Agility as a movement started with software developers uncovering better ways of doing what they do. Today that movement is driving even business leaders to rethink how they lead their organizations. What does it mean to "be" agile? How can agility be applied to leading organizations? Where do successful agile leaders start? Three stories, three secrets and three tips to apply agility to your life and work. As presented at PMDay 2020 in Kharkiv
1. Three secrets of Agile Leaders:
Leading others by leading yourself
Peter Stevens
Kharkiv PMDay
Workshops
2. Who is in the room? Would you consider yourself a…
• Developer – you design, create, test or deploy a product or service
• Agile Developer – you subscribe to the values and principles of the
Agile Manifesto
• Anti-Agile – you’re one of those developers who hate “Agile”
• Agile Leadership role– you serve as Agile Coach, Scrum Master or
Product Owner
• Project Manager
• Line Manager – Team or Group Manager
• C-Level Manager – You have overall responsibility for your company
or business unit
• Anyone else?
4. What do executives ask about agility?
• What are the buzzwords about?
• How can we innovate faster?
• How can we get business and technology to talk to each other?
• How can we develop better products?
• How can we educate our clients?
• How can agile make us better at delighting the customer
• How can I make it a success?
• What does it mean for me?
5. This introduction represents the start of a conversation
Behavior
PerspectiveMindset
Source: Barry O’Reilly, Unlearning
7. What is agility?
User Stories
SAFe
Sprint
Scrum
Planning
Poker
Story Points
Product
Backlog
Scrum Master
CI/CD
Pair
Programming
Kanban
LeSS
Product
Owner
13. Fake Agility - 2
User
Stories
SAFe
Sprint
Scrum
Planning
Poker
Story
Points
Product
Backlog
Scrum
Master
CI/CD
Pair
Programming
Kanban
Product
Owner
LeSSDo Scrum!
14. What does it mean to be agile?
Steve Denning’s Three “Laws” of Agile Organizations
• Law of the Customer
• Focus on customer needs, both existing customers, and even more importantly, new
customers and new markets
• Law of the Network
• Information flows without friction through the organization to seize opportunities or fix
problems
• Law of Small Teams
• Get business and technology working together efficiently to create customer-centric
products
18. Agility has become a topic for leadership
https://www.wsj.com/articles/are-you-agile-enough-for-agile-management-11565607600https://hbr.org/2016/05/embracing-agile
19. I’d like to share three examples of successful leaders and
reveal their secrets of agile leadership
Secret 3Secret 2Secret 1
22. “Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but
most of these were largely concerned with the movements
of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on
the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that
were unhappy.”
-- Douglas Adams
23. I don’t like how sugar makes me feel.
So I want to avoid sugar and carbohydrates.
26. Christmas represented a severe thunderstorm!
“They are good,
they are really good”
SugarPressure.com: Trader Joe's Milk Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups
https://www.sugarpressure.com/2010/12/trader-joes-milk-chocolate-peanut-butter-cups.html
32. How to create alignment among 400,000 people
Every member of the Apollo
mission knew:
1. We are going to the moon
2. It’s not going to fail because of
me
3. If something goes wrong…
Apollo 11 Ready for Launch
33. How to create alignment among 400,000 people
Every member of the Apollo
mission knew:
1. We are going to the moon
2. It’s not going to fail because of
me
3. If something goes wrong,
remember item 1
Chandrayaan 2 Ready for Launch
45. Six months later…
• “We accomplished everything needed
to achieve our initial goals.
• “Half of our initial ideas proved unnecessary, so we didn't do them.
• “We were able to achieve all our goals with ½ the work & ¼ of the time
• “And the the results are already visible in our finances!”
-- Walter Stultzer, Executive Director, Futureworks AG
46. How Walter’s team did it
• “I committed to making this a
success
• “I communicated WHY, then WHAT
• “We applied Scrum to improving
the company
• “Every three weeks or so, my
management and I got together…
• “Personal Agility was the most
important part of all
48. What are the top agile practices used in Development?
• Daily standup
• Sprint/iteration planning
• Retrospectives
• Sprint/iteration review
• Short iterations
Source: VersionOne, 12th Annual State of Agile Report, 2018
49. As part of their job to improve your organization,
does you manager…?
Practice
• Daily standup
• Sprint/iteration planning
• Retrospectives
• Sprint/iteration review
• Short iterations
% of development teams that use
• 90%
• 88%
• 85%
• 80%
• 69%
Source: VersionOne, 12th Annual State of Agile Report, 2018
51. 1 week
20 weeks
Speed comparison
This is you working on five things at once
1
2
3
4
5
52. There is a huge potential
to improve company performance
by eliminating excessive multitasking in management.
53. Tip: Start with Yourself
Apply Techniques from your Dev Teams
Apply Agility to Leadership
54. How to apply these three secrets of agile leadership
Apply Agility to
Leadership
Create clarity
on
what really
matters
Change is easy
if you want to
do it
55. Would you like to be the next Futureworks?
Walter Stulzer, Executive Director
58. Would you like to be like Walter?
• Peter Stevens
• Co-Founder
Personal Agility Institute
• peter@saat-network.ch
• @peterstev
Walter Stulzer, Executive Director