Weeknotes #37

Ways of Working

This week we had our second sprint review as part of our Ways of Working (WoW) group. The review went well with lots of discussion and feedback which, given we aren’t producing any “working software” is for me a really good sign. We focused a lot on change engagement this sprint, working on the comms side as well (with producing ‘potentially releasable comms’) as well as identifying/analysing our pilot areas where we really want teams to start to move towards this approach. A common theme appears to be around the lack of a product lens to services being offered, and a lack of portfolio management to ensure WIP is being managed and work aligns with strategy. If we can start to tackle this then we should have some good social proof for those who may be finding adoption slightly more tricky.

We agreed to limit our pilot to be on four particular areas for now, rather than spreading ourselves too thinly across multiple teams, fingers crossed we can start to have some impact this side of the new year.

New Joiners

I was very pleased this week to finally have Rachel, our new Product Manager finally join us. It feels like an age since we interviewed her for the role, and we’ve been trying our best in holding people back to make sure we aren’t veering too much away from the Product Management capability we’re wanting her to build. It’s great to have someone who is a very experienced practitioner, rather than have someone who just relies on the theory. I often find that the war stories and when stuff has not quite worked out is where the most learning occurs, so it’s great to have her here in the team to help us all.

Another positive note for me was after walking her through the WoW approach, as she not only fed back around it making sense but that it also has her excited :) It’s always nice to get some validation from a fresh pair of eyes, particularly from someone as experienced as Rachel is, I’m really looking forward to working with and learning from her.

With Rachel joining us as a Product Manager, and Dave who joined us roughly a month ago as a DevOps Engineer, it does feel like we’re turning a corner in the way we’re recruiting as well as the moves towards new ways of working day to day. I’m extremely appreciative to both of them for taking a risk in wanting to be part of something that will be both very challenging but also (hopefully!) very rewarding.

Team Health Check

We’ve made some good progress this week with our Team Health Check App, which will help teams identify different areas of their ways of working which may need improvement. With a SQL DB now populated with previous results, we can actually connect to a source where the data will be automatically updated, as opposed to manually copying/pasting from Google Sheets -> Power BI. The next step is to get it fully working in prod with a nicer front end, release it to some users to actually use, as well as write a short guidance document on how to connect to it.

Well done again to all our grads for taking this on as their first Agile delivery, they’re definitely learning as they go but thankfully taking each challenge/setback as a positive. Fingers crossed for the sprint review Thursday it’s something we can release!

Next Week

Next week we have our ICAgile course accreditation session, hopefully giving us the rubber stamp as accredited trainers to start offering our 2-day ICAgile Fundamentals course. It also means another trip to Manchester for myself, running what I *think* will be my last training session of 2019. Looking forward to delivering the training with Andy from our team for our people in Assurance!