Category: Interview Series

A lot has changed in past few month. Lots of people have lost their jobs, business were shut, profitability of organisations tumbled, and remote working has come into significant role. In this interview, we discussed with Melissa Boggs (Co-CEO, Scrum Alliance) about agile industry’s prepared for the epidemiological developments of recent times. She also shared her views on how Scrum can transform the world of work. Let’s read:

Q1. According to you, how much were we prepared to survive the challenges of a pandemic as an industry (agile)? 

Melissa:  I believe we were as prepared as we could be. Because we embrace values and principles of short feedback loops, experiments, and continuous retrospection, we were prepared for this constant uncertainty. We had principles and practices already in place that allow us to look forward, but incrementally. When the information we were/are getting was changing every moment, that incremental view was paramount. However, preparedness doesn’t necessarily make things any easier. Agility does not mean perfection; in fact, we embrace agility because we know things are not perfect. There is still a lot of hard work to be done in organizations and in our agile community. 

Q2. How can Scrum transform the world of work in today’s difficult times?

Melissa: The Scrum framework can provide opportunities for inspection and adaptation, as well as a continuous focus on improvement and team well-being. The customer-centricity of Scrum helps us focus on the right things, even when the world is competing for our attention.  

Q3. Share your three key mantras to make an organisation joyful, prosperous and sustainable.

Melissa:  These are my personal mantras as a leader for the organization: 

1. Create structures and cultures that encourage and inspire empathy for our customers, ourselves, and each other. 

2. Invite people (constantly) to tell their stories. Stories connect us, encourage       us, and inspire us.   

3. Listen, inspect and adapt. Just do the next right thing. 

Q4. What/Who has been your biggest inspiration in recent times and kept you going fighting all the odds?

Melissa:  The creativity, connection, and belief that our team has in the greater good. These are mission driven people who truly care about each other and the world they are serving. We are a tiny but mighty team, serving a global community in a worldwide pandemic, and our little group just keeps looking for how they can help. It may sound trite, There’s something about it that inspires me as a leader to continually keep striving to be worthy of that magic.  

Q5. You have mentioned about viewing the opportunities through different lenses to spark creativity. Can you share an example of how it can be done?

Melissa: As an organization, we are built in a very different way. We do not have traditional departments or management layers. Instead, we have truly cross-functional teams that focus on the different junctures in the agile journey. We recognize that the agile practitioner of several years has different needs than the brand new person, as does the agile leader. These customer-centric lenses provide a much different perspective than the traditional departments focused on marketing, IT, etc. We’ve seen incredibly creative solutions come out of these teams as a result of their focus. 

Q6. As a leader of an organisation, is the process of finding the right people the same for you post pandemic? If not, what changes are done to ensure you have the right people hired?

Meissa: We were fortunate to have a mostly full staff before the pandemic hit, so we have not had to seek out new hires just yet. We already had a fairly robust and very custom hiring process prior to the pandemic. It is very interactive in nature, so it will definitely require some adaptation if we need to do it remotely. The pandemic has changed our perspective far less than our continued journey of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The many conversations in our community and worldwide have helped us to see ways in which we can help our team to be representative of the community that we support. 

Q7. One tip to keep work life balance in current business environment.

Melissa: Boundaries. Recognizing that mental space for either work or life requires boundaries. Sometimes rituals help us to keep those boundaries defined, things that help us set our intention or clear our mind from one task to the next. Those rituals can be meditation, a walk or run, listening to specific music… whatever works for you to help your brain shift contexts can help maintain those boundaries.

As Co-CEO and Chief ScrumMaster for Scrum Alliance, Melissa Boggs blends creativity and strategy to make bold moves in service to her colleagues and community. She leads with intuition, data, and vulnerability in pursuit of joyful, prosperous, sustainable workplaces for her own organization and the world at large.
Since 2001, Melissa has embraced experiences in leadership, business, and product development. Her experience with applying, consulting, coaching, and training agile values and principles spans executive teams, software teams, marketers, and educators in domains such as healthcare, public education, e-learning, security software, government agencies, and communication technology. As a consultant and as an executive, she has consistently embodied the Scrum values, and additionally holds dear her personal values of Courage, Empathy, and Creativity.

Achieving company-wide agility is seen as a challenge for organisations, at the same time it is important in the VUCA world. In our recent interview with Jutta Eckstein, we understand why it is important. She also discussed in detail about Bossa Nova to leverage innovation from all the employees. Jetta has shared her insights on being connected to the society as well.

Let’s read;

Q1. According to you, why company-wide agility is so significant to be talked about in detail?

Jutta: The world we’re living in currently, also referred to as the VUCA world (meaning volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) challenges companies to be agile throughout. And agile doesn’t mean here applying Scrum or SAFe, it means as a whole company to be flexible, responsive, adaptive, and also nimble – or in other worlds to apply agility company-wide. Only this allows companies to both survive and thrive on disruptions.

Q2. What is Bossa Nova, and how it contributes to leverage innovation from all employees?

Jutta: BOSSA nova is an approach for company-wide agility. It enables your company to be agile, in the real sense as explained above by synthesizing Beyond Budgeting (adaptive budgeting), Open Space (leveraging the power of innovation from all employees), Sociocracy (flexible organizational structure that allows decentralized decision-making), and Agile (continuous learning via experiments and feedback). Especially (organizational) Open Space leverages innovation from all employees by not defining a job description first and then looking for people that fit that job description (or in other words by then putting people in the box that’s defined by the job description) but rather seeking and strengthening continuously the potential of every individual. Thus, thinking beyond job descriptions.

Q3. It is generally believed that management is responsible to induce innovation. What is your advice to get away from this mindset?

Jutta: The problem with this is that we believe there can be a single person i.e., the manager, who knows who will be innovative when and thus invites to e.g., an innovation lab, a brainstorming -,  or a design thinking session. However, every single person is innovative and there is no fixed time for innovation. Innovation has to happen at all times and by everyone. Therefore, Organizational Open Space is needed to invite everyone at all times to come up with a new feature, new product, or a new idea and – if there are other people who think this is a great innovation, those people start to work together for making it happen. The procedures companies often have in place for approving new ideas actually, kill most often the ideas and frustrate people to suggest new ones because these procedures are too difficult.

Q4. One of your blog mentions – Being connected to society is an essential ingredient to long-term profitability. Please explain.

Jutta: Well, no company is an island meaning, every company is part of a greater ecosystem and is nurtured by that ecosystem and should also in return nurture it. And also if a company wants to have a reputation of being agile, people expect the company to take a societal responsibility and to be humane, caring, transparent, and participative. This is also for the greater benefit of the company because it gives the company’s products a market advantage and puts the company in a better position in the “war of talents” – both because of its great reputation.

Q5. Where do you see the Agile community going five years down the line?

Jutta: I think we will see the community broadening its reach more and more. This is amongst other things, based on digitalization – meaning that more and more (or even all?) companies become software companies because no matter what your “real” product is, the key differentiator will be the software. So the community will broaden beyond software and interestingly this will be happening because of the spread of software.

Q6. Is there anything you do not like about the way Agile is being implemented?

Jutta: Well, I do like how agile is implemented – however, I see a big risk in how many people look at agile as a recipe, as something where people can be certified to support a well-defined behaviour. Because a certification per se is about verifying the person has a well-defined knowledge and a specific way of thinking. However, agile is about the opposite – it is about continuously exploring new ground and learning new things permanently.

Q7. One question you think I should have asked you. Please answer as well.

Jutta: Well, you touched the question a bit and by the way, I don’t have a good answer but the missing question is: What is our (the agile communities) responsibility in the dramatic changes we’re seeing right now?

I’m exploring this currently. For example, all too often we think if we delivered value and the customer is happy we’re done. So we seldom take the responsibility on how that value is used, what impact does it have on the world. Is it used for supporting humanity or is it hindering it? Is it consuming even more energy or is it helping reduce it? On a site note, one forecast predicts that in 2030 IT will need 21% of the world’s energy consumption. Thus, I wonder if we can start small by changing the DoD (definition of done) and also verify e.g. the energy consumption of the value we’re creating or if we can overall increase our awareness on how we can ensure that our contributions are overall positive. I think also as agile coaches or as the agile community in general, we can make a difference and we should. 

Jutta Eckstein is an independent coach, consultant, and trainer. She holds a M.A. in Business Coaching & Change Management, a Dipl.Eng. in Product-Engineering, and a B.A. in Education. She has helped many teams and organizations worldwide to make an Agile transition. She has a unique experience in applying Agile processes within medium-sized to large distributed mission-critical projects. She has published her experience in her books Agile Software Development in the Large, Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams, Retrospectives for Organizational Change, and together with Johanna Rothman Diving for Hidden Treasures: Uncovering the Cost of Delay in your Project Portfolio.

Jutta has recently co-written with John Buck a book on Company-wide Agility. This book focuses on synthesizing Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agility.