Bob's Blog
Bob is a prolific blogger who simply enjoys sharing his experiences with colleagues in the Agile Community. Topics revolve around Scrum, XP, Kanban, Project Management, Business Analysis, Testing, Leadership and General Musings.
Check back often as we've always got something to say...
I delivered a keynote at the Agile Development + Better Software + DevOps conference put on by TechWell on Wednesday, November 8, 2017 in Orlando.
The feedback I received was wonderful and it seems the talk resonated with quite a few of the attendees.
At some point, I'll get a link to the video of the keynote and I'll share it here. Until then though, here's a link to the slide from the talk.
Nathanial Willis posted this in LinkedIn recently:
I asked Steve Denning for advice on how to successfully lead an agile transformation and here's what he said:
I was attending the STPCon conference in Washington, DC last week (week of September 25). As always, there were quite a lot of old friends there. Folks I usually only meet on the conference circuit.
The conference committee tried a Lightning Talk format for the first time. They invited 7-8 speakers on stage to give 5-minute, focused talks. Dot Graham gave one that is still sticking with me.
She focused on creating (fostering, inviting, inspiring, allowing) a mistake culture. One where everyone focused on two aspects of their mistakes:
I’ve heard the learning part many times before. But this is the first time that I’ve heard “forgiveness” mentioned as part of creating a learning culture and it struck me.
In a team environment mistakes always happen. Sometimes they’re small things. And other time, they’re large ones which have an impact on the entire team.
I have a saying that I often share in my coaching and teaching. I amplify that agile teams (all teams really) succeed and fail as a team. That is, we don’t throw anyone under the bus, but we deal with everything from the solidarity of a WHOLE TEAM perspective.
I now want to add other attributes to that description:
I love the Norm Kerth sentiments regarding the Prime Directive for retrospectives where he sets the stage for the “intentions” of all attendees.
Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.
I think this sentiment helps us in our view towards mistakes and our forgiving each other (including ourselves) for making those mistakes.
I know that I for one can be really hard on myself when confronting the things I’ve done wrong.
As Dot reminded me, I want to encourage all of you in your agile journeys to be kind and forgiving of one another. Remember, they are ONLY mistakes and we all make them!
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.
I came across a video the other day that had this catchy title – Radical Candor. I watched it and was intrigued by the talk AND its implication to agile teams, organizational transformations, and sustainable cultures.
Kim Scott was the presenter in the video and she was sharing lessons she’d learned in her leadership journey at Apple and Google. In a nutshell, she was advocating radical candor for leaders in communicating with their direct reports.
The stories she told made me think about my own career and leadership journey. A couple of which I’d like to share with you.
I wish I could remember the young lady’s name. She was from a European DevOps tooling and consulting firm and she did an interview with me at one of the TechWell Star conferences. I believe it was StarWest at the end of 2016.
She was interviewing speakers to get their take on the implications of DevOps in agile, testing, and across software methodologies.
I recall vividly that she referred to DevOps as an evolutionary step beyond “agile” in nearly in every question she asked. And I told her I struggled with that idea. She was also very automation centric and extremely tools centric in her questions – referencing and emphasizing various DevOps oriented tools at every opportunity.
It’s not that I was defending agile. It’s that I have a very different view to DevOps and what it means than I was hearing from my interviewer. And I continued to explain and amplify my view in nearly every answer.
At the end of the interview, I felt that she understood my point of view. And that she had rationalized it against her own to create a more cohesive mental model for DevOps. I asked her to send me the link to the final interview, but to-date, I haven’t heard back.
And I continue to get questions during my coaching and consulting around DevOps, so I was inspired to write this post as a means of sharing my views.
I found this great article about a leadership team (SLT) adopting agility WITH their teams.
http://blog.qrious.co.nz/how-to-navigate-with-agile-leadership
It’s relatively short, but powerful because of the perspective. That is, it focuses on the activity of the senior leadership team in an organizational agile transformation.
I often think one of the core challenges for most leaders is that they are stuck in a situation where they’re telling their teams and organizations –
That is, they are not walking their talk. Now don’t get me wrong. It’s usually not a malicious or lazy play. It’s simply that they have more important things to do. Things that require their specific skill set and expertise to lead and get done. So, there is little to no time left for working like or with their agile teams.
Some may think this is ok and that it doesn’t really have an impact on the agile organization. Or the potential agile organization. I actually think it has a very negative effect.
We’ve all heard of the KISS principle. It stands for: keep it simple, stupid.
Well I want to apply it to software development leadership. Particularly those leaders that are in an agile context.
I’ve been hearing a tremendous amount of pushback and whining amongst leaders in agile contexts of late. What you say. How can this be?
Here’s a sampling of the running types of dialogue (complaints, whining, pushback, etc.) that I’m referring to:
I've been invited to do a keynote at the Agile Development, Better Software, DevOps conference in Orlando in November.
The abstract for my talk is:
In case you haven’t heard, the leadership landscape has been changing—and continues to change—to keep up with the accelerating pace of business. And agile development has been an incubator of new leadership approaches. It has introduced or fostered many innovative concepts: servant leadership, self-directed teams, empowerment, emotional intelligence, employee engagement, trust, self-selection, open spaces—and even Lean Coffee “meetings.” Channeling comedian Jeff Foxworthy, Bob Galen shares patterns and anti-patterns that surround the leadership shift to more agile tactics and the mindset that many leaders face and often struggle to adopt. Having personally endured the massive change of becoming an agile leader, Bob shares his journey and discusses how you can tackle your new role—the tactics you’ll need to change, the stance you’ll need to assume, and the role models you’ll need to leave behind. Bob explores the new lean, value-based delivery perspective that provides the right focus for delighting your internal and external customers. Prepare to have your mind blown a bit—and never again think of leading in the same way.
I'm looking for help in constructing my keynote. If you have an idea to fill in the blank:
You might be an Agile Leader if ___________
Please add a comment to this post. I'd be incredibly appreciative and you might get your idea woven into the final keynote. I'll even send you a link to the keynote video if you want to see your idea "in action".
Thanks so much and stay agile my friends,
Bob.
Quite a few years ago, while I was working at iContact, a fellow agile coach approached me with a free offer.
It seemed that he had developed an agile maturity assessment (framework, tool, approach, strategy, etc.) and wanted to try it out somewhere. I’d known him for quite some time and he had some solid agile coaching experience under his belt.
I politely told him “thank you” and that I would “think about it” and quickly closed down the discussion. To be honest, I was initially close-minded to the idea. Here I was an internal technical leader and agile coach in my company. And, to be honest, we were kicking-ass when it came to agile performance and delivery.
But the more I thought about it, the more I started to convince myself that it would be a good idea. Regardless of our performance, we could always get better…couldn’t we?
A few of weeks ago I attended a 3-day workshop given by Trans4mation which was entitled, Agile Transformational Leader. They are a relatively new company that is focusing on the agile adoption, now transformation, space. They are led by Michele Madore and Michael Spayd. Michael is well known in the agile coaching space, having founded ACI with Lyssa Adkins. And Michelle is a very seasoned enterprise-level agile coach. They both co-taught the workshop with Stuart McCalla.
One of the backdrops for the course is the Leadership Circle assessment tool for leadership affinity. It wasn’t clear to me going into the workshop just how pervasive this tool/model was in their material. To say that it is “central” is probably an understatement.
In this post, I want to share some of my observations and learnings associated with the workshop.
