\ncontrol of the teams. This is one of the examples of resistance that agile\ncoaches face if culture was not understood before proposing changes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In our new 2020 goal of transforming to\nBeing agile, we have started with understanding the current Culture, and we\naligned the approach based on that. It has been working well, and I am sharing\nhow we started with being aware of the current Culture. I hope it helps some of\nyou going through the Organizational journey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us start with the basic definition of\nterminologies of Culture and what are the various cultural models defined in\nthe industry. These cultural models help\nus with the approaches and frameworks that can be used for our\ntransformation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What<\/strong>\nis Culture:<\/strong> Organizational Culture is \"the way\nthings are done around here\" (Deal & Kennedy, 2000). Organizational Culture is\ndefined as the underlying beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways of interacting\nthat contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an\norganization. It is how the organization thinks when we are working\ntogether in delivering products. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Type of organization\nculture:<\/strong> Widely acknowledged, \"Quinn and Cameron\u2019s organization cultural model suggests\nthat there are four different types of organization culture. They are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hierarchy culture where the motto is stability\nand integration (Command and control)<\/li>
Clan culture where the motto is \"we are\nin this together\" (Collaboration)<\/li>
Adhocracy culture where the motto is\ninnovation and Risk<\/li>
The market culture where the motto\nis the bottom line <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Defining our\napproach: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Identify your organization culture: <\/strong>As your next step, identify your culture. One of the recommended\nmethods is to survey to understand which category out of four types. But in\nmost cases, you will be able to guess the Culture. Usually, it will be a mix of\none or two models, with one culture being a dominant part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
When the transformation is initiated, they\nlike of idea of transformation, the idea of doing agile and want to do what\ntheir peers are doing. Still, when we start making organizational changes, they\ndo resist making changes. It is like everybody wants to be physically fit, and\nwe take new year resolutions for fitness but do not want to give up on\ncheeseburger or not ready for all those disciplined exercise regimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One commonly occurring scenario is when we\npropose changing the reporting structure to a single reporting organization\ncomprising of the operation team, QA and dev teams. They are not comfortable as\nit is not aligned with the current operating model structure and they could lose\ncontrol of the teams. This is one of the examples of resistance that agile\ncoaches face if culture was not understood before proposing changes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In our new 2020 goal of transforming to\nBeing agile, we have started with understanding the current Culture, and we\naligned the approach based on that. It has been working well, and I am sharing\nhow we started with being aware of the current Culture. I hope it helps some of\nyou going through the Organizational journey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us start with the basic definition of\nterminologies of Culture and what are the various cultural models defined in\nthe industry. These cultural models help\nus with the approaches and frameworks that can be used for our\ntransformation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What<\/strong>\nis Culture:<\/strong> Organizational Culture is \"the way\nthings are done around here\" (Deal & Kennedy, 2000). Organizational Culture is\ndefined as the underlying beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways of interacting\nthat contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an\norganization. It is how the organization thinks when we are working\ntogether in delivering products. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Type of organization\nculture:<\/strong> Widely acknowledged, \"Quinn and Cameron\u2019s organization cultural model suggests\nthat there are four different types of organization culture. They are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hierarchy culture where the motto is stability\nand integration (Command and control)<\/li>
Clan culture where the motto is \"we are\nin this together\" (Collaboration)<\/li>
Adhocracy culture where the motto is\ninnovation and Risk<\/li>
The market culture where the motto\nis the bottom line <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Defining our\napproach: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Identify your organization culture: <\/strong>As your next step, identify your culture. One of the recommended\nmethods is to survey to understand which category out of four types. But in\nmost cases, you will be able to guess the Culture. Usually, it will be a mix of\none or two models, with one culture being a dominant part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
But in most cases, Culture was not considered in the creation of a roadmap or strategy for transformation. When I look back at a couple of Enterprise agile transformations, I found that we spent our time and effort in establishing team practices, frameworks thinking that it will become Enterprise agile. But we learned that Enterprise agile is not about doing the same thing, but many teams working together, applying an agile mindset in delivering their products. Practices are the vehicle towards enterprise agility, and shared understanding is more critical than standard practice. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the transformation is initiated, they\nlike of idea of transformation, the idea of doing agile and want to do what\ntheir peers are doing. Still, when we start making organizational changes, they\ndo resist making changes. It is like everybody wants to be physically fit, and\nwe take new year resolutions for fitness but do not want to give up on\ncheeseburger or not ready for all those disciplined exercise regimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One commonly occurring scenario is when we\npropose changing the reporting structure to a single reporting organization\ncomprising of the operation team, QA and dev teams. They are not comfortable as\nit is not aligned with the current operating model structure and they could lose\ncontrol of the teams. This is one of the examples of resistance that agile\ncoaches face if culture was not understood before proposing changes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In our new 2020 goal of transforming to\nBeing agile, we have started with understanding the current Culture, and we\naligned the approach based on that. It has been working well, and I am sharing\nhow we started with being aware of the current Culture. I hope it helps some of\nyou going through the Organizational journey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us start with the basic definition of\nterminologies of Culture and what are the various cultural models defined in\nthe industry. These cultural models help\nus with the approaches and frameworks that can be used for our\ntransformation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What<\/strong>\nis Culture:<\/strong> Organizational Culture is \"the way\nthings are done around here\" (Deal & Kennedy, 2000). Organizational Culture is\ndefined as the underlying beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways of interacting\nthat contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an\norganization. It is how the organization thinks when we are working\ntogether in delivering products. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Type of organization\nculture:<\/strong> Widely acknowledged, \"Quinn and Cameron\u2019s organization cultural model suggests\nthat there are four different types of organization culture. They are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hierarchy culture where the motto is stability\nand integration (Command and control)<\/li>
Clan culture where the motto is \"we are\nin this together\" (Collaboration)<\/li>
Adhocracy culture where the motto is\ninnovation and Risk<\/li>
The market culture where the motto\nis the bottom line <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Defining our\napproach: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Identify your organization culture: <\/strong>As your next step, identify your culture. One of the recommended\nmethods is to survey to understand which category out of four types. But in\nmost cases, you will be able to guess the Culture. Usually, it will be a mix of\none or two models, with one culture being a dominant part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
Organization agility is all about culture,\nand then making a shift requires cultural change. Organizational Culture<\/em> has often been\nidentified as one of the main challenges in the adoption of agile<\/em> values\nand principles. Consequently, organizations<\/em> may benefit from analyzing the\nexisting organizational\nCulture<\/em> even before they decide to start their transformation<\/em> journey\ntowards agile<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in most cases, Culture was not considered in the creation of a roadmap or strategy for transformation. When I look back at a couple of Enterprise agile transformations, I found that we spent our time and effort in establishing team practices, frameworks thinking that it will become Enterprise agile. But we learned that Enterprise agile is not about doing the same thing, but many teams working together, applying an agile mindset in delivering their products. Practices are the vehicle towards enterprise agility, and shared understanding is more critical than standard practice. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the transformation is initiated, they\nlike of idea of transformation, the idea of doing agile and want to do what\ntheir peers are doing. Still, when we start making organizational changes, they\ndo resist making changes. It is like everybody wants to be physically fit, and\nwe take new year resolutions for fitness but do not want to give up on\ncheeseburger or not ready for all those disciplined exercise regimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One commonly occurring scenario is when we\npropose changing the reporting structure to a single reporting organization\ncomprising of the operation team, QA and dev teams. They are not comfortable as\nit is not aligned with the current operating model structure and they could lose\ncontrol of the teams. This is one of the examples of resistance that agile\ncoaches face if culture was not understood before proposing changes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In our new 2020 goal of transforming to\nBeing agile, we have started with understanding the current Culture, and we\naligned the approach based on that. It has been working well, and I am sharing\nhow we started with being aware of the current Culture. I hope it helps some of\nyou going through the Organizational journey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us start with the basic definition of\nterminologies of Culture and what are the various cultural models defined in\nthe industry. These cultural models help\nus with the approaches and frameworks that can be used for our\ntransformation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What<\/strong>\nis Culture:<\/strong> Organizational Culture is \"the way\nthings are done around here\" (Deal & Kennedy, 2000). Organizational Culture is\ndefined as the underlying beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways of interacting\nthat contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an\norganization. It is how the organization thinks when we are working\ntogether in delivering products. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Type of organization\nculture:<\/strong> Widely acknowledged, \"Quinn and Cameron\u2019s organization cultural model suggests\nthat there are four different types of organization culture. They are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hierarchy culture where the motto is stability\nand integration (Command and control)<\/li>
Clan culture where the motto is \"we are\nin this together\" (Collaboration)<\/li>
Adhocracy culture where the motto is\ninnovation and Risk<\/li>
The market culture where the motto\nis the bottom line <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Defining our\napproach: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Identify your organization culture: <\/strong>As your next step, identify your culture. One of the recommended\nmethods is to survey to understand which category out of four types. But in\nmost cases, you will be able to guess the Culture. Usually, it will be a mix of\none or two models, with one culture being a dominant part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #181 - Approach for Reorganisation of Collaborative teams?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-181-approach-for-reorganisation-of-collaborative-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:41:50","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:41:50","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13791","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13779,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2020-02-09 20:41:43","post_date_gmt":"2020-02-09 15:11:43","post_content":"\n
Organization agility is all about culture,\nand then making a shift requires cultural change. Organizational Culture<\/em> has often been\nidentified as one of the main challenges in the adoption of agile<\/em> values\nand principles. Consequently, organizations<\/em> may benefit from analyzing the\nexisting organizational\nCulture<\/em> even before they decide to start their transformation<\/em> journey\ntowards agile<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in most cases, Culture was not considered in the creation of a roadmap or strategy for transformation. When I look back at a couple of Enterprise agile transformations, I found that we spent our time and effort in establishing team practices, frameworks thinking that it will become Enterprise agile. But we learned that Enterprise agile is not about doing the same thing, but many teams working together, applying an agile mindset in delivering their products. Practices are the vehicle towards enterprise agility, and shared understanding is more critical than standard practice. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the transformation is initiated, they\nlike of idea of transformation, the idea of doing agile and want to do what\ntheir peers are doing. Still, when we start making organizational changes, they\ndo resist making changes. It is like everybody wants to be physically fit, and\nwe take new year resolutions for fitness but do not want to give up on\ncheeseburger or not ready for all those disciplined exercise regimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One commonly occurring scenario is when we\npropose changing the reporting structure to a single reporting organization\ncomprising of the operation team, QA and dev teams. They are not comfortable as\nit is not aligned with the current operating model structure and they could lose\ncontrol of the teams. This is one of the examples of resistance that agile\ncoaches face if culture was not understood before proposing changes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In our new 2020 goal of transforming to\nBeing agile, we have started with understanding the current Culture, and we\naligned the approach based on that. It has been working well, and I am sharing\nhow we started with being aware of the current Culture. I hope it helps some of\nyou going through the Organizational journey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us start with the basic definition of\nterminologies of Culture and what are the various cultural models defined in\nthe industry. These cultural models help\nus with the approaches and frameworks that can be used for our\ntransformation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What<\/strong>\nis Culture:<\/strong> Organizational Culture is \"the way\nthings are done around here\" (Deal & Kennedy, 2000). Organizational Culture is\ndefined as the underlying beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways of interacting\nthat contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an\norganization. It is how the organization thinks when we are working\ntogether in delivering products. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Type of organization\nculture:<\/strong> Widely acknowledged, \"Quinn and Cameron\u2019s organization cultural model suggests\nthat there are four different types of organization culture. They are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hierarchy culture where the motto is stability\nand integration (Command and control)<\/li>
Clan culture where the motto is \"we are\nin this together\" (Collaboration)<\/li>
Adhocracy culture where the motto is\ninnovation and Risk<\/li>
The market culture where the motto\nis the bottom line <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Defining our\napproach: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Identify your organization culture: <\/strong>As your next step, identify your culture. One of the recommended\nmethods is to survey to understand which category out of four types. But in\nmost cases, you will be able to guess the Culture. Usually, it will be a mix of\none or two models, with one culture being a dominant part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
Let us know if you have more ideas or solutions to the problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #181 - Approach for Reorganisation of Collaborative teams?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-181-approach-for-reorganisation-of-collaborative-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:41:50","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:41:50","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13791","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13779,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2020-02-09 20:41:43","post_date_gmt":"2020-02-09 15:11:43","post_content":"\n
Organization agility is all about culture,\nand then making a shift requires cultural change. Organizational Culture<\/em> has often been\nidentified as one of the main challenges in the adoption of agile<\/em> values\nand principles. Consequently, organizations<\/em> may benefit from analyzing the\nexisting organizational\nCulture<\/em> even before they decide to start their transformation<\/em> journey\ntowards agile<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in most cases, Culture was not considered in the creation of a roadmap or strategy for transformation. When I look back at a couple of Enterprise agile transformations, I found that we spent our time and effort in establishing team practices, frameworks thinking that it will become Enterprise agile. But we learned that Enterprise agile is not about doing the same thing, but many teams working together, applying an agile mindset in delivering their products. Practices are the vehicle towards enterprise agility, and shared understanding is more critical than standard practice. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the transformation is initiated, they\nlike of idea of transformation, the idea of doing agile and want to do what\ntheir peers are doing. Still, when we start making organizational changes, they\ndo resist making changes. It is like everybody wants to be physically fit, and\nwe take new year resolutions for fitness but do not want to give up on\ncheeseburger or not ready for all those disciplined exercise regimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One commonly occurring scenario is when we\npropose changing the reporting structure to a single reporting organization\ncomprising of the operation team, QA and dev teams. They are not comfortable as\nit is not aligned with the current operating model structure and they could lose\ncontrol of the teams. This is one of the examples of resistance that agile\ncoaches face if culture was not understood before proposing changes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In our new 2020 goal of transforming to\nBeing agile, we have started with understanding the current Culture, and we\naligned the approach based on that. It has been working well, and I am sharing\nhow we started with being aware of the current Culture. I hope it helps some of\nyou going through the Organizational journey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us start with the basic definition of\nterminologies of Culture and what are the various cultural models defined in\nthe industry. These cultural models help\nus with the approaches and frameworks that can be used for our\ntransformation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What<\/strong>\nis Culture:<\/strong> Organizational Culture is \"the way\nthings are done around here\" (Deal & Kennedy, 2000). Organizational Culture is\ndefined as the underlying beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways of interacting\nthat contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an\norganization. It is how the organization thinks when we are working\ntogether in delivering products. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Type of organization\nculture:<\/strong> Widely acknowledged, \"Quinn and Cameron\u2019s organization cultural model suggests\nthat there are four different types of organization culture. They are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hierarchy culture where the motto is stability\nand integration (Command and control)<\/li>
Clan culture where the motto is \"we are\nin this together\" (Collaboration)<\/li>
Adhocracy culture where the motto is\ninnovation and Risk<\/li>
The market culture where the motto\nis the bottom line <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Defining our\napproach: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Identify your organization culture: <\/strong>As your next step, identify your culture. One of the recommended\nmethods is to survey to understand which category out of four types. But in\nmost cases, you will be able to guess the Culture. Usually, it will be a mix of\none or two models, with one culture being a dominant part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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3.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Work on the soft aspects of the team forming cycle so that it can move towards the performing stage.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have more ideas or solutions to the problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #181 - Approach for Reorganisation of Collaborative teams?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-181-approach-for-reorganisation-of-collaborative-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:41:50","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:41:50","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13791","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13779,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2020-02-09 20:41:43","post_date_gmt":"2020-02-09 15:11:43","post_content":"\n
Organization agility is all about culture,\nand then making a shift requires cultural change. Organizational Culture<\/em> has often been\nidentified as one of the main challenges in the adoption of agile<\/em> values\nand principles. Consequently, organizations<\/em> may benefit from analyzing the\nexisting organizational\nCulture<\/em> even before they decide to start their transformation<\/em> journey\ntowards agile<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in most cases, Culture was not considered in the creation of a roadmap or strategy for transformation. When I look back at a couple of Enterprise agile transformations, I found that we spent our time and effort in establishing team practices, frameworks thinking that it will become Enterprise agile. But we learned that Enterprise agile is not about doing the same thing, but many teams working together, applying an agile mindset in delivering their products. Practices are the vehicle towards enterprise agility, and shared understanding is more critical than standard practice. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the transformation is initiated, they\nlike of idea of transformation, the idea of doing agile and want to do what\ntheir peers are doing. Still, when we start making organizational changes, they\ndo resist making changes. It is like everybody wants to be physically fit, and\nwe take new year resolutions for fitness but do not want to give up on\ncheeseburger or not ready for all those disciplined exercise regimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One commonly occurring scenario is when we\npropose changing the reporting structure to a single reporting organization\ncomprising of the operation team, QA and dev teams. They are not comfortable as\nit is not aligned with the current operating model structure and they could lose\ncontrol of the teams. This is one of the examples of resistance that agile\ncoaches face if culture was not understood before proposing changes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In our new 2020 goal of transforming to\nBeing agile, we have started with understanding the current Culture, and we\naligned the approach based on that. It has been working well, and I am sharing\nhow we started with being aware of the current Culture. I hope it helps some of\nyou going through the Organizational journey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us start with the basic definition of\nterminologies of Culture and what are the various cultural models defined in\nthe industry. These cultural models help\nus with the approaches and frameworks that can be used for our\ntransformation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What<\/strong>\nis Culture:<\/strong> Organizational Culture is \"the way\nthings are done around here\" (Deal & Kennedy, 2000). Organizational Culture is\ndefined as the underlying beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways of interacting\nthat contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an\norganization. It is how the organization thinks when we are working\ntogether in delivering products. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Type of organization\nculture:<\/strong> Widely acknowledged, \"Quinn and Cameron\u2019s organization cultural model suggests\nthat there are four different types of organization culture. They are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hierarchy culture where the motto is stability\nand integration (Command and control)<\/li>
Clan culture where the motto is \"we are\nin this together\" (Collaboration)<\/li>
Adhocracy culture where the motto is\ninnovation and Risk<\/li>
The market culture where the motto\nis the bottom line <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Defining our\napproach: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Identify your organization culture: <\/strong>As your next step, identify your culture. One of the recommended\nmethods is to survey to understand which category out of four types. But in\nmost cases, you will be able to guess the Culture. Usually, it will be a mix of\none or two models, with one culture being a dominant part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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2.     Work\nwith the team to define the structure, which could have multiple works groups\nand each of them can have some part of ownership to the central team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Work on the soft aspects of the team forming cycle so that it can move towards the performing stage.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have more ideas or solutions to the problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #181 - Approach for Reorganisation of Collaborative teams?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-181-approach-for-reorganisation-of-collaborative-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:41:50","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:41:50","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13791","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13779,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2020-02-09 20:41:43","post_date_gmt":"2020-02-09 15:11:43","post_content":"\n
Organization agility is all about culture,\nand then making a shift requires cultural change. Organizational Culture<\/em> has often been\nidentified as one of the main challenges in the adoption of agile<\/em> values\nand principles. Consequently, organizations<\/em> may benefit from analyzing the\nexisting organizational\nCulture<\/em> even before they decide to start their transformation<\/em> journey\ntowards agile<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in most cases, Culture was not considered in the creation of a roadmap or strategy for transformation. When I look back at a couple of Enterprise agile transformations, I found that we spent our time and effort in establishing team practices, frameworks thinking that it will become Enterprise agile. But we learned that Enterprise agile is not about doing the same thing, but many teams working together, applying an agile mindset in delivering their products. Practices are the vehicle towards enterprise agility, and shared understanding is more critical than standard practice. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the transformation is initiated, they\nlike of idea of transformation, the idea of doing agile and want to do what\ntheir peers are doing. Still, when we start making organizational changes, they\ndo resist making changes. It is like everybody wants to be physically fit, and\nwe take new year resolutions for fitness but do not want to give up on\ncheeseburger or not ready for all those disciplined exercise regimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One commonly occurring scenario is when we\npropose changing the reporting structure to a single reporting organization\ncomprising of the operation team, QA and dev teams. They are not comfortable as\nit is not aligned with the current operating model structure and they could lose\ncontrol of the teams. This is one of the examples of resistance that agile\ncoaches face if culture was not understood before proposing changes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In our new 2020 goal of transforming to\nBeing agile, we have started with understanding the current Culture, and we\naligned the approach based on that. It has been working well, and I am sharing\nhow we started with being aware of the current Culture. I hope it helps some of\nyou going through the Organizational journey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us start with the basic definition of\nterminologies of Culture and what are the various cultural models defined in\nthe industry. These cultural models help\nus with the approaches and frameworks that can be used for our\ntransformation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What<\/strong>\nis Culture:<\/strong> Organizational Culture is \"the way\nthings are done around here\" (Deal & Kennedy, 2000). Organizational Culture is\ndefined as the underlying beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways of interacting\nthat contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an\norganization. It is how the organization thinks when we are working\ntogether in delivering products. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Type of organization\nculture:<\/strong> Widely acknowledged, \"Quinn and Cameron\u2019s organization cultural model suggests\nthat there are four different types of organization culture. They are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hierarchy culture where the motto is stability\nand integration (Command and control)<\/li>
Clan culture where the motto is \"we are\nin this together\" (Collaboration)<\/li>
Adhocracy culture where the motto is\ninnovation and Risk<\/li>
The market culture where the motto\nis the bottom line <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Defining our\napproach: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Identify your organization culture: <\/strong>As your next step, identify your culture. One of the recommended\nmethods is to survey to understand which category out of four types. But in\nmost cases, you will be able to guess the Culture. Usually, it will be a mix of\none or two models, with one culture being a dominant part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
1.     Proposed\nto run a visioning session with the coaches where they could draw the vision for\nthe new team. Since the coaches were part of the finalizing the vision, they\nwould also feel ownership. Being part of the vision could reduce friction in the group and bring more unity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.     Work\nwith the team to define the structure, which could have multiple works groups\nand each of them can have some part of ownership to the central team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Work on the soft aspects of the team forming cycle so that it can move towards the performing stage.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have more ideas or solutions to the problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #181 - Approach for Reorganisation of Collaborative teams?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-181-approach-for-reorganisation-of-collaborative-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:41:50","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:41:50","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13791","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13779,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2020-02-09 20:41:43","post_date_gmt":"2020-02-09 15:11:43","post_content":"\n
Organization agility is all about culture,\nand then making a shift requires cultural change. Organizational Culture<\/em> has often been\nidentified as one of the main challenges in the adoption of agile<\/em> values\nand principles. Consequently, organizations<\/em> may benefit from analyzing the\nexisting organizational\nCulture<\/em> even before they decide to start their transformation<\/em> journey\ntowards agile<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in most cases, Culture was not considered in the creation of a roadmap or strategy for transformation. When I look back at a couple of Enterprise agile transformations, I found that we spent our time and effort in establishing team practices, frameworks thinking that it will become Enterprise agile. But we learned that Enterprise agile is not about doing the same thing, but many teams working together, applying an agile mindset in delivering their products. Practices are the vehicle towards enterprise agility, and shared understanding is more critical than standard practice. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the transformation is initiated, they\nlike of idea of transformation, the idea of doing agile and want to do what\ntheir peers are doing. Still, when we start making organizational changes, they\ndo resist making changes. It is like everybody wants to be physically fit, and\nwe take new year resolutions for fitness but do not want to give up on\ncheeseburger or not ready for all those disciplined exercise regimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One commonly occurring scenario is when we\npropose changing the reporting structure to a single reporting organization\ncomprising of the operation team, QA and dev teams. They are not comfortable as\nit is not aligned with the current operating model structure and they could lose\ncontrol of the teams. This is one of the examples of resistance that agile\ncoaches face if culture was not understood before proposing changes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In our new 2020 goal of transforming to\nBeing agile, we have started with understanding the current Culture, and we\naligned the approach based on that. It has been working well, and I am sharing\nhow we started with being aware of the current Culture. I hope it helps some of\nyou going through the Organizational journey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us start with the basic definition of\nterminologies of Culture and what are the various cultural models defined in\nthe industry. These cultural models help\nus with the approaches and frameworks that can be used for our\ntransformation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What<\/strong>\nis Culture:<\/strong> Organizational Culture is \"the way\nthings are done around here\" (Deal & Kennedy, 2000). Organizational Culture is\ndefined as the underlying beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways of interacting\nthat contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an\norganization. It is how the organization thinks when we are working\ntogether in delivering products. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Type of organization\nculture:<\/strong> Widely acknowledged, \"Quinn and Cameron\u2019s organization cultural model suggests\nthat there are four different types of organization culture. They are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hierarchy culture where the motto is stability\nand integration (Command and control)<\/li>
Clan culture where the motto is \"we are\nin this together\" (Collaboration)<\/li>
Adhocracy culture where the motto is\ninnovation and Risk<\/li>
The market culture where the motto\nis the bottom line <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Defining our\napproach: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Identify your organization culture: <\/strong>As your next step, identify your culture. One of the recommended\nmethods is to survey to understand which category out of four types. But in\nmost cases, you will be able to guess the Culture. Usually, it will be a mix of\none or two models, with one culture being a dominant part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
Kumar understood that the team is in the initial stages of forming and culture that the coaches used to work was collaborative. Since the new organizational structure resembled Hierarchical to them, they were resisting. Here are the solutions that he proposed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.     Proposed\nto run a visioning session with the coaches where they could draw the vision for\nthe new team. Since the coaches were part of the finalizing the vision, they\nwould also feel ownership. Being part of the vision could reduce friction in the group and bring more unity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.     Work\nwith the team to define the structure, which could have multiple works groups\nand each of them can have some part of ownership to the central team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Work on the soft aspects of the team forming cycle so that it can move towards the performing stage.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have more ideas or solutions to the problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #181 - Approach for Reorganisation of Collaborative teams?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-181-approach-for-reorganisation-of-collaborative-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:41:50","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:41:50","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13791","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13779,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2020-02-09 20:41:43","post_date_gmt":"2020-02-09 15:11:43","post_content":"\n
Organization agility is all about culture,\nand then making a shift requires cultural change. Organizational Culture<\/em> has often been\nidentified as one of the main challenges in the adoption of agile<\/em> values\nand principles. Consequently, organizations<\/em> may benefit from analyzing the\nexisting organizational\nCulture<\/em> even before they decide to start their transformation<\/em> journey\ntowards agile<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in most cases, Culture was not considered in the creation of a roadmap or strategy for transformation. When I look back at a couple of Enterprise agile transformations, I found that we spent our time and effort in establishing team practices, frameworks thinking that it will become Enterprise agile. But we learned that Enterprise agile is not about doing the same thing, but many teams working together, applying an agile mindset in delivering their products. Practices are the vehicle towards enterprise agility, and shared understanding is more critical than standard practice. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the transformation is initiated, they\nlike of idea of transformation, the idea of doing agile and want to do what\ntheir peers are doing. Still, when we start making organizational changes, they\ndo resist making changes. It is like everybody wants to be physically fit, and\nwe take new year resolutions for fitness but do not want to give up on\ncheeseburger or not ready for all those disciplined exercise regimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One commonly occurring scenario is when we\npropose changing the reporting structure to a single reporting organization\ncomprising of the operation team, QA and dev teams. They are not comfortable as\nit is not aligned with the current operating model structure and they could lose\ncontrol of the teams. This is one of the examples of resistance that agile\ncoaches face if culture was not understood before proposing changes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In our new 2020 goal of transforming to\nBeing agile, we have started with understanding the current Culture, and we\naligned the approach based on that. It has been working well, and I am sharing\nhow we started with being aware of the current Culture. I hope it helps some of\nyou going through the Organizational journey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us start with the basic definition of\nterminologies of Culture and what are the various cultural models defined in\nthe industry. These cultural models help\nus with the approaches and frameworks that can be used for our\ntransformation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What<\/strong>\nis Culture:<\/strong> Organizational Culture is \"the way\nthings are done around here\" (Deal & Kennedy, 2000). Organizational Culture is\ndefined as the underlying beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways of interacting\nthat contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an\norganization. It is how the organization thinks when we are working\ntogether in delivering products. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Type of organization\nculture:<\/strong> Widely acknowledged, \"Quinn and Cameron\u2019s organization cultural model suggests\nthat there are four different types of organization culture. They are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hierarchy culture where the motto is stability\nand integration (Command and control)<\/li>
Clan culture where the motto is \"we are\nin this together\" (Collaboration)<\/li>
Adhocracy culture where the motto is\ninnovation and Risk<\/li>
The market culture where the motto\nis the bottom line <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Defining our\napproach: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Identify your organization culture: <\/strong>As your next step, identify your culture. One of the recommended\nmethods is to survey to understand which category out of four types. But in\nmost cases, you will be able to guess the Culture. Usually, it will be a mix of\none or two models, with one culture being a dominant part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
Solution:<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kumar understood that the team is in the initial stages of forming and culture that the coaches used to work was collaborative. Since the new organizational structure resembled Hierarchical to them, they were resisting. Here are the solutions that he proposed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.     Proposed\nto run a visioning session with the coaches where they could draw the vision for\nthe new team. Since the coaches were part of the finalizing the vision, they\nwould also feel ownership. Being part of the vision could reduce friction in the group and bring more unity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.     Work\nwith the team to define the structure, which could have multiple works groups\nand each of them can have some part of ownership to the central team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Work on the soft aspects of the team forming cycle so that it can move towards the performing stage.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have more ideas or solutions to the problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #181 - Approach for Reorganisation of Collaborative teams?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-181-approach-for-reorganisation-of-collaborative-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:41:50","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:41:50","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13791","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13779,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2020-02-09 20:41:43","post_date_gmt":"2020-02-09 15:11:43","post_content":"\n
Organization agility is all about culture,\nand then making a shift requires cultural change. Organizational Culture<\/em> has often been\nidentified as one of the main challenges in the adoption of agile<\/em> values\nand principles. Consequently, organizations<\/em> may benefit from analyzing the\nexisting organizational\nCulture<\/em> even before they decide to start their transformation<\/em> journey\ntowards agile<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in most cases, Culture was not considered in the creation of a roadmap or strategy for transformation. When I look back at a couple of Enterprise agile transformations, I found that we spent our time and effort in establishing team practices, frameworks thinking that it will become Enterprise agile. But we learned that Enterprise agile is not about doing the same thing, but many teams working together, applying an agile mindset in delivering their products. Practices are the vehicle towards enterprise agility, and shared understanding is more critical than standard practice. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the transformation is initiated, they\nlike of idea of transformation, the idea of doing agile and want to do what\ntheir peers are doing. Still, when we start making organizational changes, they\ndo resist making changes. It is like everybody wants to be physically fit, and\nwe take new year resolutions for fitness but do not want to give up on\ncheeseburger or not ready for all those disciplined exercise regimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One commonly occurring scenario is when we\npropose changing the reporting structure to a single reporting organization\ncomprising of the operation team, QA and dev teams. They are not comfortable as\nit is not aligned with the current operating model structure and they could lose\ncontrol of the teams. This is one of the examples of resistance that agile\ncoaches face if culture was not understood before proposing changes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In our new 2020 goal of transforming to\nBeing agile, we have started with understanding the current Culture, and we\naligned the approach based on that. It has been working well, and I am sharing\nhow we started with being aware of the current Culture. I hope it helps some of\nyou going through the Organizational journey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us start with the basic definition of\nterminologies of Culture and what are the various cultural models defined in\nthe industry. These cultural models help\nus with the approaches and frameworks that can be used for our\ntransformation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What<\/strong>\nis Culture:<\/strong> Organizational Culture is \"the way\nthings are done around here\" (Deal & Kennedy, 2000). Organizational Culture is\ndefined as the underlying beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways of interacting\nthat contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an\norganization. It is how the organization thinks when we are working\ntogether in delivering products. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Type of organization\nculture:<\/strong> Widely acknowledged, \"Quinn and Cameron\u2019s organization cultural model suggests\nthat there are four different types of organization culture. They are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hierarchy culture where the motto is stability\nand integration (Command and control)<\/li>
Clan culture where the motto is \"we are\nin this together\" (Collaboration)<\/li>
Adhocracy culture where the motto is\ninnovation and Risk<\/li>
The market culture where the motto\nis the bottom line <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Defining our\napproach: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Identify your organization culture: <\/strong>As your next step, identify your culture. One of the recommended\nmethods is to survey to understand which category out of four types. But in\nmost cases, you will be able to guess the Culture. Usually, it will be a mix of\none or two models, with one culture being a dominant part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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\n
Kumar is an agile coach with tremendous coaching experience. He had joined an MNC recently as an agile coach and coaching multiple teams. But the organization went through a transformation and now he is part of a central team of coaches. He was excited as he could part of like-minded people. But now all of them were asked to get billing from a business that did not understand the value of agile for their teams and need of a coach. This created a lot of confusion and conflicts among the coaches. He raised this issue with the leader and the leader suggested he come back with a proposal to overcome this problem. Can you help Kumar with ideas on how he could propose ways of working that help maintains the collaborative culture and also create an impact in the organization with the new ways of working?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution:<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kumar understood that the team is in the initial stages of forming and culture that the coaches used to work was collaborative. Since the new organizational structure resembled Hierarchical to them, they were resisting. Here are the solutions that he proposed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.     Proposed\nto run a visioning session with the coaches where they could draw the vision for\nthe new team. Since the coaches were part of the finalizing the vision, they\nwould also feel ownership. Being part of the vision could reduce friction in the group and bring more unity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.     Work\nwith the team to define the structure, which could have multiple works groups\nand each of them can have some part of ownership to the central team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Work on the soft aspects of the team forming cycle so that it can move towards the performing stage.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have more ideas or solutions to the problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #181 - Approach for Reorganisation of Collaborative teams?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-181-approach-for-reorganisation-of-collaborative-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:41:50","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:41:50","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13791","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13779,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2020-02-09 20:41:43","post_date_gmt":"2020-02-09 15:11:43","post_content":"\n
Organization agility is all about culture,\nand then making a shift requires cultural change. Organizational Culture<\/em> has often been\nidentified as one of the main challenges in the adoption of agile<\/em> values\nand principles. Consequently, organizations<\/em> may benefit from analyzing the\nexisting organizational\nCulture<\/em> even before they decide to start their transformation<\/em> journey\ntowards agile<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in most cases, Culture was not considered in the creation of a roadmap or strategy for transformation. When I look back at a couple of Enterprise agile transformations, I found that we spent our time and effort in establishing team practices, frameworks thinking that it will become Enterprise agile. But we learned that Enterprise agile is not about doing the same thing, but many teams working together, applying an agile mindset in delivering their products. Practices are the vehicle towards enterprise agility, and shared understanding is more critical than standard practice. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the transformation is initiated, they\nlike of idea of transformation, the idea of doing agile and want to do what\ntheir peers are doing. Still, when we start making organizational changes, they\ndo resist making changes. It is like everybody wants to be physically fit, and\nwe take new year resolutions for fitness but do not want to give up on\ncheeseburger or not ready for all those disciplined exercise regimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One commonly occurring scenario is when we\npropose changing the reporting structure to a single reporting organization\ncomprising of the operation team, QA and dev teams. They are not comfortable as\nit is not aligned with the current operating model structure and they could lose\ncontrol of the teams. This is one of the examples of resistance that agile\ncoaches face if culture was not understood before proposing changes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In our new 2020 goal of transforming to\nBeing agile, we have started with understanding the current Culture, and we\naligned the approach based on that. It has been working well, and I am sharing\nhow we started with being aware of the current Culture. I hope it helps some of\nyou going through the Organizational journey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us start with the basic definition of\nterminologies of Culture and what are the various cultural models defined in\nthe industry. These cultural models help\nus with the approaches and frameworks that can be used for our\ntransformation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What<\/strong>\nis Culture:<\/strong> Organizational Culture is \"the way\nthings are done around here\" (Deal & Kennedy, 2000). Organizational Culture is\ndefined as the underlying beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways of interacting\nthat contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an\norganization. It is how the organization thinks when we are working\ntogether in delivering products. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Type of organization\nculture:<\/strong> Widely acknowledged, \"Quinn and Cameron\u2019s organization cultural model suggests\nthat there are four different types of organization culture. They are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hierarchy culture where the motto is stability\nand integration (Command and control)<\/li>
Clan culture where the motto is \"we are\nin this together\" (Collaboration)<\/li>
Adhocracy culture where the motto is\ninnovation and Risk<\/li>
The market culture where the motto\nis the bottom line <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Defining our\napproach: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Identify your organization culture: <\/strong>As your next step, identify your culture. One of the recommended\nmethods is to survey to understand which category out of four types. But in\nmost cases, you will be able to guess the Culture. Usually, it will be a mix of\none or two models, with one culture being a dominant part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Create Strategy: <\/strong>Once we know the organization's culture, we can create strategy and plans for transformation depending on the type of Culture. Each of the cultures has its benefits and potential challenges. Based on those factors and our needs, a plan can be customized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, if your organization's dominant Culture is a hierarchy, then Kotter's approach of change management (read more at https:\/\/www.kotterinc.com\/8-steps-process-for-leading-change\/<\/a>) would be the right way to start, and SAFE would be the recommended methodology. Kotter's approach talks about eight steps, with each of the stages starts as soon as an earlier stage is completed. SAFE also has defined roles and responsibilities at each layer of organization with transparent processes and ways of working at each layer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas, if your organization is of collaboration, then having a change evangelist and Community of practice would help with your transformation. I would recommend a book called \u201cFearless change<\/strong>,\" which has a list of change patterns that we would see in most of the organization's transformation change process and how to deal with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the transformation produces tremendous\nresults and benefits, we need to be aware of a few challenges on the way that\ncould derail. Here are a few things that you can look out for a while on the\ntransformation journey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Common\nchallenges:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
People make Culture \u2013 But Not enough time spent on the people side of the change.
Most of the strategy does not consider the emotional impact of the transformation. People resist changes as they do not see what would happen to them, their job because of changes. If we ignore their fears, our transformation attempt could be futile. For example, in my recent transformation, the Scrum Master role was introduced, and as we can expect, project managers were resistant as they could not understand their new position. There was a lot of negative energy, and every meeting was chaotic. As a solution, a workgroup was created and asked them to redefine how their new role can be designed. It worked, and negative energy was converted into productive work. Another solution could be to Encourage behavior shifts not only on action.<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Reliance on one change leader
We talked about having a change evangelist as one of the approaches for a collaborative organizational culture model. Change evangelist is the most crucial role in the transformation, and their enthusiasm helps us to get more engaged in the transformation. People accept change at a different rate. There will be early adopters and they raise faith and bring in the next set of adopters. Sometimes, the next level of engagement does not work and transformation becomes a personal plan creating a reliance on one person. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Forcing the org to change.
Not enough excitement created at all levels. Teams need to feel that they are part of the transformation, and they are part of organizational success. <\/li><\/ul><\/li>
Implementing change that loses customer focus.
Sometimes we are excited about the change and becoming focused on the processes or ways of working. In my recent DevOps transformation experience, the team implemented all procedures, and they were deploying every two weeks with zero defects. After three months, they realized that the customer was not happy with the product. The team lost its focus on customer needs and was excited about its internal transformation. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong>: As we understand, Culture plays a major part in the transformation. It could make or break the success of the transformation. Hence spending some time understanding where do we stand, what will work will help us in achieving a successful transformation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Organization culture and Agile \u2013 how to make it work?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"organization-culture-and-agile-how-to-make-it-work","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13779","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"1","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13583,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-19 22:22:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-19 16:52:57","post_content":"\n
Ashok has been hired as an DevOps consultant to implement DevOps practices. He did an assessment of the team to understand the current practices and ways of working. After that, he proposed to the leadership team and product teams to have development team, QA team and Operations team as a single unit to break down silos. Development teams did not want to do support tickets and Operations teams thought that they are already busy to write code. Leadership team was worried that their role will be diluted. Hence, he was not getting buy in from the teams. How can he help the team to move towards one team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution :<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nIdeally having dev, testing, and operation team as a single team would help achieve DevOps faster. To workaround, Ashok could start with defining goals that he was planning to get out of a reorganization. Is it for better collaboration or is it for shorter communication lines or better accountability or is it for better productivity? Based on the goals that he wanted to achieve, he can define ways of working to achieve that. For instance, if it\u2019s for better collaboration, the Ops team can sit on the floor along with the development team even though they do not report to the same line manager. In addition to that, he can start looking at other principles of DevOps such as making working visible or automation wherever possible.   \n\n<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #173 - Resistance to DevOps team - how to overcome it?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-173-resistance-to-devops-team-how-to-overcome-it","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13583","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":13573,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-11-18 16:11:36","post_date_gmt":"2019-11-18 10:41:36","post_content":"\n
There seems to be a growing\nmisinterpretation of DevOps. When we hear the word DevOps, the first thing that\ncomes to our mind is automation; continuous deployment, continuous build, and\nassociated toolsets or we think of development and operations teams sitting\ntogether. Even when we search DevOps in google, you can get results such as How\nto become a full-stack engineer in 6 months or how to implement Jenkins,\ncucumber or crucible, etc. Sometimes it\u2019s represented as a separate team in the\nengineering organization. Whereas DevOps is all about breaking down Silos to\nthe full cycle of delivering value to customers. DevOps is a\nculture that requires some practices and a new vision, its common goal is\nunifying people and organizations around unique goals. Some of the thought\nleaders of DevOps have coined the term CALMS for DevOps; <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C \u2013 Culture <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A \u2013 Automation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
L \u2013 Lean (flow,\nSystems thinking) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
M \u2013 Measurement\n(measuring systems) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
S \u2013 Sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, It gives a nice representation of all DevOps encompasses. DevOps is about culture; it is also about end to end flow with systems thinking mindset; it is also about the automation of work end to end; figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts. When we read what is DevOps, it also gives a feel that DevOps implementation is not simple, it might require a lot of changes w.r.t organizational structure and might require complete automation of development and operation processes. Due to which I have often got resistance for DevOps transformation. Usually, the team brings a lot of tools for automation w.r.t build, deploy and release to declare that they have done DevOps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MVP should not be limited to new software products. Instead, organizations should consider minimum viable everything (MVE). By \u201ceverything,\u201d I do mean everything. Any change can be viewed as a product release. Whether an organization transformation and infrastructure shift, a new service, or a feature release to a classically developed product, all of these can benefit from MVE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometime back, I had read a blog that talked Minimum viable of everything to demonstrate the viability of transformation or new change or new features and wanted to experiment that thought for DevOps transformation (highlighted in the above paragraph). So, why not Minimum Viable DevOps; the first version of DevOps, that my customers can benefit from. It would help us to minimize resistance w.r.t cultural changes, reduce cost w.r.t tools but showcase benefits of DevOps implementation. I would like to share the journey of that implementation; how it started and would love to hear your feedback on this implementation.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How it started:<\/strong> One fine day, Customers of XYZ applications\nfigured that the orders that they had placed were either in the wrong quantity\nor with the wrong price due to which they suffered huge financial losses. After\nanalysis for a few days, it was figured that data was not loaded properly. The\nbusiness was very angry with the operations team for missing the problem. The\noperations team was angry with the IT team for not letting them know that there\nwas a new release. A new SWAT team was formed to solve the issue and the team\nproposed DevOps as a one-stop solution that can solve all the problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
         Business case<\/strong> - With the Minimum Viable DevOps in mind, I wanted to understand how would the end state would like for customers. What are the benefits that they are expecting? Are they expecting faster deployment? Are they looking for quicker feedback loops? Are they looking for system reliability? Used the Gemba method and interviews with Business users, development team, Operations team, and leadership team to validate the problem statement and business needs. Customers wanted the application to have good quality data, perform faster and provide a faster feedback loop for any incidents. They did not want faster release as the customers were Non-IT people and it would need constant training to keep them updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
     \n  DevOps Approach:<\/strong> With customers' needs in place, the next\nstep was to identify an approach for DevOps implementation. Even though DevOps\ntalks about Culture, automation, and end to end flow as a single unit, do I\nneed to implement all in a single go? Can we do Minimum viable DevOps for this\nteam? Hence, I started with a couple of questions to define the DevOps\nprocesses\/roadmap for this team: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. What are the ways of working of DevOps that this team needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Do we need automation from testing to Build to release to deployment to monitoring? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. How can the customer see the benefit fast? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. What are the cultural elements that I need to get started with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This helped me to define the MVP of DevOps implementation. Here are some of the practices that were implemented as part of our initial phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unified backlog \u2013 Incidents, Monitoring and operational requirements from the operation teams were included as part of the backlog. Unified backlog was used by the product owners in the grooming, prioritization process for the team to work in the iteration. The single tool was used by both the Operations team and Development team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. WoW \u2013 (Ways of working) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Dev team and OPS team were co-located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. As a start, the Dev team was asked to work on at least 1 or 2 incidents\nin each iteration and the Ops team was asked to work on some of the user\nstories. This helped in building a \u201cone team\u201d culture even though their\nreporting structure was different. When the team demonstrated results in terms\nof business metrics (faster response to incidents, time to recover, etc) reporting\nstructure was aligned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Proactive monitoring \u2013 Monitoring tools were introduced to monitor the\nbusiness metrics (Product usage across countries, performance, security, data\nquality) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Automation \u2013 Build, deploy and release cycle was not automated. Only\ntesting was automated to focus on product quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of the above practices can be a separate blog but wanted to highlight MV part of DevOps in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above mentioned four practices helped us to meet our customer\u2019s needs i.e. to achieve faster response to incidents, reduce data quality issues and improve product quality. This also helped me to showcase DevOps and the benefits of breaking down silos in achieving value generation for Customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My journey with the team continues. Will share the journey after our next phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion:<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, DevOps can be broken down into practices, processes, and tools that are needed as per the context. It is not necessary to build the complete tool chain or define new roles or define new teams to call it DevOps. It\u2019s about customer focus mindset across all the layers of the organization, Product owner learning from customers, developers coding for operation and Operation team owing customer experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
   \u201cMVP and agile are essential components of a successful DevOps organization. They are also effective tools to enable a DevOps transformation. If you are trying to figure out how to transform from a classic IT organization to a DevOps organization, start by considering the minimally viable DevOps organization. While you may have only reduced \u201cboiling the ocean\u201d to \u201cboiling a lake,\u201d the reduction will prove meaningful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further read: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win\u201d book describes the fundamental principles of DevOps, describes \u201cThe Three Ways\u201d from which are the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix \u2013 chaos monkey practice <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Savitha<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  <\/strong><\/p>\n","post_title":"Minimum Viable DevOps","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"minimum-viable-devops","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:44","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=13573","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12811,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:17:08","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:47:08","post_content":"\n
Aman was a newly hired scrum master in the organization. He realized that there were other Scrum Masters who were partially doing this role and doing technical work rest of the time. He had a conversation with his manager to understand why his role was different and if he could also do part time technical work. His manager told him it was not possible as he was hired only for SM role. Aman felt discriminated and less productive compared to others. He felt that he would not be able to grow in this organization and was very confused about his role compared to another SM. How would you handle Aman\u2019s anxiety if you were his manager or the agile coach for the team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Role of Scrum master is often misunderstood as it is called as servant leadership and mostly getting teams to high performing teams by the process of coaching and facilitation. Most often not, organisation might not realise the importance of this role. Few things that Aman could get started are <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aman to work with his HR team on defining the\nroles and responsibilities of the role, its success definition and career path\nfor the role. This will help to bring the Scrum masters in the organisation to\nunderstand the role and how it will help their career journey.<\/li>
While the\nprocess of role definition, he can connect the organisation leaders with\nindustry forum or bring in speakers from another organisation to share their\njourney. This will create appreciation for the role of Scrum master role among\nthe leaders and might help Aman in his role.<\/li>
Like Sports coach, he can define project\noutcomes or improvements as his success criteria and demonstrate the improvements.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Let us know if you have any other suggestions\nto help overcome this situation.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Chow #143 - Role Time","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"role-time","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:42:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":12801,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2019-04-09 15:13:57","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-09 09:43:57","post_content":"\n
Most of us would have watched the movie Kung Fu Panda. In the movie, the fighting style Kung Fu was represented and taught as 4 moves whereas Kung Fu has at least 100 moves. Each move has a purpose and the master would choose the right one based on the context. Sometimes Agile is thought of as a few methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe or some tool implementation, whereas Agile is a change management tool with various practices embedded with values. Based on the context, Coaches apply various practices to achieve agility. In our last blog, we saw Spotify as a tool for enterprise agility and in this blog, I would like to explore if Lean\/Kanban can be a tool for Enterprise agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agile is a change management tool, which has various practices, tools and techniques. As in any change management initiative, the organisation goes through various troughs and crests. The below graph explains how change management initiative happens in the organisation. These transformations usually require a reorganization or change in the organization structure or new roles to be created or tools to be bought, which creates uncertainty in the minds of people and affects performance. When the transformation initiative does not the go the way (if they remain in the troughs), organization loses patience and fires the change agent\/closes the initiative. After some time, they restart the initiative and they go through the same processes of finding a change agent, try for some time till they lose patience again. In some cases, this repeats quite often and it takes some time before they bounce back as shown in the picture or sometimes, they do not bounce back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n \n Reference:\n How the mighty fall \u2013 Jim collins\n \n <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As a coach or transformation leader, it is our role to minimise the troughs that organisation has to go through and make sure that they bounce back. Lean practices have been used in some organisations where they had gone through similar patterns and they have been able to bounce back. (Ref some success studies where Lean could be an alternate path to enterprise agility https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RsayVfMVjbU&t=1314s<\/a> ).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: Continuous improvement and respect for people. Here are some of the principles and practices from Lean that I think that has helped the organisations minimize the troughs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Start with the current process and do small incremental changes. Lean recommends that you start with understanding current process, what is not helping you and start with small incremental changes. Starting small makes people comfortable and easy to support for the initiative.\n
\n
Easy to roll back \u2013 if the changes that we started is not going in the right direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
With small J curve (change management graph is called J curve) \u2013 Troughs will not get deeper as it is easier to roll back.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No reorg first \u2013 Lean does not recommend creating new roles for the transformation such as Scrum Master specifically for the change management initiative. Hence it does not create uncertainty in the minds of the people and might not impact the performance of the organization.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
No time boxes\n
\n
Most business domains do not lend themselves naturally to start work and complete within small and synchronized-time boxes. Product owners had challenges in writing smaller stories and hence the teams were having design in the first iteration and development in the next sprint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iterations are a low capability crutch for software development teams with poor ability at configuration management and version control and poor capability at coordination and decision making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Flow \u2013 Flow based work - Focus on making the work flow from end to end in producing value for the customer. Each team understands the full picture of the process flow from customer entry till they exit, how their upstream and downstream teams work. This empowers the team in decision making. Remember the story of 4 blind men explaining how the elephant looks, that\u2019s how most of us think about our work\/processes. This big picture is a great tool for team empowerment. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gain\nagreement\n
\n
Show\nmirror to the teams with visual management tools such as Kanban board so that\nthey see what is going right and where they can improve. Information radiators\nhelps the team to understand the bottlenecks in the process and helps to\ninitiate changes to the process. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
These practices can be applied alone or combined with other practices to get results. However, looking at lean as a whole, gives better results. Even though Lean seems to be easy to adapt with a few principles, a few tools and techniques, it does not have a prescriptive set of ways\/processes\/roles\/tools\/techniques to go from A to point B. As a Coach, if they can understand the context of the organization and implement the Lean principles\/Practices, Lean can also be a tool for Enterprise agility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Further Read: Book by David Anderson, Lean as\nan alternative for enterprise agility,<\/p>\n","post_title":"Can Lean be a tool for Enterprise Agility?","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"can-lean-be-tool-for-enterprise-agility","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:43:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=12801","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11285,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:30:58","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 13:00:58","post_content":"\n
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the organisation and most of them shared the same feelings. They felt that they were moved to scrum master role as a demotion or as a punishment. As Agile coaches, how can we help Rajiv and other scrum masters overcome this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suggested Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on the problem statement, we can understand that the Rajiv\u2019s organisation has been doing agile without understanding why they are doing agile and what benefits that they could get as an organisation or as a team or as an individual. As discussed in my blog, \u201cwhy\u201d gives the direction to organisation. To solve the problem, Rajiv could<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.Identify a sponsor for the agile initiative (if no one exists) or connect with them to rekindle executive buy-in, define Vision, purpose and objective for the transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.Establish governance mechanism for the executives to connect with the teams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Create a Community of practice for the agile teams and connect them with the industry experts, either participating in forums or bringing in experts to talk in their forum. This will help in creating a positive momentum across the teams<\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #127 - Brand Image of Scrum Masters","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-127-brand-image-scrum-masters","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:03","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11285","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":11280,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-11-27 18:22:48","post_date_gmt":"2018-11-27 12:52:48","post_content":"\n
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do agile ceremonies). Project started and we were very much excited, started following the process as per our training (stand-up, planning meetings etc). First few days were fun, each of us correcting each other lingos and showing off our knowledge. But a few weeks later, most of us were frustrated with stand-up meetings, planning meetings (taking long time) and looked like we did not have time for anything else. Just looked at time is progressing without much progress on deliverables. We did not know what we were doing wrong hence doubts creeped in and then the eventual frustration. By six months, we were doing Agile ceremonies for the sake of doing it and with no guidance, pilot failed miserably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, when I became coach, I was reminded of the pain that myself and team went through in our pilot project. Hence, I did not want to repeat the same issues. I started experimenting with a few things that helped me in coaching and here are those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
If the Why is compelling enough, People will figure out how <\/strong>\u2013 Agile transformation usually starts with training everyone and almost in most places, teams were trained on what is scrum\/agile and how to do each of the ceremonies, how to measure metrics and what the right metrics are, etc. But as we all know, Agile transformation is all about cultivating the right mindset. For that mindset change, teams have to understand about Why part of agile rather than how part of agile. So, we started doing sessions called \u201cWhys of Agile \u201c, in which we discussed why do we stand up, why do we look at burn down etc. Once they understood the Why, number of questions\/arguments on the process reduced and coaching was very effective in making the mindset change. For example, small changes such as nobody referring to a \u2018stand up meeting\u2019 as \u2018status meeting\u2019 or asking a question like \u201ccan we extend the iteration end date by a day\u201d makes it easier to coach and gets basic questions on the process out of the way. Coach can then figure out ways of sustaining transformation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
You are only as strong as your weakest link<\/strong> \u2013 As an agile coach, most of the times I did not have the choice to choose teams or hire scrum master. Sometimes teams come with some perception, as they would have heard about the transformation (horrid or happy) stories from their friends or colleagues. Even one person with negative perception in the team could hurt the whole team and as a coach I need to handle it as I start coaching the team.\n
\n
Using tools such as five dysfunctions of team could help coaches to understand the dynamics of team (also you can refer to blog on gamification to get more tools, links)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Making the team aware of what could happen at every stage of transformation could help the team members to overcome their doubts and increase trust. I did a workshop\/simulation game called \u201cLife of an agile project \u201cwhere they would have to play out scenarios that commonly occur and how they can overcome it in the game. It really helped the teams to be aware and how each one of their roles is very important for the success of project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Stay away from cookie cutter mindset: <\/strong>Agility must be implemented thoughtfully. Although the basic principles are universal, agile strategy must come from a deep understanding of your company\u2019s needs. Using another company\u2019s strategy as a blueprint for your own, or even relying on the same patterns you may have used in the past, simply won\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Hope the tips made sense and can add value in your coaching endeavour. Love to hear any suggestions or feedback.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"agile-3-tips-effective-coaching","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:44:54","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=11280","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10812,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:48:32","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:18:32","post_content":"\n
Deepak is an Agile coach and has some really good implementation experience with large clients. He joined a new company which is into IT services and have a centralized Agile CoE. He was very excited when he started with the new company as he was ready to move on to next level in his Journey. After the induction, he was introduced to a new client who was looking for an Agile coach to help him with Agile transformation in his organization. He had couple of meetings with the client and each time he was asked how much productivity improvement he could deliver in 3 months? Deepak tried explaining about Agile concepts such as Time to market for product and team velocity but the CIO insists on showing results. If you were Deepak, how will you handle this situation?<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"CHOW #112- Showing Results","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"chow-112-showing-results","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10812","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":10806,"post_author":"29","post_date":"2018-07-31 11:32:41","post_date_gmt":"2018-07-31 06:02:41","post_content":"\n
Distributed teams are a norm in today\u2019s world and it is also beneficial from business perspective. Ideally Agile is imagined to be clustered teams, physically in one location.<\/span> For many distributed teams, it's difficult to adopt the Agile practice of face-to-face interactions <\/span>because of which, usually Agile coaches recommend creating collocated teams at one physical location.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Distributed organizations face challenges that don't appear when everybody is collocated and it is listed below.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Coordinating across time zones<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Building rapport when everyone is not in the same office<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Collaborating among different development cultures<\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
Scheduling meetings or informal conversations when both teams are online at the same time for only a few hours (or less)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
However, it might not be possible in real life to have a collocated team and we need to find some ways to overcome those challenges. Here are 3 things that I had tried which you could get started with but it is simple but it might not be easy as it sounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Turn the Camera on<\/strong>: As simple as it sounds, most of us switch off the camera when we are in a video conference. It could be due to many reasons as simple as eating food during the call or not being dressed appropriately but having camera on really helps. <\/span>\n
\n
When delving into sensitive topics on teams that generate conflict, it\u2019s way less harsh if you can just look at each other. Even on the computer. <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
It allows us an easy banter and collaboration between each other. For ex, when we are sitting in an office decorated with Diyas or balloons and it would establish a moment of connection that we would have never had.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n
People are different: <\/strong>If you are in any ceremonies, most of us would have noticed that some people talk, dominate the discussion and some people absorb the discussion without talking. If you are facilitator or even as a team member, you need to be aware of the different levels of openness in my group and learn to respect them. It's OK. There are lot of elements in play here, could be culture of the country or the organization or it could be their personality. Being aware of the differences is a very good start for each team member and accepting it.<\/span><\/span> <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Use Silence sparingly: <\/strong>When facilitating any ceremonies in person, giving the team time to write down topics on stickies is such a helpful part of the event. However, in distributed teams using an online tool or on the phone is common but it gives chance to people can check mail, instant message colleagues, or walk away and do a number of other unrelated activities. As a facilitator, you could comment on the things that are posted or nudge them during the conversation or ask the team to clarify the ideas etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Hope some of these tips help you in overcoming some of the challenges that you see in your day to day distributed Agile implementation. If there are any tricks that you have been doing, please share with us and we would happy to learn and share with larger community.<\/span><\/p>\n","post_title":"3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","post_password":"","post_name":"3-simple-tips-building-distributed-teams","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_modified_gmt":"2024-01-25 14:45:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/pm-powerconsulting.com\/?p=10806","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"next":false,"prev":true,"total_page":2},"paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_3o3","class":"epic_block_11"};

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Savitha K

Agile

Chow #181 – Approach for Reorganisation of Collaborative teams?

by Savitha K
February 12, 2020

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Organization culture and Agile – how to make it work?

by Savitha K
February 9, 2020

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CHOW #173 – Resistance to DevOps team – how to overcome it?

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November 19, 2019

Digital Transformation

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November 18, 2019

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Chow #143 – Role Time

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April 9, 2019

Agile

CHOW #127 – Brand Image of Scrum Masters

by Savitha K
November 27, 2018

Agile

Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching

by Savitha K
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Chow

CHOW #112- Showing Results

by Savitha K
July 31, 2018

Agile

3 Simple Tips for Building Distributed Teams

by Savitha K
July 31, 2018

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