Agile speaks of putting people first; however in my experience, people are the poor stepchild to process and tools. It’s not about getting scrum teams “more agile” it’s about shaping the organization's culture to support agile development. It’s necessary to understand the areas needed to create a culture that supports agile development. We have to wonder, are we asking ourselves the right questions? How do we engage our staff to create an agile workforce? How do we hire the right people? What is a manager's role in this new self-organized culture? How do we motivate those people? How do we connect them with the customer? It’s about embodying the spirit of agility to get all the magic of a startup and scaling that across a large organization.
In this session, we will talk about building your organization’s culture to support scaling organizational agility to keep the team passionate and purposeful.
Format: Presentation
Target Audience: Agile Coaches, Human Resources, Leaders, and Change Agents
2. About Me
• 20+ years managing the quality and
delivery of software projects
• 10+ years working in agile
environments
• Scrum Mastered many mission
critical projects
• Successfully implemented agile
processes and practices in 4
enterprise software organizations
• Certified Scrum Professional,
Certified Scrum Master and Six
Sigma Black Belt
5. Topics To Be Discussed
• Engagement Agility And Hiring
• Onboarding A New Team
• Customer Driven Focus
• Shared Social Learning
• Continual Change
• What Do We Need In A Leader
• Performance Management
7. Employee Engagement
• Need to find harmony between People, Process
and Tools
• People should be the driver, not passenger
• The Motivation Trinity
Mastery
Intrinsic
Motivation
Purpose Autonomy
8. • Maintain start-up culture
• “Doing” agile and “Being” agile
• Continually share the organization vision
• Create a bond with every employee
9. How To Acquire New Talent?
1. Hire people “solo”
2. Hire entire teams
(“acquhire”)
3. Promote/Move
employees from within
organization
10. Host A Mini-Job Fair Within The Org.
• Already know your
products, processes and
tools
• Improves onboarding
• Creates cross-functioning
employees
11. Traditional Job Models
• Traditional job models
force employees to
specialize in a specific
area
• More organization
focused, than person
focusedTraditional job models
require employees to
select their career path on
day 1.
12. Learning Paths
• Let employees experiment with
multiple disciplines within your
organization
• Specialization & Versatility
• Motivates employees by giving
them control to succeed in their
role
14. The Onboarding Process
In order for a team
or individual to be
successful in an
organization there
must be a focus on
the onboarding
process.
Acquire
Kick-off
Assimilate
Feedback
Follow-up
17. What Is Empathy?
The action of
understanding, being
aware of and being
sensitive to the
feelings, thoughts
and experiences of
another.
18. Empathy Driven Development
• Development approach that relies on team
members making decisions based on empathy
towards impacted customers
• Requires self-organization of development
teams
• Complementary to Agile Software Delivery
19. “When people are
financially invested, they
want a return. When
people are emotionally
invested, they want to
contribute.”
– Simon Sinek
21. Lean Coffee
• Participants drive agenda of meeting
• Dot voting from backlog of topics
• Each topic is time-boxed
• Provides honest dialog, which creates
urgency and reduces resistance
• No formal meeting invite
22. Community of Practice
• Make teams responsible for improving our practices
• CoPs have a champion from each team and one coordinator
• The CoP develops best practices for the specific area
• Champions bring ideas and issues from their teams
• Champions disseminate best practices to teams
• Each CoP establishes its own charter
• Several CoPs in early stages of development:
– Agile Maturity
– Development
– User Experience (UX)
– Performance
– Testing
25. Continual Change
• Must sustain continual change pace
• Lag time between decision and achievement
• Must be able to experiment, not just optimize
• Process and tools will become obsolete
far faster than people will
32. Continual Relationship
• Keep re-recruiting employees to build motivation
• Leader’s job is to ensure that employee’s needs,
interests and learning path are met
• Keep as wide as possible
• Less formal meetings, more coffees
33. When you scale, you must
build a continual relationship
with your employees.
38. Team Performance Goals
• Goals enables a team to clarify what constitutes
as meaningful results
• Individual recognition of members on the team
• What are your Core Agile Values
Commitment
Openness
Adaptability
Courage
Focus on
results
Trust
39. THANK YOU
DAVE DAME
Director, Agile and Lean Practices, BlueCat
Email: Dave@DaveDame.com
Twitter: @TheAgilityEdge
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/daviddame
www.DaveDame.com
Daniel Pink : Motivation - formula: autonomy, mastery, and purpose
DvB = not having the passion or excitement
If you look at start-up they have very few processes and tools. However they have a collective passion to get product or service into the market place. This is because they have the people who are emotionally vested in a common goal. They know the ‘why’ behind what they are creating. They know what they individually contribute toward that goal.
Touch on the importance of the manager
Basketball reference
Good individuals need to learn how to work together
Team resume story
Talk about your progression through your carrier where you are from where you started
Build employees for future roles not just the role they are in right now
An approach to developing software that relies on team members making decisions based on empathy towards impacted stakeholders.
This approach requires development teams to creatively self-organize within the constraints of their organizations, to work around the barriers that isolate them from their stakeholders.
Empathy Driven Development is complementary to Agile Software Delivery with Scrum and is key to Scrum Activities and Events like Backlog Management and Refining, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum and Sprint Review.
When conversations continue after the Lean Coffee ends is when you know it’s a success
Chicken video – get name of shared social learning
There are different levels to the COP: sharing technical information | Sharing past failures | sharing and collaborating on current struggles
There are different levels to the COP: sharing technical information | Sharing past failures | sharing and collaborating on current struggles
The organization gets comfortable to changing regularly
You are not scaling production you are scaling innovation
Bank example
Personal story
The walk
The move to Toronto
Ask any great leaders what their job is, and most of the time, they will tell you that they are responsible for motivating, inspiring, teaching, listening to and guiding their employees. They do this because they know that an organization is much more successful when they have thirty brains working on solutions rather than just one or two leaders’ brains working and thirty brains waiting for orders from the top.
Bosses, on the other hand, don’t see thirty brains. They see thirty pairs of hands that are made for completing orders and finishing tasks. By doing that, bosses put a limit on organization potential with each underestimated member of their human capital.
Managers have to micro-manage nearly every decision. They rob employees of the freedom to find a solution, and, by doing that, they kill any creativity that might have otherwise saved a company money, found a more streamlined process or earned additional revenue. Employees become worker bees, ants that blindly follow the leader without question
Teammates hold each other accountable, and once you’ve reached the point in your career where your employees are continuously raising the performance bar on each other—in a healthy way, of course—then you have successfully done your job as a leader.
Managers focus on a hierarchy of task-givers. They value the ability to pass down tasks from the top to the bottom, often times without trying to develop the relationships that occur from level-to-level. Managers tend to value being “above” others, frequently counting how many people work beneath them and striving to increase that number, and often making enemies and burning bridges on their way.
essentially pretend like you're trying to persuade them to join the org again
If you don’t build a continual relationship, a recruiter will
Long term (annual or longer) goals are becoming obsolete for individuals because goals quickly become irrelevant as the context changes. In contrast, if goal targets are on a per month basis and created more frequently (e.g. monthly), goal setting become an effective way to establish clear direction and set clear expectations.
Organizations must rely on teams of people to accomplish tasks
Team performance appraisals assess the performance of teamwork on organizational performance.
Recognition of individual performance and their contribution to group outcomes and the organization's performance.