Upcoming Sydney LeSS Course: March 26th - 28th, 2018

Happy to announce my upcoming Certified LeSS Practitioner(CLP) course in Sydney starting from March 26th till 28th 2018.

The 3 days CLP is highly interactive session with in depth Q &As, discussions, including a lot of hands-on activities. Several highly informative videos and talks which are carefully selected from thousands are discussed during the 3 days of experiential learning.

Here is what participants say attending my courses:

• Great Delivery, Great Examples, Group chat worked excellent, Great Videos
• Great Informal Style, Boosting collaboration
• The open discussions and listening to others discussing their case studies was fantastic

Teams from large telecom, financial, insurance, defense, retail and members from the top management consultancy firms have attended the courses so far. Team members with various roles from programmers, PMs, Testers,BAs, Agile coaches to senior management have received immense benefits by attending this course.

You can enroll for the upcoming Sydney course through this link here

Here are some of the pictures from various courses and activities

People will deep dive into conversations on LeSS principles, which includes Queuing Theory, Systems Thinking, Lean Thinking, etc.

Here is the link to register for the upcoming course.

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions.

Note: Group discounts available in addition to hardship.

Next Certified LeSS Practitioner course in Melbourne: April 23rd - 25th,2018

Happy to announce the Melbourne Certified LeSS Practitioner(CLP) course. The dates are April 23rd - 25th, 2018.

It is highly experiential and 3 days of fun filled learning.

As @Rasoul Babhban, one of the participants from the earlier Melbourne course says, you will learn, release and unlearn a lot of things over 3 days. You will uncover the popular myths about product development and will get an in-depth understanding, learning how to apply the rules, principles of Large-Scale Scrum(LeSS) on product development environment.

How to find a mentor ?

I landed in London last night and would be spending the next five days meeting the other LeSS trainers, and attending the LeSS conference.

My good friend @Vijay Dafal, who is London learned about my trip, and we caught up for lunch today. We met after nearly ten years or so. We used to work at Valtech before.

We took a trip down memory lane for a while and how we are continuing our journey learning and practicing Agile. Both agreed that It was Craig Larman who made a lot of difference in our lives. 

After returning to my hotel, I pondered a bit about how I ended up having Craig as my mentor. Thought would jot down few thoughts about characteristics of a good mentor based on my personal experiences:

1. Learning in every interaction: Mentors will make you learn during every conversation. They will neither waste their time nor yours. If you are not learning from your mentor during each conversation, think twice. 
2. Challenge the status quo: They will make you uncomfortable by challenging your ideas and status quo. 
3. Mentees commitment: Mentor's effectiveness depends on mentees commitment as well. If you throw the towel as they make you uncomfortable, then the relationship won't work.  

I used to run mentoring programs in organisations, and my data shows that only one out of ten mentees are truly committed to completing the assignments and learning. In one of the instances, I had asked mentees to read some books, and one of them came back and said, it is silly to read books as they are not in uni anymore. 

Many believe that, once they start their careers in corporates, it is the end of the journey in learning/to read books. It is an unfortunate truth. 

4. They will give away everything they know: Mentors will not hide anything, and they don't feel insecure. If you feel your mentor is not willing to share the sources of their ideas then, your mentor has a long way to go. Don't follow them.

Ask your prospective mentor the origin of their ideas, and if they keep harping, it is their idea, and they are not willing to share the books/research, then change the mentor. If you feel, your mentor is insecure in sharing the origin of their ideas, then abandon them and run. 

5. Humble and respectful: Even though mentors will challenge your ideas and make you uncomfortable, deep down in their heart, they are kind, humble and respectful. 

Sometimes I see some master chefs program on TV. Some of these so called "Master chefs" are so arrogant and have seen them publicly humiliate the participants. I personally don't think they are the good mentors/role models. 

There is a thin line between being assertive, questioning status quo and being arrogant. I am sure you will feel the difference while dealing with the right mentor. 

6. Your life will be impacted drastically and positively over a period of several years.

Before I end this post, let me ask you this:

Who are your mentors?  Do you want to add anything else that I might have missed to this list?

If you have not registered for the LeSS conference London, you still have time. Register now

Here are my upcoming Certified LeSS Practitioner courses in Australia:

Sydney: March 26th - 28th. Register here

Melbourne: April 23rd - 25th. Register here

LeSS Trainers meetup - London

As we are getting ready for tomorrow's LeSS conference in London, LeSS trainers across the globe met the day before and had in-depth discussions on various topics related to LeSS.

This is my first LeSS trainer's meetup, and it is inspiring to see the wealth of knowledge and experience, trainers across the globe are bringing it to the table. 

I will be sharing a lot of new and exciting updates in the coming days.

I am looking forward to hearing experts share their LeSS implementation experiences from different parts of the world.

Why cultural change in organisations is hard ? : Systems Thinking perspective

Many enterprises create bold vision and mission statements. However, many hardly leave up to them. Sweeping changes created in the organisations with the intent of creating a positive momentum, many a time leads to failures. Why ?

Why is it hard to bring cultural or process changes in the corporates? Why is it hard to execute many well-intended plans?

The answer, according to me boils down to the availability of leaders who have the eye to see the leverage points in the system. We have many academicians who have in-depth knowledge about the system but are very few in numbers. We have umpteen number of leaders but lack the ability to see the details in the system.

When I say, having an eye to see the leverage points, I meant the invisible structure within the organisations in the context of this article. 

As we know, the senior management looks at the organisation as per the HR structure with lines and arrows reporting to one another. However, one needs to realise that, there are invisible structures in the system which cannot be seen through naked eyes and thus cannot be easily represented visually.

The emergent behavior and the culture in the system are hugely influenced by these invisible networks. It is paradoxical to note that, the invisible structure in the system are robust self-organizing systems. However, in the same system, when the scrum masters/leaders try to consciously create self-organizing teams, they fail miserably. 

Unless and until the invisible structure is identified, it 's hard to bring any change in the organisation. Because of the emergent property of the self-organizing teams, it tends to become a moving target. An experienced enterprise coach would be in a position to see and track, influencing the necessary changes. 

I would recommend some of the following steps based on my past experiences:

1. Take time to understand the invisible structure without ignoring the visible one
2. Set right expectation with the senior management about your hunt
3. Many a times you might want to create a ripple by throwing stone in the perceived "calm water" to make underlying structure visible
4. You cannot change the system until and unless you become part of the system

Image attributions: https://flic.kr/p/6pCiBa, https://flic.kr/p/6XSpXY

Please register for my upcoming Certified LeSS Practitioner courses in Sydney and Melbourne. I would be covering many concepts around Systems Thinking during these 3 days course.

• March '18: Sydney: Certified LeSS Practitioner  From Principles to Practices
• April '18: Melbourne: Certified LeSS Practitioner From Principles to Practices

LeSS conference London: Key snippets, announcements

LeSS conference is designed in such a way that, participants learn the large-scale facilitation techniques in addition to practicing many of the LeSS ceremonies. This is more of an unconference than a conference. I never felt that stiff-neck that I typically see in most of the conferences.

For example, the conference started with a Bas's keynote followed by Craig's playing his guitar

Continuing from last year's tradition, self-designing experiment was conducted with nearly 150 participants. Teams went through 3 iterations before forming their teams.

We did an open space, providing opportunity for participants to choose the topics of their own interest.

Several luminaries and thought leaders presented some of the deepest ideas around technical practices and product development. One thing which is different at LeSS conference, per my observation was that the speakers were not invited based on their popularity, but based on their deep knowledge in certain areas.  

Nowadays, in many conferences, I see the same faces again and again. Mostly, the popular speakers are invited. There is nothing wrong with that, but it ends up feeling like a celebrity show rather than a learning platform. 

Here are some additional pix of speakers presenting and various games that were played during the session

We also had a panel discussion with the LeSS trainers

a little bit of self-promotion :-)

The conference ended with Bazaar style reviews and retrospectives.

As I shared at the beginning of the post, LeSS conference is unique. Participants are not there just sitting and listening to the monologue of the speakers. But they really "participate" in every activity and learn the essence of LeSS during every minute of the conference.

Last but not least, a new video introducing LeSS has been created, and it is really awesome. Don't forget to check this out:

Looking forward to see you in the next one.

Before I sign off from this post, have announced my upcoming Certified LeSS Practitioner courses in Sydney and Melbourne. I would be covering many facilitation techniques, ceremonies with in-depth conversations on product development applying LeSS during the 3 days course. Hope to see you in my next one.

Here are the links to register for the course:

• March 26th-28th '18: Sydney: Certified LeSS Practitioner  From Principles to Practices
• April 23rd-25th '18: Melbourne: Certified LeSS Practitioner From Principles to Practices

Why Agile implementations are failing ? three Musketeers

During my recent breakfast chat with one of my mates @James Hayes, we retrospected on the current state of Agile implementations across the industries. Of course, there are hundreds of reasons, but we also realised that three key roles in the industry play a crucial role in this entire process.

During the chat, we realised that most of the time we blame middle management in organisations for the failure of any agile implementations. However, the issue doesn't start there. The issue starts during the recruiting process.

As shown below in the picture below, we discovered that in-experienced Agile coaches apply for jobs through recruiting agencies. Recruiters who scan the profiles of these coaches may not have enough expertise to identify the right ones. The same profiles are forwarded to the inexperienced (in Agile) hiring managers in larger organisations, who recruit the in-experienced Agile coaches, thus resulting in massive failure in Agile implementations.

Again, this is just an observation and not based on any data or anything. Even though I picked coaching here, I am sure the same could apply to other roles as well.

How can we fix this?

My view is that upskilling the recruiters and the hiring managers could make some difference here. My theory is that, as long as we have a huge demand-supply gap in the coaching field, we will end up having many (inexperienced)coaches. So, we can't stop, until the gap is narrowed down. 

Before I end this post, I want to say that, the above theory is not a generalised one, I have come across many fantastic recruiters, hiring managers and coaches as well. However, don't you see we have some scope for improvement?

Honey, I will be home late, another deployment day !!

Do you call your spouse to let them know that you are going to be late again as another deployment is happening at work?   

During the daily Scrum do you hear your team members answer "I am working on Jira card 1078" in response to "What are you planning to do today?". 

Do you respond by saying you are a BA or a Java developer if someone asks "What do you do at work ?"

Even though there is nothing wrong with the answers as such, but it talks a lot about the organisational culture. My experience says that the language, the employees use on a day to day transaction is a reflection of the vision and the values espoused by its leaders. 

You might have heard the Janitor and the JFK story. While president JFK was visiting NASA, he saw a janitor carrying a mop and asked him what is he doing? The janitor replied that "he is helping to put a man on the moon." The janitor didn't see his work like cleaning or mopping the floor, but something that is contributing towards the broader goal NASA wanted to achieve. 

The point is, about the organisations inculcating the broader vision in every employee.  

https://flic.kr/p/XT6EdD

Many prominent and long-lived organisations around the world have ensured to consciously create a vision, purpose and empowering the employees to achieve them. 

Even though agile has become the defacto standard of delivering software, still employees are disconnected from the customers. 

You stop and observe any daily Scrum in your teams and observe their language. Do they keep referring to the Jira cards or Do they talk about the value being delivered to the customers?  What does it say about the surrounding system? What behaviors are being encouraged by the leaders around them?

Do you belong to a deployment team? Do you call your spouse that you are tied up and busy with deployment at nights and returning home frustrated ? what does it say about the system around you? Does that work empower and engage you with the broader vision your organisation wants to achieve ?

To achieve true agility in the organisation, employees need to be empowered, energized and engaged with the end customers. They should be made part of the larger goal and vision of the organisations. It is not good enough to do a great Scrum or Kanban and ignoring the human aspect of the system. 

Before I end this article, let me share about my upcoming Certified LeSS Practitioner trainings Sydney and Melbourne.

• March 26th-28th '18: Sydney: Certified LeSS Practitioner  From Principles to Practices
• April 23rd-25th '18: Melbourne: Certified LeSS Practitioner From Principles to Practices

All models are wrong and some are useful

During my recent chat with @Kate R S about assessing organisation's maturity, we talked quite a bit about various models and touched about Dreyfus, Shu-ha-ri, etc. 

One thing that kept coming back to my mind was the aphorism, "All models are wrong, and some are useful." This is especially true while we are analysing a large organisation or a team. 

I see organisations like any other living systems as it is run by living organisms. The complex nature of the human thinking and their interactions keep creating emergent behaviors every minute of the day.  

Trying to capture the organisation's behavior and represent it in a simplistic model is a futile exercise. As I said before, the emergent properties of a system change due to the various factors. New people are joining, old people living the organisations, corporate politics, ego-war, protecting the turfs, threat from competition, etc. keep changing the dynamics of the organisations. 

Besides, the organisations are so complex that, there is no guarantee that the data that is gathered to assess the system is the right one. Even if we gathered the data is accurate, it still represents the snapshot of the system. Creating a two-year plan to fix the organisations based on today's information is as bad as doing nothing or may be worse!

Bottomline, if you are planning to assess an organisation, be aware that: 

• The understanding the overall system as much as possible is the first step
• Observe, listen and act. This could take some time. 
• Remember that, the models that are constructed based on today's data would be stale by tomorrow. Be ready to throw it away rather than hanging-on-to it. 
• Understand the leverage points to drive the change rather than static models.

Before I end this article, let me share about my upcoming Certified LeSS Practitioner trainings in Sydney and Melbourne. You can register for these courses using the links below:

• March 26th-28th '18: Sydney: Certified LeSS Practitioner  From Principles to Practices
• April 23rd-25th '18: Melbourne: Certified LeSS Practitioner From Principles to Practices

Improving retrospective effectiveness - a Draft model

Retrospectives, one of the most popular ceremonies in Scrum, is also the most abused. As per the Scrum Guide, the purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to:

• Inspect how the last Sprint went with regards to people, relationships, process,and tools;
• Identify and order the major items that went well and potential improvements; and,
• Create a plan for implementing improvements to the way the Scrum Team does its work

As we know, the retrospective is all about the Inspect and adapt cycle, which is also the foundation for the empirical process control. 

However, my observation of a typical retrospective of many teams looks like the one in the diagram shown below:

Apart from the overall broken process, team members write a very twitterish description on the post-it something like the one shown in the screenshot below:

Even if you show the above post-it to the authors after a sprint, they won't be able to recollect what the hell was this about !! have you come across this in your teams ?

I understand that the description is supposed to be short/sweet, mostly for discussion. However, it shouldn't be too short that, you can't discuss it in the future!

Draft Model

Keeping the inspect-adapt cycle in mind, I have come up with a draft model(shown below) that could be experimented to improve the effectiveness of the retrospective.

Key changes in the proposed-model are:

• Doing safety-check ins. . Check this article to learn more about Check-ins. I know most of you might be doing it already.
• Additionally, I like people sharing their stories and narratives rather than just dumping twitterish words on the post-its. So, let everyone tell their stories, listen to each other and take notes. If I am telling the story, I would recommend someone else to take notes, write it on a post-it with points connecting the stories. 
• Look at the patterns of challenges arising out of previous retrospectives and do a root cause analysis. 
• Of course, as part of the adaptation, the improvement should not do quick fixes. The actions should look from the systemic perspective. 
• Large-Scale Scrum(LeSS) recommends teams to do Causal Loop Modelling to understand the impact of their actions on overall system.
• It is very important not to forget ask "Are we improving ?"

Feel free to share your thoughts and what did you like about the draft model ?

You can use the above model in addition to the info in these highly recommend books:

• Agile Retrospectives - Derby, Larsen
• Project Retrospectives - Kerth

Before I end this post, here are my upcoming Certified LeSS Practitioner trainings in Sydney and Melbourne. You can register for these courses using the links below:

• March 26th-28th '18: Sydney: Certified LeSS Practitioner  From Principles to Practices
• April 23rd-25th '18: Melbourne: Certified LeSS Practitioner From Principles to Practices

Role of leaders in building high performing teams: Givers, Takers, Matchers

I was reading Adam Grant's Give and Take, and according to Adam, there are three types of people. Givers, Takers, and Matchers. 

• Givers like to give more than they get, paying attention to what others need. 
• Takers like to get more than they give, seeing the world as a competitive place and primarily looking out for themselves. 
• And matchers balance and give on a quid pro quo basis, willing to exchange favors but careful about not being exploited. 

Adam's research also points that "Givers" are more successful in lives than takers or matchers, even though it comes with a cost. 

Imagine you are a hiring manager in a large enterprise and you have been asked to build a team. Question: Would you hire generous givers, selfish takers or transactional matchers?   

Good news is, we don't have to worry much about this answer as Adam shares his thought process in this HBR article. Givers are the best. However, organisational KRAs/Individual-based incentive system creates competition among employees and forces them to act like takers impeding the collaboration. 

Adam also suggests the solution:

Part of the solution must involve targeting the takers in the organization—providing incentives for them to collaborate and establishing repercussions for refusing reasonable requests

The article also has some good tip for managers/leaders to consciously create the right environment for building the high performing team.

There are three payoffs associated with teaching employees about the power of agency, boundaries on availability, and perspective taking. The first is saving your best employees—those who exemplify collegial generosity—from being taken advantage of and helping them to gain stature as successful givers instead. The second is enabling employees who fear the risks of giving to contribute more to others and to the success of the enterprise. The third is creating a culture of and reputation for generosity that attracts more givers to your organization and appeals less to takers.

The next question I would like to ask is,

Do you think that empowering the team to self-organize will ensure that all the givers, takers and matchers start collaborating automatically?  Or do you think that leaders intervention is still needed to handle the personality issues in self-organizing/self-managing teams?

Before I end this post, here are my upcoming Certified LeSS Practitioner trainings in Sydney and Melbourne. You can register for these courses using the links below:

• March 26th-28th '18: Sydney: Certified LeSS Practitioner  From Principles to Practices
• April 23rd-25th '18: Melbourne: Certified LeSS Practitioner From Principles to Practices