2. THE HERO’S AGILE TRANSFORMATION
JOURNEY
CALL TO ADVENTURE
REFUSAL OF THE
CALL
MENTORS
PITFALLS &
CHALLENGES
Scope Statement: Volunteer your time and expertise to develop a solution
that will ensure the safety of women and girls around the world. (Circa 2008)
Who Are Our Heroes? 13 Licensed Agility Enablement Practitioners, some
are in the audience!
3. THE HERO’S CHALLENGES ARE
INEVITABLE………….
Who can decipher anything from this visual radiator? Is this
Kanban, Scrum, Extreme Programing, Crystal Dev Work, Feature
Driven Dev Work Or Dynamic Dev Work?
AGILE FRAMEWORK
BUDGET
SCHEDULE
4. THE HERO’S AGILE TRANSFORMATION
JOURNEY
WISDOM
THE ROAD BACK
HELPERS
REWARDS
It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of
life.
Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. – Joseph Campbell
We leveraged constrained resources because we had agility enableme
5. THE HERO’S AGILE TRANSFORMATION
JOURNEY
REWARDS!
The team deployed a technology
safety tool and made
international headline news.
The team became the Oprah
Winfrey Show’s Season 25
Technology for good heroes!
6. DEFINITION OF AGNOSTIC AGILE
How do we practice agnostic
agile?
“Practicing agnostic agile is the
realization that one size does not
fit all therefore one framework is
not the answer. The workflow
needs to be designed to suite
customer context within a wide
strategic vision.”
7. THE OPPOSITE OF AGNOSTIC AGILE HAPPENS
WHEN….
✘....There is no art to our lean and agile practice that is
driven by empirical evidences.
✘....Emotional intelligence, understanding of customer
context, and customer maturity levels do not outweigh
the adoption of any aspect of a method or framework
even though that aspect of a method or framework
might be the more ‘agile thing to do’.
8. HOW TO TRANSFORM USING AGNOSTIC AGILE
Put the customer first.
Help the customer to deeply understand the 12 agile
mindest principles and values instead of just
framework specifics.
Select agile frameworks that fit the customer’s needs
and context.
9. HOW TO TRANSFORM USING AGNOSTIC AGILE
Applicable Agile Manifesto Principles
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software.
Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how
to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
its behavior accordingly
10. “WE MAY ENCOUNTER MANY DEFEATS BUT
WE MUST NOT BE DEFEATED.”
– MAYA ANGELOU
THE END
Notes de l'éditeur
Good morning everyone, my name is Esther and I am a chartered fellow of the British Computer Society leading the North America chapter of Women in Tech. we are a group of women who volunteer during our free time to solve day to day problems through the application of our tech skills.
In the month of July, I had the great honor of attending an event that we hosted in London where one of the Agile Mainifesto founders Mr. Arie Van Bennekum shared a most interesting perspective about enabling agility for lean software development. He called this approach “Agnostic Agile”. Yes, I see you all, I too wondered what agnostic agile meant. So today, I have the honor and privileged to share with you what I learnt from that session.
I like to a tell stories, so my presentation will adopt Joseph Campbell’s heroes journey steps which I will apply to my own experiences in the agility enablement space. However, everyone that is in this room today, is a hero in their own agility enablement journey.
How many of you know that when the call to adventure begins to resound in your ears, everything around you begins to gravitate towards that call to adventure, it’s like you have signs and direction and it all leads to you having to say “yes, I will solve that problem”
One day, the British Broadcasting Corporation reported a story about how many women’s and girl’s lives were being lost is an address that was not far from places that I had passed through in my many adventure trips. At this point, my call to adventure got amplified. So I accepted!
The moment I said yes, it’s like the universe conspired to bring everything I needed and one by one my mentors appeared from around the world. You see, I have concluded that it is impossible to have successful agility enablement expertise without mentors. A mentor is a person that you reach out to when you even get stuck or you have a challenge that scares you. A mentor does not necessarily need to be more senior than you are in the agile space, I have learnt so much from mentors that have expertise in a certain agility enablement area.
So my mentors reviewed the scope statement with me and they gave me feedback, they helped me set up realistic goals. Then the journey began!
So with a constrained budget and schedule which Agility enablement SDLC methodology worked best for us? I think most us here have been part of an agile SDLC training class. Does this visual radiator look familiar? Am going to read a few post it notes from the picture: Sprint, daily scrum, product increment….. Can anyone decipher anything from this visual radiator? This was one of our lowest moments. Trying to choose a methodology that would equip our volunteer developers in silicon valley was a challenge. Of these challenges we learnt so much- we learnt what we need to stop doing, what we need to continue doing and what we need to start doing as we continued to brain storm and select an agility enablement methodology.
Melida Gates recently released a book called “The moment of lift”. Am going to call the phase where each us encounters challenges that moment of lift because at that time, you are always one decision away from finding your treasure.
The wisdom of our agile team was found in Joseph Campbell’s quote…. So instead of quitting, we decided to continue with our project. At that time, the customer was our main focus. We decided to configure our software development methodology in a way that ensured that the women that would benefit from the solution can articulate their use cases with simplicity and test each scenario thoroughly.
In the moment of lift, we applied ‘agnostic agile’ with the help of agility enablement frameworks from the British Computer Society, PMI, Scrum Alliance and Scaled Agile.
Finally we deployed a technology safety tool that made international headline news! The 5 PMP, SCALED Agile volunteers, 6 volunteer software engineers in silicon valley and myself found ourselves celebrating as the Oprah Show’s Season 25 Technology for good heroes!
Melinda Gates recently released a book called “The moment of lift”. Am going to call the phase where each us encounters challenges that moment of lift because at that time, you are always one decision away from finding your treasure.
The wisdom of our agile team was found in Joseph Campbell’s quote…. So instead of quitting, we decided to continue with our project. At that time, the customer was our main focus. We decided to configure our software development methodology in a way that ensured that the women that would benefit from the solution can articulate their use cases with simplicity and test each scenario thoroughly.
In the moment of lift, we applied ‘agnostic agile’ with the help of agility enablement frameworks from the British Computer Society, PMI, Scrum Alliance and Scaled Agile.
Finally we deployed a technology safety tool that made international headline news! The 5 PMP, SCALED Agile volunteers, 6 volunteer software engineers in silicon valley and myself found ourselves celebrating as the Oprah Show’s Season 25 Technology for good heroes!
Now, let’s define agnostic agile together. From my story, I am going to say, practicing agnostic…..
If you’re already practicing agnostic agile, how can you tell when you’re veering far from it?
A. What are these empirical evidences – this is the information that we receive by observation and documentation of patterns and behavior through experimentation.
Agnostic agility does not mean that we do not abide by the agile manifesto principles. Here the top three principles that our volunteers applied throught the project life cycle.
You see, agility enablement requires standards. Without standards the team could struggle when it comes to accountability. Standards equip each team member with a baseline understanding of what it takes to hold themselves each other accountable.
