After hearing good things about it for years, and failing to get one of the
limited spots at its lean coffee events for almost as long, I was excited to
finally be at
Agile in the Ether last week. Here's a few aggregated notes from the excellent conversation.
How to encourage non-digital stakeholders to understand the value of discovery and outcomes over outputs?
- The business has scaled quickly and is large and stakeholders just want features
- They don't talk about problems and give people space to offer solutions
-
Help them to think about how they experience the world outside work
-
Lay out the risks/benefits of switching to incremental devlopment
- Get an ally who is respected (by them) to support your case
- Show business which haven't adapted, e.g. Blockbuster
- Show business which have adapted, e.g. McDonalds
-
Let stakeholders observe interviews with users to understand
their priorities
- Don't use the word "agile" or "digital"
- ... instead say "de-risk this proposition", "build it so we can rollback if needed"
- ... talk about the benefits of agile development not the practices
How do I get an organisation to value (agile) communities of practice?
- Some managers just don't get it
- They'll say "you need to do this in personal learning and development time"
- Do it in stealth mode; just call it a meeting!
- Ask the Community what they find valuable, and get them to talk about it
- Find stories of success and share them
- Some people think CoP is just soft and fluffy and not delivering
-
Managers perhaps don't care about the personal side of work, just outputs
- Can you make the managers look good so that they will support it
-
Talk about it in manager-friendly terms e.g. ROI, break down silos, spread
good practices, ...
- Talk about disadvantages of not having CoPs, e.g. slower onboarding
- Use some specific example of good practice to convene a group, then keep it going
Mentoring, coaching and team-building in a team where members are constantly changing. Any tips on how to keep stability?
- In this case the team is around 8 people (perm and contractors, mixed disciplines)
-
Particularly hard when people are leaving (personal and org change)
- Usually tends to stabilise, but not this time so constantly restarting
- Pairing/mobbing can introduce new people quickly
- Be alert to workplace loneliness
- People can tend to go quiet, so be hypervigilant
- Use CoP to build a shared culture across teams so that in-company movement is easier
-
Focus on some small thing together and complete it to build team spirit
-
Don't wait for a time when things just stabilise before starting
something
- One of us had used a team stability metric
- ... the number of sprints in a row with the same people on the team
- ... found that it's correlated to happiness
- ... but now worried that it's now become a marker of pride
- ... and teams are not changing enough
How to revive a flagging test community of practice?
- Lots of people have left, including the CoP lead
- New people started and are not so enthusiastic
- The CoP used to be brilliant, but it's now a shadow of its former self
-
Drew Pontikis
talked about
letting the CoP end when its energy has run out
-
Change things up e.g.
1,
2
-
Communities are so reliant on the people involved. What are their needs?
- Treat it like a new team; have a new kick off
-
Fit timing to other participant commitments to make it easier to attend
- CoP need not be the only community meetings, e.g. pairs, random coffees, etc
- It will take a while to get restarted
- It's natural for there to be cycles of energy
- Favour quality over quantity
Image:
Wikipedia
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