Stefan Wolpers

What looked like a good idea back in the 1990ies—outsourcing software development as a non-essential business area—has meanwhile massively backfired for a lot of legacy organizations.

TL; DR: Lipstick Agile — Happiness in the Trenches? Have you noticed how many people in the agile field are unhappy with their work situation? A situation where an organization already struggles doing agile, not to mention ‘becoming agile?’ This is what I call lipstick Agile. Scrum Masters and agile coaches are close to either burnout or indifference. Product Owners who “own” the product by name only, and developers questioning why “Agile” is imposed upon them and often turns out to be just another form of micromanagement. 📅 Join the 25th Hands-on Agile meetup on August 20, 2020, to explore the virtual Ecocycle Planning. Do you want to get this article in your inbox? Then sign up for the Food for Agile Thought newsletter and join 26k other subscribers. Lipstick Agile in Statements and Observations Here is a personal list of quotes, issues, observation, and challenges that have made me think about being a member of an organization — shall I stay or shall I go, so to speak: Quotes from Stakeholder and Clients “How many teams can you handle at the same time — three or four?” (This quote is from a prospective client who was looking for a Scrum Master for several newly-formed Scrum teams without any experience.) “The availability of meeting rooms is a difficult topic here.” (There was no space at all available. And improvising by using the walls in hallways, for example, was strictly prohibited.) “We don’t need physical boards; we use Jira.” (“When you put problem in a computer, box hide answer. Problem must be visible!” Hideshi Yokoi, former President of the Toyota Production System Support Center in Erlanger, Kentucky, USA.) “Test automation does not work for us. We always test manually.” (A manager from a corporate QA silo w/o an engineering background on test-automation. He had a large number of subordinates in East-Asia for manual testing.) “We deploy once a week so that the governance team has a chance to sign-off our work.” (The Scrum team in question created an excellent build pipeline and could deploy at will.) “As a Scrum Master, you will also report the performance metrics of the team to the project manager after each sprint.” (A “Scrum Master task” stressed by a prospective client.) “We can invest more in learning once we have delivered [the application] and proven our usefulness.” (Knowledge sharing as a reward. That’s the equivalent to insisting on that any R&D project must pay for itself.) “I think pair programming is a waste of resources. Remember, it is twice the work in half the time.” (Thank you, Mr. Sutherland, for not pointing at the fine-print so every business guy gets the message wrong. Spoiler alert: It is about maximizing the amount of work not done.) “Why would you include the developers in the user interviews? They are supposed to write code. The business analysts can do the talking.” (Classic taylorist thinking from the industrial age applied to knowledge work. It is not about the quantity of code developed; it is about creating the right code. In that respect, nothing is more valuable than developers directly talking to customers.) “We need to meet numbers and deadlines. That’s more important than living up to some fancy initiatives of the C-level like ‘becoming agile.’” (Charlie Munger: “Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.”) “We know what we need to build, talking to users is a distraction.” (If the waterfall approach is working for you, why venture out into the realms of agile product development?) Observations in the Past Stakeholders do not participate in ceremonies, for example, Sprint Reviews. Never. Stickies on a physical board seem to have been aligned with a bubble level by the previous Scrum Master. (A prospective client, looking for a new dedicated, full-time Scrum Master for a Scrum Team comprising five people.) The walls in the office are strictly off-limits, enforced by the facility management. (The CEO was massively proud of the (unsuited) office design by a well-known architect, showing around visitors regularly. Consequently, the Scrum had no boards.) The Scrum Master had to process office-supplies order requests of the Scrum team. (No comment.) Lipstick Agile — The Conclusion Shall I stay, or shall I go? That’s the question in situations like the ones sketched above. Suppose you decide to stay, roll-up your proverbial sleeves and get going. If you choose to leave, do so quickly before you fall victim to the singing of the corporate sirens. What I cannot recommend is shrugging your shoulders because you have to make ends meet. What has made you reconsider your job situation in the past? ✋ Do Not Miss Out and Learn more About Lipstick Agile: Join the 7,900-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community I invite you to join the “Hands-on Agile” Slack Community and enjoy the benefits of a fast-growing, vibrant community of agile practitioners from around the world. HoA BANNER If you like to join all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free. Related Articles 13 Signs of a Toxic Team Culture 22 Scrum Master Anti-Patterns from Job Ads Speaking Truth to Power 2.0 — Taking A Stand as an Agile Practitioner 📖 Download the ‘Agile Transition – A Hands-on Guide from the Trenches’ for Free 📖 Download the Remote Agile Guide for Free.

TL;DR: Creating an Agile Community of Practice Creating an agile community of practice helps winning hearts and minds within the organization as it provides authenticity to the agile transition — signaling that the effort is not merely another management fad. Read more to learn how to get your agile community going even without a dedicated budget and how to make it work with distributed teams. 📅 Join the 25th Hands-on Agile meetup on August 20, 2020, to explore the virtual Ecocycle Planning. Do you want to get this article in your inbox? You can sign up here and join 26k other subscribers. How to Become an Agile Organization – When the Plan Meets Reality Typically, the recipe for becoming an agile organization goes somehow like this: you need the commitment from the C-level to change the culture of the organization and thus its trajectory. You also need strong support from the people in the trenches who want to become autonomous, improve their mastery, and serve a purpose. Then – in a concerted effort – the top and the bottom of the hierarchy can motivate the middle management to turn into servant leaders. (Or, probably, follow Haier.) Accordingly, an action plan often starts with hiring a consultancy to help figure out a more actionable roll-out plan, mostly comprising of training and workshops, initial team building activities, and probably some audits concerning financial reporting requirements, technology or governance issues. What this kind of orchestrated initiative often neglects is the grassroots part of any successful change: provide room and resources to the members of the organizations to engage in a self-directed way with the change process itself. A successful agile transition needs an agile community of practice. The Purpose of an Agile Community of Practice The purpose of an agile community of practice has two dimensions: Internally, it serves in an educational capacity for agile practitioners and change agents. There is no need to reinvent the wheel at the team-level; regularly sharing what has proven successful or a failure in the context of the transition will significantly ease the burden of learning. Externally, the agile community of practice contributes to selling, form example, Scrum to the rest of the organization by informing and educating its members. The members of the agile community also serve as the first servant leaders and thus as role models for what becoming an agile organization will mean in practice. They bring authenticity to the endeavor. Winning hearts and minds by being supportive and acting as a good example day in, day out, is a laborious and less glamorous task. It requires persistence – and being prepared not to take a ‘no’ for an answer but try again. Reaching the tipping point of the agile transition will likely be a slow undertaking with few signs of progress in the beginning. Moreover, management tends to underestimate the inherent latency. According to a recent study directed at the path of acceptance of new social norms, the tipping point for social change in an organization is around 25%. It shows that a committed minority can have a lasting effect once it manages to attract others who are willing to join the cause. A Portfolio of Services and Offerings of an Agile Community of Practice Internal Offerings, Serving the Community Improving the level of mastery of the members of the agile community of practice is not rocket science. My top picks are as follows: Sharing is caring: The hoarding of information is one of the worst anti-patterns of an agile practitioner. Hence share everything, for example, from Retrospective exercises to information resources (newsletter, blog posts, etc.) to working materiel and supplies is helpful. A Wiki might be the right place to start. Training and education, part 1: Organize regular workshops among the agile practitioners to train each other. If not everyone is co-located, either record the training for later use or create live virtual classes. Using Liberating Structures ensures that everyone will be included and given a voice. (All of my Professional Scrum training classes are now live virtual training classes with excellent feedback from the students. Being distributed as a team is no excuse to skip the training part of the transformation.) Training and education, part 2:: If you have a budget available, invite the Marty Cagans to the organization to train the trainers. You cannot overestimate the psychological impact of such training on the change agents. It is proof that the change is what the leadership if the organization wants. Organize events: Have regular monthly (virtual) events for the agile practitioners and others from the organization and host meetups with external speakers. Make sure that all practitioners meet at least once a quarter in person for a day-long mini-conference, if possible. Otherwise, host virtual conference instead. The annual conference: Consider hosting an organization-wide yearly ‘State of Agile’ conference to share lessons learned, success stories, and failures. Again, this can be a virtual conference as well. Communication: Use a Slack or Microsoft Teams group to foster friction-less communication among the community members. Procurement: Find a workaround to allow non-listed suppliers to provide supplies such as special pens or stickies. It also could be required software for remote work that is currently not available through official channels. (Probably, there is a freelancer or contractor among the practitioners who can help with that.) External Offerings, Serving the Organization Generally, what is working for the agile community of practices is also suitable for the members of the organization, probably with a different focus, though. Try, for example, the following: Provide training: Provide hands-on training classes in close collaboration with the change agents. Consider a less demanding format that a typical day-long training class – a focused one-hour class in the late afternoon may prove to be just the right format for your organization. (Tip: Avoid the necessity for participants to apply somewhere to be allowed to the class. That will massively improve attendance rates.) Also, consider offering a kind of curriculum that is comprised of several of those light-weight classes. This format is also perfectly suited for live virtual classes. If you are unfamiliar with organizing such virtual training classes, check out Remote Agile (9): A Cheat Sheet for Remote Agile Event Planning. Communication: Consider running a website or blog beyond the agile community of practice’s Wiki to promote the organization’s path to becoming an agile organization. The best means I have encountered so far to foster engagement among change agents and early adopters is a weekly or bi-weekly newsletter within the organization. Make ‘agile’ mandatory for new colleagues: Educate all new hires on agile principles and practices to support the repositioning of the company. I described this approach here in detail: App Prototyping with Absolute Beginners. Gain visibility: Selling Agile to the organization to win hearts & minds is best achieved by making ‘agile’ tangible at a low-risk level for the individual. For example, organize regularly lean coffee sessions or knowledge cafés thus providing a safe environment to check this ‘agile’ thing out. Invite people directly to ceremonies, for example, Sprint Reviews – if you practice Scrum – that might be of interest to them. (Guerilla advertising is welcome: I used to print invitations for Sprint Reviews of my team, put them inside elevators, or left them on the tables of the cafeteria.) Provide access to change agents and Scrum Masters: Lastly, why not offer an informal way of contacting agile coaches and change agents? Some people shy away from asking supposedly stupid questions in the open and may be hard to reach otherwise. Provide transparency: Occupy a space at a highly frequented part of a building or the campus to show what ‘agile’ is about and provide an overview of practices, courses, regular events, etc. Host events: Try to organize regular events for the organization, for example, providing lessons learned from teams that are spearheading the agile transition. Create a schedule in advance and stick to it. Perseverance is critical to fighting the notion that becoming agile is merely a management fad that will go away soon. Again, this works perfectly well with distributed teams. Learn more here: Remote Agile. Overcoming Resistance to an Agile Community of Practice So far, I have not yet witnessed open pushback from an organization about the creation of an agile community of practice. More likely, you will encounter complacency or ignorance at the management level. Sometimes, the budgeting process will be utilized – willingly or not – to impede the creation of a community. But even when you are financially restrained, there is still enough room to move the agile community of practice ahead. There are several services available for free that provide video conferencing and hosting, blogs, event organization, or newsletter services. In my experience, it is less a question of available funds, but you need to overcome your anxiety and get going without waiting for written approval from whomever. Assuming responsibility as an agile practitioner in general and a Scrum Master in particular by starting a community and moving the transition forward sounds like authentic servant leadership to me. Creating an Agile Community of Practice — Conclusion Creating an agile community of practice is a vital part of the process of becoming an agile organization. It provides a lot of the groundwork that is necessary to convince the members of the organization that becoming agile is neither hazardous nor a fad but a trend and thus an excellent chance for everyone involved. Do you have an agile community of practice? If so, what practices have been successful in your organization? Please share with us in the comments. 📺 Join 2,300-plus Agile Peers on Youtube Now available on the Age-of-Product Youtube channel: 🆕 Remote Agile (1) Replay: Practices and Tools for Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, and Product Owners. Scrum Sprint Retrospective Anti-Patterns. Scrum Master Anti-Patterns. ✋ Do Not Miss Out and Learn more the Agile Community of Practice: Join the 7,900-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community I invite you to join the “Hands-on Agile” Slack Community and enjoy the benefits of a fast-growing, vibrant community of agile practitioners from around the world. If you like to join all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free. How to Create an Agile Community of Practice — Related Articles Download the ‘Agile Transition – A Hands-on Guide from the Trenches’ for Free App Prototyping with Absolute Beginners – Agile Experiments 📖 Download the Remote Agile Guide for Free.

TL; DR: Exploring a Virtual Ecocycle Planning with Mural — A Live Virtual Meetup on August 20, 2020 Let’s try our favorite Liberating Structure microstructure in a remote setting with Mural, Zoom, and Qiqochat: virtual Ecocycle Planning. Do you want to get this article in your inbox? You can sign up here and join 26k other subscribers. How to Participate in the 25th Hands-on Agile Meetup If you want to participate in the Virtual Ecocycle Planning on August 20, 2020, you have to RSVP at Hands-on Agile’s meetup page. I will provide you with the links to the event on August 19, 2020. How to Prepare for Participation Please use suitable devices for the best experience of the virtual Ecocycle Planning: Please avoid smartphones for your participation. Use a device that provides a large screen. (I use a laptop with a large external display.) Choose a stable internet connection. Test for possible VPN, network, or firewall issues in advance. Please make sure in advance that you have the necessary software installed and updated: Install the Zoom app on your device beforehand to avoid VPN or firewall issues two minutes before the class starts. (Avoid attending the sessions via a web-browser; use the Zoom app instead.) Update your browser; Chrome, Safari, and Firefox usually work well in their latest versions. Make sure you have access to Google Apps; we will need them. Close all applications that are not needed to save resources for running the class. (Also, this keeps distractions at a minimum.) Please note that there will be an attendee limit. At any given time, no more than 100 attendees are admitted to the session. Be there in time, as we close the event for new arrivals a few minutes into starting it. Virtual Ecocycle Planning — Related Content 📅 🖥 Distributed Agile Masterclass — A Live Virtual Class. Remote Agile (Part 2): Virtual Liberating Structures. Download the Remote Agile Guide for Free.

Regularly, we find articles from developers detailing why ‘Agile’ in general and Scrum’s nature, in particular, deserve our collective disdain.

Do you need an emergency fund as a change agent—whether you are acting as Scrum Master, Product Owner or agile coach—

On many occasions in the recent past, working with distributed agile teams has amplified existing organizational, technical, and cultural challenges in many organizations.

TL; DR: Results of a Test of Using Unhangout to Host Virtual Barcamps Last week, 30-plus attendees of the 24th Hands-on Agile meetup ran a virtual Barcamp experiment w/ MIT’s Unhangout, an open-source platform for organizing attendee-driven virtual open space events. Read on and learn whether Unhangout is a suitable solution to remote collaboration challenges. 📅 Join the 25th Hands-on Agile meetup on August 20, 2020, to explore the virtual Ecocycle Planning. Do you want to get this article in your inbox? You can sign up here and join 26k other subscribers. Open Space Technology BarCamps, unconferences — we know open space events under different labels. They have become very popular in the last years, either organized by an independent community or within organizations: When people must tackle a common complex challenge, you can release their inherent creativity and leadership as well as their capacity to self-organize. Open Space makes it possible to include everybody in constructing agendas and addressing issues that are important to them. Having co-created the agenda and free to follow their passion, people will take responsibility very quickly for solving problems and moving into action. Letting go of central control (i.e., the agenda and assignments) and putting it in the hands of all the participants generates commitment, action, innovation, and follow-through. You can use Open Space with groups as large as a couple of thousand people! Source: Liberating Structures: Open Space Technology. How do open space events work in practice? The Agile Camp Berlin describes the magic of self-organization at work: Usually, people who share a common interest meet and work on topics. Meaning: Everybody can present a session, even is encouraged to do so. If there’s a topic you want to present, discuss, try out or you just want to ask the community for help: the pitching session in the morning of the BarCamp gives you the opportunity to propose your topic. After the initial pitching of sessions, all proposed sessions will be mapped to the spots and rooms. After that, the law of the two feet will apply. Law of the two feet means: if you decide that a session might be valuable for you, you show this by attending it. Sometimes there’s the situation that there are more proposed sessions than slots. In that case, we vote collectively, and the most popular sessions get a slot. Source: Agile Camp Berlin: What is Barcamp? Unhangout’s Promise Unhangout promises to solve a problem we are facing if we consider Zoom to run a virtual Barcamp: How do we ensure that the law-of-two-feet still applies to a virtual Barcamp? By making everyone a co-host in Zoom? Probably, that is not the best idea in some situations. Alternatively, Manually assigning people to sessions in breakout rooms would not just create a massive administrative overhead. It would also introduce a dependency that might threaten what makes open space events so successful: autonomy, self-organization, and serendipity. This is where Unhangout comes into play to help organize a virtual Barcamp: Unhangout is an open-source platform for running large-scale, participant-driven events online. Each event has a landing page, which we call the lobby. When participants arrive, they can see who else is there and chat with each other. Hosts can welcome their community and do introductions in a video window that gets streamed into the lobby. Participants can then join breakouts, which are small group video chats, for in-depth conversations, peer-to-peer learning, and collaboration on projects. Source: About Unhangout. In other words: Unhangout’s unique value proposition is the free movement of attendees of the virtual Barcamp between breakout sessions. And we put it to the test. Lessons Learned from Using Unhangout to Host a Virtual Barcamp at the 24th Hands-on Agile Meetup Unhangout’s Features — An Overview Unhangout comprises of two main areas: a) the lobby of the event and b) the breakout room. The following screenshots were taken on an exploratory session. Unhangout’s Lobby Unhangout’s lobby is the space where all participants of the virtual Barcamp meet: On the left hand, there is a list of participants. In the middle of the window, you find the chat area. (No video chat, though.) On the right hand, there is the session planning area. (Here, we use the mode of participants to suggest breakout sessions.) Unhangout’s Breakout Rooms Unhangout’s breakout rooms are where the action happens. If you know Zoom or Google Meet, you will feel familiar with the functionality on offer: You can share your screen, raise and lower your hands, and join the chat within the breakout session. You control audio and video, muting, and removing people from the session. Lastly, you can record sessions and share videos. Additionally, there is a notepad that the attendees of a breakout session can use. Unhangout’s Shortcomings There are several shortcomings of Unhangout that come to mind regarding the organization of a larger virtual Barcamp: There is no video chat available in the lobby. The number of participants of breakout sessions is limited to ten; that’s hardly “supporting” the law-of-two-feet.” Consecutive sessions are not supported. There is little control over breakout sessions on the side of the admin. Live audio pitching of sessions before a vote is not supported. The note pad does not seem to be session-specific. While we could not address the #2 and #3, we decided to remedy the lack of a video chat in the lobby by moving the lobby to Zoom. We hence used Zoom as a wrapper application for the virtual Barcamp: We started with the kick-off in Zoom, then moved to Unhangout for the session planning and the breakout sessions, and closed the event in the Zoom lobby. However, engaging Zoom for this purpose caused audio and webcam issues in some configuration—it was either Zoom or Unhangout, but not both at the same time. The Script of the 24th Hands-on Agile Meetup Organization-wise, we followed these subsequent steps—directly taken from the skript—to accomplish the test: Share the Unhangout link, share your Unhangout dashboard via Zoom: Please join Unhangout via the following link. a) Round 1: Adding breakout sessions: Please add your breakout session proposals by clicking the “plus” in the upper right corner. (3 min) b) Round 2: Introducing the breakout sessions: If you have suggested a breakout session, please introduce your session to the whole group via Zoom. ( We go down the list from top to bottom. It is one minute per pitch.) c) Round 3: Voting: If you haven’t yet voted in Unhangout, please do so now. You have one vote per proposal; clicking twice will remove your vote again.) Accept and open breakout sessions in Unhangout: I will now “open” the breakout sessions, and you can join your preferred one by clicking on it. (The breakout session will open in a new browser tab.) Please remember: A breakout session can host between 2 and 10 participants. Run the breakout sessions: Join your breakout session of choice; the sessions will last 30 minutes. Alternatively, stay in the lobby — our Zoom session — for a chat at the virtual coffee machine. Session hosts: decide on how to run your session. Please ask in advance for permission of the attendees if you intend to record your session. Close breakout sessions after 30 minutes: Please rejoin the whole group in Zoom to collect feedback and discuss the outcome. Rate the experience w/ Unhangout: How would you rate the experience with Unhangout? Please add your feedback to the Google slide deck. (5 min) Discussion: Let’s discuss the findings. (10 min) The whole exercise with a short debriefing/retrospective took about 2.5 hours, including a break. The number of participants peaked about half an hour into our virtual strategy session. (38 out of 102 who RSVPed.) A Virtual Barcamp w/ Unhangout: Discussion, Feedback, and Lessons Learned These are the lessons learned from running a virtual Barcamp with Unhangout: What Works Well in Unhangout The following quotes regarding the positive sides of Unhangout are from the participants: Easy to use Jitsi was working fine for me Jitsi worked for me in this tool. (I had problems in the past.) Worked well for me, no issues with Jitsi Liked the overview of the sessions and the visibility of how many are in a session Easy to set up the market place Relative easy to use Quality communications with new people with similar interests. What Needs Improvement in Unhangout The following quotes regarding the negative sides of Unhangout are from the participants: Jitsi can sometimes be a problem First time joiners will have a hard time figuring everything out and will miss out on things → make new testing for everybody in advance Two video conference tools in parallel are hardware challenged Audio was awkward in the first minute in Unhangout session until everyone closed their Zoom window Need time to figure out how all things are working Look and feel is quite clumsy I didn’t get that I needed to close Zoom, after that it worked Difficult to maintain Zoom and another tool at the same time A few people I could not understand during the Unhangout session, but I don’t know why the audio was bad for them In retrospect, I would ask participants to “leave computer audio” in the Zoom call and stop their video before joining the Unhangout session. The echo and webcam blocked in another application was an issue for us. Hosting a Virtual Barcamp w/ Unhangout — Conclusions Does Unhangout support a virtual Barcamp organization, a remote unconference, and a distributed open space event? Yes, it does as long as the group is small; 30 people can be well supported, particularly if they already know each other. Otherwise, a different set-up may prove to be more useful. The idea of utilizing Zoom as a wrapper for Unhangout worked okayish for the majority of participants. However, there are configurations where Zoom and Unhangout are colliding in their respective attempt to gain control over microphones and webcams. Have you hosted a virtual Barcamp in the past? If so, what set-up have you used? Please share it with us in the comments. 📅 Join the 25th Hands-on Agile meetup on August 20, 2020, to explore the virtual Ecocycle Planning: 📺 Remote Agile: Practices and Tools [Replay of a Live Virtual Class] At the end of March, we ran a Remote Agile Practices & Tools live virtual class with about 30 participants from all over Europe, the Eastern Seaboard, and Canada. The participants agreed on recording it and make it available to the agile community. We edited the recording slightly; for example, we removed the waiting time during the exercise timeboxes. Otherwise, the video accurately reflects how one way of collaborating with a distributed team using Zoom breakout rooms may work. Except for three teaching blocks of about 20 minutes in total, the whole Remote Agile Practices & Tools class of 2:45 hours comprised of interactive work: {"preview_thumbnail":"/drupal/s3fs-public/styles/video_embed_wysiwyg_preview/public/video_thumbnails/b2ZtAaM1V9w.jpg?itok=-WRcgxkW","video_url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2ZtAaM1V9w&feature=emb_logo","settings":{"responsive":1,"width":"854","height":"480","autoplay":0},"settings_summary":["Embedded Video (Responsive)."]} If you have any questions regarding the class, please let me know via the comments, or contact me in the Hands-on Agile Slack community. If the video snippet does not play, please watch the video on Youtube: Remote Agile (1) Replay: Practices and Tools for Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, and Product Owners. ✋ Do Not Miss Out and Learn more about the Virtual Strategy Session: Join the 7,700-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Team I invite you to join the “Hands-on Agile” Slack team and enjoy the benefits of a fast-growing, vibrant community of agile practitioners from around the world. If you like to join now all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free. Virtual Barcamps — Related Content Agile Camp Berlin 2019 Video. Hands-on Agile #23: Quo Vadis, Scrum Master: The Results of Our Virtual Strategy Session. All posts on Liberating Structures. Download the Remote Agile Guide for Free.

TL; DR: The Agile Movers & Shakers Interview w/ Ryan Ripley Today’s guest is Ryan Ripley. Ryan is a Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) with Scrum.org. He hosts the Agile for Humans podcast and most recently co-wrote Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions for Common Scrum Problems with Todd Miller for PragProg. Do you want to get future articles in your inbox? If so, you can subscribe here and join 26k agile peers. The Agile Movers & Shakers Interview with Ryan Ripley Today’s guest is Ryan Ripley. Ryan is a Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) with Scrum.org. He hosts the Agile for Humans podcast and most recently co-wrote Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions for Common Scrum Problems with Todd Miller for PragProg. Please describe what you do in 280 characters: “I teach people how to use the Scrum Framework. I write books that help teams deliver value to their customers and host an agile podcast on iTunes.” What brought you to ‘agile?’ “I took a Scrum Master class with Ken Schwaber back in 2013. Waterfall never felt quite right to me. After learning about Scrum, I became passionate about my work again and realized that we can expect delivery while still treating people with respect. Ken’s class was a game-changer for me.” Why do you believe that being passionate about ‘agile’ is worth your time? “A life well spent is one that involves serving others and helping them find joyful ways to reach the outcomes they’re after. Agile has given me the opportunity to have a life like this.” How would you characterize your way of contributing to an organization’s success in becoming agile? “I focus a lot on training leadership teams on how to create environments that agile teams can succeed. By getting that part right, we make the wider investment in training, coaching, and mentoring much more impactful. This type of training is critical to an organization’s success and can make or break an agile adoption.” What is in your toolbox? “I try to use low-tech items as much as possible. Post-it notes, 3×5 index cards, painters tape, a flip chart, and Neuland markers these are all my favorite “go-to” items, but these days I’m spending a lot of time using Zoom “break out” rooms and Mural to help facilitate, coach, and train teams. That said, the tools are not really that important. I’m trying to make things easier for my teams using strong facilitation and coaching techniques. Whether I’m using flip charts are virtual whiteboards, the point is to still create opportunities for teams, to learn, adapt, and grow. We are here to help people make new and better decisions frequently. Empiricism is the main tool in my toolbox. Everything else helps us get there.” Do you believe in removing yourself from a team or an organization in the long run? If so, why is that and have you done so in the past? “I think that context is everything with questions like this. In general, yes. I think after a period of time that it’s time for me to leave. At a certain point, I become part of the system of work that I’m trying to shift. At that point, my effectiveness (value) drops well below the price it cost to have me on a team.” What has been your greatest success so far, and how did you manage to realize it? “Finishing Fixing Your Scrum is high up on the list. We spent two years on the book and have gotten a lot of feedback so far that it’s really helping teams. I’m hesitant to mention project-specific things. The Development Team and Product Owners involved did the work and deserve the credit that comes with it. If I’ve helped someone live a better life and discover a more joyful way of working, I’d consider that a big win.” What has been your worst failure so far, how did you contribute to it, and what did you learn from it? “One of my biggest failures was early on in my Scrum Master career. A project manager asked me some very innocent questions about controlling scope and dates while working with Scrum, and rather than digging deeper into their concerns, I lashed out about such things are impossible and essentially turned a potential ally into an opponent. I learned a valuable [lesson] about trying to figure out the question behind the question. In other words, what is a concern, need, fear, etc. that the person is really asking about. Had I done that, I think I would have shown a lot more empathy and saved myself many issues during that particular Scrum adoption.” Finally, what is your magic tool as a coach/trainer or Scrum Master? “My magic tool as a Scrum Master is curiosity. I have found that tools come and go. Facilitation techniques emerge and fade. Even the Scrum Framework changes occasionally, but keeping an open, curious mind while working with people will never go out of style. The second I lose that mindset and drift into judgment, it’s time for me to step out of a coaching stance and get my mind right. I’m useless if I’m judging people.” Which newsletters, blogs, podcasts, or Youtube channels do you follow that deserve more credit than they receive now? Any recommendations? “The Meta-Cast podcast by Bob Galen and Josh Anderson is excellent and deserves a lot more attention than it gets. Bob and Josh dig deep into important topics and freely share their insights, experiences, and stories.” If you could recommend only one book on ‘agile,’ which book would that be? “Aside from my own 🙂 — I still think that Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck is still one of the most important agile books ever written.” Whom should we interview next? “Todd Miller.” Learn more about Ryan Ripley on his website, follow him on Twitter, reach out to him on LinkedIn, and learn more about Ryan the author on Amazon. Note: If you like to suggest a peer for an interview, please let us know by leaving a comment below. Thank you! ✋ Do Not Miss Out: Join the 7,600-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Team I invite you to join the “Hands-on Agile” Slack team and enjoy the benefits of a fast-growing, vibrant community of agile practitioners from around the world. If you like to join now all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free. Related Content Adding to the Ryan Ripley interview, we recommend the following articles: All interviews from the Agile Movers & Shakers series: Agile Movers & Shakers — the interview series. Agile Movers & Shakers (2): Diana Larsen. Agile Movers & Shakers (4): Dave West, CEO of Scrum.org.

TL; DR: Remote Agile Transitions We are used to saying the Scrum is a perfect probe for organizations, as it will reliably discover all dysfunctionalities. Since the pandemic has forced many of us to work remotely, this unique capability has been kicked into overdrive regarding remote agile transitions. Here are my top-10 challenges of organizational change that remote Agile has made more urgent to address than ever before. 👉 Join your peers and explore how virtual BarCamps work: Hands-on Agile #24: Virtual Open Space Events w/ MIT’s Unhangout on June 25th, 2020. Do you want to get this article in your inbox? You can sign up here and join 26k other subscribers. Why Remote Agile Accelerates Change Three months into working with distributed teams, at least for the majority of us who are not working for one of the remote work pioneers like Automatic, Gitlab, or Buffer, operational issues at a tactical level have been addressed. Zoom has fixed many of the problems reported, we learned how to organize engaging remote events, and more people start embracing techniques like Liberating Structures or Training from the Back of the Room to get all sorts of work done. With a good outcome, as it seems that remote work improves productivity, at least when team members are engaged with their work. Now that the dust is beginning to settle, I believe it is the right time to switch from survival mode with a focus on keeping operations running back to a more strategic way of handling change to become an agile organization. Here are my top-10 challenges that remote Agile transitions are facing: A lack of a vision: Why is the organization pursuing to become agile? What are we fighting for—is it really about learning faster than the competition? If an organization is not transparent about vision and strategy, teams will find it significantly more challenging to become self-organizing and accept responsibility. (Or let us put it in a different way, Alice-in-Wonderland style: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”) Ignoring the trend: The organization’s middle management, as well as individuals, do not embrace an agile mindset or abandon it quietly, believing ‘Agile’ is a pandemic-related management fad—like distributed teams and remote work—that will go away sooner or later. (Well, I think that Agile is a massive trend, not a mere fad. And remote work is here to stay, too.) Clinging to projects: My budget, my feature: The organization tries to become agile without switching from a project-based to a product-based development approach. The process continues to be ruled by (annual) budgets, and risk-mitigation by committee is still the norm, becoming even more counter-productive during a remote agile transition. Culture I: No failure culture: In moments of crisis and uncertainty, organizations and individuals tend to focus on short-term results. If your professional future depends on appearing useful, staying in your comfort zones becomes an incentive as it pays to play safe. However, shouldn’t rapid learning and being innovative now be the name of the game to preserve the organization’s future? (Failure is an inevitable part of that approach. During a remote agile transition, leaving the comfort zone, taking an acceptable risk should be rewarded instead.) Culture II: The culture is lagging behind developments: The organization is not doubling down on transferring or preserving its culture in a remote agile environment. My favorite definition of company culture goes as follows: Culture is what happens when you are not looking. Now apply this model to a situation where there are no watercoolers and coffee machines that can act as waterholes for the tribe, and where having lunch is not an option. (Going remote requires more effort to cultivate your organization’s culture, particularly at the leadership level.) Distrust meets a bias for action: A perceived loss of control at the management level accompanied by a bias for action both lead to doubling down on old-school Tayloristic micro-management during a remote agile transition. The management abandons self-organization the moment it is needed the most due to the complexity of the situation and resulting uncertainty. It also still believes in its traditional role: telling people what to do, how to do things, and making sure everyone is busy at all times. (A thoughtful dealing with the new situation requires investing more in trusting people, their willingness to accept responsibility voluntarily, and self-organization.) Surveillance: Trust won’t be built by surveilling and micro-managing team members. Therefore, don’t go rogue; the prime directive rules more than ever in a remote agile setup. Trust in people and do not spy on them — no matter how tempting it might be. (Read more about the damaging effect of a downward spiraling trust dynamic from Esther Derby.) A slow convoy of organizational silos: The organization moves at the speed of the slowest to change functional silo. Pre-pandemic, it has not pursued efforts to establish a rapid build-test-learn culture, and thus departments are moving at different speed levels. (In a remote Agile world, the resulting friction is steadily increasing, probably to a breaking point.) Team-building issues and agile HR: In a market where skilled people are made redundant, the people folks move back to defending the organization from the individual worker instead of focusing on supporting the transition to a team of teams by actively involving team members in solving personnel issues. (There are plenty of dark patterns of this kind, for example, moving people among teams upon short notice. Or, not staffing teams adequately, for example, leaving Scrum Master positions open or make working Scrum Masters redundant. Open positions are not filled, and teams are kept too small and hence not cross-functional and, therefore, not self-organizing. Or they do not involve teams in the recruiting process itself.) No training and tech is your problem: The organization is not actively training team members in the technology, software, and practices that the distributed team relies on. To make matters worse, the organization does not provide support with technology or connectivity in the home-office. (Don’t assume that people know how to use the technology and software involved or have an adequate Internet connection. Therefore, offer regular training classes to signal that not knowing how remote agile collaboration works can be resolved and provide any support necessary to get home-offices up to the standards. Failing in this respect at an organizational level qualifies for the category of penny-wise and pound-foolish.) Conclusions The added complexity, the increased uncertainty caused by this pandemic make working with cross-functional, self-organized teams in a decentralized fashion — collaborating as a team of teams — more valuable than ever. Now is the time to double down on becoming agile to reap the benefits of business agility: overtaking the competition while creating value for our customers; don’t regress to the practices from the 1920ies if you want your remote agile transition to be successful. What is your take on the notion that remote work and uncertainty are accelerating agile transitions? Please share it with us in the comments. 📺 Remote Agile: Practices and Tools [Replay of a Live Virtual Class] At the end of March, we ran a Remote Agile Practices & Tools live virtual class with about 30 participants from all over Europe, the Eastern Seaboard, and Canada. The participants agreed on recording it and make it available to the agile community. We edited the recording slightly; for example, we removed the waiting time during the exercise timeboxes. Otherwise, the video accurately reflects how one way of collaborating with a distributed team using Zoom breakout rooms may work. Except for three teaching blocks of about 20 minutes in total, the whole Remote Agile Practices & Tools class of 2:45 hours comprised of interactive work: {"preview_thumbnail":"/drupal/s3fs-public/styles/video_embed_wysiwyg_preview/public/video_thumbnails/b2ZtAaM1V9w.jpg?itok=-WRcgxkW","video_url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2ZtAaM1V9w&feature=emb_logo","settings":{"responsive":1,"width":"854","height":"480","autoplay":0},"settings_summary":["Embedded Video (Responsive)."]} If you have any questions regarding the class, please let me know via the comments, or contact me in the Hands-on Agile Slack community. If the video snippet does not play, please watch the video on Youtube: Remote Agile (1) Replay: Practices and Tools for Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, and Product Owners. ✋ Do Not Miss Out and Learn more about Remote Agile Transitions: Join the 7,700-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Team I invite you to join the “Hands-on Agile” Slack team and enjoy the benefits of a fast-growing, vibrant community of agile practitioners from around the world. If you like to join now all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free. Related Posts We recommend the following additional posts related to the question of remote agile transitions: Agile Failure Patterns in Organizations 2.0. Agile (Part 4): Anti-Patterns — Pitfalls Successful Distributed Teams Avoid. Remote Agile (Part 1): Practices & Tools for Scrum Masters & Agile Coaches. Download the Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide: 160-plus ways to improve your way of Scrum.