Things Are Broken: A Case Study In Moving Tooooooooooo Fast

Speed.

It's been a driver in our industry before it was even an industry. The more Agile becomes more mainstream, the more we think it's part of the package. Books are out promising that certain frameworks can deliver twice as much in half the time. And yet, teams still struggle delivering what's expected of them.

Once I started asking people of all levels of leadership what they thought speed would give them, it allowed me to develop some experiments around those expectations.

Please join me for a case study where we discuss the need for speed, the origins of that desire, and the ways it manifests itself into deliverables. My desire is for the audience to take away some powerful learning into their places of work. Only by understanding the expectations around speed can we reset them into an environment built around trust and support for motivated individuals.

 
 

Outline/Structure of the Experience Report

This will be a combination of an experience report and case study that has some slides and conversation geared around the topic.

Learning Outcome

Key learnings:
1. What does speed get us, really?
2. Is there a misunderstanding of speed?
3. Conversations of speed are really related to something deeper going on.
4. How can we change the conversation?
5. How to run build-measure-learn loops about speed on teams.

Target Audience

Anyone who has ever been asked to help teams move "faster".

Prerequisites for Attendees

There are no prerequisites to this session. It will be just slides and some engagement questions about my experience with speed.

Slides


schedule Submitted 6 years ago

  • Chris Murman
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    Chris Murman - Brainwriting: The Team Hack To Generating Better Ideas

    Chris Murman
    Chris Murman
    Agile Consultant
    SolutionsIQ
    schedule 6 years ago
    Sold Out!
    45 Mins
    Workshop
    Beginner
    Brainstorming has long been held as the best way to get ideas from teams for decades, but what if we are wrong? Can we take the successful aspects of collaboration and create a better environment for quality concepts? Come learn about brainwriting and get more from your team today!
     
    Description:
    If you work in an office, your boss has probably forced you into a brainstorming session or two (or 12). Invented in the 1940s by an advertising executive, the purpose was to solicit a large amount of ideas in a short period of time. By putting a collective of creative people in the same room, better concepts should come. Sounds very agile. 
     
    However, science has shown several times that brainstorming is a terrible technique. It’s cumbersome due to all of the interdependent activities happening at once. When spending time generating ideas as a group, you often spend more time thinking of others ideas than your own. 
     
    Fortunately, a relatively unknown technique is starting to gain popularity called brainwriting. Incorporating it into your team events can produce more diverse ideas and provide a friendlier environment for collaboration. In this session, we will workshop them and leave the audience with all of the tools to bring the technique back to their offices.
     
    What Makes It Compelling:
    I was skeptical when I first read an article on the technique, mainly because I had always believed brainstorming produced quality ideas. As a “stickies and sharpies” type of coach, I’d seen so many teams collectively throw out ideas during planning and retrospective sessions. But in the ensuing weeks, I started seeing where the article was on point in terms of producing quality ideas.
     
    After contrasting the ideas generated after using brainwriting for a few weeks, my mind was changed forever. Even better was the events themselves didn’t seem that different to teams. 
  • Colleen Johnson
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    Colleen Johnson - End to End Kanban for the Whole Organization

    Colleen Johnson
    Colleen Johnson
    ScatterSpoke
    schedule 6 years ago
    Sold Out!
    45 Mins
    Talk
    Intermediate
    We often look to our engineering teams first to drive efficiency and speed to deliver but as we optimize the flow of our development processes we quickly create pressure in the organizational workflow with the activities that feed into and out of product delivery.  Product definition struggles to keep pace and establish a queue of viable options to pull from.  Marketing efforts begin to pile up as features release faster than we can share the news.  All of this stems from optimizing only one part of the overall system.  In this talk we will look at how to scale Kanban practices to the entire organization to provide the visibility, flexibility and predictability to make every part of the business truly agile.  
  • John Le Drew
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    John Le Drew - Swearing, Nudity and Other Vulnerable Positions

    John Le Drew
    John Le Drew
    Founder
    Rainbow Laces
    schedule 5 years ago
    Sold Out!
    45 Mins
    Talk
    Beginner

    Over 3 months John recorded over 75 hours of interviews and spoke to some of the most respected people in the industry to produce an audio documentary that attempts to answer the question “What is safety? And why is it important anyway?”

    This highly interactive talk will present the findings and guide and challenge you through a journey to understanding safety. Including short interactive sessions and role play exercises to cover the following topics:

    • What is safety?
    • What are the elements that make a team effective?
    • Is psychological safety the foundation to team performance?
    • What can we all do to help foster psychological safety in our teams?
    • What is the relationship between safety, stress and engagement?
    • What is the profound impact of a lack of safety and engagement on society?

    This talk has grown as John created the new podcast The Agile Path. The first season on this podcast is about safety in teams. John has interviewed world renowned specialists in the field; Christopher Avery, David Marquet, Jerry Weinberg, Esther Derby, Johanna Rothman, Woody Zuill and many more in over 75 hours of audio. This has been a fascinating deep dive learning experience for John and he hopes to explore these insights with the audience.

  • Awais Sheikh
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    Awais Sheikh - Did We Forget Someone on this Journey? - Understanding how to Incorporate "the Business" in an Agile Transformation

    Awais Sheikh
    Awais Sheikh
    Business Proces Engineer
    MITRE
    schedule 6 years ago
    Sold Out!
    45 Mins
    Talk
    Beginner

    You've sent the managers to Scrum Master training. The development team is getting pretty good at writing automated tests and have most of the release process automated. Your CIO is recognizing that Quality Assurance, Security, and Independent Testing is going to need to change to take advantage. But something isn't right. Specifically, you're still not producing products that delight customers. Or, you are producing products that delight customers, but they can't see the light of day because of other stakeholders.

    The dirty secret in Agile Transformation is that for all the talk about how the IT organization needs to change to engage with customers and produce working software, what gets less talked about is how comfortable the customers, or the proverbial "Business", has gotten with the status quo before Agile.

    In this talk, we explore who are the stakeholders that comprise "the Business", what barriers they often face in adapting to Agile, as well as some practices that can help you ensure that they have seat on the Agile Transformation train.

  • John Le Drew
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    John Le Drew - Diversity, chocolate and safe cracking.

    John Le Drew
    John Le Drew
    Founder
    Rainbow Laces
    schedule 5 years ago
    Sold Out!
    45 Mins
    Talk
    Beginner

    Diversity. It's the topic of the hour. Organisations are all putting 'diversity' and 'equal opportunities' on every job ad. But, for some organisations it still seems to be a struggle.

    What's the goal? Do we want diverse teams because it's the "right thing to do" or is it "good for our teams and organisations"? Are we hiring minorities to keep up with quotas or our competition?

    This talk will engage the audience in a frank discussion on what diversity is, why we need it and how we might achieve it. Guiding attendees through the latest research with practical exercises to demonstrate the issues and open discussion to find answers to the following questions:

    • What does diversity mean? How does it relate to me? 
    • Why does diversity matter in effective teams? 
    • How can teams where everyone is different be effective? 
    • How can we increase diversity in our organisations? 
    • Is positive discrimination a feasible and ethical way to achieve diversity in our organisations? 
    • How can I employ a diverse group, when they are not applying?

    Diversity is no longer just a moral imperative, it's critical to effective organisations.

     

  • Katy Sherman
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    Katy Sherman - How Agile Killed Managers

    45 Mins
    Talk
    Beginner

    Agile adoption has changed the corporate landscape in many different ways. And while the change has been mostly positive for the teams, some can see Agile and Scrum ideas as a revolt against the traditional management practices. If the team is self-organized, what’s the manager’s role? Uncertainty leads to confusion and fear, stress and distrust. Managers who don’t understand the spirit of Agile, who cling to their titles and try to preserve the chain of command, can sabotage and hurt the Agile transformation. During the talk we will discuss different ways managers can become an obstacle during Agile transformation, and what they should do instead to help the teams grow to their full potential and be successful. We’ll see how the manager’s role has changed over time, what they have lost in the transition, and how their fear and insecurities can lead to management dysfunctions. We’ll review examples of how managers can ruin the agile spirit, and then take a look into ways managers can boost agile transformation and become true leaders.

    At the end of the session you'll understand the conflicts and dilemmas that make your managers behave like they do, you'll learn how become a great Agile manager and how to help your manager to turn into an awesome Agile leader. You'll also have a better idea on what to expect from Agile transformation, how roles will change over time and what you can do to make it successful.

    I am a Director of Software Engineering and I'm speaking from experience of being a manager in Agile world. 

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