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Agile Role Transitions: Keep Austin Agile 2018 Activity Summary

By: Brian O'Fallon | Jun 06, 2018 |  Agile Transformation,  Article,  Leadership,  Product Owner,  Scrum,  ScrumMaster,  Team

Agile Roles are well defined in any foundational training for Scrum or Kanban. However, it’s not always clear who will be filling those roles as an organization begins using its chosen framework. Organizations are already fully staffed to their current way of developing software, and it stands to reason that most of the folks who will be working in the new paradigm will be transitioning from an old role to a new one.

At Keep Austin Agile 2018, I presented a talk called “So You Made Your Project Managers into ScrumMasters: Roles Transitions When Becoming Agile”. This talk went over common role transitions that occur during an Agile transformation and some of the challenges that come with these transitions.

The audience and I then thought through the various activities that happen during software development in traditional development frameworks, and who was responsible for those activities. Next, we migrated those same activities over to the new Scrum roles. We looked for patterns, noting where people in those role transitions picked up and lost activities and noted times where these activities might get lost in the shuffle. Finally, we looked at the skills that people in these role transitions might need to acquire.

Here is the collective output from these sessions, along with some of my own observations. Enjoy!

Team

The “Development Team” groups really keyed in on the need to become more self-directed.  Becoming an empowered team is a bold step, and the power to create and execute your own plan comes with an equal dose of accountability. People crave this kind of autonomy, but it can take a while to adjust.

There are some keen insights in the skills area. As cross-functional teams are created, the clear code base ownership of component teams becomes more diffused. Also, there was good focus on the skills needed to become a productive member of a more independent team.

Start Doing:

  • Self-motivation
  • Be more accountable
  • Relative estimation
  • Meet Daily
  • Be a facilitator
  • Be responsible for a solution without approval from the Dev Manager
  • Learn Agile
  • Make Decisions
  • Being accountable
  • Committing to completing work
  • Take ownership of tasks
  • Take more accountability
  • Incremental/Iterative process
  • Commit to complete

Stop Doing:

  • Waterfall process

Skills That May Get Lost in Translation:

  • Enterprise Architects
  • Platform Ownership

Skills That Individuals May Have to Acquire:

  • Proactive communication
  • Becoming cross-functional (while being less focused on personal velocity)
  • Adopting practices that reduce technical debt

ScrumMasters

The ScrumMasters in our workshop had a commendable focus on supporting their teams and promoting the Scrum process, and on acquiring the soft skills needed to help the people involved. Amongst the activities they anticipated they would stop doing, the ScrumMasters focused on managing to a plan and being the person in control.

Interestingly, the ScrumMasters were concerned about the loss of focus on budgeting, dates, and documentation. I encourage them to find the opportunity to team up with their Product Owners and learn portfolio planning practices to understand dates and budgets in their new world.

Start Doing:

  • Creating and defending a sustainable pace
  • Protecting the sprint
  • Motivate EMPs
  • Making Process Decisions
  • Motivation Skills
  • Start coaching
  • Learning about ScrumMaster
  • Servant leadership/Facilitation/Coaching
  • Manage teams at a micro-level
  • Forward planning or “micro-planning”
  • Set clear expectations up to stakeholders
  • Manage teams at a micro level
  • Coaching devs on sizing
  • Serve your team–remove roadblocks, etc
  • Facilitation skills
  • Motivation skills
  • Be a cheerleader
  • Mentoring new dev members
  • Motivating team

Stop Doing:

  • Load balancing
  • Controlling the work being done
  • Micro-managing
  • Budgets
  • Stop being a “ScrumNanny”
  • Controlling everything
  • Robust schedules
  • Updating project plan
  • Creating a project plan
  • Knowing everything

Skills That May Get Lost in Translation:

  • People management
  • Proactive
  • Documentation
  • Managing budget
  • Making delivery dates
  • Making giant, meaningless documents
  • Tracing accountability
  • Scope Definitions
  • Powerpoint

Skills That Individuals May Have to Acquire:

  • Stakeholder management
  • Soft leading teams
  • Collaboration
  • Coaching
  • Coaching
  • People skills
  • Learn to be a servant leaders
  • Influencing
  • Get comfy with ambiguity
  • Leading by influence

Product Owners

The Product Owners understood their market and felt the weight of their new responsibilities to set the direction for the team. There were great mentions of gathering up incoming requests, handling external communications, and negotiating priorities. As for their interactions with the team, there was a focus on creating stability.  

There were a few puzzling comments. Market research was called out as something that might get lost. That is certainly not the intent here. Feedback loops with the market are especially important now that the teams will be releasing more frequently. This might reflect a concern about time management. New Product Owners often feel slammed when new responsibilities are put on their plates and the old responsibilities are slow to disappear.

Start Doing:

  • Business expertise in the product
  • Manage expectations to leadership
  • Breaking down complex projects
  • Communicate status externally
  • Keeping stakeholders informed
  • Convey product vision & goals
  • Relentless prioritization
  • Negotiating trades

Stop Doing:

  • Stop weekly status meetings
  • Stop increasing and decreasing burn rates on a dime
  • Status meetings
  • Dictating timelines
  • Interruptions
  • Stop schedule builds
  • Status reports

Skills That May Get Lost in Translation:

  • Market research

Skills That Individuals May Have to Acquire:

  • Planning skills
  • When is the product “Done”
  • When will the product be delivered
  • Agile training
  • Cross-functional mindset
  • Coaching skills

Managers

We were fortunate to have great representation from managers at the workshop. Their focus is clearly on setting up the ecosystem that will allow Scrum to thrive. This was demonstrated by things they were going to actively do, like pay attention to technical debt or be catalysts for change, and the things they were going to stop doing to create space for the teams to self-organize, like stop micromanaging tasks, plans, and development approaches.

More so than any other group, managers had many items they feared might get lost. Managers felt a lot of ownership for delivery, and they voiced concerns that this new process might not adequately fill the void if they stepped out.

Potential gaps were identified at almost every step of the process, from initial estimation to planning, execution, and ultimate delivery. Dependency and risk management were mentioned more than once. To clarify, managers often times have great abilities in these areas, and they have much to teach to their individual engineers, ScrumMasters, and Product Owners. But the emphasis should be on teaching, not taking control. Indeed, the one item called out as a new skill to be learned was “coaching and support”.

Many managers find that as they step out of the day-to-day execution management, they finally have time to mentor and develop their people and to set high-level departmental direction.

Start Doing:

  • Negotiating for tech debt, refactoring
  • Removing systemic impediments
  • Start managing scope instead of attempting to keep it fixed
  • Start being flexible with time frames
  • Move to Agile Test
  • Start creating an environment for self-directing teams
  • Be a catalyst leader
  • More training on how to operate as a self-managed team
  • Facilitation
  • More fully empowering team

Stop Doing:

  • Financials responsibilities
  • Stop scheduling every task to an end date move to sprints
  • Managing business objectives
  • Financial reporting
  • Stop managing team at a micro level
  • Stop using “middle-men” for decision-making
  • Stop managing the team at a micro level
  • Production validation process
  • UAT Testing
  • Creating detailed project plans
  • Being an expert leader
  • Ability to control development practices
  • Managing tasks
  • Stop directing
  • Stop managing to a date

Skills That May Get Lost in Translation:

  • Process driven
  • Vendor Management
  • Setting scope
  • Communication planning
  • Identify interdependencies
  • Help people get better
  • Scope changes
  • Estimating work
  • Be accountable to the organizations for completing work
  • Inter-project dependencies
  • Risk Management
  • Risk Management
  • Communication planning and execution

Skills That Individuals May Have to Acquire:

  • Improve coaching and support

 

Sometimes, Agile training just isn’t enough to help employees fully transition into their new roles. Schedule a free, 2-hour Agility Roadmap Workshop with an expert to help you understand the best next steps for your organization and how Agile Velocity can help your people feel better in their new roles.

Contact Agile Velocity to schedule your free Agility Roadmap Workshop.

512.298.2835 | info@agilevelocity.com

 

Blog

Organizational Alignment Will Make Or Break Your Agile Transformation

By: Brian O'Fallon | Jul 10, 2017 |  Agile Coaching,  Agile Transformation,  Article

organizational alignment from leadership down to the teamsIn organization after organization Agile adoptions fail because “Agile” is seen as something only technology teams do. They see getting to market faster and delivering more value as something that happens solely within the delivery team. Marketing, design, sales, and business development are seen as inputs or outputs to the delivery process rather than part of the delivery team.

An Agile transformation often requires a full shift in the culture and mindset of an organization, and that’s not an easy feat. Even if executives have a clear understanding of their goals, communicating these goals and aligning the company around them isn’t usually second nature. In fact, an article in Harvard Business Review on organizational alignment argues that one of the four reasons for a misaligned enterprise is that most organizations do not have enterprise alignment as a core function.

Signs Organizational Alignment Is Missing

  1. Lack of camaraderie between the business side and Technology side

When there is a big divide between business and tech, each side is seen as the enemy of the other. The Business views Technology as “bad suppliers” and Technology sees the Business as a department without clear direction. According to the Scrum Alliance 2015 State of Scrum Report, 71% of survey respondents reported tension between their teams and the rest of the organization.

  1. Lack of customer value-centric goals

A lack of customer value-centric goals ultimately leads to a company losing sight of their product’s grand vision. The value a product brings to the customer should be the North Star the entire organization aligns goals towards.

  1. Tribalism

When things get siloed, weirdness happens. I like to refer to this issue as Tribalism. This occurs when tribes, or groups, begin to develop within an organization. Communication between teams is blocked, and productivity is limited. Inevitably, this leads to weird things happening and the formation of opposing goals.

  1. Promises of Agile go unfulfilled or the transformation has stalled

Whether it’s six months into a transformation or two years, in our experience, a stalled and/or unfruitful transformation is one of the top reasons to invite an organizational coach. Getting predictable is one of the main promises of Agile so it may be time to call if spotty delivery continues to be an issue.

Coaching & Alignment

When we kick off a transformation engagement, the first thing we ask our clients is “why?” During the discovery process, we gain an understanding of why an organization needs our help so that we can help establish, articulate, and install the broad alignment needed for a transformation’s long-term success.

We meet with leadership to determine the root desires for the adoption and transformation. The goal for the transformation cannot be to “do Agile”; transformation goals must be grounded in measurable, strategic outcomes. Without empirical measures of success, how do organizations know when you’ve gotten to “Agile enough”?

Transformation goals can be tied to the business or be adoption-based. We help leadership fully articulate these goals and find a sure way to measure them. “What does success look like for you? What’s different a month, two months, six months from now? How can we measure this?” Defining the metrics they would use to track the goals they’ve created helps create accountability and direction. Example metrics include:

  • Improving product quality
  • Improving employee morale
  • Faster time-to-market

These typically vary from organization to organization, based on the unique business goals each may have. This gives our coaches a place to start when helping organizations to build their transformation backlog.

Broadening Alignment

It is important to note that having clear, measurable goals is only half the battle. These goals go to waste if only the high-level executives understand their significance. For an Agile transformation to successfully take root, there must be transparency and buy-in throughout the organization. Everyone, from executives to Technology, needs to see how each of their individual roles play into the larger picture.

Without this level of transparency, we begin to see a breakdown, and a greater divide between the executives and the Technology department begins to form. Next thing we know, everyone is playing the blame game. Executives are upset with Technology, and Technology is feeling underappreciated for their hard work. This, of course, all results in a storm of even more work for everyone.

In the latest State of Agile report, 19% of participants say a major challenge they face while adopting Agile is ineffective collaboration. Traditionally initiatives are broken down into individual components that are assigned out to individuals or departments to complete their portion. Dependencies are identified and everything is integrated into the end. The flow of information tends to be hierarchical, and collaboration is generally just meeting to manage dependencies. Typically, it all falls apart, in the end, little fits together correctly, deadlines are missed and frustration abounds. This is why an organization needs alignment from top to bottom— and back up again.  

Visibility and Transparency

When we initially begin to experience transparency, there tends to be an element of horror on both sides. The business side assumes the tech side is always tinkering away on their products and is shocked when they find out what Technology is actually working on. Things like technical debt and infrastructure work seem like nonsense to the business side. However, these processes need to be kept in place to keep technology organization efficient.

Technology is horrified because business doesn’t understand the importance of their work. Even worse, they may not believe the outlined plans because priorities thrashing has given them whiplash one too many times.

With effective alignment and coaching support, this only lasts a little while. Coaches help discover all the work being done and make it visible to everyone. This allows the Business and Technology to have a much better understanding of how time and talent is being used currently so that programs are able to be prioritized in the future. Leadership is also able to see impediments slowing or blocking value delivery giving them the opportunity to address those impediments and set the organization up for future success.

Transparency can be scary at first, but it pays off in the long run. Having this richer understanding of what everyone is doing and how their roles and work fit together will allow a company to successfully follow their transformation roadmap and reach their goals.

Agile transformations aren’t easy. Often time, we see the transformation begin to fall apart when leadership fails to provide their teams with the direction and support needed to be successful and a system for maintaining alignment once the transformation is complete. We connect leadership to their teams and the rest of the organization to ensure that their goals are universally understood and achieved. The goal is for executives and management teams to build the foundation that will help them continue to be agile long after the push for transformation ends.

 

For more on our approach to building lasting business agility, you can check out our Transformation Services page.