Are we Agile or Fragile? Agile Africa 2017 - RSGI 2017 Bangaluru

REGIONAL SCRUM GATHERINGINDIA 2017BANGALORE | SEPTEMBER 6-7

Are we Agile or Fragile?Reflections from the IQbusiness Agile Index Report 2017

BIASE DE GREGORIOEXECUTIVE PARTNER –LEAD agility@IQbusinessIQbusiness – South [email protected]@biased77

#RSGI2017

WHY AGILE INDEX?

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WHY?Business Engagement1

Program Execution2

Team Delivery3

Change Management5

Local optimisation4

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HOW?

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20% Scrum Masters

14% Coaches / Consultants

4% Product Owners

HOW?QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS –ONLINE SURVEY

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66% Information Technology

50% Financial Services

49% 5000 employees +

66% Leadership role

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INDUSTRY LEADERS

Peter Alkema - CIO FNB Business Bank

Norman Blunden - Head of Agile Portfolio Office Standard Bank Corporate and Investment Banking

Christiaan du Preez - Head of Global Markets (IT) Standard Bank Corporate and Investment Banking

James Knupfer - Absa CTO - Director of Agile Transformation and Coaching

Josef Langerman - DevOps and Agile Evangelist Standard Bank - Group Head Software Engineering

HOW?QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS –INTERVIEWS

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AGILE EXPERTS

Antoinette Coetzee - Owner and Founder of JustPlainAgile

Ellen Gottesdiener - EBG Consulting, Inc. President and Agile Product Management / PO Coach

Sam Laing & Karen Greaves - Owners of Growing Agile

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KEY OBSERVATIONS

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CROSSING THE CHASM

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Larger companies

17% 5 Years + Mid-sized companies

18% 5 Years +Smaller companies

33% 5 Years + Practitioners

50% 5 Years +

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OR RATHER CROSSED THE CHASM

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“While Agile adoption within IT appears to have “crossed the chasm”, enterprise agility is lagging”

LACK OF FOCUS ON TECHNICAL PRACTICES

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56% Scrum / Scrumban

0.4% XP/FDD

>59% Process driven practices, tools and techniques

<36% Engineering-driven practices, tools and techniques

6% Adopted to improve engineering discipline

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LACK OF FOCUS ON TECHNICAL PRACTICES

Tips:• Engineering practices and improvement

should be on same backlog as features• Slack time to improve skills• Technical Coaching• SM & Coaches gain knowledge and

experience in engineering practices

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“Engineering practices are used by less than 36% of the respondents. By neglecting these practices, teams will struggle to improve their velocity and quality of software delivery, impacting their ability to be Agile.”

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ARE WE REALLY FASTER?

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72% Adopt to accelerate product delivery

58% Adopt for the ability to adapt to change

93% Realise improvement in ability to change vs

79% Realise improvement in faster time to market

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ARE WE REALLY FASTER?

“I don’t think Agile as a methodology is a silver bullet that will make things go faster, but if you just think about making the most valuable decisions based on the most value to our clients, with that, you’ll go faster.”

Tips:• Hard conversations to set expectations• Invest in automation• Leaders to remove organisational

blockers• Focus on optimising the value chain – the

system

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IS IT CHEAPER?

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8% Adopt to reduce costs

7% Adopt for improved predictability

82% Realise improvement quality

86% Realise improved predictability

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IS IT CHEAPER?

Tips:• Optimise flow of work• Remove waste• Backlog refinement to prioritise high-value

items• Portfolio prioritisation and limit WIP to

focus on high-value initiatives

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“Cost was the hopeful, call it by-product, of doing things differently. So, we never went in to say, I want to save so much, but we knew we would get a cost-saving if we do it. So, we wanted to do the right thing and then cost will follow.”

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SUCCESSES ANDCHALLENGES IN ADOPTION

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SUCCESSFUL ADOPTIONS?

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Teams62% somewhat successful

34% completely successful

4% not at all successful

Organisations67% somewhat successful

12% completely successful

21% not at all successful

Antoinette Coetzee – Founder and Owner JustPlainAgile

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LACK OF BUY-IN?

43% Top management

35% Combination

8% Bottom-up

13% Don’t Know

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Norman Blunden – Head of Agile Portfolio Office Standard Bank Corporate and Investment Banking

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LACK OF BUY-IN?

Tips:• Lean / Change approach• Experiments and feedback-driven

change• Participatory and collaborative

change management• Understand WIIFM

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“It’s not only the top Exec leadership that needs to buy into these ideas. It’s also the layers below them… that may require radical restructuring in organisations...finding the right place to house the people in the middle layers is quite a challenging problem.”

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CHANGE MANAGEMENT (RESILIENCE)

13% completely adequate change activities

57% somewhat adequate change activities

30% not at all adequate change activities

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CHANGE MANAGEMENT (RESILIENCE)

Tips:• Remind your stakeholders that this is a

journey• Reflect on the victories no matter how

small• Change events (HSM) – ELSA Model

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“It's not the sort of change that’s going to happen overnight – for every three steps forward it’s two steps back… but looming deadlines and high expectations will leave you overwhelmed and despondent; it’s not healthy.”

“Perhaps hardest of all is how difficult it can be to see the progress that’s been made from the inside.“

“When you look back…you’ll see that you’ve played an important role in the future of your organisation… how do you keep going when it gets really tough?”

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ROLE OF PRODUCT OWNER AND SCRUM MASTER

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41% Hardest role to fill is a Product Owner

32% Hardest role to fill between Scrum Master (19%) and Agile Coach (13%)

3X More certified Scrum Masters than Product Owners (SA)

10X More certified Scrum Masters than Product Owners (India)

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Norman Blunden – Head of Agile Portfolio Office Standard Bank Corporate and Investment Banking

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ROLE OF PRODUCT OWNER AND SCRUM MASTER

Tips:• Take time in identifying the right people• Allow coaching to these roles• Provide slack to learn• Understand the roles and responsibilities

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“…there can be challenges to fulfil the product ownership role if the business doesn’t buy in or believe (in the value of the role)… and the other challenge is that their current role prevents them from taking full ownership of the (Product Owner) role…”

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MIDDLE MANAGEMENT CAREER PATH

“Current management levels might provide resistance, and it’s important to clarify the roles of traditionalmanagement and the specialisttechnology roles.”

“…new ways of working and a technical career path really needs to walk next to each other, otherwise we will have resistance… because there’s uncertainty…”

Tips:• Work with HR to define career paths for

technologists• Work with HR to define performance

management in ‘New Ways of Working’

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ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL

Tips:• Learn from Lean / Agile principles and

use this as departure point• Align on principles and then select

appropriate practices• Apply SHU-HA-RI and only tailor when

you understand the trade-offs

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“…look at a problem holistically and use whatever we have in our tool boxes, whether it comes from SAFe or whether it comes from something else. We should be able to apply our Lean and Agile thinking to the problem that’s in front of us and work with the mindset… the problem lies in the mindset, the problem does not lie in the tool that gets chosen.”

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WHAT DOES THE FUTURE

OF AGILE LOOK LIKE?

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Peter Hundermark – Agile coachAgile42

MOVING FROM IT TO CULTURE

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“…people are going to start saying, let’s do some work upstream, let’s sort out requirements and business cases and design and project prioritisation, and then DevOps… going to be downstream innovations, and then your usersand your customers will start to see processes around them start to be innovative.”

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BUSINESS AGILITY

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“…from a business perspective (we’re) displaying some great agility. And if we look at some of the ways that we are pushing some of the agendas… (there’s)

evidence of agility at play, but maybe not in the way we would look for it, or in the way we try and label it.”

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SO ARE WE AGILE OR FRAGILE?

Same maturitySame challengesSame experiencesSmaller marketMoving towards business agility

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#RSGI2017

Name : Biase De GregorioPhone : +27 11 259 4430 Mobile : +27 82 411 1976

Twitter : @biased77Email : [email protected]

THANK YOU