Scaling Engagement Agility

davedame

About Me• 20+ years managing the quality

and delivery of software projects• 10+ years working in agile

environments• Scrum Mastered many mission

critical projects• Successfully implemented agile

processes and practices in 4 enterprise software organizations

• Certified Scrum Professional, Certified Scrum Master and Six Sigma Black Belt

Why do we scale?

How do we traditionally scale?

Topics To Be Discussed• Engagement Agility And Hiring

• Onboarding A New Team

• Customer Driven Focus

• Shared Social Learning

• Continual Change

• What Do We Need In A Leader

• Performance Management

ENGAGEMENT AGILITY

Employee Engagement• Need to find harmony between People,

Process and Tools• People should be the driver, not passenger• The Motivation Trinity

Mastery

IntrinsicMotivation

Purpose Autonomy

• Maintain start-up culture

• “Doing” agile and “Being” agile

• Continually share the organization vision

• Create a bond with every employee

How To Acquire New Talent?1. Hire people “solo”

2. Hire entire teams (“acquhire”)

3. Promote/Move employees from within organization

Host A Mini-Job Fair Within The Org.• Already know your

products, processes and tools

• Improves onboarding• Creates cross-

functioning employees

Traditional Job Models• Traditional job

models force employees to specialize in a specific area

• More organization focused, than person focusedTraditional job models

require employees to select their career

path on day 1.

Learning Paths• Let employees experiment

with multiple disciplines within your organization

• Specialization & Versatility

• Motivates employees by giving them control to succeed in their role

ONBOARDING A NEW TEAM

The Onboarding ProcessIn order for a team or individual to be successful in an organization there must be a focus on the onboarding process.

Acquire

Kick-off

Assimilate

Feedback

Follow-up

Onboarding War Games

Learning The Technology

Understanding The Process

TeamBonding

CUSTOMER DRIVEN FOCUS

What Is Empathy?The action of understanding, being aware of and being sensitive to the feelings, thoughts and experiences of another.

Empathy Driven Development

• Development approach that relies on team members making decisions based on empathy towards impacted customers

• Requires self-organization of development teams

• Complementary to Agile Software Delivery

“When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are

emotionally invested, they want to contribute.”

– Simon Sinek

SHARED SOCIAL LEARNING

Lean Coffee• Participants drive agenda of meeting

• Dot voting from backlog of topics

• Each topic is time-boxed

• Provides honest dialog, which creates urgency and reduces resistance

• No formal meeting invite

Community of Practice• Make teams responsible for improving our practices• CoPs have a champion from each team and one coordinator• The CoP develops best practices for the specific area• Champions bring ideas and issues from their teams • Champions disseminate best practices to teams• Each CoP establishes its own charter • Several CoPs in early stages of development:

– Agile Maturity– Development– User Experience (UX)– Performance– Testing

Tech Talks

BLUECAT Talks

CONTINUAL CHANGE

Continual Change• Must sustain continual change pace

• Lag time between decision and achievement

• Must be able to experiment, not just optimize

• Process and tools will become obsolete far faster than people will

Fail Fast, Fail Often

WHAT DO WE NEED IN A LEADER?

Leaders are coaches first. Managers are bosses first.

Leaders give advice. Managers give orders.

Leaders promote teamwork. Managers promote hierarchy.

Continual Relationship• Keep re-recruiting employees to build motivation

• Leader’s job is to ensure that employee’s needs, interests and learning path are met

• Keep as wide as possible

• Less formal meetings, more coffees

When you scale, you must build a continual relationship with your employees.

PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Decouple performance and compensation

Goals Theme

Performance Mgmt: Short vs Long-term

Short-term theme #1

Short-term theme #2

Short-term theme #3

Short-term theme #4

Short-term theme #5Long-term theme

Team Performance Goals• Goals enables a team to clarify what

constitutes as meaningful results• Individual recognition of members on the

team• What are your Core Agile Values

Commitment

Openness

Adaptability

Courage

Focus on results

Trust

THANK YOUDAVE DAMEDirector, Agile and Lean Practices, BlueCatEmail: Twitter: @TheAgilityEdgeLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/daviddame

www.DaveDame.com

Image Credits• Empathy: https://hbr.org/2015/03/empathy-is-key-to-a-great-meeting• Brain:

http://www.olaalaa.com/health-tips/health-benefits-of-olive-oil%E2%80%8E-cancer-heart-disease-cardiologist-fruit/

• Experiment Model: Jason Little interpretation• Fail Fast, Fail Often: http://itsfunny.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Fail-and-win-reality.jpg• Job Fair: http://resumebear.com/blog/2009/04/09/2009-job-fair-survival-guide/• Broken chain: http://eagle-entrepreneur.com/2013/02/gsu-students-work-to-break-the-chain/• Intrinsic motivation:

http://www.mbaskool.com/business-articles/human-resource/5587-why-performance-management-is-so-difficult.html

• Understanding your customer - http://financial-way.com/defaultsite