Friday, February 3, 2017

Agile for Leaders

Agile for leaders

What leaders have to do to enable, promote and support an Agile way of working-
and to ensure that teams are 'doing the right work'.

Challenges of today

1. Too  much work
2. Pressure to deliver
3. Stressed and/or disengaged teams
4.  Missed targets
5. Sub optimal results

''Growth is controlled not by the total of resources available but by the scarcest resource'' -  Dr. Liebig

''Every Organization has at any given point in time at least one constraint which limits the system's performance relative to its goal''- Dr. Eliyahu M.Goldratt
You can only deliver as fast as the slowest part of your process

Little's Law

Increase throughput by demand and production leveling

Work in progress (Reduce WIP)/ Average Completion rate (Increase completion time)= Total Cycle time (Managing the on-ramp / remove constraints/  Don't overburden

Minimize WIP-   Backlog, In Progress and Done

Switching loss-  productivity reduces when focus is shifted in multi tasking

Doing the right work:
1. Mission and Value
2. Strategic initiatives
3. Objectives and Goals
4. Manage the funnel of work
5. Visualize the work in progress
6. Program Delivery practices/ Strategic practices and Operations Practices
7. small, stable cross functional teams

Work and team structure fundamentals:

1. Small batch size
2. Single prioritized funnel of work
3. Pull work to match WIP limit
4. Small, stable cross functional team
5. Multiple teams are loosely coupled and tightly aligned

Work:  enhancements, new project work, bug fixes, 3rd line support
PM  - Product Owner
Team :  IM, BA, Designer, Customer SME, Dev, Tester, Cross functional core team

Work smarter than harder!  To do more and have fun while doing it..it gets better


Customer-facing, end to end teams, as far as possible

1. Front end/ Bankend infrastruture
2. Analysts/ Designers/Developers/ Testers/ Compliance
3. Content Designers, Actuaries and Delivery support

Loosely coupled, tightly aligned!


Leaders or Managers:-


Organizing a group of people to achieve a common goal - Definition of leadership - wikipedia

1.  Clarity of purpose -   clear strategy
2.  Inspire purpose -  Mission, Vision and Goals
3.  Strategy is about choice.  Best choice comes with colloboration

Set up for Success:
1. Structure teams
    Right Resources/  Right Place and Right time
2.  Small and empowered teams
3.  Optimize value flow
    Remove bottlenecks
    Eliminate Waste
4. Leaders -visit the teams, see the walls and visualize the value stream mapping
5. Stop watermellon projects-  Green outside and Red inside.
6. Govern for greatness
    Doing the work right
    People management and guidance
7.  Drive innovation
    Sharing/ Learning / Innovate/ Improving
    Create exciting work environment

Summarizing Agile leadership

1. Inspire purpose
2. Set up for success
3. Optimize value flow
4. Govern for greatness
5. Innovation

Source:  IBM Agile Academy