Agile 2019

I’ve been attending the annual Agile conferences for a few years now. I have two primary goals:

1. Learning. It’s an opportunity to learn new trends in the Agile world, master a few new techniques, and take back actionable takeaways that I can use in my job.
2. Networking and Volunteering. Each year, I meet a lot of people – new and by now familiar ones – who become my support group and source of inspiration for many years.

Plus, I have to confess. While I am not a party person, I enjoy the conference’s Thursday night party. It’s fun, special, crazy, plus all friends are around. Whether it’s renting out the whole Atlanta Aquarium, a beach party in San Diego, or taking over the whole block at the National Harbor, the party is a memorable event.

This year was no different. I learned a lot, met a lot of interesting people, and had a great time at the block party. The goal of this blog is to share my learnings and thoughts from the event. I noticed two major trends: Agile coaching is actively moving out of software delivery space and becoming oriented towards a value stream (“business agility”) and agile coaching defined human factor as the cause for success (hence, three keynotes: one on the danger of seeking perfectionism, one on ineffectiveness of multitasking, and one on the importance of play). Last year, at least one of them, Troy Magennis’ keynote on metrics, was directly applicable to day-to-day delivery, and this year the shift towards people coaching vs. process coaching was apparent.

There was even a “self-care” track; plus last years’ invention (I think – at least I do not recall it before), “Audacious Salon”, filled before the prior session was over. There were no big findings in business agility or self-organization, though there were interesting presentations, including Dean Leffingwell’s view on business agility. Agile novices appreciated the Scrum talk by Jeff Sutherland. Lyssa Adkin’s audacious salon was filled an hour before the session started. A few powerful experience reports, as always. So the summary is – Agile is alive, it’s transforming as a framework and becoming more of a state of mind and a uniting power for many people who want to empower others to live healthy and motivating professional lives.

Now a little bit about the two things I came to the conference for.

Learning. The presentations at Agile conferences are 75 minutes, with four presentation per day including three keynotes on Monday-Thursday and two on Friday. I was doing a presentation myself (topic: Reshaping Enterprise Agility with OKRs) and volunteering for two slots at Agile Advice, so my goal was to attend all remaining 11 presentations, which I managed to accomplish. Plus, I had a chance to spend time with some of the speakers outside of their presentations, which was awesome. So the below is the combined learning from all these experiences grouped by area of interest.

1. Business agility. This is an important topic for many large organizations who figured out software delivery but are still looking for the best ways of integrating it into the end-to-end business process. I found Dean Leffingwell’s session on this very interesting. He spoke about built-in quality as a driver of business transformation. It was great engaging in a hallway conversation with Evan Leybourn on business agility. Evan Leybourn and Sally Elatta presented the data on state of business agility globally. There were many presentations on this topic, but every speaker had their own definition of business agility. As with any new term, it’s not universally defined yet. As Dean Leffingwell put it, you ask seven people to define business agility, you get seven different definitions. My favorite presentation was on metrics of agility, which is not the goal but a start of the root cause conversation. As the presenter, John Tanner, put it: would you punish the person who pressed the red alarm button on a submarine in the time of danger? He spoke about using business parameters such as Net Promoter Scope and AARRR (”pirate metrics”) metrics to capture success of the agile transformation
2. New collaboration techniques. There was a lot of discussion about challenges of working with global distributed teams at scale. I was inspired by the experience report from a 400-people agile release train at an oil & gas giant on doing global distributed retrospectives at the experience track – a lot of thoughtful ways of giving everyone a voice and staggering root cause analysis sessions in three time zones with basic collaboration tools, to ensure that everyone has a voice. There was an interesting session on Open Space agility, which I was not able to attend but heard positive feedback about it. Finally, there was a number of sessions on Liberating Structures – a new (for me) set of collaboration and brainstorming techniques, which I will definitely add to my toolbox. I’ve heard of the concept before and got a book and an iPhone app, but only at the conference I saw how powerful these techniques were at the conference Retrospective facilitated by Dana Pylayeva. TRIZ is my favorite, http://www.liberatingstructures.com/6-making-space-with-triz/.

3. Personal agility. The keynotes were inspirational and fun. I now know about “the rule of three”, “the power of -ish” and the seriousness of play. The bottom line is: we are not perfect but we want to do the best thing we can; we want to multitask but it’s not beneficial because our brains are not wired this way; we are adults but it’s important to us to have fun while we work hard to accomplish the goal. There was great advice on finding coaching buddies or creating coaching triads to support each other’s learning. Pavel Dabrytskiy’s presentation on Scrum Master selection criteria uncovered unintentional biases and the decision-making parameters, and how to overcome those in bringing the best people for the job.

Networking and Volunteering. From my experience of volunteering at agile coaching clinics, it is always (without exception) a rewarding experience for both sides. Among the questions I got, were questions on introducing TDD to organizations, agility for a DevOps team, on running distributed PI planning sessions, and even a question from a newly appointed Product Owner who had no idea what Agile is.

​Some of my "coachees" were experienced agile coaches with a wealth of experience who just wanted to talk with a colleague. One of them led a large platform implementation and had a challenge with introducing the concept of emergent architecture to senior leaders. He wanted to talk about rework and was concerned about his superior’s negative view at rework. The first suggestion that I made to him is to avoid using the term “rework” and use “refinement”, “emergent design”, “continuous improvement” instead – he said it was a great takeaway. Sometimes simple things are not the most obvious ones.​

The latter is my personal greatest takeaway. I learned many great techniques, met a lot of interesting people, but most importantly, I was challenged to think differently, to try new ways of achieving results, and most importantly, I found out that no one is perfect – and I shouldn’t try to be either. Every Agile implementation, even the most mature, has multiple challenges and inefficiencies, so it is just a matter of working collaboratively and diligently to overcome those one by one, and the friendly Agile community will support you.

"Would you punish the person who pressed a red button on a submarine? Similarly, metrics is just a start of a root cause conversation." - John Tunner
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"What makes a leader? A follower."
"The best leaders are the greatest followers themselves."
​- Portia Tung

"There are plenty of concurrent sessions going on here at Agile 2019 in Washington DC. About 20 options to choose from every 90 mins!

At this, or any conference, it’s easy to be swamped, firehose style with content, topics, presentations, models and references. The key in distilling information is to get up higher in context, out of the detail of a case study for example, so you can take a key message and share it or explore it further. Here’s a tapas of some quotable quotes from today:
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🔸The culture of any organisation is shaped by the worst behaviour the leader is willing to tolerate (Gruenert & Whitaker)
🔸 Rules for inquiry: turn judgement into curiosity; conflict to shared exploration; defensiveness to self reflection; assumption to questions (Jeremy Lightsmith & Glenda Eoyang)
🔸 Great managers manage themselves first (Johanne Rothman)
🔸 When someone is in flight, fight, freeze - that’s not a time to coach. It’s not a teachable moment (Cailtlin Walker and Andrea Chiou)
🔸 Setting an objective that is impossible to achieve won’t motivate employees (Mariya Breyter) 🔸 Pay attention. Learn to see. Sense and Respond (Woody Zuill)"

- Lynne Cazaly, Speaker and Author. Keynote speaker at Agile 2019 
​https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6564610845115068416/

"Tuesday conference at hashtag#agile2019 was great. Heard the talk from Dominica DeGrandis on how to make better business decisions with flow metrics. We should align and focus on what key metrics that biz understands. Use other metrics such as velocity and committed to done for team retrospective for continuous improvement.

Also enjoyed Mariya Breyter talk on using OKRs to align teams to organizations goals. Simple and yet powerful framework. Can’t wait to have another great conference."

- Andy Sio, Healthcare Technology Leader | Forbes Coach Council

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6564840113992458240/