Course announcement: FlowViz Fundamentals

FlowViz is a free data visualisation template for Power BI that allows you to better visualize flow metrics from the data your teams’ Kanban board generates in Azure DevOps, Azure DevOps Server, TFS or GitHub Issues. The chart contains industry recognised flow metrics (Throughput, Work In Progress, Cycle Time, Work Item Age) as well as probabilistic forecasting/Monte Carlo Simulation for answering “when will it be done” or “what will we get”. It is inspired by the work of many leaders in our field, such as Larry Maccherone, Troy Magennis, Dan Vacanti and Prateek Singh. 

Since launching in 2019, it has been downloaded hundreds of times and continues to be one of the most popular tools in the marketplace for flow metrics. 

I'm pleased to announce the next iteration of the product: FlowViz Fundamentals course.

FlowViz Fundamentals provides a comprehensive overview of every chart within FlowViz, detailing how they are calculated, what to look for in the charts, exercises where you have different teams' charts presented and you have to observe what you can identify, as well as follow on videos where I explain what the patterns/anti-patterns are.

The course is online and self-study, allowing you to go at your own pace and contains over 50 videos for you to work through. No additional downloads are needed, with all the videos and example exercises (with sample data) built into the course.

Weeknotes #39 - Agile not WAgile

Agile not WAgile

This week we’ve been reviewing a number of our projects that are tagged as being delivered using Agile ways of working within our main delivery portfolio. Whilst we ultimately do want to shift from project to product, we recognise that right now we’re still doing a lot of ‘project-y’ style of delivery, and that this will never completely go away. So we’re trying to in parallel at least get people familiar with what Agile delivery is all about, even if delivering from a project perspective.

The catalyst really for this was one of our charts where we look at the work being started and the split between which of that is Agile (blue line) Vs. Waterfall (orange line).

The aspiration being of course that with a strategic goal to be ‘agile by default’ the chart should indeed look something like it does here, with the orange line only slightly creeping up when needed but generally people looking to adopt Agile as much as they can.

When I saw the chart looking like the above last week I must admit, I got suspicious! I felt that we definitely were not noticing the changes in behaviours, mindset and outcomes that the chart would suggest, which prompted a more thorough review.

The review was not intended to act as the Agile police(!), as we very much want to help people in moving to new ways of working, but to really make sure people had understood correctly around what Agile at its core really is about, and if they are indeed doing that as part of their projects.

The review is still ongoing, but currently it looks like so (changing the waterfall/agile field retrospectively updates the chart):

The main problems observed being things such as lack of frequent delivery, with project teams still doing one big deployment to production at the end before going ‘live’ (but lots of deployments to test environments). Projects are maybe using tools such as Azure DevOps and some form of Agile events (maybe daily scrums), but work is still being delivered in phases (Dev / Test / UAT / Live). As well as this, a common theme was not getting early feedback and changing direction/priorities based on that (hardly a surprise if you are infrequently getting stuff into production!).

Inspired by the Agile BS detector from the US Department of Defense, I prepared a one-pager to help people quickly understand if their application of Agile to their projects is right, or if they need to rethink their approach:

Here’s hoping the blue line goes up, but against some of that criteria above, or at least we get more people approaching us for help in how to get there.

Team Health Check

This week we had our sprint review for the project our grads are working on, helping develop a team health check web app for teams to conduct monthly self assessments as to different areas of team needs and ways of working.

Again, I was blown away by what the team had managed to achieve this sprint. Not only had they managed to go from a very basic, black and white version of the app to a fully PwC branded version.

They’ve also successfully worked with Dave (aka DevOps Dave) to configure a full CI/CD pipeline for any future changes made. As the PO for the project I’ll now be in control of any future releases via the release gate in Azure DevOps, very impressive stuff! Hopefully now we can share more widely and get teams using it.

Next Week

Next week will be the last weeknotes for a few weeks, whilst we all recharge and eat lots over Christmas. Looking at finalising training for the new year and getting a run through from Rachel in our team of our new Product Management course!

Weeknotes #35 - Retrospectives ≠ Continuous Improvement

Back to Dubai

This week I was out in the Middle East again, running back to back Agile Foundations training sessions for people in our PwC Middle East firm. 

I had lots of fun, and it looked like attendees did too, both with the engagement on the day and the course feedback I received.

One issue with running training sessions in a firm like ours are that a number of large meeting rooms still have that legacy “boardroom” format, which means for little movement during sessions that require interaction. Last time I was there this wasn’t always the case, as one room was in the academy which, as you can tell by the title was a bit more conducive to collaboration. As well as that we had 12 people attend on day one, but 14 attendees on day two which again for me is probably two people too many. Whilst it generally works ok in the earlier parts of the day as the room can break off into two groups, it causes quite a lot of chaos when it comes to the lego4scrum simulation later on, as we really only have enough lego for one group. Combine that with the room layout and you can understand why some people can go off and get distracted/talk amongst themselves, but then again maybe that’s a challenge for the Scrum Master in the simulation! A learning for me is to limit it to 12 attendees max, with a preference to smaller (8–10) audience sizes.

Retrospectives

I’ve talked before around my view on retrospectives, and how they can be mistreated by those who act as the ‘agile police’ by using their occurance to determine if a team is/is not Agile (i.e. “thou cannot be agile if thou is not running retrospectives”). This week we’ve had some further contact from our Continuous Improvement Group around the topic and how to encourage more people to conduct them. Now, given this initiative has been going on for some time, I feel that we’ve done enough around encouragement and providing assistance/coaching to people if needed. We’ve run mock retrospectives, put together lengthy guidance documents with templates/tools for people to use, people practice it in the training on multiple occasions yet there are still only a small amount of people doing them. Given a key principle we have is invitation over infliction, this highlights that the interest isn’t currently there, and that’s ok! This is one in a list of many ‘invitations’ there are for people to start their agile journey — if the invitation is not accepted then ok, let’s try a different aspect of Agile.

A more important point for me really is that just because you are having retrospectives, it does not always mean you are continuously improving.

If it’s a moan every 1–4 weeks, that’s not continuous improvement. 

If nothing actionable or measurable comes out of it that is then reviewed at the next retro, then it’s not continuous improvement. 

If it’s held too infrequently, then it’s not continuous improvement.

With Toyota’s Kentucky factory pulling on the andon cord on average 5,000 times a day, this is what continuous improvement is! Worth all of us as practitioners remembering that running a retrospective ≠ Continuous Improvement.

Next Week

Next week we have a review with ICAgile, to gain course accreditation to start offering a 2-day training course with a formal ICAgile Fundamentals certification. It’s been interesting putting the course together and mapping it to official learning outcomes to validate attendees getting the certification. Fingers crossed all goes well and we can run a session before Christmas!

Weeknotes #33 - Right to Left

Right to Left

This week I finished reading Mike Burrows’ latest book Right to Left. 

Yet again Mike manages to expertly tie together numerous aspects of Agile, Lean and everything else, in a manner that’s easy to digest and understandable from a reader/practitioner perspective. One of my favourite sections of the book is the concept of the ‘Outside-In’ Service Delivery Review. As you can imagine from the title of the book, it’s taking the perspective of the right (needs, outcomes, etc.) as an input, over the left (roles, events, etc.) and then applying this thinking across the board, say for example in the Service Delivery Review meeting. This is really handy for where we are on our own journey, as we emphasise the need to focus on outcomes in grouping and moving to product teams that provide a service to the organisation. One area of this being around how you construct the agenda of a service review. 

I’ve slightly tweaked Mikes take on matters, but most of the format/wording is still the same:

With a Service Review coming soon, the hope is that we can start adopting this format as a loose agenda going forward, in particular due to it’s right to left perspective.

Formulating the above has also helped with clarity around the different events and cadences we want teams to be thinking about in choosing their own ways of working. I’ve always been a fan of the kanban cadences and their inputs/outputs into each other:

However I wanted to tweak this again to be a bit simpler, to be relevant to more teams and to align with some of what teams are already doing currently. Sonya Siderova has a nice addition to the above with some overarching themes for each meeting, which again I’ve tailored based on our context:

These will obviously vary depending on what level (team/service) we’re focusing on, but my hope is something like the image above will give teams a bit clearer steer as to things they should be thinking about and the intended purpose of them.

Digital Accelerators

We had another session for our Digital Accelerators this week, which seemed to be very well received by our attendees. We did make a couple changes for this one based on the feedback from last week, removing 2–3 slides and changing the Bad Breath MVP exercise from 2 groups to 4 groups. 

It’s amazing how much a little tweak can make, as it did feel like it flowed a lot easier this time, with plenty opportunity for people to ask questions. 

Last weeks session was apparently one of the highest scoring ones across the whole week (and apparently received the biggest cheer when the recap video showed photos of people playing the ball point game!), with a feedback score of 4.38/5 — hopefully these small changes lead to an even higher score once we get the feedback!

Next Week

Next week is a quieter one, with a trip to Manchester on Tuesday to meet Dave, our new DevOps Engineer, as well as help coach one of our teams around ‘Product’ thinking with one of our larger IT projects at the minute. Looking forward to some different types of challenges there, and how we can start growing that product management capability.

Weeknotes #21 - Personal Kanban & Continuous Everything

Personal Kanban

I started this week by running a little bit of an experiment, using Kanbanchi as a personal kanban tool for the week. We’re current trialling the product with different teams, mainly as it nicely integrates with G Suite. It’s easy to get started, and once I’d created a board I mapped out my workflow (of course using WIP limits as well) of:

To Do This Week | To Do Today | Doing | Done (Awaiting Feedback) | Done

After that, I set myself a 15 minute daily standup at 7:30 each morning, to review my board and make a plan for the day. Much like when you work with new teams, you don’t quite realise how many things you’re doing (or things that are half done!) till you start to make it visible.

They’ve also recently added some metrics to the product as well which, for those that know me will be aware of, are something I’m very passionate about. Here is a look at my CFD for the week as of this morning:

Overall, I found it pretty useful and something I’ll look to stick with in the future. Nothing like eating your own dog food!

Continuous Everything

This week we ran a workshop to start to define how support would work in our new ‘Product’ world. With the traditional hand-off from Dev to Ops (throwing over the fence?), the conversation was all around how we bring these two groups together, in particular looking at some of our pilot product teams we’re working with at the minute and how we can incrementally introduce that in. It was good to have a number of the roles in teams already prepared to explain to a wider group, as it helped provide context around what outcomes we’re trying to achieve, plus the chance for us to get feedback around if they actually make sense. Whilst there’s no doubting there will be teething problems/learning, the good thing was that everyone came away positive and with a shared understanding on how we want things to work. Simon from the Operations side did a great job in facilitating, in particular by involving not only those of us on the Agile side, but also our supplier (for the pilot team) and procurement in the conversation. With this adoption of new ways of working, it is clear that everything now moves to being continuous. Not just continuous integration and delivery, but also continuous compliance, continuous support and ultimately, continuous transformation. There is no ‘end state’ and teams should now be constantly looking to experiment, learn and evolve their own ways of working.

Agile Outside IT

The Assurance Digital Audit team had a bit of a soft launch this week in their Agile adoption, which I attended along with their core team based in London. The team are taking a pragmatic approach to Agile adoption, using kanban boards at Project > Deliverable > Product Backlog Item (PBI) > Task level depending on your role in the team, combined with daily scrums to start with. What’s been great so far is the recognition that full blown Scrum is probably not right for their context currently, but they have expressed a desire to incrementally get there. The team have taken to it really well so far, with myself just needing to sow the seeds every now and then around what the principles of Agile are, gently steering them if they start to go off track. It will be interesting to see how the next few weeks/month play out, with a plan for a UK wide adoption based on the outcomes of piloting it in London.

Next Week

I’ll be starting next week off with a discussion around Machine Learning in an Agile world, with a team interested in learning more and applying the practices relevant to their context with the work they do in Assurance. We’ve also got a long overdue team night out planned for Wednesday at Swingers Mini Golf — looking forward to a few drinks, great company and hopefully not too many sore heads (and bruised egos after the mini golf?) the next day.

Weeknotes #18 - Agile Assurance & The Dip

Scaling OKRs

After a year of experimenting with OKRs, we’re getting a lot better as a team in setting achievable and ambitious objectives and key results for the quarter. The approach appears to be working, as this week our help was requested by a member of our IT leadership in helping set OKRs for five other teams across our IT department. This presents a new challenge for us, in that we’ll get to learn about scaling OKRs and how we can use them across multiple teams to create departmental (and scaling to organisational) alignment. With the fact that the key results are SMART in their nature, it should also mean personal objective setting is a lot easier for people. I know this is something a number of people (including myself) find difficult, so if we can introduce something that makes this easier then it’s another potential win for our team.

Agile Assurance

I had some good conversations this week with multiple people in our Assurance team who wanted to learn about applying Agile either to their own work internally or developing further offerings to assist clients. 

It makes sense why an offering around an empirical, data-driven approach would appeal to clients, as well as the fact it’s focused on the roots of Agile around empiricism and transparency. An interesting learning for me in our conversations was just around how many misconceptions there are when it comes to metrics/measurements for teams to use. The language used such as ‘Items committed Vs. Items delivered’ or ‘Estimate Accuracy’ are almost all set out with a bias of ‘it must be the teams fault’ — rather than looking at underlying system symptoms, as well as focusing on outcomes. 

A good few hours coaching however managed to reset some of these misconceptions, so I’m looking forward to the next steps in us developing something that will ultimately aid organisational agility.

One of the partners in one of our business lines for Assurance seems dedicated to adopting Agile within his team(s), which was great to hear. So often it feels like our role is around convincing people why Agile is the right fit for them, whereas this was very much one centered on the how, rather than the why. We pickup again first thing Monday morning (I love a sense of urgency!) and already I’ve got lots of ideas in how we can help them adopt a pragmatic, flow based way of working based on Agile principles.

The Dip

This week I started reading The Dip, a short book by Seth Godin. The book explains how you might be in a dip, which may get better if you persevere, or that you may get stuck, and it will never get better no matter what you do.

According to the book, Winners quit fast, quit often and quit without guilt — until they commit to beating the right dip for the right reasons. It’s a good short read, and useful for anyone going through wider change programmes, who may need some supporting reading around the dip they may be in.

Next Week

Next week I’ll be recording a podcast with a couple of my colleagues on ‘bringing goals to life’. Given one of our three goals for this performance year is around taking an ‘agile by default’ approach, we want to give people some assistance and (hopefully!) inspiration around what that means and how everyone can help contribute towards us achieving our goals.