Why weeknotes?
Recently, I’ve been inspired a lot by reading the Weeknotes of both Sam Lewis and Rita Goodbody, who are doing some excellent work with Novastone Media. What’s great about their work is that each week they share their learnings (please give them both a follow!), both being very open around challenges they’re facing, accomplishments they’ve made each week and share their stories. After getting into the habit of checking Twitter on a Friday afternoon for their latest posts, I figured why not give it a try myself.
Special mention to Sam who I have known for a while now through the Kanban world, who first introduced me to the concept.
Like him I really like this point:
So yes, this will be something I’ll be trialling for a bit…
Helping others learn, whilst learning myself
This week I ran a ‘Hands on with Azure DevOps’ session for our Project Management group. Having been asked by another area of PwC to run a similar session in March, I offered out the opportunity for the PM’s to be the first to experience it…with the proviso that it was the first iteration so not everything would work smoothly!
One thing I have learned in adoption of new tools is just showing how to use it isn’t enough, so I created a sandbox Azure DevOps collection/organisation setup each attendee with their own project, then showing them how to do something, then they get to create their own variation within their environment. I had printed workbooks as a supporting tool (in case they got stuck), but deliberately only had enough for one per pair, forcing a bit of collaboration. A few things went wrong, mainly in how I structured the first bit of the course by having them create multiple teams, on reflection I realised that keeping it simple and using the default team would have been better. Generally, people said they really enjoyed it and that it has helped them learn a lot more, with also some feedback that the pace was maybe a little too quick, so there’s a bit of learning for me as well around my delivery.
Training, training and more training
The rest of the week has been mainly filled with continuing internal enablement through our team running 1-day Agile Foundations courses.
On Tuesday I paired up with Marie to run a session, and yesterday myself and Dan delivered another. I’m shocked that so many people have signed up (out of a function of 220 people, 180 people will have attended by the end of March), as we were very clear in wanting people to “pull” the training, rather than be forced to attend. One person who attended yesterday said in the intro that they had ‘high expectations’ because they had heard so many good things, which was nice to hear and set the tone for a good day. Based on the feedback we received it seems all attendees really enjoyed it. One individual let us know that it was “probably the best training they have been to in years” which, whilst very flattering, does make me wonder what other training they have attended!
Mid-flow on my favourite topic (metrics)
The course itself is very hands on, we’re keen to give people the principles and also dispel some myths that Agile = Fast and/or Agile = Scrum, something which is a bit of a personal bugbear of mine. We introduce the manifesto and the principles then support that with a game of Agile Eggcellence, then cover Scrum before lunch (using the Scrum guide — not some internally warped version of Scrum) as well as the often overlooked technical excellence aspects such as CI/CD. After lunch we introduce the Kanban method using Featureban, then go into User Stories, Minimum Viable Product, again supporting that with some examples and the Bad Breathe MVP game.
Final section of the day is centered on business agility — here we look at INGs Agile Ways of Working journey (to inspire — not to copy/paste!), the outputs from the State of DevOps report, as well as internal/client case studies.
The main thing here is in an IT context to open up the discussion around what our impediments are and, more importantly, how can we collectively overcome them. Once that’s done we finish with a game of “40 seconds of Agile” — a variation on 30 seconds of Scrum with some Pocket Scrum Guides for the winning team.
Marie and Dan have both grown into the delivery of the training incredibly well. When we first started these sessions it was myself doing the majority with themselves supporting, whereas now most sessions are split 50/50.
They are both also great at weaving in their own experience/stories into their delivery which for me, adds a further element of ‘realism’ for attendees. I’m very fortunate to work with them (as well as James and Jon in our team) as part of our Agile Collaboratory team, in particular due to their enthusiastic yet pragmatic approach.
Going for (Agile) Gold
Eyes closed — no gold medal for being photogenic
Wednesday night we held our first Agile Olympics event within one of our London offices. The event was in two parts, for the first half teams were given a case study around product decomposition and had a roughly an hour to analyse a case study and do some initial visioning around the product and producing a vision with various increments as part of it. The second half was a quiz using the Kahoot app, with prizes for the top three teams for both rounds. I was heavily involved in helping formulate the case study and write the quiz, as well as being one of the main judges for the case study outputs from the teams. It was a really fun event, with nine teams across different business lines entering. All of them did a great job in focusing on user needs and business outcomes for their product, rather than outputs and making a list of features. Some Partners appeared to be a bit upset at their quiz performance and demanded copies of the answers which, given the quiz contained a number of anti-pattern questions (what is Sprint Zero, etc.) shows to me we still have work to do internally. We’re hoping this is the start of many events where we can grow the Agile & DevOps coaching network across the UK.
Project to Product
Over the Christmas period, I found myself immersed in Mik Kersten’s Project to Product book. For me, the book is brilliant and very much represents the future of work for large organisations that they need to adopt in order to remain relevant/successful. Product thinking and the whole #NoProjects movement has been a keen interest of mine in the past two years, with us slowly starting to introduce some of that thinking internally. The past few weeks we’ve been formulating our first Value Stream which, for our context will be a service (with a set of long-lived products) or a major product, with multiple teams within the value stream supporting that delivery.
One of the things we’ve been looking at is the roles within a value stream, whilst teams will self-organise to choose their own framework/ways of working, what should be the role of the person ‘owning’ that value stream?
The working title we have gone with is a Value Stream Owner (VSO), with the following high-level responsibilities:
The owner for the Value Stream must be able to manage, prioritise and be responsible for maximising the delivery of value for PwC, whilst staying true to Lean-Agile principles.
Specifically, there is an expectation for this individual to be comfortable with:
Small batch sizing (MVPs/MMFs), prioritisation and limiting work in progress (WIP)
Stakeholder management and potentially saying ‘not yet’ to starting new work
Learning and understanding flow metrics, using these to gain better insight and improve the flow of value
Inspect and adapt — You will be familiar with the concept of ‘inspect and adapt’ and showcase that in your work
Focusing on business outcomes over outputs
Ensure that continuous improvement is at the core of everything you do and that you encourage all members of the value stream to be on the lookout for new and better ways of creating value
It’s proving to be challenging, mainly due to finding suitable groupings for such a large IT estate, but we’re getting there…hoping to formulate the team(s) in the next 2 weeks and start working through the Value Stream backlog.
Next week
Next week I’m heading out to Wroclaw, visiting one of our suppliers which should be interesting (I get to meet their Tribes — and no they are not a music streaming company!). Travelling abroad always presents a challenge for me, I don’t like compromising on not attending key meetings in the UK just because I’m out of the country, so will be a delicate balancing act of getting value from the trip vs not getting behind on other work. I’ll be sure to share next week how that goes.