Thursday, February 2, 2017

Agile Principles, Values and Behaviours & Practices

1. Begin with clarity about the outcome and let it guide every step along the way
2. Listen, iterate, learn and course correct rather than wait until its perfect
3. Encourage self direction for teams to unleash innovation, instead of concentrating leadership in the hands of a select few

  • Focus on the customer and business value
  • Iterative and Fast
  • Flexible, adaptive and continuously improving
  • Collaboration and teamwork
  • Empowered and self directed teams
  • Don't control too much
  • Cant hold it total tight or too loose, and lose on innovation
  • Leadership is in the hands of everyone

Foundation Belief's and Values

1. Respect
2. Openness
3. Trust
4. Courage
5. Culture


Values are the values we walk past-   Australian General
Absence of trust leads to invulnerability
Fear of conflict -  Artificial harmony
Lack of commitment - Ambiguity
Avoidance of accountability - low standards
Inattention to results -  Status and Ego

Agile/ Lean/ DevOps/ Design thinking based on
1. Agile Practices
2. Agile Principles
3. Agile Values

leads to change in behaviors

1.  Do a standup
2. Retrospect

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Agile Practices
-  an overview of some core agile practices, as well as the Japanese learning concept of Shuhari

Source:
Phil Abernathy -  Agile transformation coach

1. Social contract

team gets together - write short sticky notes on the acceptable and unacceptable behaviors of the team, that we go to live by
Social contract is owned by the entire team/  everyone is accountable
Gives the flavour of the culture, and changes needed
Penalties if you break the social contract
2. Scale of expectations
worst thing that you can give someone you love is trust
Trust is a box of expectations
Talk about the expectations to each other, be clear
what can you do and what you cant do
3.  Mood marbles
Red one's and Green One's-  Put the marble based on the mood in a jar
based on the color in the jar, we identify the mood of the team
Keep it simple...Agile is about simplicity
4. Stand up
Talking to the issue and not the person
Identify solutions for any problems or any blockers
Ask if you can help, tremendously supportive in agile
5. Retrospective
little action - 3 pieces of the emoticons on the board..
what is working well
what is not working well
I don't understand
-  Group the issues based on the 3 questions

As time, how are we going to fix the issue as a team
In the next iteration
In the next cycle

6.  Set of measures
a. Discovery +VSM
b. story cards
c. Wall of work
d. Showcase
e. Burn - up charts
f. Issue Bulls Eye
g. stand-up
h. Risk matrix

Practise name-  Scale of Expectations

More Blame-worthy towards More Praise-worty

1.  Deviance - deliberate violation of selfish purpose
2.  Inattention -  Inadvertent deviation
3.  Process in adequacy -  Faulty process
4.  Uncertainty- Lack of clarity
5.  Hypothesis Testing - Experimentation for the good of the company
Sanctions  leads to Rewards....


Failures are the way we learn
Fail fast is the new way of learning and recover
Intention should be good
Put up the prioritized list on the portfolio wall
Change the wall and columns of the notes - based on the situations
Visualize the process, the work and everyone to understand what is going on

Release plan -  has Release wall and Iteration Wall
Plan - Develop- Test-  deliver
Visualize the trends and mood marbles..to understand the team work


The practices are like a buffet-  laid out to allow people to pick what suits them.
These practices ensure behavior is aligned to the values and principles

1.  Leadership Practices

Agile strategy pattern
Portfolio walls
Backlog prioritization
social contract
Kanban Board
Team environment
Team rotations
Leader Smashes

2.  Collaboration Practices

Agile discovery practice
Stand ups
Retrospective
Showcases
Backlog grooming
Planning Poker
Team of teams
Design thinking practices

3. Delivery Practices

Agile Program/ Operations Patters
Automated Test-driven development
Burn down chart
Continuous integration and deployment
Design thinking practices
Dev-ops practices
Story cards
Value stream mapping


Documentation:

We don't use documentation to achieve shared understanding
We document shared understanding
Agile takes a lot of emphasis away from documentation.
It even gets the incorrect reputation that it is anti-documentation that doesn't provide value
More importantly, Agile recognizes that documentation isn't the best way to gain a shared understanding


In Agile, we talk, we converse and then we document the understanding

The Japanese concept of Shu-Ha-Ri


If you can make a curry, but cant make French pastry and someone asks you to make French pastry, what do you do?

You find the recipe, buy the ingredients and follow the recipe
You don't decide, without understanding the recipe, to boil the pastry instead of baking it in the over as instructed

It's the same with Agile or any new way of working.  In order to learn, we must follow the process as described.
Then once we have practiced it is a couple of times, we can adapt the receipe to make it better and finally when we are well
practiced and experienced, we can write our own recipe

Shu-  Follow
Ha-  Break
Ri-  Transcend


Source:  IBM Agile Academy