Weeknotes #10
Back to it
After a fun week away looking for wedding venues, it was back to the office this week. Thankfully I’d resisted the temptation to take my personal iPad away with me which I use as part of our BYOD scheme, so I was greeted with all 120 emails to read once I got back. With only seven actually needing my response I think I need to work on my filters! Interestingly whilst away I had received emails from colleagues in the US, Brazil and Malaysia, it’s great that we’re finally bringing together the agile islands (to coin the phrase from Jonathan Smart) to all work towards better business outcomes, both internally and with our clients.
The good and bad of tooling
On Monday I was up in our Manchester office running another Hands on with Azure DevOps training session. After having to postpone/re-arrange four times due to other conflicts, it was good to give people the same opportunity that those in London had. The continued postponement obviously had an impact on attendee numbers, with only five out of the original ten who signed up being able to attend on the day. Monday’s session was a good one for me from a learning standpoint, as now I’ve learnt that smaller numbers work better for me with this type of training, as we were able to finish ahead of time (planned for four hours, finished just after three hours). I think this is because it allows me to have one-on-one time with everyone in the group, as well as having the group small enough to ensure that no one is left behind or that we aren’t flying too far ahead. I also think I’ve now got a better handle on my delivery pace, as in the first few sessions it was fed back that I was moving a little too quickly for people. All attendees did ask to keep the printed workbooks I brought with me and for their ‘dummy’ projects to be kept open for a few weeks to play around with, which I take as the session going well!
I’m not always keen on training session dedicated to tools, mainly as I feel most of what we do is mindset based, but also I hate to feel like we’re prescribing a way to use a tool to people. Thankfully no one has fed that back but I do hope people leave with an appreciation they can tailor their usage of something dependent on their context, rather than following “the book”.
I’ve struggled with motivation for these in the past as well, mainly due to the time dedication needed however I did really enjoy the one this week, so hoping to hold a couple more of these if there is enough interest.
One potential negative impact of running sessions like these is that once people become exposed to a tool and see others using it, they fall into the trap of using the tool for everything, and almost as a replacement for actual interaction with people. This was highlighted to me in particular this week with one of our teams who had raised four new impediments within Azure DevOps. As part of our new ways of working we’re obviously going to uncover challenges/constraints we face in our organisation and I have no problem with raising impediments in a tool, however I also think as practitioners we should be consistent in our exploratory nature towards problem solving, much like we are with new feature requests. In this instance, simply creating an impediment titled “Security delays” with no elaboration or conversation as a group is not particularly helpful. It has the ‘smell’ of “let’s raise everything in the tool so we can say it’s been raised” rather than proactively working together to find a way forward. Let’s try to apply the same principle of the 3 C’s in order to break down what the issue is, rather than relying on the tool to drive our interactions.
Trending in the right direction
The weekly portfolio review meeting brought about a nice surprise this week. Throughput was trending up (delivering more), average cycle time was trending down (delivering sooner) and net flow was trending up (finishing existing work before starting new work). It’s good to see that we are staying true to the WIP limits we have set, however with a queue forming at the front we face a big test ahead in coming weeks.
The easiest thing to do of course will be to start something new, due to external pressures or a need to please, however if we are serious about new ways of working then it will be an important part in putting into practice the mindset we want to have. We also had a couple reported instances of work being ‘pushed’ by senio people this week, and/or side conversations to get people to start new projects. Whilst frustrating these are all learnings and examples to feed into future discussions at leadership level to ensure we aren’t reverting back to old behaviours.
Next week
I’m out on annual leave again from Thursday this week (do I even do any work?) so will be back in the office on Wednesday. We’ve got a session for one of our teams in Assurance on Thursday around Agile Foundations, which will be fun and start to bring that ‘single team’ mindset together. I’m also starting to do some one-on-one coaching with a couple people around taking them to the next level as Scrum Masters and/or working towards their PSM1 certification.
