Agile Business

Opening Story: Employees are invited to an Executive briefing about the future of the company. The CEO and other board members present the strategy for the next few years that could mean significant change for a lot of employees within the company. At the Q&A session as people ask questions about what it means for them, answers seem vague and ambiguous, and executives refer to a plan that the Operational Director is creating and will be available in a few weeks. Employees leave the meeting unsure of what this means for them. When the Operational Director's plan is made available, the leadership makes efforts to 'convince' or 'win-over' the employee-base, so that everyone is bought into the plan and executes it. Summary: Rather than spending time communicating the plan to everyone, spend time communicating the problem and context, and involve people in working out the solution inclusively. Context: You're a member of the board and believe that t...

Opening Story:  A Murmuration of starlings is an amazing sight, hundreds of birds flying together to create mesmerising patterns called murmurations. It’s thought that it could be a form of protection from predators or a way of signposting a roost. When you see hundreds of individual birds working rapidly as a single entity, changing direction quickly to achieve their goal, you start to wonder what it would be like if hundreds of humans could work together as a single entity rapidly changing direction as required to achieve their goal. Summary: To create a shared vision, environment, behaviour and culture within which individuals work rapidly together to achieve a single outcome.  Context: The company employs some great people, but for some reason, collectively, the overall performance isn't what it could be. There are some areas of the business that act in a silo, and there are schisms or politics at board level that are reflected in how the different de...

Opening Story:  The CIO stands-up and presents to the Technology group: "We’re going to adopt Agile across the company. Our goal is to achieve stage 4 Agile Maturity as defined in your packs and on the slide here. We’re investing in you our people. We’re bringing in some coaches to help us get there and this is our top priority this year…." Some weeks and months later… The teams have achieved stage 2 Agile Maturity but will not achieve stage 4 by the end of the year. The problem is that business as usual activities are getting in the way, and we’re all focussed on customer deliveries and bigger projects, so the Agile stuff is taking a back seat. Summary: Make sure everyone understands the direction and strategy of the company, and that the Agile journey has been shaped to achieve that goal. Context: It is not uncommon when people start out on an Agile change journey that everyone wants to set the goals and targets for the Agile adoption. What’s the goal for o...

Introduction Pattern theory is one of the most significant and potent knowledge tools available, and yet hugely under-utilised, too few people have been introduced to this subject area. It is the codification of successful experience. Each pattern describes a problem context, and then articulates how it has been solved in the real-world on multiple occasions. And by putting multiple patterns together and identifying their inter-relationships, we are able to create pattern languages that enable the improvement of entire systems / entities. Pattern theory was first introduced by Christopher Alexander in the 1960's for town architecture, and has since then been successfully used in other domains such as  software design . Jim Coplien 's book " Organisational Patterns of Agile Software Development " adapted pattern theory for organisational patterns and was one of my first Agile reads back in 2005. Introduced to the concept by Ian Shimmings , the two of us went to...

The Agile industry or Agile community has collectively / organically solved many of the early problems of ‘doing Agile’. For example, in 2003, scaleable elastic infrastructure was a dream, DevOps as a term did not exist, neither did Gherkin, JIRA, Rally, or many other tools now readily available in the marketplace. We now know that Scrum works and has been proven to work, we know that XP design, code and test practices are essential for high quality code and its longevity. We know that BDD  combines both the definition of the system and the testing of the system into a single activity. We can create dynamic, containerised CI development pipelines that measure code quality, vulnerabilities, build quality, build times, and we can integrate our automated tests into multiple suites to optimise our development pipelines. We’ve learned how to become far more objective about product development, we have tools for automating the Product Backlog and providing fu...

(first published 5th October 2017) TECHNOLOGY BLOG 1: BEGINNINGS Our customers face a changing landscape of tightening regulation, security threats, rapid technology adoption, big data and an increasingly competitive environment. New disrupters such as Pension Bee are capitalising on the B2C capabilities that digital experiences provide. They offer a free consolidation service on one of three pension types: tracker, matched or tailored directly to multiple-policy holders. The interface is simple and removes the complexity of pensions to put control back into the hands of individual consumers. Tightening regulations and associated fines are driving the need for more granular auditing and reporting compliance. Changes to regulations require a responsive delivery capability, enabling traceability and visibility of complex heritage systems with increasing data volumes. This year alone has seen numerous security breaches: Deloitte  was subject to a cyber attack (The Guardia...

(first published 30th October 2017) WHAT IS TECHNICAL DEBT? Technical Debt is quite a complicated subject to describe. For a simple explanation,  read this great blog by Martin Fowler . WHY IS TECHNICAL DEBT IMPORTANT? Any software solution more than a year old is guaranteed to have some level of Technical Debt because, within that timeframe, someone will have taken a short-cut or made a tactical decision that will make further changes harder in the future. Working closely with our customers, we are seeing systems that have been in place for years and are, therefore, likely to have higher levels of Technical Debt. In understanding our customers' needs, we are seeing that they are struggling to respond quickly enough to their customer and portfolio demands, making them vulnerable to new market entrants or at risk of losing market share. As we work with our customers to understand their business needs better and ensure we continue to provide the right products and servic...

(first published 1st june 2018) MASTERY In order to provide every opportunity for people to gain new skills and knowledge, we've created a structured personal development framework. The framework aims to aid mastery and progression through establishing clear competency frameworks that link competencies, self-assessment, career progression, coaching, learning resources, 'lunch-and-learn' sessions and training into a single framework for personal development. To support this framework, we've created virtual  communities of practice  that share and learn knowledge. Employees choose the areas of development based on their own development plans:  read our previous blog . One day every month, the Company 'downs tools' for the day and focuses on its communities of practice, which we've branded 'Hive'. Hive days are given over to personal development, learning and coaching activities; these activities are decided upon by individuals based on their d...