Nov 18, 2022

Let’s define value

I would like to start by defining “value.” The dictionary defines value as “the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.” So, value inherently involves the perception of a person or persons. Some companies put an emphasis on revenue while others like non-profits place an emphasis on charitable action for the cause. As agile coaches, we have the potential to work with both kinds of clients. The value definition belongs to the client. If a client doesn’t have a clear definition of value, they are often left unable to see the value they are receiving based on what we are helping them accomplish. In this case, it’s important that we help clients define value at the very beginning of our partnership.

Measuring value

SAFe® addresses this problem in a straightforward way – it says there are two primary outputs to a successful PI Planning event. The first is a program board and the second is committed PI objectives. The PI objectives are what provide us with what we need to drive the business to a clear understanding of what is valuable to them. In brief, the features prioritized in a PI Planning session are submitted to the agile teams and the teams determine what portion of them can be accomplished during the PI. As the teams are working through that process, they create PI objectives which provide a feedback loop to the business to confirm the agile teams have a common understanding of what is being requested through the features. As the business reviews the PI objectives, they designate the value (between one and ten) that those PI objectives represent in terms of business value. At the end of the PI, the PI objectives are reviewed and the business grades the actual business values obtained through the work completed during the PI by the teams.

From PI to PI, this business value delivered is tracked through the mechanism of predictability metric. The overall result is to provide visibility of enterprise values and volume of value being delivered to everyone. The business can now see both sides of the equation – what they are paying and what value is being delivered.

Nov 4, 2022

I came to ICON Agility Services because it is a people-focused culture. We help each other succeed and we value having each other’s back. In kind, I’d like to help you prepare for your next Agile interview. To help get you on the road to success, I will help you make a game plan from my own experience. Recruiters look for many different factors that set you above other Agile Talent. I’ve always been told that recruiters are the gate-keepers to a company, so I thought it would be helpful to provide you with a cheatsheet of the qualities I look for in my candidates.

Top 5 qualifications recruiters
look for when hiring Agile Talent

1. Experience

First things first, you need to show that you are actually qualified for the role you are interested in. When a recruiter asks you “Tell me about your background and your prior work experiences” emphasize any instance or situation where you have hands-on experience with the role you would like to get.

For example: If I am looking for Release Train Engineer (RTE) opportunities, agile professionals that emphasize how many ARTs and PI Plannings they have been a part of will go a long way.

OR: If there are Scrum Master opportunities that need to be filled, those who demonstrate their experience bringing teams together, impediments overcome, and ways you’ve influenced the team’s agile mindset will automatically position themselves for qualification. With this in mind, show the recruiter that you have practical hands on experience that would make you a strong candidate.

2. Presentability

Bottom line: being presentable is such an important factor when going into an interview. You’d be wrong for thinking that being presentable is a given. Speak clearly, confidently, and directly when being asked questions. Keep away from providing long winded answers that might lose the attention of the interviewer. Additionally, show that you are flexible and a “go-getter” that likes to make a true impact. Most importantly, on any video calls get on camera and wear something nice!

3. Consultative

In the agile world, it’s critical to be a consultative influencer. Most companies do not want a role player, they want an impact maker. Consultative is the ability to demonstrate your skills/strengths while coaching others to create real results. Interviewers will look for this unique skill, so demonstrate your ability and your consultative nature within your allotted interview time. Any company could use agile talent who can provide that kind of support for agile transformation.

4. Coachability

You might be thinking “What? A coach being coached?” Accepting feedback from others, even as a coach, promotes the mindset of continuous improvement – even a component of the SAFe® mindset. Make sure your “attitude” or “ego” does not prevent you from continuously growing as an agile professional. Being able to work with others and listen to feedback makes you a better teammate and aligns with what Agile encourages.

5. Ambitiousness

Many recruiters are looking for mentors and continuous learners. Show that you can be “a rockstar!” Set yourself apart from the rest unapologetically. You are someone that goes above and beyond to drive an organization’s transformation forward. So, tell them that! Don’t be afraid to be a disruptor. An organization’s digital transformation relies on employees who want to be a difference maker.

ICON combines industry best practices and processes with real world experience to deliver pragmatic customer solutions in a rapidly changing marketplace. But we can’t do it alone.

I’m excited to learn more about what you are looking for as the next step in your career (just make sure to use the 5 Qualifiers I just told you about). Apply at the above link, learn more about opportunities to further your professional agile career, or reach out to me directly at Blake.Lawson@iconagility.com.

Jan 27, 2022

Agile transformations in organizations have been occurring since before the Agile Manifesto made clear what many of us saw as gaps in our management. As we have seen over time these transformations continue to grow and evolve throughout any organization’s history and as methodologies and frameworks change and adapt. There will be setbacks, new management, new initiatives for the company, major budget cuts, etc… The nature of these ever-changing landscapes challenges even the most well-formed launches.

So what do we do about it? How do we get through a stale transformation? How do we light the fires of change or overcome the biggest roadblocks to continued success?

The following are my steps and corresponding principles that guide me when coming into an organization that feels stuck. As is the case with most Agile implementations and guides, the focus here is on the principles. The actions themselves will vary depending on your group, role, and the previous steps taken during the initial transformation.

A little disclaimer, this post is from the perspective of an internal or external coach coming in and working with an organization that feels like they are not progressing. The ideal situation is that the organization feels stuck, and uses existing retrospective and adaption ceremonies to evolve. However, in the effort to stay accurate to the real world, I am taking the perspective of the more common practice of bringing in external or internal coaches to help organizations.

How do you know this organization is stuck?

When referencing the Implementation Roadmap, the following points can be a helpful guide for determining when an organization might be stuck.

“The organization is stuck when…”

• They do not know where they logically fit on this roadmap.
• The Measure and Grow points along the roadmap provide little to no value.
• They are not moving along this roadmap or any other transformation roadmap.
• They cannot record measurable change.

In summary, if the organization is not moving down a transformation roadmap, not able to measure change, and/or is not seeing increases in their fundamental business results, then they are stuck.

Common Reasons Why Organizations “Get Stuck”.

When interacting with an organization you suspect is stuck, it is important to understand generally why organizations stop transforming in the first place.

Here are some of the most common reasons I’ve experienced in the industry:

• Changes in management or leadership
• Lack of movement on previous I&A items or retrospective ideas
• Lack of prioritization of relentless improvement
• Frustrated change agents and LACE members
• Lack of training or knowledge across the organization

I am sure every well-renowned coach has seen each of these reasons in detail and you will too; however, my Principle for Understanding is:

“Find the Sour Spots in the Transformation”

• Sour Spots in a Transformation are foundational steps that were either missed, skipped, thought too risky, or difficult at the beginning or mid-transformation that has allowed dysfunction to fester.
• Sour Spots are people, processes, products, technologies, and culture that will take more time, energy, and careful conversations than other team or organizational transformative actions.

Will all reasons be sour spots? Of course not. However, it is important to see what might qualify as sour spots and decide your best course of action for both visualizing and addressing those within the organization.

One sour spot I regularly see while coaching stalling organizations is a lack of understanding around the Value Stream Identification workshop and its outputs. This can be a tough and tiresome exercise for organizations, with little help in the beginning, and oftentimes are led by new coaches or individuals without an objective view of the organization. There are a lot of parts of that workshop that, if not done correctly, can cause scaling dysfunction. Additionally, this workshop is supposedly regularly evaluated when introducing new Epics, new product lines, and when understanding any halts in the flow of value.

If the organization had a negative or grueling experience with the initial workshop, they may be very resistant to attempt it again or put it into a regular practice. You will have to take extra time to empathize with those that feel resistant and with leadership that may feel this workshop will change their current structure or realm of control.

Evolving – Taking a Systems Thinking Approach

Now that you know how to identify an organization that’s stuck, what steps can you take to identify the key reasons/issues for the dysfunction? How do you visualize to make clear what is holding them back? It is time to bring them into a state of organizational evolution.

The steps for organizational evolution are…

1. Research this organization’s transformation past, present, and future.
   • Research: Track down the Transformation Goals and Strategic Themes to uncover the real reasons the organization had for “going Agile”.
   • Question: What is their top priority that they are not seeing measurable growth in? Does the relationship between their goals and what they are measuring match?
   • Summarize: If you could summarize their Transformation in one paragraph, what would you say?
   • Dive In: Dig into each level as its own transformation: Portfolio to Teams to Program and maybe Solution, if they have that level. Create a layout of this portfolio. I commonly take a people, process, and technology perspective here. Invite yourself to key events to see if roles match activities performed. Try to look for visible agreements, metrics, and information.
   • Listen: Everything tells you something so, don’t be afraid to gather all the information you can.
   • Re-Evaluate: Continually be on the lookout for additional sour spots within the organization or transformation. Bring them into your Empathy Interviews.
2. Conduct Empathy Interviews
   • What is an Empathy Interview?
     • Empathy interviews are about asking key coaching questions to prompt them to think about themselves and their teams within the context of the transformation.
       • What is most important to them?
       • What keeps them up at night?
       • What is lurking beneath the surface?
   • Who to Interview?
     • Find your current LACE or lead change agents. If unsure, ask around for who they may be – try to keep the number of people interviewed to as few as possible to start.
   • Why conduct interviews?
     • Interviews will tell you what the data can not. They allow you to build trust while also getting the opinions of others on the potential organizational sour spots you might discover.
3. Identify Meaningful Assessment Categories
   • Assessment Categories are highly variable between coaches, implementation, or organizational preference/goals.
   • Choose what will resonate with that organization and those leaders while embracing our Evolving Principle.
   • The output of this should be the start of a data-based assessment you can introduce to the organization.

   Some Examples:

   • Agile Values & Principles
   • SAFe Business Agility Assessment/Core Competencies
   • Portfolio vs. Program vs. Team
   • Culture vs. Product vs. System vs. Process Implementation
4. Organize Your Results
   • Choose what will resonate with that organization and those leaders.
   • Create a mix of anecdotal observations and summaries with a measurable data-based assessment.

   Some Examples:

   • Spider graphs
   • Bar charts
   • Word clouds from Empathy interviews
   • Excel sheet
   • PowerPoint
   • Interactive post-it boards
   • Mural boards

Your specific actions and ways you organize your assessments may change, however, keep in mind my Principle for Evolving:

Focus your assessments, research, and discussions on the value of “being” Agile over “doing” Agile.

There are lots of ways to do Agile Assessments or take a comprehensive view of an organization’s struggles. You may want to just grab something off the shelf and use it for any organization. However, the objective is to focus an organization on improving and humbling yourself and the processes in place to the values, principles, and needs of the organization you are working with.

It was brought up when I gave this as a presentation that some organizations are not going to care about “being” Agile, they’ll just want to check the boxes and do the ceremonies right. Us Agilists know the earth-shattering impact that Agile mindsets can have on the individuals and teams within a transformation. However, sometimes, emphasizing “being” Agile over “doing” Agile comes with time, trust, empathy, and taking a holistic and economic view. Choose the best and most focused way to get that across to your organization even if it means they continue to make some mistakes or work suboptimally.

Now that you have assessed and have a lot of very organized data, what do you do with it to make real, sustainable relentless improvements?

Transforming – Bringing in the change agents/LACE

Depending on your organization’s maturity level you might be working with a LACE (Lean-Agile Center of Excellence), part of a LACE, or a small group of change agents from that transformation. You may even be working solely with the Scrum Masters of a team(s). Regardless of the structure, it is important to find that team of individuals and start to enable them to lead their organization forward.

This organization can kick start its new transformation after you…

1. Present results to change agents/LACE and gain initial feedback.
   • Present: Time to shine! Present your results either to the LACE or respective change agents and at different organizational levels as necessary.
   • Identify: different teams depending on if it is a DevOps transformation vs. a Product Management focused transformation.
   • Ask for Feedback: Be what you preach and ask for feedback!
   • Coach: Start to coach negative organizational habits.

   It is important to note that, when you start to introduce categories and assessments and make visible the different impediments in the organization, you are going to start influencing people’s ideas or feelings on their organization’s people, processes, and technology. The sour spots are now visible, and this will not be a welcome message to some individuals or departments. It is best to continue to make these assessments visible using empathy, compassion, and humility.

2. Input results into the Inspect and Adapt, or current retrospective ceremonies of this organization.
   • Transformation Backlog: All items, regardless of priority, go into the Backlog.
   • Transformation Funnel: Start a funnel for all transformation assessment opportunities to feed back into the portfolio, program, and team improvement ceremonies where possible.

   It is important for programs and teams to start taking responsibility or asking for support on these transformative opportunities for improvement. They need to determine how to address them and when. Internal or external coaches are there to make the problems visible and help to coach change, not dictate it. So let the funnel begin!

   
3. Kick-off a Culture for Relentless Improvement.
   • Empower: Coach the LACE or Transformation group to own the transformation – My best advice here is to have the organization’s leadership or management drive the message that Relentless Improvement is the goal of the organization moving forward, and that this LACE or Transformation group are the agents of that improvement. Leadership buy-in and approval of this group, to me, is paramount.
   • Create the “Principles for Relentless Improvement”: This document should serve as a working agreement for the new/improved group of change agents. They should be able to answer how they will work together and how they plan to keep the momentum going over time.
   • Retrospect: More than likely you are performing this activity as one person or a small subset of persons. With that comes bias, preferences, and mistakes. One of the first goals of this new/improved group will be to retrospect on how they will do better with future assessments or funneling of retrospective items.

This article has included a lot of information and a lot of steps that you may or may not agree with depending on the structure of your organization, or the walls you will need to break down to get there. I will leave you with my Principle for Transforming since regardless of your structure, culture, sour spots, LACE, or Agile practices one statement remains true for instilling a culture for Relentless Improvement and continued transformation:

“The goal of any retrospective activity is grassroot change by enabling individuals, teams, and organizations to problem solve for themselves and their organization to the mutual benefit of employees and customers.”

Need additional help evolving your Agile Transformation? Learn how to improve and continuously adapt your companies strategies, plans, and outcomes by contacting one of our experts today.

Or “Is there value in assigning Business Value to PI Objectives?”

Dec 14, 2021

Now by way of context, the coaches I am talking with are all very experienced coaches, having worked with many organizations on their move to Agile, and particularly Agile at Scale. The conversation is not the result of a lack of knowledge or experience but rather based on a keen understanding of both the purpose of the practice, the why, and the organizational dynamics in which it will be applied.

So to review, the reason that SAFe suggests the practice of both PI Objectives and the assignment of Business Value is to:

My experience has been that you can use both PI Objectives and Business Value assessment effectively. But I’ve also seen the practice get in the way of progressing true change or, worse still, seen organizations simply go through the motions, with no collaboration or feedback.

I suspect that this in the end is the root cause of the different perspectives. I’ve seen the practice used very effectively. For example, I attended a PI System Demo recently and, as they went through the demonstrations, the Business Owner really closed the feedback loop by talking about what the original PI Objective’s expectation was, what happened in the meantime, and what the resultant effect was. She was clear about how we were all in this together and took pains to stress where the Program troika and the management team had contributed to (especially) less than expected results. The resultant actual Business Value assessment made sense.

But if this is not happening, then you should not force the practice. What this means is that you will need to revisit the purpose of the practice, and determine how you will get the same outcome if you do not use this particular part of the framework. For example, can the organization agree that the feedback loop is based on features being delivered and what does it mean if we do this? Can we evaluate the predictability of Business Value delivered through more direct means, such as a result of the telemetry of released product? Should we use PI Objectives without assigning Business Value so we can establish this important feedback loop? And so on.

Like all changes that affect the organization, context matters. And sometimes even experienced coaches will have to agree to disagree.

Need additional help?

PI Planning can get messy! If you find yourself in a bind, then drop us a line. We’d love to help you with your PI Planning. Let us know your concerns, and we’ll set up a consultation with an experienced SPC in your industry.

Read more about PI Planning on our Blog:

5 Things to Know Before Your First PI Planning

The Synergistic Nature of PI Objectives

Pitching PI Objectives to the Sharks

Dec 1, 2021

Length: 9min. 03sec

Leadership fads come and go, but Agile has endured beyond fads and has become the de facto standard for how value gets delivered and how work gets done. In Episode 1 of this video series, ICON Coach, Dan James, gives an executive summary of the reasons competitive organizations seek to transform to Agile values, principles, and practices. This video series will help you build leadership support and allow leaders to recognize the ROI that follows a transformation.

Take our 3-minute survey to see if your team is ready
for an Agile Transformation