Category: Interview Series

Interview with Linda Rising

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Being fearless is similar to being Agile, says Linda Rising – an author, speaker and an independent consultant. Our conversation began with discussing her experience in varied field, primary challenges to make change happen and how can change be fearless in the world of uncertainties.

In the second part of interview, she explained effectiveness of Agile meetings, solutions to make decisions in less time and her secret of being successful.

Let us take you through our discussion;

Q1. How does your experience in different fields of university teaching and software development help each other?

Linda: I believe a variety of educational and work experiences informs what anyone does. As humans, we have a tendency to narrow our focus. Anything that can help us lift our heads and look around and see other points of view will help us do a better job of solving problems and making better decisions.

Q2. What are three biggest challenges to make change happen? How can they be addressed without hitting on people’s motivation?

Linda: The three biggest challenges we face are our own beliefs.

(1) We believe that people are rational decision makers, when all the evidence from behavioral economics shows that we are not. If we fail to consider how people feel about change and only rely on facts to convince, we will fail.

(2) We believe that our ideas are “good” and that “goodness will win in the end.” We have only to look at the failure throughout history of many great and “good” ideas to know that this is not true. Goodness is a relative term. People in our organizations can see even the best idea as threatening. Again, failure to consider other points of view and the fears others have, even of good ideas, will get in our way.

(3) Regarding resistors as stupid or bad and thus ignoring them will hinder our change efforts. The work of E. M. Rogers shows that a predictable population of adoption curve will describe the initial results of a innovation in any domain. Everything from agricultural ideas to technological break-throughs will cause some to be happy and others to resist. The belief that we in any environment will all react in the same way is asking for trouble. Some people will always love new ideas — let them experiment. Others will always be afraid — let them hang on to the benefits of the status quo to ensure they are not forgotten. Get the best from all your people. That’s the way progress is made.

Q3. People resist change. One of your books is titled ‘Fearless Change’. How can change be fearless with so many uncertainties attached to it?

Linda: Life is full of uncertainties. It has always been a struggle to move forward. The Innovators and Early Adopters have always led the way and the Late Majority and Laggards have resisted. This population of adoption has enabled our survival as a species. Imagine our stone age ancestors uncovering some new variety of fruit. Should everyone eat it immediately? We were typically hungry all the time. The answer is “No.” Let the adventuresome try it. The others will follow along as they are comfortable. Some will never eat it. This is all good. This means survival. This is still with us today. We should embrace it and use it.

Q4. Meetings are hated by many. What is your take on Agile Meetings and its frequency? Please provide 3 quick tips on how to avoid it turning into a time sink for organizations.

Linda: More meetings should be stand-up. Evidence shows that this will not only shorten the meetings, it changes the dynamic. The powerful loud guy who sits at the end will no longer dominate. When people stand and move around, the process becomes more democratic and more inclusive and more fun. More organizations should try it — not just for the daily stand-up.

Q5. How can a Product Champion and a Product Owner be differentiated? According to you, what characteristics a Product Champion should posses?

Linda: This depends on the organization and the product. There are small organizations with small products who only need one role. There are large organizations with complex products who need many people to play many roles related to product ownership. The question to ask is, “Who will answer the various questions from development?” That answer will determine the number and kind of roles.

Q6. Decision making on time is of paramount importance for any business to grow. Is there any solution to take decisions in less time.

Linda: Involve as many others as possible who take diverse points of view and hear from them independently.

Q7. Where do you see Agile Community heading today?

Linda: We are on the road. Agile today is not what agile was 10 years ago. That is a good thing.

Q8. If you have reveal one secret of being successful to our readers, what it would be?

Linda: Keep learning. Stay open. Listen, listen, listen. These are really all one thing.

 

 

Linda Rising is an independent consultant who lives in Nashville, Tennessee. She has authored four books and numerous articles and is an internationally known presenter on topics related to patterns, retrospectives, influence strategies, Agile development, and the change process.

With a Ph.D. from Arizona State University in the field of object-based design metrics, Linda’s background includes university teaching and software development in a number of different domains.

Interview with Klaus Leopold

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Klaus Leopold is an Author, Speaker, Kanban Trainer & Practitioner, System Thinker and a Traveller. It was our pleasure to converse with him about Agile Teams and Business Agility while interviewing him. As a special, you can get Klaus’ latest book Practical Kanban for only $9 instead of $24 by using this link: https://leanpub.com/practicalkanban/c/innovationroots

We discussed in detail about how Agile Teams can contribute towards Business Agility and if being Agile makes organisations future-ready. Let’s read;

Q1. Is Agile the perfect solution for making healthier and flexible organization? As per your experiences how can it help to deal with unrealistic development plans?

Klaus: Perfect – what’s perfect? However, I am convinced that an organisation needs to show a certain degree of Agility if it wants to survive in the market in the long term. It is important to me that the organization has to show this agility in terms of business Agility and this has very little to do with Agile teams.

Q2. Why do you say that Agile Teams has nothing to do with Business Agility? What is one most important thing, you think is missing in the Agile Teams to achieve the same?

Klaus: The basic idea of Agile teams is awesome: small, quick-witted cross-functional units that have everything on board so that they can deliver customer value. So much for theory. In practice, I have never seen a knowledge work organisation with more than 30 people where one team alone can generate 100% of the customer value. There are dependencies: other development teams, other products, business, marketing, lawyers, etc. The more dependencies there are, the longer the waiting times. I am an absolute fan of the idea of removing dependencies. But one thing is also clear: it doesn’t matter how you set up an organization, there will always be dependencies. Therefore, it is systemically seen substantially more important that the interactions between the teams are Agile, so that the organization can react rapidly on dependencies. It is rather secondary whether the work in teams is done with Agile methods. Agile infrastructure outside of the team boundaries is needed to Agilize the interactions of an organization. In the Flight Levels model (www.LEANability.com/en/flight-levels) we speak of Flight Level 2, which coordinates the work between the teams.

Q3. How can an Agile Team contribute towards Business Agility? Suggest 3 simple solutions.

Klaus: It only takes one thing: Think outside of your team box! Think business!!

A few examples:

– Whenever improvements are needed, we must first and foremost improve the generation of value for the customer and not organisational structures. I’m a Netflix customer. My request is simple: “Will watch film!” As a customer I don’t care about organizational structures like teams, no matter whether they are Agile or not. Surprisingly, it’s not your company that pays your salaries, but your customers.

– Velocity, throughput, cycle time, etc. are rather unexciting metrics from a business perspective. It is much more important to find out what value we have achieved for the customer and/or on the market. So the point is to change the team’s perspective from output to outcome.

– Work with cross-team, prioritized backlogs that clearly show business priorities and do stick to priorities. When you think this through, situations arise where specialist teams can’t work on their specialist topics. That’s a good thing! Support other teams in order to keep the business priority before you start new work where you have the knowledge on board but which has lower business priority.

Q4. Sometimes Scaling Agile is mistaken for adding more Agile Teams. How can it be addressed?

Klaus: Well, I believe that “more Agile teams” is a scaling approach that mainly helps the consulting companies but not the companies that are being consulted. As a consulting firm, it is quite a big contract to change 200 teams in a company to Agile. They all need training and initial support. That generates a lot of income. However, as we discussed earlier, Business Agility is all about Agile interactions between teams rather than how many Agile teams are running around in an organization.

Q5. When a business is undergoing Agile Transformation, the critical question to answer itself is ‘What it wants to change?’. What’s the Klaus’ way of finding answer to this question?

Klaus: Becoming Agile for the reason that you are Agile is rather unsexy. That is why I would ask an earlier question: What should improve in the company after all? When you know what needs to be improved in an organization, you can find a tailored way to achieve these goals. I’m not a fan of screwing any (Agile) methods into an organization and then look what happens. These changes usually last until the next chic method poster appears on the horizon, which is then screwed into the organization. Agile methods can be a very good source of inspiration, but I can only recommend against establishing methods with copy and paste in organizations.

Q6. In the era of human intellect, innovation and creativity, Talent Agility is something new being heard of. Help our readers understand the concept of Talent Agility.

Klaus:I am definitely not an expert in talent Agility. My understanding of it is that employees are not hired on the basis of their skills – such as e.g. “we need Cobol programmers”. We have to accept the idea that the skills we possess today will no longer be in demand in a few years’ time. If organizations want to be successful in the long term, they have to find those people who want to change as the world changes.

Q7. If a business is Agile today, does it become future-ready?

Klaus: Well, I would say Agility is the basis for an organization to be future-ready, but that alone is not enough. The organisation still needs to make the right strategic business decisions for long-term market success. For example, it would not have helped Blockbuster Video to have many Agile teams, if you rely on the business model “video rental” in a world of Netflix & Co. This is probably not the best strategic business decision.

Q8. Please share your mantra for sustainable Agility.

I don’t think an organization needs sustainable Agility. If an organization wants to survive in the market, it must be able to react in an Agile manner to changing conditions. It is absolutely important for a company to develop sensors, for what its customers need, what is happening on the market and what its competitors are doing. Agility is a means to an end in order to implement the findings.

 

Klaus Leopold is computer scientist and Kanban pioneer with many years of experience in helping organizations from different industries on their improvement journey with Lean and Kanban. He is author of the book “Practical Kanban” and co-author of the book “Kanban Change Leadership”. Klaus is one of the first Lean Kanban trainers and coaches worldwide. He was awarded with the Brickell Key Award for “outstanding achievement and leadership” within the Lean Kanban community in San Francisco, 2014. His main interest is establishing lean business agility by improving organizations beyond the team level, especially in large environments from 50 to 5000 people. Klaus speaks regularly at renowned Lean and Kanban conferences worldwide. Klaus is just finishing his new book “Rethinking Agile” which will be published on 1st Dec 2018. Check the website of the book to get updates: https://www.leanability.com/en/rethinkingagile