I want to see teams supporting each other, sharing information, making decisions and taking actions that better the way they work and the outcome for their customers (internal and external to ict). I want to see our people treating each other as we would a good friend with trust and respect. I want to see us creating teams that others want to join and be part of. I want to see great teams that understand our connections between our teams are important in helping each other succeed and are working to improve and grow these interactions. I want to see us growing and improving, moving forward a little by little everyday to make this a reality.
Month: May 2019
Book review – Tribes by Seth Godin
My favourite nuggets from this book.
People want to belong. Tribes need two things, a common vision and a way to communicate.
Motivate, connect and leverage
The only thing holding yourself back is fear.
Don’t settle for less, we have an obligation to make things better.
This book has a lot of good snippets to inspire and invite you along in your own journey to creating your own tribe and leading it by nurturing your followers and creating that vision and story that people tell themselves and get passionate about.
I need to figure out what my story is. I know I want to make things better and I have the passion and desire, I just need my vision and story to inspire my followers.
Tied hands
I have been struggling with hitting bricks walls constantly with our leadership team lately I have been trying to move us towards focussing on value for our project, to document our value stream, highlight those bottlenecks and pinpoints so that we can apply lean principles to improve them. I don’t have the trust of the leadership team, I haven’t been able to minimize the risk enough or sell the benefits for them to even give it a try. They can’t see the value and they don’t see me as having the experience to be able to lead us on this experiment. They want to have decisions by leadership committee, they want to bring in external consultants to tell us what to do.
I’m trying to reframe this as a great challenge to learn how to manage up and gather expertise knowledge from our consultants. It should be nice if the people doing the work had a chance to feed into and be part of making our value stream great.
Book review – agile and lean program management by Johanna Rothman
Instead of scaling agile, scale projects into programmes. In program management you scale agile and lean practices across the entire program (group of projects) so you can release a great product. The program is all about collaboration and facilitation.
This book takes the principles of agile and lean and applies these to program management. It has a lot of information and examples to really cement these into your way of working.
- Encourage the teams to understand how their tasks relate and are connected to the others in the team.
- Build trust within the team and across the organisation
- Deliver often to receive feedback from your customer.
- Work in a way to create technical excellence and design within the team
The Lean principles were reiterated and this is one of the first books I have read that really put these in a way that was helpful for me.
- Eliminate waste
- Amplify learning
- Decide as late as possible
- Deliver as fast as possible
- Empower the team
- Build integrity in
- See the whole
Agile and lean together create adaptive programs the value is in the overall deliverable.
I really liked how Johanna stresses the importance of each program needing a good vision and charter in place. This does appear to be the stumbling block that we have at work at the moment. We are lacking the vision and need to allow teams to solve problems cross functionally and collaborate without hierarchy getting in the way. Without the vision and the support to remove obstacles our teams are just plodding along trying to get the work done in the best way they know with the information they have.
Good program management is about helping the teams collaborate and coordinate to achieve the deliverables. Program mangers are the voice or face of the program… and need to take a product centric view and keep the customer top of mind.
Johanna then goes on to talk about risk and how by using the iterations you highlight the technical risks and by delivering incrementally you reduce schedule risks and by reducing the WIP you improve the flow and maximise work done.
Using Cynefin to solve problems Experiment to uncover unknowns.
A program is emergent, you can’t plan everything in the beginning. You learn and change as you go.
Johanna then explains what the Program management the core team responsibilities are and how they may find it best to use a kanban board at a more strategic level. The core team provide business leadership and value, sharing progress across the organisation and keeping the roadmap updated.
Core team responsibilities
- Write charter
- Backlog
- Roadmap
- Solve cross functional problems
- Solve team problems
- Monitor status and risks
- Remove roadblocks
- Decide when to release to production
And of course people are very important, Make sure you have all the right people. You don’t want to omit the key people. the engagement and management of your team and stakeholders is a very crucial part of any project or program or team management and leadership.
Agile leadership
I went searching the web for information on Agile leadership this week as it seems to be my current pain point. I work in an organisation with hierarchy, and this provides it’s challenges when trying to encourage and inspire people to try new things, to experiment and take some initiative.
Many people are so entrenched in having to cover they butts, that they can’t do anything without prior approval, their managers are worried about losing control and then become very command and control. Then I have other leaders who walk the talk but not the walk. They say all the right things but then insist upon getting in all the details for their team members tasks and taking over. We have managers who have taken the give intent message from David Marquet video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psAXMqxwol8 to the extreme and gone, you have the top level vision now you go and make it happen. But the vision is too high, they have not provided the team with the support and tools to actually succeed and achieve and then get frustrated when the team don’t achieve what they expect them to.
I found this whitepaper from the Agile business consortium https://www.agilebusiness.org/resources/white-papers/culture-and-leadership-the-nine-principles-of-agile-leadership and it is going to be my next support mission for my manager who is new to her role and struggling. She is still too much in the detail and scared on losing control so wants to be on top of everything. It is a hard thing to change, but if you can provide the direction with the success measures, timeframe and expectations and then support your team to accomplish that I truly believe you will get a better result. I see managers as needing to take on the role of scrum manager and coach. They need to make sure the processes are followed and set the team up for success, and they need to remove the obstacles from the team and grow the team to remove the obstacles themselves.
Book Review – the Agile project manager 2020 by David B Twilley
I feel this book hasn’t grasped the true agile mindset, that they are still arguing the project manager position and tasks. I can understand that, I have heard time and time again of companies removing their PMO and project managers etc because they are moving to Agile. But it shouldn’t be like that. Agile is a mindset not a methodology, it shouldn’t replace project management, all those tasks are still required and they are not covered within all the agile frameworks. I know myself I have struggled playing the Scrum Master and the project manager for projects. You need to use the agile frameworks as frameworks, they help but they are not the be all and end all.
I didn’t get a lot out of this book. I think it misses the point of agile in regards to the agile values and principles.
Connecting by listening.
I was reading a book recently and I can’t remember which one but it mentioned Reflective listening.
A technique where you Listen for the feelings people use and reflect back to them what you hear and see in body language and what you interpret about what they are saying without making it about you. The aim is to get the other person to say “yeah” because then they feel that you really get what they are saying. It’s about being there for the person your with, making it about them and not you or pushing your solution onto them.
Ultimately I am not responsible for another persons life and decisions, I can only participate in their life no matter what that participation might come to mean to them, in the end they will discover their own way. It is not my responsibility to take over someone else’s problems or opinions or thoughts of me.
I have been having success with keeping things in perspective by using a technique I will call lalalala. Whenever I feel my emotions taking over or that I am reacting too strongly to what someone else is saying. I start saying in my head lalalala. I stop thinking about what they are saying. I just listen and stop analysing. I review when I am away from them, but for that moment in time I am just there listening to them.
Book review- Agile Project Management by John Carroll and David Morris
I am currently working through our project life cycle for Agile projects at work. We are using DSDM and Scrum. To create our project management site for new project manager or scrum masters to our team I have been researching ways to define how we work.
I borrowed this book from the library and was sold almost immediately. I flipped through 1/2 The book and decided I needed this book. I bought it from the book depository as I want the physical book.
The book is exactly what it says it is.
- Easy to follow
- Plain English
- Fully illustrated
It is well organised and laid out and I can get to the pages and information I want really quickly.
I love the wah the book explains more than just scrum. The book covers DSDM in detail and has a chapter on lean, XP and feature driven development.
It also covers various frameworks for scaling agile projects.
I am very excited about this book and can’t wait to go through it with my team.
Team building- creating a communication strategy
I am planning a communications challenge for my team to help with team building and our team communications.
Step 1
Take a stock take of our communication channels.
What our learning and commumication styles are?
Step 2
What are our communication challenges and successes? What to keep, stop, start.
Step 3
Define our end goal.
Step 4
Identify alternatives and talk through our options and what we want from each communication channel and when we use each one and for what.
Step 5
Make an action plan- Putting these details into our team charter as our team communication policy.
Blameless postmortem at home?
I am currently working my way through the devops handbook, looking for ideas that I can implement. I have just hit part v – the technical practice of learning. While reading this section I thought of a way that I could use this technique at home with my relationship with my sister. Things have not been going well here for a while and we are on the path of making improvements. I wonder if running a blameless postmortem would be of benefit. Just to layout what went wrong and how we both contributed to it so that we can put in place counter measures in the future to help prevent similar situations from happening again.
The first step would be to gain acceptance of the idea with my sister.
The second step would be to create a timeline with the details from each persons perspective on what went wrong
The third step is to accept responsibility for our contributions to the failures. (avoiding all those I could have I should have, I would have and asking instead why did it make sense to me when I took that action?)
The fourth step will be to brainstorm and decide which counter measures to implement assuming and acknowledging that we are human and we will make mistakes and likely the same mistakes again in the future. This will be especially true for my sister and I as some of our mistakes are personality traits and habits that we have relied to our whole lives even thought they have not served us well.
Step 5 will be to have a monthly or bi monthly review of our counter measures effectiveness and add in a retrospective to work on how will can improve how we work together.
mylifenotesweb.wordpress.com 