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Xavier Albaladejo

CAS2014 - Agile Spain Conference - December 2014

Agile Management is different

v1.2

CAS 2014 2

Speaker Bio & Company Information

Xavier Albaladejo is Agile-Lean Coach on organizational

transformation and member of everis Agile Excellence

Center. He helps large organizations to bring more value,

faster and efficiently, using Agile and Lean principles.

Xavier Albaladejo coordinates a Postgraduate on Agile

methods in La Salle, he is Certified Scrum Practitioner,

founder of proyectosagiles.org, Agile Barcelona and

member of Agile Spain Board of Directors.

insert photo

AGILE EXCELLENCE CENTER

IT Government – Technology BU

PMA

Postgrado en

Métodos Ágiles

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Ag

ile M

an

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em

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Ag

ile M

an

ag

em

en

t

Different

mental

models

Principles Approaches

Culture

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Different context

Traditional

Reduced competition

Mass/chain production

Lengthy product cycles

Push the product in the market

Agile Competitive markets

Fast product cycles

Adapt to the demand

Fast feedback and innovation

Short productions

Principles and Culture

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Principles and Culture

Different productive models

Traditional

Complicated

Repeatable

Predictive

industrialization

Agile Complex

Uncertainty

Adaptability

Learning

Improving

<

It is unusual to repeat a work

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Major success and productivity factors

1 People competence

2 Team cohesion

Main factors

4 Experience and knowledge in

similar projects

5 Middle Management style

6 People motivation

See full study in http://www.slideshare.net/xalbaladejo/en-cas2013-agile-lean-organization-and-productivity-improvement-frameworkv30

3 Technical / product complexity

Focus in learning, improvement, growth.

Competitive

advantage!

Repeat projects of

same type

Intrinsic motivation!.

Organizational facilitator, teamwork.

Stable

teams

by product

line or client

type.

“Cells”

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Principles and Culture

Employees

Agile

People ¡Think, emotions!

Knowledge workers, “creators”

Traditional

“Resources”

Easy to change “pieces”

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Profit 3

Principles and Culture

In Agile employees motivation is fundamental.

Satisfied

clients

Service quality is proportional

to employees “quality” and

satisfaction

2 Motivated

employees

Without employees there are

no products nor services, they

are who generate value

1

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Principles and Culture

Indirect management vs know the place where work is done.

Agile - Lean

Go to see & listen to the “trenches”

to understand problems and worries

Traditional

Office mgmt, indicators, conversation

with direct line of reporting

<

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Principles and Culture

Conformance to standards vs all people seek for improvements.

Traditional

Stable processes, created by specialists.

Penalties to people who don’t follow the rules

Agile

Empowerment & System Ownership to

bottom-up improvement of standards

Don’ look for guilty people, but on

how to improve the process

Safe environment to

challenge status-quo

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Principles and Culture

Command & Control vs self-organization and service to teams.

Traditional

Command & Control.

Micro-management.

GROUP

Agile

TEAM

Thinking together. Self-organization.

Management as servant leaders.

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Principles and Culture

Organization. Departments vs cells.

Traditional

Programming Testing Analy

sis Dev

Ops

Departaments

Own projects (and budget), knowledge silos.

Pooling & proxies, capacity, assignments

Programming Testing Analy

sis Dev

Ops

Cell N

Cell 1

Cell 2

Agile Competences

Lifecycle and projects are cell-contained. Stable, cross-functional teams, face to face

See the whole model in http://www.slideshare.net/xalbaladejo/en-cas2013-agile-lean-organization-and-productivity-improvement-frameworkv30

End to end

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We’ve seen that

Principles are

different

Let’s talk on different

Agile Management

http://www.jokeroo.com/pictures/funny/884904.html

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¿What is the purpose of

an organization?

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Create the context To achieve:

Organization purpose

Good products or services 1

Cells that “run”:

1 - fast

2 - efficiently

2

… so winning the Time To Market race and

quickly incorporating market feedback

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You should not feel the organization.

Whatever you do in efficiency should not

slow down cells.

The organization

should be a help,

not an impediment

Organization purpose

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Who are the “clients”

of an Agile Manager?

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Programming Testing Analy

sis

People from their competence area (that are part of cells).

Competence areas Testing

Competence

Manager

Cells that implement the organization strategy (they produce the value and

must “run” fast).

Cell N

Cell 1

Cell 2

Agile Manager clients

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Do you know what is a

core team?

Infrastructure team: creates context for teams to flow

faster, making the infrastructure seamless.

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Managers as a “Core” team

Management must be a facilitator at an organizational level

Removes organizational impediments

to improve end to end flow.

Creates & improves the context in order to help cells to flow.

Identifies people “in the trenches”

that should talk directly.

Management works on organization seamless

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Agile Manager responsibilities

“Shaping

the

context”

takes time

Traditional

Strategy

People

Operative

Micro-management and intra-team coordination, among

departments, capacity management, assignments.

Collapsed management that benumbs projects.

Organization

Culture

Strategy and

improvements

People growth and motivation

Operative

Organization, structure and teams

Culture

Agile

Management removes

organizational impediments

in the value flow

All

aspects

need a lot

of Go see

and listen

to the

trenches

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Agile Managers types and responsibilities

Responsibility Organizational responsible Operative

The following areas are responsibility of all people in the company…

… but it is still important to have ultimate explicit responsibilities.

Culture and

Organization

Especially Middle Management.

Hire people with the right idiosyncrasy.

Organization and cell design, motivating work environment.

Identify and connect people that should talk directly.

Scrum

Masters

Outlearn Competence Managers Communities of Practice, professional growth, mentoring, motivation.

Speciality

Coaches

Outimprove

Improvement Champion End-to-end flow responsible (“processes”) and waste identification.

Organizational improvement and global metrics. Based on

Competence Managers and Scrum Masters feedback (bottom-up).

Scrum

Masters

Product CEO and Product Managers Project Portfolio prioritization and teams workload limitation,

based in their capacity.

Product

Owners

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Agile team

A fractal in the high level Agile Management team

Product

Owner

Scrum

Master

Product

Champion

Cross functional development & operations team

Development Q/A Operations

UX

Customer care

Improvement

Champion

Growths a high performance

team, who share objectives (an

strategy/roadmap guided by

business value) and that regularly

reflects on. Collaboration at all

levels !!!

(Competence Managers)

Competence

Manager

Competence

Manager

Competence

Manager

Competence

Manager

Competence

Manager

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Agile Manager characteristics

Teaches Mentors, develops and grows people in competences, doing “craft teaching”.

Coaches by actively listening and making people thing by asking questions. 10

Gives example 1 Specially in meetings (positively). Signals when there is not collaboration-sharing-help.

Protects the Organization form behaviors that puts “the tribe” under risk.

Motivates 2 people to create commitment, increase creativity and performance, is inspirational and

creates a motivating work environment.

Visions 3 at a long term, creates an strategy guided by business objectives, jointly with his team.

Designs 4 the Organization. Creates Cells formed by cross-functional and stable teams,

constituted by people that complement each other.

Empowers 5 self-organized teams to take decisions, given boundaries and constraints, (“the team

knows the problems”) and establishes directives to guide/align.

Facilitates 6 Removes organizational impediments in order to help cells flow.

Connects 7 Identifies people “of the trenches” that should talk directly.

Walks 8 to the place where work is done, to directly know the reality, problems and worries.

Reflects 9 on how to improve the system, regularly, with his team. Creates a safe environment

for making proposals and improvements.

With your people, “tribal”

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Best Manager award - Google

Your bosses

respects you

You do incredible

things for your clients

Your people

loves you

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Questions

everis.com

IT Government

Technology BU